Barely a few months (6, 7 ?) since using Mac OS X and my system has got basically unusable: MacPorts has died and gone to hell, root certificates get systematically rejected by Safari, the system is sssoooo ssssllllloooowwww that using it feels like moving in water. Firefox crashes every few hours. Parallels isn’t working anymore in Coherence mode.
The system is so unreliable that my only option is to reformat the machine and restart from scratch (basically what I had to do when I used XP — but XP usually lasted a good year and a half between reformats).
With that and all the software incompatibility problems, I am seriously considering switching to Windows 7 + Cygwin and thrashing this whole Mac OS experiment in the huge pile of “tried: didn’t work”.
Just tell me where to send the Win7 copy you need…
I bet you are secretly rejoicing from my Mac OS fiasco.
I must have already a Win7 license somewhere in the freezer. If Win7 solves all my torments I promise you’ll be the first to know.
The Firefox issue may have more to do with Firefox 4. Firefox4 seems to be much less reliable than FF3 and use more memory.
It is possible — FF has been really a pain those past few days. Let’s hope they’ll get it stable soon, otherwise I’ll be having a traumatic switch of OS and browser at once.
Maybe you should give GNU/Linux a try
I use Linux a lot… on the servers !
My experiences with it on the desktop (or laptop for that matter) have been less than ideal (to put it mildly). But I keep trying every now and then.
Well, maybe you’re asking OS X to be a lot of things at the same time (Linux with Macports and Windows with Parallels)…
Safari –> have you tried Chrome?
Parallels –> maybe fullscreen
MacPorts –> yeah… maybe reinstall from scratch…
I know the pain. Hope you find a cure.
But that’s one the main issue for an academic-purpose desktop system (at least in the data-processing intensive fields): it has to serve as front end for a lot of different systems, serving different purposes. I was hoping that the scheme of isolated Frameworks of MacOS would make it an ideal candidate for that, but — as always — reality seems to be more complex…