What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

Running linux on a Mac laptop is a bit of a pain, mostly because of the keyboard/touchpad. The control and alt keys are in strange places (at least on my powerbook), and having only one button on the mouse is pretty irritating when you're not in OSX. I actually replaced my powerbook with a Linux laptop primarily for those two reasons; I'm always working in a terminal, so not having reasonably placed control and alt keys pretty seriously slowed down my ability to navigate on the command line and in an editor.<p>I'm not sure if this applies to the MacBooks, but on my Core2 Duo Mac Mini, the left audio channel frequently gets a lot of static when playing music; it seems to be a random thing on boot; either you will have static on this boot or you won't. It's a common problem of the Mini with Linux, but I have no idea if it ever happens on any other Mac.<p>If you're a KDE user, then OSX's finder will drive you mad. They don't have IOSlaves, but they do now have Fuse, which can allow you to browse remote file systems over ssh. If the ssh connection goes down, every finder window (including the desktop) freezes until the fuse connection times out, and it never feels quite as nice as KDE's IOSlave system, but it does make browsing of remote systems possible.<p>Spaces is a little flaky if you try to use it the way you use a normal multiple desktop implementation. With spaces, you can have either all windows of an application on the same virtual desktop, or you can allow them to be on multiple desktops. If you do multiple desktops, then alt-tabbing to a running application won't ever switch your current desktop. Since OSX generally only has one instance of each application running, this can make switching between windows of the same program on different desktops a bit of a pain. It's not terrible, but it isn't as smooth as it could be.<p>To be honest, I'm not really sure why a developer would use a MacBook at this point. When I bought mine, Linux's wifi support was a sick joke, which made it pretty pointless for a laptop. OSX is very polished and clean, but their developer tools for python, php, etc are going to be the same tools you'd be using under any other OS, I would think. Is TextMate a killer app for OSX now? What does OSX offer that's really good for web development?

I can't think of any common annoyances. I come from the Linux desktop world, so having a GUI that works right is great. It was hard to get used to the close in the top left and drag in the bottom right only at first but I don't even notice that anymore.<p>Under the hood it is Unix, includes Python and wxPython by default, Xcode is free and an awesome development environment so I can do as much and more than I can with a Linux box.<p>If you need to run Ubuntu, just do it in Parallels, otherwise your annoyance is going to be having to reboot into OSX.

I had tons of hardware problems.<p>It’s just that I could be an outlier, these kinds of stories are always so freaking anecdotal and not really a help when deciding what to buy.<p>My screen failed and was exchanged. Then my main board failed and was exchanged. Now everything seems to be working fine. Oh, yeah. I nearly forgot, my DVD drive was unable to burn anything so it was exchanged. The exchanged drive was also unable to burn anything and was exchanged again. After those two tries it finally worked. And I already destroyed two batteries. After mere 110 cycles both were unable to hold much charge (they lasted for 30 min or less). Both were exchanged.<p>All this, and the MBP is not even two years old. Since I have Apple Care I didn’t have to pay for labour or parts, but I had to pay for transport to and from the few places in Germany where Apple hardware is repaired and I didn’t have my laptop for several weeks in the span of those last few months.<p>I hope that’s all for now because I actually still like my MBP. I planned to buy a new one at the earliest in three years, but after all those failures I don’t have much hope that my MBP is going to make it.<p>But: it simply cannot be the case that every or even a big percentage of Macs fail like this. With Apple having to pay for two batteries, one whole screen, a main board and two DVD drives plus all the labour they certainly didn’t make any profit from my purchase.

The green button has inconsistent behavior by application - firefox maximizes to whole screen, safari sizes to the window, iTunes goes back and forth from mini-Player<p>No cut and paste between windows - But I use the command line for most things, so it's not that big of a deal

The custom "framework" system for Ruby and Python is a minor annoyance when you want to customize or upgrade them. Apple puts python in one place, the python community installers put it in another, and neither is where you'd install it on your own. Although installing most things and building from source are pretty much the same as with linux, if there is already an apple-installed version you might find you need to so some minor surgery (make a symlink or two) after an initial install. In most cases, using macports works just like any other package manager and, as a bonus, keeps everything segregated into its own directory tree, so many people use that when possible.<p>Still, these issues are minor and infrequent. Linux installs aren't always painless and will require triage from time to time, too. But compared to doing the same stuff on windows, well ...

Why would you get an MBP just to install any other OS on it?<p>I've owned a couple (15" MBP currently), and I think there is more durable hardware out there that can be had cheaper.<p>I don't really have any annoyances with OSX or the MBP hardware. That is not to say it is perfect, just that I knew what to expect going in, and that there is no all around perfect OS or hardware. I do find the overall annoyances much less than when I've had to work on plastic (Thinkpad) laptops with Windows.

One thing I miss from Windows-- the ability to easily access any menu item from the keyboard (not just items that have a defined keyboard shortcut). Yes, it can be done, but not "out of the box" using individual keystrokes to navigate each level of the hierarchy.

No cut and paste in Finder... you have to move your files from one window to another...

You really want to run OS X on the hardware, to take advantage of all the details of the various hardware nooks and crannies (power management, wireless hardware, etc.)<p>There's no real downside to running any Linux distro in a VM. (Again, I recommend VMware Fusion.) You can put each VM in its own full-screen space and switch around between them (and Mac OS X) with a keystroke.<p>Highly recommended.<p>(BTW, the way that Fusion works it that it essentially goes "under" OS X, when Fusion is running; it becomes a hypervisor, running OS X and the other OS(es) as virtual guests on an equal footing.<p>I heard a great talk at C4[1] from one of the VMware Mac engineers, who said that the Apple engineers weren't very happy to learn the details of how virtualization works (since it replaces their precious OS at the lowest level), but they didn't really have any choice, either. ;-)

If you're an Emacs user with (3!) decades old-finger habits like me, Mac OS X is a dream come true--you can customize the Cocoa text environment to be a quite decent subset of Emacs, available in most system apps now (most importantly, Safari).<p>Oops, this is an anti-annoyance. ;-)

I wrote this back in early 2007, and it still applies:<p>Four things OS X can learn from Windows 95 <a href="http://www.tinyapps.org/weblog/mac/200703210700_four_things_osx_can_learn_from_win95.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.tinyapps.org/weblog/mac/200703210700_four_things_...</a><p>You would think that after all these years, Apple would have copied these simple yet essential abilities from Windows 95:<p>1. In Spotlight's search result window, files should be able to be deleted, copied, moved, renamed, etc.<p>2. Spotlight should offer an "In Folder" or "Location" column rather than forcing the user to press the tiny "i" symbol for each result.<p>3. The Trash should have two more columns: "Date Deleted" and "Original Location".<p>4. The context menu in the Trash should offer a "Restore" option to return files to their original location. This is especially useful in putting back the 20 or 30 files from 10 different locations that Adobe asked you to remove and then realized they shouldn't have.

I have two:<p>1) The new Macbook Pros moved all the function keys around. I can no longer control the volume with one hand, because the Fn key is too far away from F10-F12. (I want my F-keys to be F-keys, not Fn-F-keys, because I use Windows via Fusion all the time, and use F-keys in Mellel all the time as well).<p>2) When opening a Finder window, Finder starts to create thumbnails of all the documents it understands, and replacing the default file icons with the thumbnails. Nice feature - except that every time it creates a new thumbnail it refreshes the window. Consequently, if you are trying to rename a file, you can't do it in the window. Every time you try, the window refreshes, and you lose focus on the filename! You are forced to do a Command-I just to rename a file. There is no reason this has to happen. Why can't Finder refresh a thumbnail without stealing focus? Idiotic.

The mouse speed algorithm. I'm using an iMac for three days and want to throw it out off window. I just keep missing the clicks! Or the mouse go too fast and pass the controls, or too slow and don't reach them.<p>But the worst thing is that when I switched to my Dell Notebook (ArchLinux), I was too used to the iMac's mouse =\

Finder is pretty horrible. Keyboard shortcuts are all over the place and overall I find Finder really unintuitive.

The glossy screen!

The Cut/Paste in Finder issue comes up a lot, because in people that use the GUI for file management the basic action becomes a deeply ingrained habit with a specific mental model.<p>Windows-style "pick up here, drop there": - make selection with mouse - cut with keboard - navigate to destination with mouse - paste with keyboard<p>Mac-style "carry from here to there": - make selection with mouse - drag with mouse - navigate to destination with mouse - drop with mouse<p>You can learn to use the other kind, but if you have to switch between them often you'll likely grow frustrated with one or the other. With the Finder for lacking Cut and for others lacking spring-loaded folders and Expose.

Inability to resize windows from any corner except the bottom right.

You don't have a set of packages that is as broad, well integrated and easy to use as Ubuntu's or Debian's packages. MacPorts is a lot better than nothing though.

OK -- I might be alone on this, but I have a 30" Dell monitor, and the single top menu bar concept simply does not scale to large monitor sizes.

Terminal.app can't go full screen. I don't need a scrollbar. I don't need menu bar. I don't need any window decorations.<p>I really like Terminator on linux; it's a python script that wrapps Gnome Terminal and lets you split the screen horizontally and vertically. I'd love to have that on OSX but don't want to run X/Gnome/etc.

The lack of good keyboard shortcuts for window manipulation. Window management in general is a pet peeve of mine.

For me the email client and finder for file management. I am going to try entourage but its not outlook, its outlook light. Apple should look at the fact there are five separate mac products that emulate windows explorer, that alone should tell them that Finder is lacking for file management.

I think the thing that bugs me the most is the fact that there is no way to create a new window from the dock. The only thing that the dock does is start the application if it is not running or activate the application if it is running.

[FN] and [CTRL] need to change places!<p>Why does't toggle full screen work in stock X11?<p>Why is it so hard to get plan9/wmii to work properly :(<p>Binary package managent for common tools, like subversion etc.

I miss focus follows mouse.

Apple has Balkanized their OS's API. Most software out there only supports the latest release. The rest only supports two releases back. In fact with 10.6's release imminent it is hard to find software that supports older than 10.4 anymore.

one tiny thing is that the analogue of ctrl + left or ctrl + right, with cmd, skips to the end of the line instead of to the next word, which is a smidge annoying.

Ability to switch Terminal tabs with Cmd+1, Cmd+2 ...

iTunes doesn't come-to-front when you click its Dock icon if it has a window open already.

Security warnings all over the place.

Not having a MAC to begin with.