2004-07-11 - 4:05 p.m.

Think different.

Explore the world behind the GUI.

I do what I need with terminal, laughing on the candy interface of everything else.

Doing the things different makes me try links to enhance my browsing experience, configure mutt and sendmail, find a way to deal with my privacy and GPG keys using plain command line, use terminal for editing text and prints.

It makes me not use the candy, dummy aqua interface every single time it is available.

Thinking different could make me buy a Dell. Why not? If they sold them without any OS, I would enjoy playing with Debian on it. (As a Dell I mean any pc) Thinking different does not have to mean sticking with the prepackaged candy dummy aqua interface and repeating Steve after every single keynote.

It can make you open every single application in your system and remove the options you will never use. I don't speak Korean or Norwegian - with all the respect to the multilanguageness of the X, if I will ever have a Korean boyfriend accessing my Mac, I will go thru the reinstallation of system for him. I don't necessarily want all the options - if I know I likely will use only US English, Italian and maybe Spanish, they are fine. No user manuals, software agreements, useless language packs in my system please. Not at home. It is different if I get paid for testing them, but even that does not mean I would have to have all the tested items in my own system.

There are moments when the native applications are just not enough. Safari is great, but it being of commercial origin, it will never have some controls I want to add to a browser. Mail.app is great, but I want to open every single criteria of the spam filters, clean manually the last enteresd addresses cache, and so on. Filevault is great, but I don't want my music encrypted. All I care to have encrypted I do without it, just using my own keys. Even filevault has its limitations. Restart the Mac in single user mode, and you can reset the password via commandline. That about it. GPG you can't reset via command line, it just will be your own problem if you lose your own key.

And once more, multiple desktops. Working like Exposé. How can it be that I've heard people wanting it since 10.0 came out? It is kept out so that the candy GUI lovers will see it as the 150 improvements 10.5 will have?