I upgraded to Mac OS X on Friday evening. I love it. It looks good, it’s fast, it’s Unix…it’s everything that I could want an operating system to be. Well, almost.
I switched back to OS 9 this morning. For two reasons. The first, and most important, is that OS X won’t work with Netatalk volumes. (Netatalk is the Linux implementation of Appletalk. It’s probably more widely used than Appletalk, at least on servers.) It will mount them OK, but it doesn’t know what to do with them. So I can browse the file structures, but I can’t read or write any files. Since our office data structure is set up such that very little data actually resides on our machines, and everything is on the servers, Appletalk is an absolute must.
The second problem is that Mail, the mail-reading app that comes with OS X, doesn’t properly support IMAP. I can’t specify the root folder where my IMAP data is stored. So Mail tries to traverse my entire home directory on each of my IMAP servers. Not cool.
If it weren’t for these two flaws, I’d stick with OS X. But having to use Outlook Express in Classic sucks. If NFS were properly implemented, I could use that instead of Appletalk. But none of these things are true. So OS X is my weekend OS. Mac OS 9 is my workhorse.