Is OS X ready for the desktop?
I was ready to answer that with an emphatic NO! yesterday. It was getting physically painful to use the laptop's trackpad and though that's hardly an OS X issue, being hardware, the solution of using an external pointer was at first almost as bad. The default mouse acceleration curve is messed up so that the pointer either moves at warp speed and is barely if at all controllable, or it is stuck in molasses slow. That slow might be great for getting to exact pixel in an image editor, but it's lousy for everything else. Fortunately the Logitech tool bypassed that acceleration curve issue.
The color thing was (and still is) an irritant. Today I finally managed to find and (mostly) successfully modify a skin for Opera to get my soothing gray backgrounds back. Alas, the address/URL field is still white and I'm not sure I can change that. I've posted a question regarding that on the Opera forum. It seems a strange omission. It's not an issue on KDE, but then KDE lets me set the system colors to my liking.
Opera now works about how I expect, though it did take the different trackball and I'll need to use what to me are unusual button presses (I am that used to third button emulation in X now) and changing both (Mac) Opera and OS X so that F5 and F12 do what I expect them to do.
For IM I now have Adium at least partly set up. I have the AIM part going. I haven't tried to get the Yahoo, Google, or LJ messaging going yet. I have a tolerable color scheme, though I can see further changes ahead. Shading and highlights might be "in" but I'd love to kick those out and have nice, crisp flat colors. ADDENDUM: I also would like to have some of the events not have any notification. No sounds, no bounce, no pop-up, just quietly do nothing. Amazingly, there seems to be no such option.
For IRC, Colloquy seems pretty good. The colors have been made sane, and Jay found how to solve the deal-breaker issue: If I have to use "/me" instead of "/a" (I know, nonstandard, but it's how I do it, so there) it's not an IRC client I'll use very long. It would be nice to lose the weird "justification" and use a full line and keep in angle brackets. It would also be nice to have actions (where /a came from) be in a different color than "spoken" text. Nits? Perhaps, but I know what I really want. ADDENDUM: The in-program use of "chat room" instead of "channel" is another nit, and one that makes me wish x-chat aqua was a real option. I understand the developer's reasoning, but I vehemently disagree with it. It's IRC. It's a channel, dammit.
iTerm, at least, seems to be right as it is. The only issue I've had with it wasn't iTerm's fault. It was just how OS X (and MacOS before it) does things. It's going to be some time before I'm used to having the program controls away from the program and up at the top edge of the screen. I understand the consistency thing, but oy, that makes for an awful lot of (time consuming) "mousing around" to do simple things.
Smultron (text editor) is also pretty good once the colors are made sane. Again the only real issues I had it were not the editor itself but OS X.
yakko mentioned Xee for an image viewer and it seems pretty good. I still haven't settled on an image editor. I might to have to wait for a new version of GIMP and/or for Apple to fix its X11 implementation. I did see that the absolute latest version of GIMP was available - for a price. Typical Macintosh. ADDENDUM: With the X11 fix, GIMP no longer crashes as soon as I try to make it actually do something.
Granted, this is a new (to me) OS, so new programs and all the time spent whacking things into (rough) shape the first time is probably to be expected. I haven't had to do that in some time. For the last few years, I simply copied config files and was done. That's very easy to get used to. I now have a system I consider usable. Not ideal, but usable.
So, is OS X ready for the desktop? I am not sure if I can answer that with "Almost, it just needs a system color configuration tool that really is one and not something that only changes the trim between two nearly identical choices." or "Yes, but you need to use third-party applications wherever you can and whack things into shape." I cannot answer with an unreserved and emphatic "yes" as I spent far too much time getting things tolerable and no time really getting anything done. And getting out of the way and letting people get things done is supposedly OS X's claim to fame.
I used to wonder why anyone would take recent Apple hardware and put Linux or BSD on it. Now I know why: to have control and familiarity.