-- Window management: This is essential: I need to be able to Alt-drag a window to move it, by clicking anywhere in the window. And need to be able to resize a window by Alt-middle dragging a quadrant. I've been doing this since '98 and I'm not going to lose that muscle memory any time soon. Is there some OS X utility to let me do that? I have to imagine there is. If not, that's the first thing I'd have to write.
-- their speed. Can you get a fast machine that's also pretty quiet? The G5s towers aren't that quiet. Especially the disk grinding. Can I do iSCSI over gigabit on root? I know how with Linux, but I don't know OS X or OpenFirmware. I don't know how I'd netboot an "initrd"-like thing to get iSCSI up and running. So I'm not going to go down that route and I'll use a local disk for awhile at least. I hear the Mac Minis are quiet, but I'm concerned about speed. Then again, I'm using a P3 800 on my desktop right now, so I'm accustomed to slow. I'm just concerned that a slow G4 + fruity graphics would be slower than what I'm using now, which is already a little too slow for my tastes.
-- "Optimizing Volume". I know what it's doing technically and I still don't care. Just annoying.
-- Need to use my keyboard and mouse. But that should be no problem. This is an old serial keyboard with a PS2 adapter on it, with a USB adapter atop that, and it works in my old PowerBook.
-- App (well, window) switcher in top-right. OS 9 used to have that, and GNOME has it nowadays, and I love it. Why'd it go away in OS X? I've seen a utility to add that back, though.
-- The OS X shareware culture. Which makes sense, since people already threw a couple grand down for their computers, they're probably willing to buy some $25 bonus apps. But I'm used to Libre, so the shareware thing might irk me too much. We'll see.
Overall I really respect OS X and Apple and I want to like it and use it.