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More On The Mac and Unix
acaben writes: "On MacSlash, we're running a story that gives more information on the Unix-ness of MacOS X, expounding on recent articles from MacWeek and Slashdot. With insightful commentary running from packaging applications to using X-Windows on the MacOS X Beta, we hope to shed some new light on the Unix aspects of the Public Beta."
Since I don't have a PowerPC, I'll wait until someone ports Darwin to anything else, and then see what happens.
:)
1) If Apple graciously incorporates the code and releases versions of MacOS X for other platforms, maybe I'll try it out.
2) If Steve Jobs curses them and doesn't release anything for those 'renegade' platforms, I'll sigh as I always do when Apple doesn't get it.
3) I'll wonder why people didn't make a fuss like this over BeOS. It is also rather easy to use and Unix-ish, and at least they "get it" somewhat.
However, *BSD has accomplished something big: at least we won't have people tortured by MacOS anymore. Hopefully. Now let's see how long it takes for Win2k to turn into a *real* Unix.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
>What on earth for?
1) LyX
2) focus follows mouse
3) moving between windows from the keyboard
I wouldn't consider switchin without *all* of these.
> Who the hell is asking you to *switch*?
Reality says one OS on my desk. I need access to all my files, all the time, and when I'm running servers for my students, they need to stay up.
This means that I either run FreeBSD with X, or that I run OSX--running both isn't an option, meaning that either I stay, or get a mac and switch.
hawk
>You like the focus to follow the mouse?
:) It took getting used to, but I find it wonderfully convenient. I can type things in another window while leaving what I'm interested in up front, and I can click widgets in other windows like you mention. However, I *don't* like the settings that cause windows to come to the front as the mouse crosses; that just drives me nuts . . .
yep
It certainly shouldn't be the default on the mac, and certainly isn't appropriate for new users. However, it *is* something I use all the time
Also, my mouse doesn't move aruond much; I don't have to worry about where it is . . . About the only thing that regularly leads me to mousing around on a regular basis is making graphs with xcircuit and sorting through large quantities of mail (I use the command line for small quantities).
hawk
'Nuff said...nah, I'll say more. :^) That's absolutely true. On my home machine, I've installed both Win98 and Linux-Mandrake (for that matter, also BeOS 5 PE, SuSE, Slackware, RH...) and I've gotta tell you that Linux-Mandrake was by far the easier install. I've had a number of people simply say, "I don't understand why you run that Linux crap; Windows is so much easier." No. It's easier to them because they unpacked their machine and it worked, like a toaster.
On another note, I've had a few people rant to me about how bad Linux "sucked" because their scanner didn't work or their weird soundcard didn't work. Hell, it's all PnP; why wouldn't it work in Linux?
Support, man, hardware support.
Why is hardware support so bad under Linux? Thank Microsoft. They're the ones that pushed for companies to release standard drivers instead of documentation. Now, instead of companies releasing program info, we have companies that release drivers and, if you want hardware info, oft times they want an NDA signed/agreed to. And we've seen a proliferation in the number of different chipsets/instruction sets. Remember when printers were ProPrinter, Epson, or PCL compatible? Or video cards were compatible with whatever IBM/Microsoft were touting as the latest-greatest standard?
*sighs* man, I'd love to see a tech manual for my HP DeskJet. Or, for that matter, my parallel-port cheapo scanner.
>How many windows users know how to partition, and
>format a hdd, then install an OS on it? Not many.
Ah, but it's worse than that. There are users that feel like something's gone wrong if, say, their kid changes the background image in Windows. Once they decide to change it back, they have no idea! My wife still doesn't understand the Windoze taskbar. For that matter, I was trying to help her through something, and I asked her to minimize the window that was in focus. Minimize? God, you would have thought I asked her to produce final results for the Human Genome Project. This from a woman who is light-years ahead of me in music theory. I've tried to get her to go through the nice little Win98 manual that comes with Windows (it's true! the book is good for something other than the serial number!) and she won't do it; it's too confusing. Confusing, yeah, like Curious George is confusing. Heh.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Well, I know Apple hasn't exactly hidden the UNIX origins of thier new OS, but they also haven't made a secret of building a lot more on top of it. I guess I'm skeptical that OS-X will convince people that UNIX is consumer-ready.
In fact, I predict the opposite - the corporate world will, IMHO, see the OS-X story as "well, UNIX seems to be a good foundation, but look how much work Apple had to do to make it useful." Now, I'm not saying that's an accurate conclusion, but it does seem a likely one.
Besides, I would wager the majority of (non-geek) computer users, at least outside the Mac Users' domain, probably couldn't care less about OS-X. And I'd wager that most of the folks who care about OS-X as end-users don't care that it is based on a UNIX-like OS: they just want thier Mac to run. The credit for the stability of OS-X will go to Apple, not to BSD, for the most part (even if that is inaccurate).
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Apple did release the source to the BSD parts of OSX. It's called Darwin. Everything that Apple used that was Open-Source is still Open-Source, albeit under a different license.
Apple didn't have to do that, of course. They could have kept the source to themselves (If I remember right, NeXTStep did this; the only thing the community got back from them was GCC's Onjective-C compiler, and even that came only after a rather little-known court battle). Perhaps that's why Apple is Open-Sourcing Darwin; Steve hasn't forgotten his last tangle with the OSS community and doesn't want to risk another one.
Speaking of compilers, have Apple's modifications to GCC gotten back into the main or devel trees yet? I know they were going to contribute back their changes, and given Apple's history with MrC I would imagine this could help towards a truly kickass compiler on PPC.
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Dunno about whether hiding parts of the system is a problem. MacOS already has hidden directories and files you shouldn't play with, such as the Temporary Items Folder in each directory, or the Desktop DF and DB files. These do not normally lead to maintainability nightmares - the worst problems I ever saw were when "bad" apps revealed them in file dialogue boxes and allowed users to manipulate them.
Otherwise I see little visible effect of the underlying Unix on the user experience.
In fact all this problem about being "unable to select what to replace" is also true of Drag&Drop, except because you have to hold the stupid mouse button down people don't think about the fact that they can't select what to replace. (I have tried using middle-mouse-drag to select the replacement but it does not seem to be user friendly).
If you treat it this way, it should be clear that middle-mouse-paste should work for any data type, as long as drag&drop works.
It would be nice if Apple, having much more control over the gui, might consider adding some ability like this.
It would be nice if they allowed X applications to work (not window managers, though!). This could be done by either making a dummy X server or by replacing Xlib. I expect several third-party solutions for this will show up quite quickly.
The key thing that Apple needs is serious hardware. Not to discount the PPC processor, but there's more that differentiates N-way SMP Mac systems and an SGI Origin. Bus and memory architecture on the high end stuff is much more sophiticated, plus SGI does a fair job with hardware video acceleration, something Apple has been relying on commodity Wintel vendors for lately, and taking a little heat for (Rage 128 on the Cube, for example).
An SGI acquitision would give Apple immediate access to SGI's high-end hardware design experience as well as credibility in high-end visualization markets that might like an Apple GUI but don't believe it can cut the mustard on the rendering jobs they do.
I imagine Apple would LOVE to offer a high-end Apple branded 3d video solution. Apple loves to sell proprietary hardware where the margins are tasty, and its users love to pay the money for it as well. SGI could be the source of that technology.
I can also imagine complete product solutions that merge Mac desktops with Origins and a seamless, networked GUI that can tie them all together.
I can't believe that all the time Steve spent doing animation he didn't seize upon this idea..
Ideally Mac applications would be X-windows aware (if that concept exists) so that they could be displayed on an X term elsewhere.
Totally off-topic, but I'll reiterate that I *still* think Apple should buy SGI. It'd give them the high-end visualization market that SGI still has and give them an instant entree to the enterprise-scale hardware which they very sorely need.
Now that they're dedicating themselves to OS X, think of the low-end SGI apps that could fairly easily be ported to the Mac *and* think of the Mac stuff that could go to the SGI.
By adding X support to OSX they could make this kind of marriage really fly.
If Sun can buy Cobalt to get into the applicance business, why couldn't Apple do it the other way around?
If they're going to put an "X" in there, I'm calling it OS "X", not OS "ten"!
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
There seems to be a group of developers that both MacOS and general *nix fans leave out -- and that's the NeXT/Openstep community. Not incredibly large, but many die hard fans who learned to love using the dev tools/object framework that is still part of OS X.
I think the enthusiasm has waned a little bit -- back when Apple first released Rhapsody DR1, there were already apps from many NeXT developers. TIFFany -- which claimed to be a photshop killer -- comes to mind. I think, however, that time to market for the consumer version of the OS and probably Apple's tendancy to support/favor big names (like Adobe) and mistreat *step'ers probably made some of these guys drop off the radar. It's certainly made some of them less than enchanted with apple
Omni Development (among others), though, is still going at it, daring to stand up in the browser market among others. If you're interested in a peek at the community I've been talking about, check out Stepwise.
Tweet, tweet.
Repeat after me, dual boot. If you want X, you can always boot into linux.
We all know that gcc and other cool CLI tools are ready and waiting for us when we get our OSX box. For many, that is the reason for Linux.
Yaboot, for sure!
Al
photosMy Photostream
As far as an X11 -> Quartz compatibility layer, that would be great. Tenon (www.tenon.com) has created an X server that runs on OS X and sounds like it integrates pretty well. They have a description & screenshots here.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
Why not?
Are we to post our comments on both MacSlash and Slashdot?
Last time I heard, it doesn't really matter. You can shut up too for either sites if you want.
Or post reactions to the article on MacSlash and reactions to Slashdot's article on MacSlash's article here?
If you're that bored, and that's your cup of tea....
What's the point of providing two discussion forums for the same story?
So maybe just because /. links over there, we should shut down either sites' discussion forum, just because vertical-limit can't take the duality?
Maybe you haven't figured it out yet (ie you didn't bother to click the link), but the opinion article is IN MacSlash. It's not like MacSlash linked to some story, and Slashdot linked to MacSlash, just so users can find the link on MacSlash.
Why just Slash? Maybe we should exclude all ZDNet stories too from now on, and scurry over to their "Talkback" forums.
I assume OS X should be able to compile and run BSD apps 'out of the box'. However, the lack of X compatibility is a bit of a shame... Is anyone able to provide answers to the following questions:
(1) Is anyone working on XFree86 for Darwin?
(2) Would it be possible to create some kind of 'X compatibility layer' for porting X11 apps to OS X?
(3) If (2) is not possible, how about porting GTK+ or Qt to OS X/Carbon/whatever?
It would be a *huge* bonus for Apple if they could have easy access to the vast array of Unix/X applications already out there; I'm surprised they haven't given more thought to this concept, especially with the current community and media interest in Linux.
-- briggers
-- briggers Remove blinkers to email me.
You like the focus to follow the mouse?
Ick. That's the first thing I change when I get X up and running on a new UNIX account. It's a major annoyance to have to keep your mouse in the way of your window when typing on it. It also requires you to manage your window positions carefully so that no two windows overlap in a major way. Most new users I've seen run into it get confused or frustrated very quickly.
There's no way in hell Apple would ever switch their GUI behavior to that. They just recently gave in to allowing you to click on widgets in a window that did not previously have focus. Personally, I'm against that behavior since it makes it to easy to accidentally close a window, but it's not nearly as bad as the danger inherent in mouse-based focus where you could accidentally click anything in a nearby window.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Ideally Mac applications would be X-windows aware (if that concept exists) so that they could be displayed on an X term elsewhere.
Not necessary at all. Theoretically, Apple could begin using the Quartz Display PDF layer to perform the same functions as the old NeXTSTEP Display PostScript engine. Both technologies are much more efficient than X. While they wouldn't be as easy to view from other machines due to the wide market penetration of X, that's no reason to have to cripple your architecture by wedging in a hacked up protocol to an existing clean architecture.
As for the SGI comment, I'd love to see NUMA-based high-end Mac servers, but other than that SGI's hardware business is suffering. The typical strength of SGI was in the graphics market, where NVidia, 3dfx, and others are chewing them apart in the race to be the best card for gamers. The rest of what they do is done better by people like Sun.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Knowing the history between Apple and Micro$0ft Apple probably only went the *nix route to annoy Micro$0ft.
Actually, no. There's a good bit of history you might have missed if you weren't paying attention 3-4 years ago. Apple saw that the Copland project was going nowhere, so they axed it. They began to shop around for other OSes to buy and convert to Mac. BeOS was the first contender way back in the days before it even had basic things like printer support. In fact, this is what got Be the national limelight.
However, Apple saw that they were looking at a company with some really good ideas, but their current work-in-progress was very raw and unfinished. Plus, the head of Be, Inc. was an ex-Apple headknocker who left under less than amiable terms. He wanted to stick Apple with a huge bill for buying out Be.
Then Apple was pointed the way of NeXT, Inc., which was formed by Apple founder Steve Jobs. It was a product that had over a decade of maturity, and established customer base, and a series of visionary technologies that were years before their time. It also had a staff of top-notch, well recognized engineers, such as the head developer of the Mach microkernel. OPENSTEP, the cross-platform version of NeXTSTEP, was powerful, stable, and had a great interface that could be built off of. The fact that UNIX was the source of its stability wasn't a big deal. It was just another bonus.
Still, why didn't they just go all out and run Linux on it. They could cut a load of their development staff and save money if they did that.
No offense, but this one is a serious no-brainer. Mac is strong everywhere Linux is weak. The interface and ease of use is what makes Mac beloved by all its users. To move to Linux would be a slap in the face of the Mac faithful who don't like tinkering with their system because they have to to get something to work. To go from the eligance of the Mac GUI to any X-Windows based solution would be to fall behind Microsoft in terms of UI. Also, it would mean completely abandoning all of their developers who would sooner turn to Windows-only solutions than try to rewrite for Linux/X11.
Furthermore, moving to Linux as the OS would destroy Apple as a hardware company. Why pay twice as much for only slightly better performance than an Lintel system? The reason why people buy Macs is for the Mac OS. Seperating the two or destroying one half of the software/hardware marrage would destroy the entire company. Some common sense should let you see why they wouldn't move to Linux.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
GIMP
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As far as I recall, all OSX configuration files are going to be valid XML. Thus, when the system tries to use a config file, it checks to see whether the config file conforms to its DTD or not, and responds accordingly.
Why is this relevant? Because well thought up XML schemes can be used to dynamically generate neat windows in which the user can see what possible actions there are with the current config file, ie. the user does not have to be able to see the /etc dirs directly, because some generic admin tool can be made, to transform all the nasty looking config files into pretty drop down boxes and what have we.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
No. Mac OS X don't use use an X window compatible window manager. Their window manager/2D graphics system is much more related to Display Postscript. Although it is based on PDF and not PS. And it does not (I think) have any space between the system and the window that makes it possible to run the interface of an app on another machine (Display Postscrip on NeXT did that).
;)
So yes. They are Apple and oranges
My question is, isn't OS X essentially the answer to the question of "where is a unix my mom can use?". I mean, haven't Gnome and KDE always wanted to eventually have a seamless GUI that "hid" the complexity of unix from new users (and exposed it to power users)? Seems like OS X has trumped both Gnome and KDE in that respect. Of course Gnome and KDE have trumped OS X in the "Free" respect.
Is everybody out here in geek-land who was supporting Gnome and KDE because they wanted unix brought to the general user, going to go out and now recommend OS X?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Interesting.
Could someone with hardware insight comment on the feasability of phasing in PPCs inplace of MIPS. Does the MIPS architecture have a justifiable reason to exist, or is it around just for legacy reasons?
I think the right conclusion is very close to this: UNIX is very good
at solving a lot of low-level technical issues, and the best
cross-architecture platforms out there are UNIXes. But they have
awful, unforgiving user interfaces. It's roughly the conclusion I
take from the Unix-hater's handbook, etc.
the middle one is there.. it's the left and right that are missing..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I find that unix isnt actually that un-user friendly... if you stuck a person with no computer experience infront of a computer, and said, here, I've got these windows 2000 cabs n stuff over on this hard disk, on this computer over here... now, install windows 2000 for me from scratch... its just not going to happen. Stick someone infront of a puter and say, "here, here are the install files for linux, go for it", again, not going to happen. If you compare user experiences between windows and a full running gnome or kde setup, you're going to get similar experiences. What makes unix hard, is the fact that it doesnt come pre-installed... it makes you learn it from the ground up, instead of the top down - the way that most people learn windows.
People accumulate knowledge, and draw connections between bits of knowledge. If you have many bits of knowledge, and no connections, you're going to feel really dumb and confused. If you dont have a lot of knowledge, but really know how it all fits togeather, you dont feel really stupid, and you feel comfortable. When you learn something like windows from the gui down, you get to learn the most basic behavior of software. Just like you can be familiar with your body, without having a PHD in biology. A preinstalled OS lets you get comfortable before you go rooting down in the more technical areas. When you start from the bottom, you are exposed to a huge amount of information - you dont understand the context of it, and thus cant draw relationships. You get confused, and feel stupid, and blame the OS for being complicated and not user friendly.
How many windows users know how to partition, and format a hdd, then install an OS on it? Not many.
I think the plan is to conquer the SGI market, not buy into it. I wouldn't be suprised to hear about a deal in the works for many of the reasons you mention, but SGI has been on shakey ground recently and their market might be ripe for someone like Apple to come along with a hot new OS and multi-processing hardware at an attractive price.
Da. UNIX vill make kountry stronk.
Thanks. I have long been fond both of UNIX and that quirky style of the Socialist Realism artwork - it's almost as funny as some of the modern corporate advertising imagery such as high tech, slim, withit, blonde HP power lady skipping over the floor polishing machine, no doubt working hard after hours and Getting Things Done (years before Carly Fiorina arrived); or the man with the Jeep and cell phone in the woods Being Individualistic but Getting Business Done on His Own Terms.
All that aside, as a UNIX user I've always noticed the peculiar skirmishes going on between two other camps of computer users: Wintel and Mac. LOTS of people would use Windows, of course, but the Wintel crowd was heavy on beancounters, people wearing suits that are NOT fashionable but rather purchased for large amounts of dollars and meant to portend power. Those folks didn't seem to have a very well-developed sense of humor. We don't know why it is ubiquitous, but then, so is television.
The Mac crowd was heavy on artists and academics, freethinkers that love birds and sushi, sometimes dressing in black shirts with the top button buttonned. Often, though, they didn't care much about clothes except as another decorative expression. We know the Mac users are in the minority and they know they're in the minority, and we never know if they'll be doomed two years from now. It reminds us of lovers standing in the breeze on the bow of the Titanic.UNIX has had a mythos from long ago. As a student in the late 1970's, strolling along a corridor in a physics building (Caltech had more than one physics building, but only one humanities building), I could see where some graduate student had plastered a printout with the word "Unix" on it, very much as a Statement. Just as now, in my large scale workplace, some of the Mac users don't have plain drab just the nametext nameplates next to their doors - they have an identifying colored rainbow apple next to the name text.
The myths live on.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
What on earth for? I can't see any reason to put X on Mac OS. Its' GUI is fantastic, why would you want to replace it (unless you are some wierdo-S&M type hacker (or from attrition :-)))?
I can understand trying to get X apps on top of the Mac GUI, but if you need all of X, why not just install a linux/bsd distro on the Mac?
Does anyone see any reasons for doing this?
--
Donate free food here
I used to be a hardcore Mac user (and still am) but I have to say, after playing around with the Public Beta, I am amazed, to say the least.
Aqua is cool, and Classic runs okay... carbonized apps are cool, but what I love is the USIX aspects of OSX. It is'nt that hard to grasp, and once you do, it transforms the MacOS into some sort of superOS.
I love being able to maintain my webserver (APACHE not WebSTAR) through a telnet client. And OSX is so damn stable, it's like a dream come true. BSD is the shit, and I think OSX is what sold me (and will a lot of other people) on UNIX as a consumer OS.
djsw
Actually I think the problem is worse than you state. What usually happens is someone with some windows experience (often quite alot) has been told that linux is a good operating system to have. Consequently - feeling adventurous they try and install it. For a first time windows user the result is usually either a failed install or a failed install and a trashed Windows installation (i.e. won't boot and windows user doesn't know about fdisk /mbr). This certainly happened to me and put me off Linux considerably. Now, things have got much better recently so most people can actually get the install going.
However, your typical user still has to deal with making all of the hardware work correctly - this is not a problem with a preinstalled computer because the user doesn't yet know that all the hardware doesn't work correctly - however our experience windows user is fully aware that the computer does not work as well under linux as windows. This is not a suprise, our user has spent some time making it work under windows, tweaking from the default buggered install. However, we now have to deal with the fact that - there is no control panel to fix the system with, none of the familiar commands work and we have no documentation. This is a major barrier to actually making the transition.
I made the transition from linux hater to linux user because I had network access to a machine I wasn't adminstrator on and found applications that were useful with no obvious windows counterpart (e.g. using cron to automatically email companies that don't respond). Then an experienced friend of mine led me through a complex RedHat 6 install making all of the network and modem go to route out the network on my house. Then I installed a simpler Laptop of my own and then did a reinstall of my server. Now I'm quite happy with command line + Linux and my laptop no longer runs X to give me more battery life.
To make the transition decent answers have to be given to
why use linux?
how do I install linux?
how do I make it work?
I think your best market now is Win2K users who can't burn CD's (adaptecs software is f****d under win2k). Show them a linux system that will burn under heavy load and they may be persuaded to try it out.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
"I'd wager that most of the folks who care about OS-X as end-users don't care that it is based on a UNIX-like OS: they just want thier Mac to run. The credit for the stability of OS-X will go to Apple, not to BSD, for the most part (even if that is inaccurate)."
This is true, up to a point. But in some ways, a general ignorance of Unix seems to help drive a certain romantic ideal -- an ideal that keeps the word "Unix" in very active circulation even outside of geek circles. To the typical Mac end-user, Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old. Unix is like a brawny Soviet on a Constructivist poster, swinging his hammer for his comrades. We don't know why it's good, but damn if our hearts aren't stirred by the weighty, solidly angular goodness of it all.
For Unix to become "consumer-ready," it must first create for itself a certain popular mythos, the same way computers themselves did in the eighties. That's already happened among Mac people... it remains to be seen how far it spreads beyond.
Making something that's derived from a unix-like OS easy to use certainly seems no easy task. Apple seems to be addressing this issue by trying to completely hide the BSD layer from the user. From a user-interface standpoint, I can understand this, but I wonder if it's going to create lots of problems with system maintainance. Wilfredo Sanchez's USENIX paper gives a few examples of problematic differences between the Mac and BSD systems. For example, since the pathname delimiter is a colon in MacOS and a slash in BSD, filenames have to be translated, and different programs will see the same file in different ways; likewise, Mac programs will often expect a file to have a resource fork, and BSD programs won't normally be aware of the resource fork. Apple seems to have addressed these issues, but their solutions still strike me as somewhat ugly hacks to intertwine two drastically different systems; it seems like this could cause problems in certain cases.
Sanchez also writes, "although we use BSD as the core system software, we do not want to require our users to understand how BSD works. Ideally, the typical Macintosh user does not even know that BSD is there. The very presence of such folders as 'usr' and 'etc' on disk is therefore awkward, and we hide those directories and their contents at the application level". I understand the reasoning for this, and I agree that having cryptically named folders floating around wouldn't help ease of use. At the same time, it's disturbing to me because the 'usr' and 'etc' directories do exist and presumably are critical to the operation of the system, and hiding them from the users is bound to cause problems if for some reason it's necessary to access them. Apple claims that it'll never be necessary to see these directories, but I'm skeptical; perhaps you won't encounter them in normal use, but what if something in them gets corrupted, or something? Hiding parts of the system from users sounds like it'll lead to a maintainability nightmare.
Another point, less significant but still non-trivial: the internals of OS X are massively different from those of any previous OS. This presumably means that expert users are going to have to learn anew how the system works in order to maintain it.
Life is far too important to be taken seriously.
Why is this innovative?
in two words, it's the user and the apps, dummy.
The unix beards and suspenders folk are a quiet mysterious set of gurus whose faces are hardly ever shown to the public.
In the other corner, we have the Jade iMac being advertised on the tellu with Joe Raposo's "It's Not Easy Being Green", a artfully crafted box with an equally attractive OS, and a whole world of commercially supported apps, like photoshop, etc.
OOPS-- Did I say the dirty work 'commercial?'
Some folks still can't or won't adapt to the notion that it's okay to use free (speech and beer)
apps, largely because they can't program, and don't want to
A) pester developers to fix bugs when they can't contribute code
B) tolerate crashy software while the baazaar gets it's act together.
C) spend the hours configging and maintaining/managing the box that could be used productively editing home videos of the kids over firewire for playback on Aunt Edna's tv.
So really, bridging the commercial and free worlds in this way is valuable to both our communities.
And besides, if you must have your devtools and such (and I want em too, this is posted from Mandrake/helix-gnome) you can put em back, along with X... but if there's a Aqua/carbon/cocoa'ed solution that runs native, am I gonna choose the crashy X version especially if the open source project is poorly managed and stagnant (too often the case)? not a chance.
A host is a host from coast to coast
but no one uses a host that's close
While several people have noted that it should be easy to recompile and run many of the standard UNIX utilities, I'm very curious as to how OS X's new file architecture (using packages...noted on /. a while ago) will affect UNIX programs. It seems Apple's trying to standardize how applications are stored in the file system, and my guess is a simple recompile doesn't really do that. But maybe not? Also, will there renaming of certain directories cause problems? Like /usr to /User? Seems like this should break many applications....but maybe not?
I can not for the life of me understand why Slashdot readers think disdain for colored cases qualifies them as hacker gods when they're unable to comprehend the difference between a completely novel GUI that replaces everything from X up and an Enlightenment theme with translucent buttons.
Somehow, I do not believe we will be seeing this open sourced anytime soon...so why is this so innovative?
Uhh, because innovation is in what you make, not what license you use?
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Security: some Mac users like to boast of how secure Mac OS is as a web-server. But that security was partly because Mac OS simply doesn't do as much (in terms of network services) as an NT or *nix box and partly because Mac OS is less used for internet servers and so less known. OSX, though, is *nix. You can do more with *nix - and so can the cracker. How will Mac users react to that? If Macintosh do lock down the security, I bet it won't withstand having a load of freenix tools and services added.
Biodiversity: the Mac way of doing things has meant great uniformity amongst Mac machines and systems. From my *nix-geek POV that's not great but it has brought definite advantages to Mac users in terms of stability and ease-of-use. On the downside, IME because Macs work so well together I've found it very difficult to talk to Mac users who want to send/share files with our staff (Linux/Windows environment) because they have trouble with the idea that it might be difficult to get two computers/filesystems/networks to communicate, for them it just happens. How will Mac users (and Macintosh) react to an influx of *nix geeks who want to be able to change everything but still have it all work with the bits they haven't changed. How will they react to the *nix world demanding that OSX stay compatible and open? What will Mr Jobs think?
I can see plenty of areas for friction between Macintosh (the company as opposed to the users) and the freenix world. Steve Jobs' own dealings with the Human Interface group show how little time he has for awkward developers. If there is friction, how will the notoriously loyal Mac users react? Especially if adapting to the Unix world-view means some painful changes for them (viz. my comments on security above).
OSX definitely means that the Mac is coming in from the cold but will some/many Mac users decide they were better off on their own?