Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?