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?
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'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.