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.