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Is Mac OS X Threatening Linux?
An unnamed correspondent asks: "Does anyone think that the release of Mac OS X will threaten Linux? A UNIX-based OS that XFree86, the GIMP, Apache, etc. run on, and is easy to use and maintain for a beginner, might not bode too well for the little OS that could. I'm not talking about techies -- I'm talking about people who might use Linux on their desktop (companies who are deploying it, etc.). Why would they want to use Linux instead of OS X?" It's not a new question, but it won't go away, either. Anyone out there planning to jump to Mac OS X from Linux or one of the (other) BSDs?
oh wait.
- A.P.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Windows NT is not a server OS, because it requires decent hardware, a fair ammount of RAM, and has an ugly GUI.
I'd say there's no question that Windows NT competes with Linux. Maybe not in your minds - using Windows as a server is unthinkable - but look what percentage of Web sites is being served by IIS. A PowerMac G3 might seem like a ridiculous hardware requirement to you, but if you're setting up a new machine and buying new hardware anyway, Mac OS X can certainly run on an $800 iMac; would you buy something cheaper to run WinNT?
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
In other words, the current situation is heavily monopolised and doesn't represent a market in any normal sense. _Any_ additional player getting a larger share legitimises the very concept of 'additional player'.
The more OSX out there, the more plausible the concept of 'well I have an x86 already, how about I run Linux?'. The more Linux out there, the more plausible the concept of 'if I'm already not running Windows maybe I want something real slick'. Sort of a mutual feedback thing.
It's not very useful, and it's not what anyone *means* when they say linux, but "GNU/Linux" is a technically correct label for the linux kernel and the GNU utilities.
On the other hand, when we say "Linux," we usually mean either
a) the kernel, or
b) the kernel, and the usual collection of things from a gaggle of different sources (X, bsd, sendmail, perl, and a gaggle of others including GNU).
Oh, and it's the bsd utilities, of which GNU has an implementation, that
we're in love with, not the GNU versions themselves. Many of us prefer the non-GNU versions (and particularly the real documentation instead of that wretched info system . .
hawk
This has been one of my back-burner issues that I've just never gotten around to. (Among other things, it's easier to just install FreeBSD :). Are there instructions around for this somewhere?
hawk, who thinks the -- from the -- options should be violently thrust through those who inflict them upon us, and wants the man pages for mkdir and rmdir to reflect that the lenght of their names is a long-standing bug
Of course Apple's preference will differ. See, you don't spend any ca$h money on software, and are probably going to keep running on x86 anyway. Any software you write you are going to insist on open sourcing, and you're going to write it for other programmers, not artists and secretaries. And when I say artists, I don't mean web page geeks running GIMP, I mean people who spent 6 years at Fine Art school and think that computers are either at best a necessary evil, or of no more importance than an easel and a paintbrush, like many of the Mac users I know.
From a commercial perspective, you don't exist to them.
Which is why serious software users get escrow licenses from their vendors, and have done so for decades.
There is a chance for OSX to have some impact on the number of Linux users, or number of potential users. It depends on the location - is it going to be a place who thinks "Why buy that when I can download something for free to do the same thing?" - they'll go with Linux. Or is it going to be a place that thinks "Why try to put some free stuff together, when I can buy it from a bigname company and get their backing?" - they'll go with OSX.
Does OSX run on Intel? If not, then it'll be even less of an impact, as I don't see people buying G4's to put Linux on them (I'd like to, but we're talking about large volumes). If it does run on Intel, then MS has more to fear than Linux people would because the Mac people would be able to directly steal machines away from MS.
Any way you slice it, people who want to use Linux will not change. People who want to use Mac's will not change. People who want to use Windows will not change. There will be a minor handful who are in limbo about what they want to use, or have no say in what they use.
Oh yeah - Coke also makes water - Dasani.
I believe by installer he was talking about the "RedHat installer" or "debian installer" etc...not the install program you can use for installing your apps (ie. InstallShield).
While Windows may have some nasty library dependincies like you mentioned, I don't recall the last time I had a problem under Windows with library problems.
With Linux apps I pull down, everything seems to want every other library out there it can think of to be installed to run/compile. And those libraries that are required in turn want some other libraries.
While this problem may be true for Windows, a great job has been done to hide that.
Linux - I wanna install GIMP. IIRC, I need GTK+, GLIB, ImLib, LibJPEG, LibGIF, LibTIFF, LibPNG, and a lot more. And if I just downloaded an RPM of Gimp, I need to make sure I have all of those, and the correct versions. And if I grabbed the source, which is awsome to do, then I have to have all the development versions built.
Windows - I wanna install Photoshop. I check the options I want and click Next and I'm done. I don't know or care what it needed.
Yes, the "everyone shove stuff in \system32 is scary, but this is a desktop machine, not a server.
It's already out. http://www.opensource.apple.com/
You can download darwin there, and it'll run on x86. But I was running Rhapsody, their Crossplatform environment beta on a x86 machine over a year ago. I still have the CD. I assume that Rhapsody eventually became OS X, and they just cut x86 support.
Joseph Elwell.
Apple/Mac will always have their niche ... but the reason Microsoft and Linux exist is because of cheap x86 hardware. And as far as I can tell [cue up your Beatles CD] it's getting cheaper all the time.
RFC2119
Suddenly, you have an OS that does everything Linux does and can even run Linux binaries (thanks to BSD Linux-binary compatibilty)
Actually, MOSX *would* run LinuxPPC binaries if it actually used the ELF ABI (application binary interface), which is not the case.
MOSX runs Mach-O (I *hate* this name), XCOFF and PEF (itself an extension of XCOFF) binaries.
Mind you, someone could write an ELF loader and use that to load LinuxPPC binaries--something that could easilly be added to Darwin. I actually have such code (for which I claim no credits).
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
I can't count how many times I've been asked something like this now. Nor can I count how many times I've said this:
;-)
Linux is not going away.
LinuxPPC isn't going away, either.
Linux ON PowerPC definitely isn't going away.
Take your typical Mac user. They probably got the machine because it was easier for them to use and manage than a Windows box. They may do things like use PageMaker, Photoshop, Kid Pix, or play some games. Surf the net. This is the typical Mac user to me.
When they're done with their Mac, they shut it down, and go into a different room, where they watch what their TiVo just recorded. They don't know it, but they're using Linux. On a PowerPC.
The TiVo is my favorite example of how Linux is slowly, quietly infiltrating our lives, but not being noticed. Most people don't know the TiVo is running Linux/PPC. But it is! OS X coming out will not make the TiVo go away.
Then there's the traditional Linux/PPC markets. OS X will share some of those. OS X runs really well on the G4. But what if you have a lab with 20 Power Mac 9500s? You can't install OS X on them. But you can install LinuxPPC. Buy one CD, install 20 times. You won't be charged 20 times for that.
Use the Beowulf software on the Extras CD, make them a cluster. Will Beowulf be included with OS X? I doubt it.
Just because OS X is coming, Linux is not leaving. And whenever OS X actually does ship, I'll send Steve Jobs a telegram. Maybe it'll say "C:\\ONGRTLNS."
Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996.
-- haaz.
(This is the second time this has been on Slashdot. Let's make it the last. :)
;-)
Everyone is saying "Will OS X make Linux go away?" No one is asking "How can Linux and OS X help each other?"
Look at what's happening. UNIX is taking over the PowerPC OS market. AIX, Linux, and Mac OS X are all UNIX-based. Windows NT for PPC stopped being made years ago. That leaves "classic" OS X, and proprietary embedded systems. And you can count SoftWindows, I guess.
OS X and Linux/PPC are both UNIX-based systems running on the same processor. We should take advantage of that, not bemoan the potential fate of Linux.
Not going away,
Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996.
-- haaz.
Thanks, but I read it first on slashdot :-)
Yes. A modern BSD kernel rather then the Mach microkernel with the monolithic BSD single server on top of it. Which is a pretty damm old BSD kernel (older then FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD and BSD/OS -- not older then the kernels, but older then them!). It is nice that there is a new layer of things to let the FreeBSD device drivers to slip in without too much trubble though.
A modern Linux kernel would probbably be better then the mach kernel, but I don't have enough Linux experiance to say for sure.
It's not that there is anything stunningly wrong with Mach, just that it has seen way less work over the last 8 years then any of the BSDs (and they started at about the same place), or Linux (which Mach started out ahead of).
That is, of corse, assuming that the WINE hooks, or SCO hooks, or other other OS hooks are enough to cram Classic into a BSD or Linux.
If you ditched the NextStep menus and went with Mac style ones that would be pretty decent. But this is a lot better for getting older Mac users not to be intensly upset about OSX.
The dock isn't bad, but I miss the quick-bar, and I only used OS9 for a week! (Prior to that I has used whatever MacOS came before the first color Mac!).
I've been waiting for someone to do a "drool proof Unix" for a lot longer then five years. I'm supprised it is Apple, and pleased too. (I can't count NeXT because I never had admin on one, and can't say how drool proof that part was -- at least if it was actually first I'm only delaying it's credit to recognise it now as OSX...)
Where to start?
OSX PB is time limited, but you get to refund it's price vs. the OSX release price. Not the worlds best deal, but not a total rip off.
All the older apps I rand under OSX ran just fine (it started up "Classic" which is almost certonally a modifyed OS 9). In fact other people have reported running 68000 programs like MacDraw 0.8 under Classic. Oh, and for anyone who has never seen it run to start an old app "under Classic" you put the mouse over it and click twice (or click on a document associated with it), if "Classic" isn't running it starts automatically (but slowly), then your old app starts, and you are thrown into a world of the past (the old nice task switcher is back and all). You can click on your new apps to get back. Not the best thing in the world, but pretty easy.
I have seen an app that didn't work right under Classic. Apple's own iMovie got a bad aspect ratio and was gennerally unplesent. I hope it is fixed for the release (in twoish months). Hell I hope there is a new public beta next week and iMovie works under it!
Of corse it takes a lot from old systems. It is NeXT after all. And better off for it. mostly. It is a shame they are using the Mach kernel. The network stack needs work. I have to down/up the ethernet every once in a while to keep it running. Sometimes I have to flush the arp cache. I hope that gets fixed in the release too.
Still under OS9 the mac crashed three times or more a day. Under OSX in three weeks I have had one panic. A few application crashes (actually a lot if you count some of the repetable ones I tracked down, but I was looking for the source of the crash). Zero hangs. Zero failure to un-sleep (it is on a laptop). Two or three "system getting slower and slower because the window system and/or finder looks like it is leaking memory" where logging out and in again made things "all better".
Not the kind of quality I would hope for in a Unix desktop, but far far far better then the old Mac OS, or Windows. And I can allways hope it gets better in the release.
Name 10 people in your direct vicinity that use Windows wissler right now. Tell me that hunk of crap won't be mainstream within six months of release.
I fully expect Apple to be the biggest Unix seller by volume (not dollars!) when OSX gets bundled with all new Macs ("this summer"). Is that mainstream? Well Apple has a pretty low desktop share, and OSX will take a while to help it. It'll sure be mainstream for video editing systems though, and people who shoot comercials digitally, and some other markets. It'll sure deserve the mainstream more then Windows. And until Linux/FreeBSD/whatever gets a nice candy coated shell that my mom can use, it'll deserve the mainstream more then the other Unix systems as well.
Be done with DAVE (if by that you mean, as I suspect is the case, Thursby Software's DAVE) for people using it as an SMB server, that is. For people using DAVE as a client, you'd need to have something like the smbfs for FreeBSD ported to MacOS X. (I don't know how hard it is to port a FreeBSD file system to the MacOS X kernel; I'm assuming here that it'd be easier than porting the Linux smbfs.)
I also don't think strict compliance is very important. I would be happy if I could rely on a command-line program (no X) that does no ioctl calls was the only thing guaranteed to work (and it can read any file, so NT does not conform to this). For instance they can go ahead and break that incredible mess that is pseudo-ttys and the terminal driver.
Yes, certainly, but you are wasting a lot less of it by not taking over the whole screen, which is what the current X solutions do.
NT DOES NOT conform to the POSIX standard in any useful way. For instance, a file created by a POSIX program is not visible to a normal NT program, and vice-versa. This makes it totally useless. They also did a very minimal support of POSIX, so minimal that no real program can port to it. It was simply so it could be checked off on government requirement lists, but purposely broken enough that nobody would write portable programs for NT.
This will allow any X program to run on the Mac (and will probably allow remote X applications to appear in windows on the Aqua screen, too).
Even with this, I would expect ported toolkits to produce faster and more reliable code.
I don't see OS X as a "threat" to Linux. Either the poster is trolling for responses, trying to turn UNIX against UNIX, or generally hasn't thought this through.
.dll's I know...)
Apple went to BSD for one major reason: to keep the Mac RELEVENT. Apple was under pressure to go next-gen in their OS. It *could* have been the NT kernel... they gave it serious consideration. Rumor was Bill threw one of his famous tantrums when Apple dissed him for the BSD kernel.
BSD does not require Apple to give back code to the community -- yet Apple does exactly this with Apache and others. This allows Apple to transition to "semi-free" OS status, while they make whatever plans they have for the future. This tells me Steve Jobs "gets it", even if he doesn't do what WE would want him to do, like make a damn QuickTime for Linux client. Thanks to AVIPLAY, the Microsoft Media stuff is one of the best multimedia technologies on Linux (yeah, it's just wine thunking evil MS
Apple at this point gets to ride the coattails of the free software revolution. I say more power to 'em... Linux is not that polished yet, and even when it's close, the hardware still needs to be managable also.
SO... had OS X been out 18 months ago when I had my Mac, I may have not dug into Linux quite as much.
Now tho, when I look at the new Macs, I think "what GREAT LinuxPPC boxes they would make... NO fans!!".
"Good artists borrow, Great artists steal.."
;)
If anything nice UI/system wise with OSX, OSS OSes and GUIs will simply steal them and make them part of the coollective. I _like_ the enlargement of the *nix ecosphere, and I think it'll be a suitable kick in the ass to competing GUI environments to get them to interoperate and improve..
(Jobs stole that quote BTW
Your Working Boy,
Huh? What makes you say that? Based on the massive and incredible innovation going on now in GNU/Linux?
If you ignore the under-the-hood changes that the kernel hackers have been working on that make the Linux kernel so nice and fast (which may or may not be innovative -- I'm not enough of a propellerhead to know), the past 9 or so years of GNU/Linux development has been catchup to the current state of Unix in general (here I'm thinking Solaris, HP/UX, IRIX).
Netatalk and Samba are great, but what are they? Reverse engineering of protocols ages old.
Gnome? KDE? Very nice toolkits for building apps -- almost as good as Openstep, which is what -- 9 years old itself? And not nearly as easy to learn and use as Hypercard (15 years old now?)
StarOffice, Applix -- WYSIWYG document editing is 1984 technology, man. The Gimp? Photoshop, late '80s.
Apache? Well, now you're talking -- the Free Software/Open Source poster child sets the standard for fast, reliable web serving -- but Linux hackers didn't make Apache. Apache hackers did. For Unix in general, not Linux.
Linux is great, no doubt -- though I'm a BSD guy myself -- but it's not innovative, but derivative. That's not a slam -- MS got to where it is today by being a company that excels in making derivative products. It's hard to be innovative when you're still trying to get the basics down (remember Malda on "Geeks in Space" gushing over antialiased fonts in X? Crikey, it's been around for YEARS on the Mac...)
Your primary argument (i.e., Linux will always be around) is absolutely true. My difference in opinion is that Linux hackers will be the cauldron from which will spring the Next Big Thing.
(Please notice that I do not think that collaborative programming, "Open Source programming", is the fault nor a bad thing. The method by which Linux is derived is not the issue, just the fact that Linux is still in the catch-up phase)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
... and this is why you're just now getting anti-aliased fonts in X. And why half of your programs will support it, and half won't.
It's an engineering trade-off. You get flexibility and freedom, you lose concurrency with the state-of-the-art.
(when I state-of-the-art, I mean things like Quicktime/RealPlayer/IE 5.5 not loadable kernel modules)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I also just bought a Dual-G4/450 box, after aeons (i.e. a couple of Major versions) of running Linux on Intel hardware, and I absolutely love it. I'd have to say that OS-X on G4's is pretty much a must-have for any serious geek. The hardware is wonderful, the SMP support on OS-X is far beyond Linux 2.2 (I haven't tried 2.4 SMP, so I can't comment there), and as the previous poster points out, OSX is *beautiful*.
...
That said, I also intend to get myself another Linux box at some point to do things like CPU-work and as a disk-server. Apple hardware is both too expensive and too pretty to be something you stick in a closet. I actually would say that I see OSX *helping* linux in the long run, because it gives UNIX a port-of-entry to the desktop world. Eventually, I see it as being both desirable and trivial to use Linux boxes as server and cpu-farms for large Apple installations. MS has announced that Office will be ported to OSX, as will Alias|Wavefronts Maya, my favorite program of all time. The apps will be there, and there's no good reason Linux can't be the NFS/WWW/Whatever server for them.
And, while I respect the work of the GNOME folk (sorry, KDE still makes me shudder), they are very far behind the Aqua desktop, and will be for quite some time. The combination of the OpenStep dev environment with the Apple UI engineers has created a work of beauty, IMHO, and having things like live Quicktime video feeds sitting behind tcsh just makes me smile every time.
In summary, I'd think that any UNIX-lover out there should welcome the arrival of a very advanced UNIX environment (open-source of a kind, no less) with a very advanced GUI environment on top. This only bodes well for UNIX in general
"Images are incapable of repose." - Bachelard
I suppose the real question is "if it's undergone professional usability testing, what professionals tested it who didn't kick and scream about the single-mouse-button issue?" These "professionals" obviously don't have the same ideas I do. *grin* I honestly don't care one way or the other which OS pummels Windoze. I just want at least one of them to do it. Why do people insist on pointless bitching, btw, about KDE and Gnome generally sucking? Why not instead suggest improvements in a non-flamebait way? Instead of saying "Well for one thing you could catch up with Windows!" why not explain what the !@#$ you actually mean? Are you complaining that Gnome and KDE don't look exactly like Windows? Are you complaining that they don't have a "Start" button (I know they have their own equivalents -- I mean the word "Start" which apparently some people can't live without :)? Do you dislike the way the window manager behaves? Choice is a wonderful thing, particularly when it goes beyond picking a theme.
Of course, you could change window managers. Or try configuring the window manager. Or switch to the other environment (KDE -> Gnome or Gnome -> to KDE). Or you could just ditch both and run Enlightenment standalone (hehehe), where you can literally alter how everything looks (or whether it even appears) and how everything behaves.
The Mac is built on some wonderful hardware. Expensive, but wonderful stuff. But bloody hell, can we PLEASE get past this one-button fixation? Sure, you can stick on a different mouse, but what do you do with a notebook? I'm not about to whip out an external mouse on a bus ride :)
Read my stuff.
Eazel also has professional usability testers. In fact, just last week Andy Hertzfield gave a presentation of Nautilus to a room full of user interface experts at a BayCHI meeting because Eazel is trying to hire more usability experts.
Eazel is trying to make the Gnome inerface to Linux seriously cool and seriously usable. I hope they give Apple some competition because MacOS X still seems to need it.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Hogwash. I'm with Linux partly because I like Linux, but mainly because it's free. And both the "free beer" and "free speech" issues matter to me alot. Apple has shown some willingness to head towards both kinds of free, but an equally clear unwillingness to go all the way, and you still have to buy their ugly, overpriced hardware.
And I realize the "ugly" part is just my personal opinion and, plainly, others see that differently.
But don't think that means that OS X isn't something to be reckoned with -- and learned from.
That OS X can be learned from is a valid point, and a good one at that. That OS X or any Apple product is "something to be reckoned with" is just nonsense. Apple was a force to be reckoned with once and only once, and despite their abortive comeback attempt, their internal culture makes it impossible for them to gain more than a small fraction of the market no matter how good their products are or aren't. IBM has a similar permanent blind spot in its marketing department.
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Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
In essence, if you want a Unix-style desktop environment, why wouldn't you stick with Linux or xBSD, rather than trying to graft one on top of an environment that's obviously been built to have the Mac front end on it?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Perhaps by now it's penetrated your brain that Linux does run on Intel hardware. You know, the kind most people who do run Linux already have.
Hoooooooly cow, did you get the lobotomy for free at least?
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> khttpd is just a toy for static content. Tux holds the world's record for fastest SPECWEB performance.
I would be interested in seeing SPECWEB results for Cheetah, which runs atop the MIT exokernel. It's amazing what you can do when you run the whole webserver on the bare metal.
God, I love being downrated by all these penguinistas. -2, Not Party Line. Might even be fair if it weren't for the fact that the same abuse directed at Microsoft gets modded up.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
(Walks up to the podium, large briefcase in hand)
(Opens the briefcase, pulls out a sheaf of papers and transparency slides.)
(Erases what's on the whiteboard, and flips a flipchart to a fresh page.)
(Clears his throat, steps up to the microphone)
MacOS does not run on Intel.
(Walks away)
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Didn't anybody see this article posted on Slashdot several weeks ago? It basically concludes that if a user switched to LinuxPPC because OS 9 lacked a feature, and MacOS X now includes that feature, it's quite likely that they will switch back. And yes, OS X is a very significant threat to LinuxPPC.
It is hard not to get hooked on the design of the G4 - even opening the box is an experience, courtesy of Master Showman Steve Jobs.
Using a Mac fixes the most serious long-standing problems with Linux:
* You have mainstream applications - X-native versions of Word, Photoshop, Illustrator, professional video editing software, etc, etc are all coming.
* It's a thing of beauty. Nobody can accuse X of being an aesthetic delight; even the Enlightenment window manager doesn't help as much as I would have hoped.
The main disadvantages are a reliance on pricey hardware and the lack of an open source GUI environment. But if you're more interested in getting work done than tampering with the GUI, that's fine. And if you consider that normally you would have to buy a Windows system and a Linux machine to do development, and with MacOS X you can ditch Windows entirely and run everything off one box, well, net-net you're probably spending about the same. And the hardware is really, really nice.
So I would say yes, MacOS X does threaten the Linux market share. Granted, not to a great extent, since most people don't want to pay for Apple hardware. But I hardly ever use my Linux machine at home anymore; I've switched to my shiny new Apple dual G4/450 under MacOS X, and I'm happy as a clam so far.
D
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Go to http://store.apple.com and select cheapest possible system, then load it up with memory and disk on your own.
:-(.
I thought of doing that for my dual G4/450, but rumours of lousy Apple Store service stopped me, so I bought the standard package from a local store.
Unfortunately, I belive you can no longer upgrade cheapest possible to the highest end processor - they are reserving the 733mhz for the high-end systems
For MacOS X, the consensus among Macheads is that you should probably get the dual G4/533 for $2,500 instead of the G4/733 for $3,500 unless you need the DVD burner - the cheaper system will be faster under X.
D
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Even Microsoft is having trouble getting some vendors to write drivers and applications for anything other than Windows 9X/ME.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I tried Linux a while back, but it was too much hassle at the time, so I grudgingly went back to Windoze. Been meaning to give another go at it now that various folks have been working on making it less of a hassle, but haven't gotten around to it.
Now I've been reading up on Macs and especially MacOS X. A slick GUI on top of a *nix core looks real good to me, and what the hell, it's time for new hardware, anyway.
I dunno how common people like me are, but I bet I'm not unique.
And my point was that all this too will be availabe to OS X users as well. Java wiull be FULLY integrated into the OS, or so I hear. GNUStep will probabley run there as well as the variety of other tool kits.
If you have ever used PowerBuilder or VC, you'd see why noone could have been successful doing something like this on UNIX. People who use UNIX tend to want 'fast' & quick and clean and neither of these tools worked that way. VC requires about 128 Meg of RAM to operate 'okay'. Powerbuilder does okay with 32.
I'm not knocking Linux, I like it and use it every day. But I think that OS X actually presents a threat to M$ more than Linux. All the UNIX programs would be easy to port to OS X rather than Windows, especially if they are POSIX compliant. Personally I am looking forward to checking out OS X. For me, someone who does not want to care about all the underpinnings of an OS, but wants the stability I have only seen in UNIX liks OS's (i.e. not windows), this may be a third option. And so what if it cost 3 grand. Many people spend that on top of the line PC's.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Yellowbox/Openstep). How is it that a former OS that basically failed (mostly due to Steve Jobs, no fault of the OS) being reincarnated as MacOS X and having basically the same development tools as before is a "find"?
In terms of market acceptance, Nextstep and openstep failed. In terms of delivering an excellent product, both the OS and the development tools/framework were quite successful. Small software shops did some pretty amazing things thanks to the productivity allowed to them by the platform.
I expect the same thing to happen here -- the market will probably overlook some of the incredible tools available. But that doesn't make Cocoa any less excellent.
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Tweet, tweet.
Um, how exactly is this *offtopic*? This is talking about a reason not to switch to OS X from Linux -- namely that darwin hasn't found its way into most autoconfiguration schemes, and so you can't easily compile things for it.
OS X and Linux and their relative merits really should be part of the threads here, right?
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Tweet, tweet.
Yes, there are a lot of others, like you. But I'm not one of them. Then again, I'm the exception because I know what I'm doing with Linux. Trouble is, not everyone does; certainly not the unwashed masses (e.g. office workers). Windows has become ubiquitous. Some people don't even know that they are running one of a choice of operating systems. Sure, it crashes every now and then. But that's mostly if you leave it on 24x7, and most office workers and home users don't.
Linux does have a lot of things to change to make it even viable where Windows reins. And geeks are unlikely to use those tools (I know I won't), so it will be hard for us to make things like that. I shun the GUI in favor of the CLI myself. My main worry, though, is that someone will come along and solve this for Linux, and it will get popular, but that they will do this in a way that breaks its usability for the geeks (we'll have our own version, of course). For example, they might change the format of configuration storage so that their new tools are the only way to configure and that would be bad. But it is the mentality. Where it all goes remains to be seen. But all the points are valid; Linux, today, isn't what the masses are prepared to handle.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As long as I have my command line and my text editor, I have no system administration problem. Of course that only means there will not be a total shift to OS X on that basis. But I can also say I won't use whatever KDE or Gnome come up with for system administration, either. The big reason is I already have most of it scripted to automatically get the information from the sources I want it to get it from. What KDE, Gnome, and Eazel could do for the masses, though, is shield them from having to worry about becoming a system administrator for their desktop. But I can't see myself administering 100 remote servers in diverse locations with those tools.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"You are in a maze of twisty messages all alike."
Suddenly, you are confronted by a greasy Troll, screaming enthusiastically, if a bit incoherently, about Natalie Portman pouring hot grits down someones pants, and wielding a large, tranluscent blue computer mouse with only one button.
--
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Just a note on one of those. In KDE 2.x it is as simple as browsing smb:\\ to do samba work. I think you can cross that one off your list. Every single smb app before this time has had you set up a million options before even browsing. apluase for the kde team.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Yeah. Bellsouth's preferred ADSL modem is a USB model... I believe ?Alcatel?. Win98 works fine, but I upgraded a coworker's home system to Win2K for her, and discovered that it won't work - a "known issue".
Try as I might, I can't find the USB module to try swapping it around, or even such a simple thing as the source for the driver and Windows USB API to look into what the problem is. Oddly enough, I was told by all concerned that there was "nothing that can be done".
Meanwhile, my Mandrake 7.1 box at home is humming along nicely on Bellsouth's ADSL network. Interestingly enough, I was at another office when the ADSL came in, and the BellSouth tech had a CD-R with the drivers for all the various DSL modems on various OSes, except Win2K - but it did include Linux drivers.
Is this FUD... No, now you can call it an ancedotal story and discount it that way. And yes, Win2K is nice. I'm upgrading our Win9x machines to it. I just wonder how long before I upgrade our machines to KDE/Linux for the same reasons?
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I mean, really.. what exactly is that supposed to mean?
Threatening what.. it userbase? Linux isn't a company who can have it's profits taken away by a competing OS.
Threatening development? Most true good development under linux easily ports to or from other unices... unix is unix....
Threatening... a bunch of linux startup profits? Who cares... linux exists solely because people want it to exist, and for no other reason... linux will only die out when people no longer find great reason to use it..
It always struck me as odd how people like to contrast linux -vs- windows like it a competition.. or linux -vs- other unices.. it not a competition... it just linux doing it's thing, because that's what it's users want.
Whats to stop M$ from releasing W2K for the G4 the following quarter?
That's worth a laugh or two. NT used to run on PPC, Alpha and MIPS R4x00. Used to. All these platforms were dropped for financial reasons (no sales), but now there are some serious technical chalenges to port them back. Don't think that MS could do it in a quarter, or even a year. How is 64bit Win2000 coming? How about Win2k for Itanium?
MS Office really is the trump card. Perhaps the recent announcement was a sign that Apple has indicated to MS that it will not release OSX on intel for some time.
look, an iMac comes with a 350mhz g3 with 64megs of ram. on pricewatch, you can get a 1ghz pIII system, complete, with twice as much RAM for $804. And please don't tell me that clock for clock a g3 (g3, not g4) is three times as fast as a pIII. For $1499 I could get a 1ghz micron PC. The iBook looks like a god damn toliet seat, so I won't even get into that... and as for comparing anything to a sony on price, well, they are a company that dosn't even pretend to charge more money based on their brand name.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Bit dubious.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I don't think "most linux boxes" is a valid count. Years ago I was arguing the toss over making linux a desktop OS and, in particular, letting hordes of wailing newbies loose at it and the degenerate GUI-dependence that'll ensue.
As far as I'm concerned, "most linux boxes" is a concept from that arena, and they can all go to pot.
Datapoint: of my 4 main linux boxes, 1 dual-boots into the dark side of the Force, and that's all. And with better support for the Psion 5mx in the open-source world, I'd be 100% M$loth-Free.
MacOS on PPC won't let you do that, of course; but then we're not talking MacOS here, we're talking MacOS-X or Linux/PPC. If you can run MOL, you can run MacOS 9 on linux, you can run the Windoze emulator in MOL, you can run windoze on your powerbook. That's the theory, anyway: why I've not done it is plain simple, I can't be arsed and don't have any need, but don't let that stop you.
~Tim
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~Tim
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Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Agreed. People using Linux are typically computer enthusiasts who want to work under the hood, or they are using it for business purposes. Or it's embedded in their VCR and they don't even know they're using it. OS X is targeted to the general computer user.
That being said, I do think some of the computer hobbyist types are going to be attracted to OS X. I remember drooling over the Next Cube (objective C, nextstep, display postscript) way back then, but couldn't afford one as a poor college student. Now OS X envy has me in firmly its clutches. Quartz looks very cool (though I admit I haven't seen the API) and it's a major factor for me, as much as I hate programming X. On the other hand, I loved using Interviews and hope Berlin gets some momentum and eventually replaces X Windows.
While Apple does support a lot more hardware than it did just a couple of years ago, it does not compare to what they would face in the PC market. Apple would have to be willing to sacrifice their PPC sales, enter a market where they will not control the hardware nor exclusively profit from it, and invest additional resources to support the new platform.
If Apple's previous dealing with the Mac clone companies are any example we will never see OS X for the x86.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Huh? SunOS (up through 4.x at least) was pretty strictly BSD-derived (e.g. 'ps auxww; shutdown -now'), although I believe System V style utilities were an installable option (under /usr/5bin). Whenever Sun pulled the Solaris name-change (SunOS 5.x = Solaris 2.x) is when they went to full System V (SVID) & POSIX compliance (e.g. 'ps -ef; shutdown -g0 -y -i6') although binaries under /usr/ucb retain the BSD semantics.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
While Windows may have some nasty library dependincies like you mentioned, I don't recall the last time I had a problem under Windows with library problems.
As a user or a developer?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Insofar as MacOS X for x86 goes, I can't even consider it, because while it may exist somewhere in the catacombs beneath the Cupertino campus, There's no way it'll get out alive with Steve Jobs around. Good idea, bad idea... it's tragically irrelevant. With Steve at the helm, it's the way things are. Mac users have had to deal with Steve so often that we're almost jaded to the neat toys (very neat - why hadn't someone thought of the auto-xover ethernet before?) and resigned to the debatable decisions and brushed-steel interfaces.
I don't know that I'd call Macs expensive and slow (considering what you get), but I sort of agree with you.
You see, I've watched the BSDs since before I first installed Slackware from a big pile of floppy disks years ago. I -wanted- to use the BSDs, but I couldn't. At the time, I had a proprietary CD-ROM drive that's still not supported by anything but linux, and I was using IDE, which the BSDs didn't yet support. I used that machine until I got my 486 with a parallel-port zip drive that linux supported, but the BSDs didn't. Now, I'm running a dual-processor machine that only linux can use effectively.
Linux's real market is in getting more use out of existing hardware. With OSX, you're buying hardware to support the OS. With Linux, you're getting an OS for free that runs on whatever hardware you already have. I can buy a new Super-GX-Pro-64-Turbo-Mega graphics card, and if it's not supported yet, it will be next month. I can also pull my old 386sx out of the closet, and it'll be supported too. Nobody but Linux can do that.
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Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
...from Steve Jobs to spell serious trouble for Linux:
"Release Mac OS X for x86"
The Mach kernel is very cross-platform, and Apple already has Mac OS X running on x86 in their labs. Only minor tweaking and testing and the Word Of Jobs stand between it and shipping.
Will it happen? Depends on whether Motorola can deliver on faster CPUs. If not, Apple has no choice.
When Apple can justify the loss it will ensue by not selling some hardware versus the gain it will generate by further hardware market penetration, they will release an X86 version. It's simple business sense.
It's a little more complex than that. Apple is about the entire experience, not just individual parts of it. Jobs has said this time and time again. This is beyond business, this is what they do. Case in point: if some generic video card doesn't work on OSX86, it's Apple fault. This kind of thing doesn't mesh well with the brand.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
i say this alot to all my friends: use the OS/hardware combo that works the best for you.
being a CS student, i have to use a UNIX variant so i use linux most of the time, but windows 2000 for quake 3 team arena. and when it comes to doing a video for my housemates band, we jump over to our mac for iMovie.
i do think that OS X will threaten linux as well as *BSD, even as far as giving windows a run for it's money.
there is room for everyone and we NEED variety, god knows that using one system all the time is boring, and i don't really think that you can survive only knowing one system nowadays.
this is just my experience, family use macs, housemates use windows, CS crew use linux, gotta know them all.
peace
I've thought about what MacOS X could mean... a user-friendly UNIX.
But... the real threat is that MacOS X for Intel could turn Apple into a software company more akin to a linux distro vendor.
I don't think Apple can stall MacOS X for Intel for too long, and I belive that Apple even planned to provide a transition to Intel architecture.
Question is: what could MacOS X on Intel have to offer that users can't already get with Linux? Quicktime?!? A Window manager? An API?
The poster talks as if Linux already *has* the desktop. It doesn't. If Mac OS X is actually a better desktop system, so be it. This is supposed to be a meritocracy, right? Why do we have to fight OS X? Sure, we can borrow ideas from it if and where it is better...but if Linux is technically the wrong solution, why do you assume we need to push it? I don't like Apple as a company, but I applaud their work with OS X, BSD, and Open Source.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I think the guy's a god. Who do you know who has the balls to not alter his every day speech patterns for a press interview? Anyone who comes in and outright levels with you is ok with me. The press asked him some hard questions and he answered every single one of em without pulling any punches. That's not just downright honourable, it says something about the CEO. It says "we're so sure that this current slump is a non issue I dont even have to bullshit you about it." Not that I think he is right, but he does and that's what matters.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Press interview, reseller interview.. whatever.. the guy owns.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Hmm, UNIX core, with an easy-to-use GUI? It sounds like the best of both worlds.
Mmm, well, I don't think SunOS can really be marked up as a BSD success, Solaris really isn't BSD (I lived through a SunOS to Solaris changeover). NeXT is a bit of a BeOS - nice idea, works well, but not adopted. BSD/OS I don't know - what is it?
I hope that OS-X *is* successful: it'll stop all the `What's the point of *BSD?' questions and the sourgrapes about Linux's success from the *BSD crowd.
Linux has had massive amounts of media attention dumped upon it in the last 18-24 months and is available for use on cheap-ass PCs that most companies were about to throw out.
Apple is still perceived as a dead or dying maker of overpriced, underperforming goofy-looking hardware which only works with a one-button, hockey-puck mouse. (Note that none of this is actually true...well, anymore.)
I love using Mac OS X, and I would enjoy seeing it deployed as widely as possible at work and in schools, but Apple has a very long and painful road ahead of it if it means to suck marketshare away from Linux, especially in businesses. Perhaps they could start by spending some of that USD4,000,000,000 in cash on better advertising?
--
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
If anything it's the other way around - by making their OS compatible with *NIX apps, it means that if the *NIX apps gain enough popularity on MacOS X, theres nothing to tie the user to the Mac platform, except for the excellence of Apple's hardware and OS.
This is exactly as it should be, and the availability of Linux on the Mac hasn't exactly hampered it's growth in the x86 market
I fail to see how the availability of another OS/hardware platform threatens Linux's existence one iota.
Arguably better OSes/hardware have been available for years, in the form of systems from SGI, Sun, Compaq, Microsoft, Apple, Amiga, Be and the rest.
MacOS X looks like a hundred bucks, and it should perform well on the expensive Apple systems that it will ship with. However, all that eye candy and custom engineering comes at the cost of performance and hefty support requirements for Apple.
Volume constraints mean that you can buy an x86 workstation that will wipe the floor in almost every performance category (excepting Altivec-optimised routines since SSE2 isn't widely supported) with the fastest Mac system available for the same price or less.
However, not everyone wants a huge, ugly beige space heater with a spaghetti tangle of wire hanging out the back that sounds like a 747 taking off every time its fired up on their desktop.
MacOS X is simply consumer NeXT, and time will tell if it will achieve any better success than the old-skool developer version.
And frankly, if its a better system in every way then Linux deserves to lose market share in favour of MacOS X, until it can compete effectively with it.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Did you even *read* my post???
of course your 286 won't outperform your G4.. But if you spent the same amount of money on an x86 system as you did on a Mac system, you'd almost certainly have a faster computer with the x86.
I did say x86 which includes AMD, and i'm afraid you'd be hard pressed to get that 500 MHz G4 to outperform a 1+ GHz P3/TBird at anything at all.
The 1 Ghz x86 machine would certainly come in cheaper too.
Clock-for-clock, the G4 probably is faster in most areas, but when its a case of dollar-for-dollar, then it's a very different story.
Obviously macs have other advantages, but in terms of price/performance, IMHO, Macs simply aren't competitive.
Apple and Motorola simply don't sell enough computers/desktop CPUs to be able to compete on price with x86 vendors.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I almost died laughing when I saw your list. I had thought people had gotten beyond the GIMP==Photoshop dillusional stage. Gimp comes nowhere near Photoshop. End of story. Do a big project on both and see which one you end up liking at the end of the day. OpenOffice not only has fewer features than MS Office, but they actually made it slower and harder to use. Now that takes some serious skill! ;)
I haven't used Jazzware, but most likely it is inferior to Cakewalk. (How do I know? Jazzware doesn't cost as much
As for 3D Studio being equal to blender, don't make me laugh. Not only does 3D Studio's workflow and interface whip blender to shreds, but it has features Blender hasn't dreamed of.
PS: SAW and ACID are multi-track audio editors. Trust me, you won't find an equivilant for those on Linux either. Linux might have some good apps, but in terms of "best of breed" apps (regardless of cost, of course) the party's on Windows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The only reason for using Windows is playing (3D) games
>>>>>>>>>>
What planet *are* you living on? I suppose all the Photoshop, SAW, Cakewalk, ACID, 3D Studio, Office, etc, all have their own fully functional, OSS counterparts. In terms of apps, Linux only competes in the server market and light-weight home user market.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I like Linux because it runs on a computer I own. Like many ./ users, I run Pentium x86 system. Windows on one drive, Linux on the other. Linux is very convenient for me, because I can slowly replace my Windows applications with similar Linux Applications, WITHOUT replacing this big metal box on my desk.
I mean, those Apple Cubes are pretty & all; but I don't want to plunk down > $1000 for a new Box, simply because I like the OS.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
BTW, on what do you base your assumption that current apple hardware is "second rate" other than processor speed?
Processor performance and memory subsystem performance. Before last week, buying an Apple meant PC100 and off-die half-speed L2 cache. The move to PC133 might be ok, if it didn't signal that Macs won't have DDR for at least a year and, judging by their past behavior, probably longer.
While we're at it, Apple has constantly been behind the times in I/O standards (ever since they abandoned SCSI that is) as well: late to PCI, late to AGP, late to AGP4x, late to ATA/33, late to ATA/66 and currently late to ATA/100. These things actually don't matter nearly as much as the first two, but as they form the only part of the hardware performance equation that's missing I thought it's worth pointing out that Apple's constantly behind the times here too.
Finally, beyond all the stuff mentioned above--which is stuff you can't/couldn't get on a Mac--there's all the hardware insufficiencies of the Mac Apple will try to sell you. Just 6 months ago if you bought a Mac it meant no removable media, and a barely usable mouse and keyboard. It still means no floppy and a very cool but not very useful mouse. Until a week ago it meant no CD-R.
Also until this week it meant shelling out mucho $$ for a computer with a laughably inferior video card--which is arguably the most important component in a consumer PC today. Even now the best Mac you can get comes with a cut-rate budget video card--albeit a decent one--and Apple would have you pay as much as $2200 for a computer to get even that! Of course, it's probably fine that the Mac remains 6 months to a year behind in 3D capabilities, as the top-of-the-line games (with the sole exception of Quake3) come out on Mac 6 months to a year late anyways.
So let's review: the Mac platform is generally about a year behind PC platform mainstream in terms of processor performance (yes that's performance, not clock speed), memory subsystem, and video performance. Indeed this is not much of a new trend (although processor performance has fallen further and further behind the last couple years), as the Mac has been approximately a year behind in adopting most mainstream PC standards.
The only cases in which Apple can be accused of having "innovative hardware" are in fact cases of innovative marketing: just like "Airport" (i.e. IEEE 802.11) cards, which appeared for PC notebooks at exactly the same time they were launched and trumpeted as "only on the Mac", the "all new only on the Mac Superdrives" (i.e. DVD-R drives) will be available for PC exactly the same day they are available for Mac. Yes, Apple may do a good service in picking neat new hardware standards to showcase and bring to the masses, but Mac hardware doesn't offer anything a PC can't match for less money, and never has.
(A possible exception is if you use the G4 or G4+ for the applications it was actually designed and intended for--i.e. embedded signal processing. And yes, the majority of Motorola's G4 revenue comes from embedded systems, not Apple, which is *why* they designed an embedded processor not a PC CPU. What, don't tell me you actually thought AltiVec was so useful for mainstream PC apps that it's worth almost doubling the size of the CPU die and cutting peak frequency by 30%!?)
"Dell's 14.1" screens are 1400x1050 by way of comparison.) "
e o/ati_radeon_32mb/ ) is offered as an option in cubes. It is also optional on all G4s, IIRC. They should offer the 64mb variants of both cards, as well as all other models and cards from other manufacturers, but I think Apple's relationship to nVidia is quite new and will take a little ramp up time, as well as their relationship to other vendors. Hopefully OSX's BSD underpinnings will make driver development a little easier and help expand the Mac hardware possibilities.
I'm not saying Apple shouldn't offer the possiblity of higher resolution on their 15.2" display, but have you ever used a laptop display at 1280x960 or 1400x1050? Unless you have a magnifying glass handy, all I can say is 'why'?
"The fact that the Sony's puny 12.1" screen has the same vertical resolution as Apple's brings the matter of LCD quality a lot closer than "15.2 vs. 12.1" would seem to indicate"
In theory, i'd agree. In practice, no way. See above.
"a real video card isn't even an *option* on any iMac model, nor on the Cube)."
No option on the iMac, but then it's a stripper model. iMac users will probably be doing some light gaming, but I don't see 3d rendering in their daily activities. I'm pretty sure the Radeon (last I checked it performed respectably in tests (both 2d and 3d) and was considered a "real" competitive 3d video card -- a quote from the Sharky Extreme review: "Despite no longer boasting the fastest 3D on the market, the RADEON should not be scoffed at. Its superior video acceleration, crisp 2D quality, and an aggressively competitive price further add to a sweet slice of 3D gaming pie. " -- see here the aforementioned review: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/vid
just my blog and pix
Don't get me wrong -- i agree with a lot of what you say. It's not hard to see that most Macs are overpriced for what they're offering under the hood. You could make the same argument for most "luxury items".
"Even if there were a good way to compare performance across the two platforms" pretty much kills the idea of straight performance comparisons. There are plenty more reasons but i'm sure we don't have to elaborate on that.
It's not really fair to compare street pricing of a PC notebook to retail pricing of a yet unreleased product. Try it again when the PB has been out for a month or two (though by my guess it will take a while for the price to drop).
Also, as another poster pointed out, LCDs are very expensive, so the 12.1" vs 15.2" difference is not a small one in manufacturing costs, nor is usability (at least in my experience using notebook screens). Unfortunately, it seems there are very few 1" thick full featured, full screen laptops running around to compare the PB to. With the advent of the mobile Duron (you were complaining about Intel cornering the market) that might start to change.
BTW, the current video card in all but the base G4s is a 32mb GeForce2 w/ an optional Radeon.
PS. I use a P3 at work and an Athlon at home, in case you were wondering.
just my blog and pix
Yes, but the PB monitor is only close the same size in viewable area, not in aspect ratio. It is a very wide monitor -- probably the equivalent of a 17" monitor (usually the viewable area of a desktop is at most 1.2" smaller than the advertised size, which would make the viewable on your 17" around 15.8") -- but also a very shallow monitor (more like a 15" desktop, which I'd normally run at 1024x768). It's because of this lack of vertical size that the vertical resolution lacks, why I wouldn't begrudge them too much, and why i'd say that the resolution they give it is just fine.
just my blog and pix
"Apple has constantly been behind the times in I/O standards"
What? First to *use* USB (not just put it on the board). First to use Firewire. Using 32bit Nubus when PCs where using ISA slots. Yes, in some ways they're late, but in others they're way ahead.
The "laughably inferior video card" may be so for FPS, but actually performs quite well for graphic artists. Makes me wonder why they specced it.
BTW, the only decent 802.11 system out there that can hold a candle to the AirPort system is the Lucent Orinoco system, which is slightly more expensive and a lot harder to set up.
"Mac has been approximately a year behind in adopting most mainstream PC standards"
How many makers right now are putting out machines with DDR RAM? Last I checked, not many. Sure they're ramping up, but Apple would be stupid (and possibly insane) to be on the top of the curve for every trend. Their machines would be even more overpriced and they could end up with a Rambus/Intel fiasco on their hands if they made the wrong choice. Better to let someone like Intel make that mistake and fight the battles worth fighting (i.e the ones pretty much won already like USB, firewire)
One final word re: price/performance -- find a notebook that can compete in that area with the new powerbook. Good luck.
just my blog and pix
"Apple *will* somehow have to address the price performance issue if they want to gouge market share out of others. But they can keep their core advantages (enumerated above) and keep their core customre base, maybe even grow a little. "
Witness the Powerbook G4. A lot of people think it's a loss leader...
just my blog and pix
With the pixel-by-pixel antics of xlib, even by fully porting the API to aqua, you'll be wasting most of the potential of display PDF.
-bugg
Who said anything about using X instead of aqua?
I would guess that ports of GTK+, Qt, and perhaps other toolkits (Motif maybe?) are not far behind. Then, you have them all running on aqua. And that's sweet.
-bugg
or reboot your plumbing system in order to access one or the other. in other words, changing operating systems from windows to linux is a pretty big leap
Ever used VMware? I use it daily to run Linux and BSD on top of Windows 2000. Great product (althought it would give a newbie the impression that Linux requires windows to run...)
Mark Duell
You don't have to register it, and there are no serial numbers. You start the box, answer a few questions that are used to create an account for you, supply your Internet settings (or create a new Earthlink account if you don't have an ISP already) and start using it.
Mac OS X will be included with every mac, including the $799 iMac, so it's not exactly expensive. Windows 2000 is $200 or $300 by itself. It's not free like Linux, but not everybody has the time to dedicate to Linux, or can get their work done with Linux applications.
Do you have any idea how stupid you sound? Do you get how big the Mac platform is? Most of the art and music and movies you enjoy daily are made by people who use Macs. Something like 25 million users. Apple has 4 billion dollars in the bank, and this is their first unprofitable quarter in over three years. Compaq has had three or four unprofitable quarters since then.
... you just sound like an idiot. You are saying that the sky is green.
I mean
...it was pretty much asked right here on /. like 2 days ago, if not yesterday.
No, I'm pretty confident people won't decide to stop supporting Linux. I know I have no plans to do so, and I know there are at least a few thousand people out there who share the same feeling, and that's all it takes. Unlike corporate owned and controlled products, all it takes is one person to make sure Linux doesn't go away. The rate of development might decline a bit ;) but it will still be there.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Sun is NOT funding FreeBSD to any sun4x architecture. The FreeBSD/SPARC port was started in 97 by Jason Evans, who, at the time worked for Sun MicroElectronics (SME). SME had approached the FreeBSD core offering monetary compensation for FreeBSD on sun4u's. The core team turned down this offer with jkh saying that SME's offer was not of major interest since to be of long term use of FreeBSD, such a proposal would need to include support for a number of years from someone internal to Sun. Eventually Jason Evans left Sun and the port remained largely untouched since October 10, 1998. The core team's response was reasonable at the time. Now if Sun came with an identical offer today, you bet that gorilla vagina thats grafted on your right hand they'd pounce on it now. David O'Brien and some others have been tinkering with it since early 2000 though.
As of late, Jason Evans has been working on the KSE project
To throw in a bit of dramatic irony, while the FreeBSD/SPARC port was in its ragnarok, Sun signed that deal with Red Hat :|
Meandering abit offtopic but oh well...
The most important thing to have is open specifications for file formats - the basis for what most of us do with a computer.
For example so apple can't force you to use MacOS* in order to see quicktime movies, or so M$ can't force you to run Win*/Office* to read word docs.
This inevitabily leads to better software because companies can't reply on your dependance, you could use the adobe quicktime player if you wanted so if apple wants to keep their customers they have to improve their software to compete, not prevent competition in order to compete.
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'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
Maybe since I use multiple Unix(-like) operating systems, (linux, *BSD, solaris, irix), and use GNU tools on most of them, I don't think of those GNU tools as Linux. They are NOT linux, they just share the same license. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's GNU, not linux, that lives on if people give up on the linux kernel.
don't even bother; it's not worth it. one of them will just come back with some stupid "mom & pop" store quote for a Pentium III (or a Dell, now that i've said it :) and then add a little statement passing off Altivec as a "toy" that only Photoshop people care about.
most people here don't think that ease of use, fewer driver conflicts, quality hardware, Altivec, pleasant design, great software like iMovie or the ability to just get work down without fucking around with the computer to be worth a premium. that's fine, to each their own. for the rest of us, there's a G4 with MacOS X.
and as a note about the speed difference between x86 and PowerPC: i love playing around with my Linux box, and i use Windows at work. but it boggles my mind how much faster i get work done on my Mac compared to my Linux box, or my Windows laptop at work, and how much less time i spend trying to fix crashes, conflicts or doing troubleshooting.
so this is what i wonder: if i get work done faster on my Mac than i do on any other machine (due to the reasons i've outlined above), what difference does the benchmarked speed matter? if i'm getting my work done faster, doesn't that mean it's a faster machine? it means enough to me to keep using my Mac, and i've come to realize that for what i do, there's absolutely no other machine that comes close.
- j
You will be able to do every fucking thing you want to a mac running mac os X
you're actually quite right. Apple has never really gone out of their way to keep users from editing things, but they haven't opened it up on purpose either. there's already a lot you can do with the MacOS, and MacOS X looks to be even more cutomizable.
for starters, just about everything is stored in (text based) XML files on the hard disk. there have already been a lot hacks to do all sorts of interesting things (and as you mentioned, getting the old NeXT Step interface back on Cocoa apps is one of the more interesting ones). lots of other functions (like the position of the dock) can be changed using the defaults command from the Terminal.
the more i delve into it, the more i realize that MacOS is actualy quite customizable. Apple hasn't purposefully hidden anything, but they haven't published anything either: but hey, that's part of the fun! :) so while it's never going to be as customizeable as Linux, it's right up there, and i think there could be a lot of great things to hack onto it. Mac developers seem quite resourceful, so i'm really looking forward to the hacks that appear after the final release.
the only problem i can see is that i'll need a second Mac to screw around with. otherwise it'll end up like my Linux box is right now: refusing to boot and giving me nasty kernel messages (gotta get around to fixing that :).
- j
developing (open source) software for it for over two years.
that's great, and i hope to see more open source developers start using MacOS X. i think it's a promising platform to create some really good open source software for a large (desktop user) market. i'm looking forward to developing for MacOS X.
Just recently, I aquired a dual-G4/500MHz machine
that's a very nice machine.
Oh, and I absolutely LOVE the G4 hardware. The instant I openned the case, I thought "Damn, why didn't anyone else think of this!?" You really have to see it to understand, though.
...
G4 hardware is still on the expensive side
these two thoughts are related. i find with Apple hardware you do pay a premium for the "intangibles" (such as that amazing case) and lots of extras (like the gigabit ethernet you have in your machine). the trick is, if those intangibles and extras aren't something you want, then Macs look quite expensive. of course, if they are something you want, then they're right in line. they're definitely not for all people, that's for sure.
- j
And forgive me if ist been pointed out ebfore...
MacOSX is basically FreeBSD udner the hood.
And yes I think its a threat. its what I want. A decent desktop Unix without the weight of X on its shoulders.
There are runors Apple has an Intel port in the labs. Wonder if they'l get rbave enough thsi time to release it. If they did, IMo they could be in a position to be the next big OS company.
Do you really think the market for computers allowinging massive tinkering with the innerworkings of the OS is anywhere near as large as the market for computers that all look and work predictably, have consistant interfaces and procedures? Oh, and there's also that infinately customizable free OS that apple would have to campaign against. I think its name starts with an L or something...
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
But the POINT you ignored was that if they had been improving on the already superior BSD instead of trying to bring underdog Linux up to speed, we would have something MUCH better.
OSX does pose a threat to Linux. But remember, it is tied to Apple's hardware. That alone will limit it's adaptation.
I think Jobs' trump card is OSX for Intel/Athlon. It makes no sense to announce it until a critical mass of native OSX apps hit the market. Then, Apple releases Apple branded Athlon based hardware. They could still make it proprietary by having some special ROM on the motherboard to protect the market and control drivers, etc. I'm sure AMD would be willing to accomodate them.
OSX could end up being a killer OS. The power of UNIX with the ease of the Mac. The only thing that I can see stopping it is if Eazel kicks ass and does it better. Could happen.
Well duh! Unless Apple plans to release MacOSX for the x86 architechture, I don't see what how it's threatening Linux since Linux's growth is not on PPC.
Well then, you're looking at the number of people who are looking at buying new hardware to run non-MS operating systems, and whether they're willing to step entirely away from the Intel-esque world. I still don't see that it's going to be enough people to significantly affect the Linux community, especially the semi-mainstream segment.
As I've said before, mass-market appeal of any given platform is very tightly bound to available applications. It's useless to speculate about who will do what until enough good, solid, competitive apps are available to tempt people away.
Oh, and lest we forget--we're not discussing "OS X vs. a Free OS", it's "OS X vs. Linux (which happens to be a free OS)." Let's keep the rhetoric for the conversations where it has a bearing.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I agree with everything you said about the self-rightous whining. I'm not too sure how likely it is that OS X will make a significant dent in the commercial world, though. Sun is selling fully supported hardware, with a (fairly) well thought out and consistent UI for not much more money than Macs right now. The sticking point is apps, as it always has been. There's already some reluctance among the Big Players to develop for the Mac, and I don't know how Apple is going to get the apps developed. IF they can do that, then they might have a winner.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Some of the same people who designed the original MacOS are working on Nautilus. Lest we forget, many people hate Aqua and want the original MacOS interface back.
Burris
Hey Brainchild, you can buy those products for Mac.
But by the time they're finally released on the Mac, many of the products are already passé; it's no longer "hip" to be good at them. For example, is being able to kick ass at Doom still a valuable skill? No, the game of the month is Quake III Team Arena for Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, and Microsoft Windows ME.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
You can download Darwin for x86. But that won't give you Quartz/Carbon/Cocoa (Mac OS X userland libraries) which are all proprietary binaries for PowerPC machines; good luck finding a machine that can code-morph into both an x86 (for the games on your Windows partition) and a PowerPC (for Mac OS X's userland). -- Dr. Mario game for PC based on Mac OS X's Aqua theme
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
also to all those people who bitch about apple being overpriced, slow blah blah. give it a rest already. if you don't want to buy a mac then don't and don't criticise those who do. whatever computer u buy is a free choice, its not a status thing. having a faster CPU doesn't mean u have a bigger penis.
in short this topic is pointless and smeg
The sad truth is that the vast majority of Linux boxes are dual-boot and/or run wine/vmware (maybe plex86). MacOS on PPC hardware just isn't going to let you natively run those non-portable windoze apps, particularily games.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
So why wouldnt it be posible for Mac OSX to do the same? masses of linux coders brushing up gnome/kde/xfree86/etc to get it upto spec, and maybe even better then Mac OS X.
You've answered your own question. A mass of coders is never going to agree on one widget set, or one file manager, or one configuration framework and database, or one user preference manager, or one way to do anything.
The fundemental advantage Apple has over Linux is Apple's ability to choose the "one true way" -- keep what they like, throw away what they don't like, and pay a bunch of people to implement the boring, tedious, and unrewarding little pieces you need to fill in the gaps and make it all work together. Apple decided that, where possible, they would eliminate choice -- choose one way that works, and then spend the time, effort, and drudgery (i.e., money) to polish it all up.
Apple is hoping to make a successful Unix by getting rid of all the stuff we normal associate with Unix and with Free Software. There's no way that a mess of linux coders are ever going to duplicate that -- there's no incentive for a mass of linux coders to try. When we can't even agree on a widget set (I have open apps right now with Gnome, KDE, Motif, XUL, and Athena widget sets, and I don't even want to think about Java Swing), and most user-land applications really never go beyond the 85% stage, it's pretty clear we're never going to make anything even remotely like MacOS X.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I'm sure if I poked around it a bit more, I'd find more things to nit-pick, but I think I heard something about a good number of config files moved to XML? If so, that's pretty far away from any of the current *nix's.
Do you generally nit-pick about good things? What do you do about bad things?
It would also be fun to see MacOS X scaled down to the pda's and embedded systems. These are all areas that Linux excels in and has been proven as a good solution.
Wow. You must be using a completely different dictionary, because when I look up the definition of "good solution" and "excel" in my dictionary, Linux doesn't even come close to matching the definition for pda's.
I imagine MacOS X can scale down to PDA's the same way Win CE can -- not by porting the operating system, and the 30 or so system calls provided by the kernel, but instead by porting the rich and featurful API the programmers actually use on top of a new operating system.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I'm sure if I poked around it a bit more, I'd find more things to nit-pick, but I think I heard something about a good number of config files moved to XML? If so, that's pretty far away from any of the current *nix's.
Do you generally nit-pick about good things? What do you do about bad things?
It would also be fun to see MacOS X scaled down to the pda's and embedded systems. These are all areas that Linux excels in and has been proven as a good solution.
Wow. You must be using a completely different dictionary, because when I look up the definition of "good solution" and "excel" in my dictionary, Linux doesn't even come close to matching the definition for pda's.
I imagine MacOS X can scale down to PDA's the same way Win CE can -- not by porting the operating system, and the 30 or so system calls provided by the kernel, but instead by porting the rich and featurful API the programmers actually use on top of a new operating system.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
> Hmm... Answer a few questions (that together with hardware ids generate a unique profile) and create an internet connection... no data would be sent anywhere, right?
At each boot Mac OS X use ntpdate to sync clock with ftp<some number>.apple.com. I watched that over my FreeBSD firewall. I don't really like this because it set up a precedent... It can be changed, of course, so it is not that bad I think...
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Well, I haven't had many problems actually using it, apart from the odd random reboot, but getting it on to my machine was a pain in the butt. It would load drivers for stuff I didn't have and then stop, requiring CTRL-ALT-DEL. After 15 times it got to the partioning screen, and then saw my Linux partitions as one big partition and wouldn't let me install it on my second drive. So after backing up my Linux partitions I started again, and after 15 times got it installed. Now according to Microsoft's supporters, it's my fault for buying a Compaq because they have so much proprietary shit (although I haven't found anything yet that isn't commodity hardware), but that doesn't explain how I've managed to install the supposedly less compatible Linux - RedHat 5.2, 6.0 and 6.1, SuSE 6.3, Mandrake 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2 - without a hitch.
Because it runs on dirt-cheap commodity hardware, which OSX will never do. Not all software on Freshmeat is crap, but it's still better to have a choice, and you don't HAVE to use any of it. Are all the apps for the Mac flawless? I don't think so.
I don't really foresee this as a *major* problem. We're only losing Macs users. ;)
Just kidding guys! Seriously, I don't think it's an overpoweringly major problem. The majority of Linux users now are probably x86 based, and as far as I know, OS X isn't being offered on that platform.
As far as Mac users, naturally the TRUE power users will want Linux, but as for the majority of users, they ALREADY use mainstream OS's, so what's the harm in introducing them to the joys of UNIX? ;)
I think this will actually HELP the open-source movement in general, but may harm Linux in specific a little.
Not to worry, tho, IMO.
Regards,
- Jester
I used to think that I was a MacOS bigot, but I've since changed my tune on that. A couple years back I switched from the MacOS to Windows (initially 95). I hated it. But eventually 98 came out. I began to appreciate it more and more. I've found WinME to be nothing but a dream to use as far as the UI goes. Except for the crashing. Every time I suffer a fatal exception error I feel a distinct urge to fly to redmond and beat the crap out of MSFT's QA engineers. In any case, about 3 months ago I purchased an iBook because I sorely needed a laptop, and I couldn't bear the thought of purchasing another Wintel machine. OS X public beta had come out shortly before and had been getting many rave reviews. I received the machine shortly thereafter in the mail with MacOS 9.04 preinstalled and hated it. Thankfully I got OS X in the mail the next day. I installed it as I related previously. I have never suffered a crash on the machine. It runs Apache, Jakarta-Tomcat, all of my XML tools, the Java Dev. Kit, Office 2001, and Unreal flawlessly. I have discovered that I am not a Mac bigot, but in fact a user interface bigot. I feel that KDE and Gnome (mind you that I am referring to KDE 1.x and Gnome without Eazel) are somewhat lacking in the tasty eye-candy that make a computer friendly to me. Microsoft seems to have finally figured out how to make a computer (relatively) easy to use. Apple has, once again, perfected it. OS X is a beautiful OS. It has a perfect mixture of power user features and beginner hand-holding.
If Linux suffers as a result of OS X's release it will be in its best interest in the end. Linux, as cool as it is (don't get me wrong, I still use it) has many rough edges. These need to be corrected before it will ever appeal to a mass audience. Then again, who is to say that this has ever been the goal of the OSS movement? We all come out better in the end with the release of high-quality software, no matter who has created it. I certainly do not claim to an expert in the field I have been discussing, only someone who has used many different operating systems (MacOS, OS X, Linux flavors, BSD, Win9x, NT 4, Win2k, and the BeOS).
Please do me a favor and not moderate me down if you feel that what I have written only contradicts with your philosophy. Thanks.
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
Companies will not be migrating to OS X or Linux. They will continue to happily use NT and hire dope MCSE's fresh from boot camp.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
This was similar to the LC pizza boxes awhile back. Remove the two screws permentantly and you could open the case with a quick switch pull.
Now if I could only have a slick G4 tower case, with my custom-built Athlon machine inside, and the Apple log scratched out with the word "Fervent" stenciled over it. Dude!
-
-Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I'm impressed. Since purchasing it, I haven't really used the Linux side of my box too much.
-
-Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Apple takes on an arguably bigger responsibility than RedHat and the others combined when it puts out the first commercial *nix we've seen in a while.
By commercial I mean, non-at&t, non BSD (not *BSD). They're PRE-INSTALLING unix for home users. Anyone else would have said they were mad, but they've gone and made it usable for grandmothers with no-button mice.
Wasn't making linux usable for grandmothers one of the proposals that gets bounced around every now and again?
Reason why OsX will out do Linux: It's preinstalled and has support of Apple, which ain't small cookies.
Reason why Linux will keep advancing, regardless: it's free/Free and runs on just about any hardware you throw it at, all the while performing useful, if mundane functions. Firewall, router, print server....cheap internet appliance, etc... netatalk....
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
A few of the art guys I work with thought that Mac OS X would spell the end of M$, but I pointed out to them that with M$ you tie yourself to expensive proprietary software, with OS X you tie yourself to overpriced, albeit high quality, hardware.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
That's really not so bad, since it only gets 1/4 of my laptops disk capacity, is not the default OS, and I anyway only need it to edit customer documents during a train ride.
But what really got my attention, was this statement of yours:
Oh And Fuck Netscape, lynx is better...
Man, and that from a graphics designer :>
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I used to use Nextstep - the predecessor to OS/X. Nextstep used a swapfile scheme that prevented any swapped pages from being removed from the file if another page had been allocated in the file after it. In other words, the only way to shrink the swapfile was to deallocate pages in exactly the reverse order of their allocation - a nearly impossible task. When probed about the problem, Avie Tavanian (CTO of Apple, then the chief OS designer for Next) said that it would be exceedingly difficult to alter the swapfile algorithm. Perhaps it's different in OS/X, but his statement gives me good reason to doubt it.
What was the big deal about a big swapfile? The bigger it got, the slower the system became. I used to reboot twice a day to keep my system from bogging down. I had a 64Mb system (the most you could get in a typical workstation back then), and I ran emacs, the compiler/linker/debugger suite (modified from gcc & gdb) and my programs (they topped out around 10Mb). I was SO HAPPY to switch to NT because it meant that I could reboot only about once a week instead of twice a day!
I'm looking forward to moving back to *nix someday when the tools finally match those on Windows (emacs and cygwin ports have made NT bearable). But I'll switch back to Win95 before I got back to Nextstep or any current incarnation that behaves the same way.
Apple has a pretty serious chance to win over a whole slew of developers and users. The only limitation is the price tag. How many people want to pay $2,500+ to buy an Apple when they can get a vanilla home built pc for around $700. Personally as a developer, if I could build my own vanilla Apple system I would obviously write software for what I own. Otherwise I will stick to the cheap and widely available pc.
Arg. Regex hangover. "It seems we're no longer raising children, but breeding consumer pods. Fuck it, let Mattel and
Being facetious, but isn't this why ESR is so pissed off?
It's GNU that we've fallen in love with, that everyone keeps calling Linux, that happens to be so powerful and wonderful.
Emacs, GCC, gmake, etc...
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I always get the initial stuff confused.
ESR and RMS ^^; Oops.
Yeah, but you get the point of my post, right?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
So I took up a co-worker's offer to install W2K off of the MSDN disks (I had to create four boot floppies because the DVD wasn't bootable), and once I got it stable, I haven't rebooted since the last time I switched around some LAN cards.
My uptime (as measured by the Local Area Connection Status for my LAN card) is now 41 days. I have one utility I've found since then that might work after I reboot, but I haven't wanted to try it badly enough to reboot.
I'd say W2K can be pretty stable if you don't rely on some PFY in IT to ghost install it for you.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
MCSEs don't come from boot camp, they come from reboot camp!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I don't view that as an advantage. I like the fact that I can get half a dozen good toolkits for X11. And the X11 architecture is good enough to actually make all that stuff work reasonably well together. Companies like Apple or Microsoft don't even try.
it's pretty clear we're never going to make anything even remotely like MacOS X.
And I'm grateful for that. I'll take the messy, vibrant open source software community over the centrally directed, glitzy, market-research-driven behemoth any time. Your preferences may, of course, differ.
That, rather than technical differences, is why MacOS X is no threat to Linux. And given how stubborn and wrong-headed Apple's policies have been so far, it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.
As for Visual Cafe and Powerbuilder, there have been numerous attempts to build similar tools for UNIX and Linux, and they have failed to catch on. I suspect the reason is that those tools are actually not very effective in comparison to programmatic (scripted or declarative) GUI development.
To top it all off, its shell sucks. I mean Dos has always sucked when compaired to bash or tcsh but in win2k the only good thing you could do with it (boot into the BeOS) is gone.
Enough for me to want to use the BeOS for everything except testing my websites for those that do use IE.
Want some more reasons?
I would like to see windows more customisible. I would like to use bash, have themes, ect This should happen untill I get to use OS X as my web creation station. NT is the best windows so far, but shit is still shit, even when its more clumped together.
I want a good browser for the beos, or linux. Oh And Fuck Netscape, lynx is better...
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
"A threat to Linux?" Not really a question we should be asking in my opinion. If the OS is good enough to bring other people away from Linux, then it's probably worthwhile. If someone makes something good, just because it's not what you'd like to succeed doesn't make it a problem. Actually, on second thought, in the case of BETA/VHS it sort of did matter, but that doesn't really relate to OS's as far as I'm concerned. I hope you see my point.
Linux and MacOS X are not really the same sort of thing. "Unix-like" is not just an item on a checklist. Linux is very nearly a true Unix (I'll let the pedants debate this one), while MacOS X shares more with NeXTSTEP and OpenSTEP - directory structure, NetInfo, display(postscript, PDF), et cetera. While Linux is a nearly-universal kernel which runs near-flawlessly on many different systems, MacOS X is strictly a workstation for Macs. Linux has no problems running my Sparc 5 and my AMD K6 - nearly all of the services I run on each are source-compatible between the two - and is a proven server operating system. My department deploys no less than 5 Linux servers (Oracle and Apache), and they requre little maintenance - just a rack to live in. OS X is a very smooth desktop operating system, and that is in fact what I use at home and at work. While Linux can be used as a workstation and OS X as a server, for many reasons they are not comparable: cost (free vs. ~$120) hardware many platforms, and from a few megabytes of RAM on a 386 to multiple gigabytes on sun4u One platform - late Moto PPC, and no less than 128Mb RAM goal from single-floppy routers to multiprocessor servers to desktop game and work machines simple, stable, powerful desktop operating system The only reason OS X might tread on Linux's toes is the fact that it does have Unixish services and such. You can run Apache, sshd, proftpd, bind, innd, and other services from MacOS X. But that is not its focus. The only reason Linux might tread on OS X's toes is that Linux can be used as a power-user's desktop operating system. But in my opinion, that is not its forte - and shouldn't be its focus.
Great rant!
I think you overstate things a bit though.
The installer situation on Windows is pretty piss poor too. Microsoft says you're suppose to have an installer/deinstaller that does certain things, but leaves it up to you to manage all those things. It takes a lot of effort and thought to do a good installer, even with a tool like Installshield which does a tremendous amount of the heavy lifting for you. This is one area in OSX that's very intriguing -- packaging up an applications resources in a directory and treating the whole package as an object. This helps users to move applications around with impunity -- one of the best historical features of MacOS.
Windows has exactly the same library dependency issues that Linux has, which is to say if you require a later version of the MFC dlls you'd better install it. It makes me a bit nervous to routinelly install the MFC dlls, since I don't like the prospect of creating regression bugs in other software installed on my users' computers. Installing these dlls in the system directory requires that you have essentially unlimited access to the computer; I don't like this all-or-nothing approach to security.
The graphical chaos you mention was pretty much the case in the early days of GUI program development on Windows or the Mac too, and quite a few klinkers are still being produced for both platforms.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What? First to *use* USB (not just put it on the board).
That's an argument about their choice of peripherals, not about their support of i/o standards. It's marketing, not engineering. (Not that marketing is not important, just a different discussion.)
First to use Firewire. Using 32bit Nubus when PCs where using ISA slots.
Still using Nubus years after the PC had moved to PCI. Indeed, I'd count Nubus along with SCSI--in both cases Apple went with a clearly superior solution early on, but ended up being held back as the mainstream PC standards, driven by the much larger marketplace, managed to improve much faster and yet be much cheaper than what Apple used.
The "laughably inferior video card" may be so for FPS, but actually performs quite well for graphic artists. Makes me wonder why they specced it.
"The Macintosh does not have any decent 3d support, so therefore we can pretend that 3d support is not important." Any $9 graphics card is just fine for 2d, although I seriously doubt that 16 MB and a 230 MHz RAMDAC are really good enough for any serious graphic artists. The simple fact is that the Mac does not do 3d well, and that that is simply pitiful in this day and age. And no, 3d is not just used for games; you may be shocked, but there are actually graphics artists that work in three dimensions too! (They use PCs and Unix workstations.)
BTW, the only decent 802.11 system out there that can hold a candle to the AirPort system is the Lucent Orinoco system, which is slightly more expensive and a lot harder to set up.
I don't know how hard it is to set up, but IIRC for what you admit is only a slightly higher price it has a much greater wireless range.
How many makers right now are putting out machines with DDR RAM? Last I checked, not many. Sure they're ramping up, but Apple would be stupid (and possibly insane) to be on the top of the curve for every trend. Their machines would be even more overpriced and they could end up with a Rambus/Intel fiasco on their hands if they made the wrong choice. Better to let someone like Intel make that mistake and fight the battles worth fighting (i.e the ones pretty much won already like USB, firewire)
As this thread was initially about system *performance* (as opposed to capabilities), let me tell you that DDR is MUCH more "a battle worth fighting" on this metric. But you have a very valid point--indeed, I agree with you completely. The thing is, what you're saying assumes that Apple will be designing and validating its own chipsets, incompatible with the real world, every time they want to add a feature. In such an environment, it is indeed not worth it to come out with a DDR chipset now. Moreover, while it would have been worth it to come out with a PC133 chispet a year ago and a DDR chipset in around 3 months time, the fact that Apple is the one designing and validating every new chipset is the reason these chipsets are always a year behind the times--it's a very complicated process and Apple's engineers are understandably stretched thin to try to replicate the work of dozens of companies in the PC world.
That's the problem with having a vertical monopoly; there's not enough room for differentiated product lines and innovation. In the PC world, there are 2 or 3 major chipset manufacturers competing to come out with the fastest chipsets with the most new features, and another couple players who drop in to keep competition high. There are about a dozen major motherboard manufacturers, who compete to best implement these chipsets with the most features at the lowest price. Because the PC RAM market is so large, you have all the DRAM manufacturers in the world driving chipset innovation as well. Finally, because PCs are used for general purpose tasks and because there's an independent benchmarking industry in the PC marketplace, all these people know that they won't be able to get away with a single toy SIMD benchmark as an overall measure of "performance"--thus they all feel pressure to create components which actually work fast over a wide variety of circumstances. Hence the PC market is moving into 2.1 and 3.2 GB/s FSBs while the Mac is finally hitting 1.1 GB/s. Oh, and while we're on the subject, it turns out I was wrong: you won't be able to buy a G4 with on-die L2 cache until the G4+ is released in March. Only then will the G4 finally be approaching clock-for-clock parity with x86 chips (according to SPECcpu, i.e. a real benchmark suite).
Now, I'm not saying there aren't some important tangible benefits to Apple's vertical monopoly. I just don't think they're worth the drawback: machines which cost twice as much as the equivalent PC did when it was released 9 months ago.
One final word re: price/performance -- find a notebook that can compete in that area with the new powerbook. Good luck.
Here you finally have a point: the new powerbook is very impressive and indeed competitive with PCs in price/performance. One important reason why is that AMD has not yet had a viable notebook CPU for the mainstream and performance ends of the market, so therefore Intel has a monopoly over that segment and thus performance notebooks tend to cost as much as powerbooks. Conversely, Apple has seen itself frozen out of the market it practically invented with the first powerbooks, as the portable market becomes more and more dominated by corporate consumers. Thus you have a reversal of the situation in the desktop PC market: Intel is getting away with monopoly pricing, while Apple is heavily discounting to try to break back into a market they've nearly lost.
Still, no matter how I might try to talk bad about it, there's no doubt the new powerbooks are very competitive. On the other hand, the situation is decidedly *not* as Apple has presented it. Here's what Apple has to say on the matter:
Sony Vaio Z505...........PowerBook G4
12.1-inch display........15.2-inch wide-screen display
Magnesium alloy..........99.5% pure grade CP1 titanium
650MHz Pentium III.......400 MHz PowerPC G4
No optical drive.........Slot-loading DVD-ROM
2 hours battery life.....5 hours battery life
Not wireless ready.......AirPort antenna built-in
1.15 inches thick........1 inch thick
$2549*...................$2599*
(Taken from here.)
Now let's look at what the actual facts on that Sony Z505 really are.
First off, let's take note of the fact that contrary to Apple's blatant misrepresentation, the Z505 with a P3-650 actually costs $2250, not "$2549". But what's $300 among friends? Well, we can use some of that money to buy the Z505 a 6-hour battery, so hahaha on you. The cost is now $2450, or $150 less than the Mac. Also while the powerbook may be a miraculous 3.8 mm thinner than the Z505, the important measure is of course weight; the powerbook, at 5.3 pounds, is 41% heavier than the 3.75 pound Z505--which makes sense, as they really serve different purposes. Indeed, the low weight (and its huge popularity) is the reason the Z505 is so underpowered for its price (for a PC that is), but we'll disregard that for now.
Unfortunately, there's no way to buy the Vaio as unloaded as those powerbooks: in particular, no way to buy it without at least Word 2000. Nor is there any way to purchase Word 2001 with our brand new powerbook at the Apple Store. We could buy it from MS for $400 but that doesn't seem quite fair. Instead we'll upgrade both machines to Office.
Where does that put us now?
Sony Vaio Z505...........PowerBook G4
12.1-inch display........15.2-inch wide-screen display
Magnesium alloy..........99.5% pure grade CP1 titanium
650MHz Pentium III.......400 MHz PowerPC G4
No optical drive.........Slot-loading DVD-ROM
6 hours battery life.....5 hours battery life
Not wireless ready.......AirPort antenna built-in
1.15 inches thick........1 inch thick
12 GB HD.................10 GB HD
3.75 pounds*.............5.3 pounds
$2650....................$3060
*Longer battery adds weight from this original measurement, but I couldn't find out how much.
What's missing? Well, the DVD player, for one thing. An external one adds $400 to the Z505's cost, making it just a hair cheaper than the powerbook. The 650 MHz P3 is in reality a good deal faster than the 400 MHz G4, but by using the right programs an argument can be made that the G4 comes close. "AirPort antenna built-in" is a red-herring, since you still need to spend $100 for the AirPort card. I looked it up, and the first place I checked had an Orinoco card for $160. Again, I'm almost positive this card has much better range than AirPort. Eh, let's look it up, shall we? Well, AirPort only goes a measely up to 150 feet. Orinoco goes...let's see...up to 1750 feet. Hmm. Guess the "built-in antenna" isn't working too well, is it??
So what do we end up with? The new powerbook is almost exactly the same price as a similarly configured Z505, except that the Z505 has a tad more HD space, has an extra hour on the battery, and, sorry to say, is the faster machine. Alternatively, you can get the Z505 without a DVD player and save $400.
Meanwhile, the powerbook has a luscious 15.2" screen, while the Z505 is stuck with a 12.1" which, while quite small, at least manages to almost hit the resolution of the powerbook (1024x768 vs. 1152x768). The benefit of giving up the nice screen and the internal DVD is up to 1.55 pounds of heft and of course that extra hour.
In other words, it's arguably a tossup. Of course it's a bad comparison because one is a sub-notebook and the other a full-sizer, but Apple chose it, not me. Still, it's worth noting that the Z505 is perhaps the most overpriced laptop around, so it's not such a surprise that Apple chose it when making a comparison.
Well phew! Aren't we enlightened? Did I pass? (It wasn't that tough, I let Apple "find a notebook that can compete in [price/performance] with the new powerbook" for me!)
Now it's my turn: find a desktop Mac that can compete in (price/1.5)/performance with a similarly equipped desktop PC--and I mean in a wide variety of benchmarks, not just Photoshop and RC5. (Indeed, it would be tough to do that even with Photoshop, assuming one actually used a complete Photoshop benchmark like PSbench.)
Good luck. Unfortunately, there are very few good cross-platform benchmarks to consult; the most well-respected cross-platform benchmark in the world, SPECcpu, shows the G4 in a rather unflattering light--indeed, because of this Motorola hasn't even released official scores for the G4, making it the only current general-purpose CPU family I can think of for which SPEC scores are not available. Oh wait, I lied: there's no SPEC scores for Cyrix chips either. However, there are SPEC scores for the P3, P4, the AMD K7, for Sun's UltraSparc II and III, for IBM's POWER3 chip which is sorta related to the G3 kinda sorta, for the Alpha EV67, and the MIPS R12000 and the HP PA-RISC 8600-just in the past year. The point is, every real chip releases SPEC scores, usually early and often. The best we have for the brand-spanking-new G4+ is an *estimate* for the outdated (in fact retired) SPEC95 suite, and man it's not too pretty. Of course, Motorola can always complain that they don't have a very good Fortran compiler, which is key to a good SPECfp score (their SPECint score sucks too, though); still, this is no one's fault but their own, unless of course they never meant the G4 or G4+ to be a high-performance general-purpose chip (oh that's right, they didn't; they built it for the embedded market).
Other cross-platform benchmarks are invariably much less trustworthy, because they are almost always binary only and are never of the breadth or depth of the SPEC suite. Picking Photoshop, for example, is just plain dumb, as Photoshop is simply better optimized on the Mac than on the PC (alternatively, we could benchmark Word and see which runs it faster). There's a nice collection of published cross-platform Mac vs. x86 results here; it's worth perusing, even though most of these programs make *very* poor overall benchmarks, taken as a whole they at least provide some semblence of a big picture. Needless to say, I think your task will be pretty difficult, even if there were a good way to compare performance across the two platforms.
I once heard ESR say in regards of controlling your business "if you own a piece of software that is crucial to running your business, and you don't control that software, you don't control your business."
- passion
(Damn the karma and full speed ahead!)
Why choose between a mac interface and linux when you can have the best of both worlds? I'm currently in the process of creating a GNOME fork that is based on the Mac OS UI (as opposed to the current GNOME UI layout that is copied from Microsoft). Due to the open source nature of the GNOME project (thanx for the code, helix, er, ximian) I am able to quickly modify Gtk/GNOME apis so that they will produce mac-like interfaces. And when I recompile code that uses gnome-app-helper macros, voila! Instant mac interface. Cancel/No buttons will be on the left where they belong, as will OK/Yes buttons on the right. The "Exit" menu item will now called "Quit". Simple keyboard shortcuts will use the modifier key by the spacebar (alt), instead of the one in outer mongolia (ctrl). The menubar will be at the top of the screen where it belongs. And list goes on and on. So many GNOME apps on Freshmeat, so little time!
It gets even better. GNUstep is, of course, open source. And what does GNUstep have? Bundles! (just like MacOS). Once gnustep's bundle code is added to the mixture, the stupid hassle of dealing with packaging systems will be less stupid and more robust. Goodbye annoying RPM/deb messages and corrupted binary databases, hello fast, easy installs!
Code is power.
- It is unix based - thats essential for me. I can install ssh, use vi, etc, etc.
- It allows me to use most of the apps I already know and love on linux.
- It has a good front end that will run all those commercial apps I've been missing in linux (the whole reason why I have linuxppc & OS9 on my laptop).
- Hardware compatability. Linux-ppc is doing an awesome job, but there is still alot of devices that just wont work or features of the machine that arn't there (like sleep support, firewire, irda, etc).
- Ease of use. OS X is looking like a great interface - the sort of thing I can give my girlfriend and have her happy without asking me a billion questions.
Yes, I will miss linux. But I still wish the project well and look forward to when I can switch back. But when it comes to the uses above, it is still very much in development, and I don't have the time needed to spend working on it (tweaking my installation and helping code) at this time in my life.I "grew up" on Macs, and until 5 years ago had never so much as touched the command line. Now I fully rely on Linux for just about everything, though I do still have Macs and WinPC's around the house and office. And of course, I've had at OS X. And... well... it's nice. But I have to say that the things I have (and I'm sure many others have) grown to really like and love about linux just are never going to be there on the Mac.
For example, I like being able to change just about everything about my OS. I like to spend hours just fscking around (every pun intended) with my GUI and my OS, just to see what will happen. Yes, I have ended up spending a hell of a lot of time re-installing or restoring from backup, but that is what "beater" computers are for. And besides, I've found that to be the best way to learn considering the open hostility and serious condescension I've received when asking questions in online forums.
Please forgive me if I am wrong, but isn't Apple not going to allow you to use whatever configuration of GUI or shell that you want? As I recall that was subject of some conversation and even a story here at Slashdot, and it would strike me as something very UN-Steve Jobs to allow the end user to make drastic changes to his OS. I mean, he is (or at least was) rabidly against allowing anyone to do too much tinkering with his OS and computers in the past.
Anyway, much as I did think OS X was a might peerrrrrrrty, and had lots of fun animations in the way things worked and was zippy etc., and much as I do still really like Apple hardware, OS X isn't going to get me to just chuck out my Linux library.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Let's look at how Big of a Question this is.
1) Take all the Mac users.
2) Get rid of any who aren't currently using Linux, or likely to in the near future in the absence of OS X.
3) Of those who remain, calculate the percentage who are likely to jump ship.
If my numbers are correct, you end up with about 3.5 people.
OK, I know that's a gross exaggeration. The point still remains that there are a tiny tiny number of people actually running Linux on the Mac. OS X isn't going to affect the Linux community as a whole much at all; and it's probably not going to affect the Linux/Mac community much either since they're already going against the grain. They _are_ they techies, the hobbiests, and the tweakers; if they decide to run OS X, they'll figure out a dual boot system to do it on.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
if they get x86 sorted out, how many people are going to want to buy expensive, slow macs instead of an athlon based peecee?
granted, the mac is a much better design (in the guts) but is that enough for people to "go proprietary"?
X86 compatibility, all the chipsets that gpl code runs on, would be a royal pain in the ass to support without looking at a lot of gpl'd code. remember, linux has no problem running on chipsets that were made years ago.
the reality is, if they support PC's, a lot of mac people might jump from their hardware...a lot of linux/bsd people won't pay $120.
in the meantime, linux will continue to improve on all architectures.
on the other hand, if it were priced at something like $30-$40 bucks, without copy protection, i bet there are a lot of linux people (and companies) who would jump for x86, just cuz it's exactly what people want -- an alternative to macs (peecee hardware) running an OS that isn't embarrassing or slimy to use, and is supported by a fairly reputable corporation.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Released the Whistler beta with code in it to prevent you installing an app on more than one PC. I am against software piracy. I am also against anything that makes my life significantly harder in maintaining the banks of otherwise identical M$ boxes I manage in an educational institution
There are noises that M$ are looking to kill off or restructure the volume discounts to corporates
They have announced plans to kill off the 95/98/Me line, to try to move the world ultimately towards Whistler. Thing is, many PCs have been sold with Windoze on board in the last three years almost as home appliances. How will these users react to being told that the PC which (sorta) functions as they expect, will need an OS upgrade, and they will have to pay for it ? This is not corporate world folks, and I bet many don't !
It seems that M$ (or at least, its putative OS corporation) are in the process of trying to rationalise its product line, and maximise profits. In doing so, and being too gung-ho about it, they risk killing the goose that lays the golden egg. For corporates, the cost of ownership of M$ will skyrocket. This opens the door for a machine which consumers (and corporates) can buy off the shelf which is easy(ish) to use. Like an iMac or a G4, for instance.......
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
It's important to keep a larger perspective here. More people are using computers every day, but those people have choices to make about what operating system they use. True, there will be people who move from Linux to Mac OS X, but there are still plenty of people who'll go take a shiny new G4 and stick the latest LinuxPPC version on it.
Important to note, however, is that Linux is being used more than ever for servers, in both number and market share. This, IMO, is where Linux excels the best. Mac OS X will run a server on an overly expensive (for what's given) system that just is a GUI overkill for your average e-mail or web server. On the other hand, Linux runs a very slim OS as an e-mail, web, database, DNS, etc. etc. server. While Samba definately isn't perfect or near NT's native implementation of it, it's definately reliable enough now for regular use.
I'll grant those anti-Linux people that Linux isn't perfect for the desktop. I used it for some 11 months, but found too many applications I needed just couldn't run under Linux, and I don't think Wine is really worth trying to run Office through (even though it, as of recently, does run it). However, I'm absolutely astounded by its hardware support, and comparing directly to MacOS X it's unbelievable (running only on the later Macs and their supported accessories is just plain crap for hardware support). I currently run Linux on my laptop (old Pentium 150 Mhz), and my server - they run absolutely beautifully. All of my laptop hardware is supported by Linux, even my old Chips and Tech video card under XFree86 4.0!
Coming back to my original point though, new people are still getting into computers, most taking a newbie OS like MacOS or Windows. But those that are using Windows now are switching to more advanced OSes like Linux, BSD (all flavors), BeOS, etc, as they become comfortable with setting up their systems. Perhaps MacOS X will take a chunk of LinuxPPC users, but I think that Linux is in good position to gain serious market share in the next 3 years.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
One thing I have always liked about Apple is how they do this. Just try finding a free (legal) copy of windows 95, or even win 3.1 or dos for download from microsoft.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
Well, who cares if it runs Linux apps? They are usually open source anyways, they can be recompiled. What isn't open source, can be bought today for MacOS, and will be available by fall for OS X. On top of this, the personality of Linux (and Windows apps for that matter) don't appeal to Apple's customers. Too hard to use and feel to cludgy.
"A deal with Insignia Solutions to license Virtual PC code and create Red Box (an environment in which Windows apps can run). "
What developer would EVER code for Mac native apps if a Mac could transparently run Windows apps? What does this offer a customer that Windows doesn't offer natively? Apple's customer base is NOT interested in running Window's applications, generally speaking. They are too cludgy. Even MS Office on Mac "feels" better to a MacOS than Office 2k on a PC. Microsoft KNOWS what their Mac using customers want...that's why IE for MacOS had many usability features before it did for PC. Print preview, tabbed searches, easy to manage favorites (much easier than in IE 5.5 on WIndows), you can set it to ask to accept/refuse cookies on a site basis (great when you want to go to nytimes and slashdot, but dont want any other cookies...it REMEMBERS it too)...just to name a few.
Even if these reasons didn't matter, MacOS X won't exist on x86 commody hardware for the two following reasons: 1. OpenFirmware blows BIOS out of the water and 2. IRQ's are a great source of pain. Mac customers don't want to know or see or even deal with anything resembling IRQ's. When I first of IRQ's my first thought was "you gotta be kidding me?"....
Burn Hollywood Burn
The other thing people are missing is that OS X will have something(s) Linux WONT. Quicktime (used exclusively on many sites), IE 5.5 (needed for some sites you debate the good or bad of this), office, and many more windows programs. Linux wont have these. It will basically have all that Linux has plus a whole lot more.
Lastly OS X will ahve cocoa and carbon, which although I have not used, I have heard are way better than QT and gtk/gnome API's. AS well they are making a program that will make GUI creation easier and faster than Visual Cafe or Powerbuilder.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Every time the BSD tcp/ip stack beated the Linux tcp/ip stack, masses of linux geeks threw their weight at the problem until linux came out on top.
:)
The same is now happening with memory management, many times, on the linux kernel mailing list, people refer to 'BSD is faster in this type of operation or load', and people are coding like crazy to make linux the better party.
So why wouldnt it be posible for Mac OSX to do the same? masses of linux coders brushing up gnome/kde/xfree86/etc to get it upto spec, and maybe even better then Mac OS X.
Nothing seems to motivate a linux coder more then 'the other guys were better then you'. So heck, im hoping it will be a good thing
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
While Linux is a nearly-universal kernel which runs near-flawlessly on many different systems, MacOS X is strictly a workstation for Macs. Linux has no problems running my Sparc 5 and my AMD K6 - nearly all of the services I run on each are source-compatible between the two - and is a proven server operating system. My department deploys no less than 5 Linux servers (Oracle and Apache), and they requre little maintenance - just a rack to live in. OS X is a very smooth desktop operating system, and that is in fact what I use at home and at work. While Linux can be used as a workstation and OS X as a server, for many reasons they are not comparable:
The only reason OS X might tread on Linux's toes is the fact that it does have Unixish services and such. You can run Apache, sshd, proftpd, bind, innd, and other services from MacOS X. But that is not its focus.
The only reason Linux might tread on OS X's toes is that Linux can be used as a power-user's desktop operating system. But in my opinion, that is not its forte - and shouldn't be its focus.
so I can make certain that patches I submit as a result of porting utilities to OS X don't break Liunx builds!
Finally, part of the appeal of OS X for me was summed up quite nicely by Linus Torvalds some time ago:
has gotten too easy on Linux!
.sig: file not found
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-Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
You see, when you say ``Linux,'' what do you really mean? You really don't think of your kernel. Really, you don't. You think of all those great tools that help you to get your work done... tools like make and vim and gcc and grip and the gimp and apt and everything else that make you more productive. Things like the window manager that does what you want, and configurability of how your text editor works, and being able to easily remap your keys and such.
If, suddenly, you can get something from Apple that has a BSD underneath, with all the great tools you have grown to love, is it really MacOS that you're loving? No, it's still the things that you love on your computer that you call ``Linux.''
Might MacOS decrease the number of people who run the Linux kernel? Perhaps. Mostly, though, I think it will increase the base of people who have access to all the great tools that we love. In that perspective, what we call ``Linux'' will just have more people added to the ranks.
And, I think, this is what is going to happen to all the computer vendors, especially the UNIX vendors: They will either become like Linux, or they will die. Either you will have all the great tools available to you on your UNIX variant, along with easy (apt-style, perhaps) upgrading and such, or you will see that flavor of UNIX die off. So you might still have a Solaris or IRIX kernel, and maybe even C library, but your installation will become more and more Linux-like. And so, sort of, Linux will achieve Total World Domination. Maybe not the kernel... but the powerful environment, for sure.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
...and I'll say it again, OSX, or any other OS for that matter, represents no "threat" to Linux. Does Coca-Cola "threaten" water? Does the existence of dominos "threaten" my ability to play cards? Of course not. It doesn't matter how popular any OS becomes, because Linux is free, and will always be supported and improved upon by those who love it. It does not rely upon a centralized authority to ensure it's continued survival, ala Windows. As long as one person is running Linux, Linux is alive. The pundits keep talking about Linux as though its a traditional product. It's not. It's not in a race to "beat" anything. We users may hope for eventual supremacy over other OSes, but that is not now, nor has it ever been a primary concern. All the attention from the media, and the involvement of companies like RedHat is great, but it's all peripheral to the central idea that Linux was created, and is maintained by the people who use it. Something better may come along someday, and if it is truly better people will switch. But I can tell you that it will have to be free and open for that to happen. I wish Mac OS well. But I have no concerns whatsoever that there is any potential that it will "threaten" my current OS of choice.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Just recently, I aquired a dual-G4/500MHz machine and MacOSX beta. I started up the machine (which shipped with OS9 installed), and the first thing it did was crash. Then I installed OSX.
First of all, OSX is *beautiful*. You'd be hard-pressed to pick out an individual pixel on the screen with OSX running. The anti-aliasing is done very well (does not look blurry), and I haven't noticed any slowness in any of the rendering.
The interface isn't extremely different from previous MacOS's (note that I haven't used previous MacOS's much). The menu bar still stays at the top of the screen, and programs still don't quit unless you choose "quit" from the file menu, which bothers me. The rest of the interface is very nice, however. Lots of drag-and-drop, which I like.
I could see myself switching to OSX as soon as it goes mainstream and gets more applications to support it. You can run OS9 programs now, sort of, but it's slow. OSX is stable, though, and POSIX-compliant, which means it beats Windows in my book. And since I really like things that are well-designed and thought out, I like it better than Linux, at least on principle. We'll see about usability.
Oh, and I absolutely LOVE the G4 hardware. The instant I openned the case, I thought "Damn, why didn't anyone else think of this!?" You really have to see it to understand, though.
Over the past few years, Apple has really changed. Basically everything that was wrong about them before has been fixed, and in many cases made *better* then the competition. The only problem remaining is price. G4 hardware is still on the expensive side, though not so much so as I rembered. Also, if you know what you are doing, you can bring the price down by buying just the case and mobo and using standardized parts for everything else (ATA/66 hard drives, PC100 RAM, AGP video (ATI cards), USB keyboard/mouse, etc.).
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MacOS X is going to slaughter Linux on the desktop. But who cares? BeOS slaughtered Linux on the desktop, Windows 2000 slaughterd Linux on the desktop, MacOS 9 slaughtered Linux on the desktep, NeXTStep slaughtered Linux on the desktop, even Windows 3.1 was better than Linux on the desktop.
Linux, as we know it today, it not going going to ever take over the desktop -- not when it doesn't support any of the new media files, not when it doesn't have a decent web browser, not when every distribution comes with (several) piss-poor, incompatible, incomplete control panel utilities, not when it every single program I run seems to have its own widget set, has a different set of fonts, has home-rolled its own ugly alpha blending, and has a different look-n-feel to go with it all.
It will never take over when clicking "install everything" on any distribution means that every passing script kiddie has root on your machine. It will never take over when every single piece of software available requires a certain kernel, a certain C library, a certain set of fonts, a certain version of X, a certain version of Gnome, or any one of the half-dozen Java Runtimes, and each is incompatible with whatever you're running now.
Linux will never take over when every significant program has implemented it's own (somewhat incomplete, and slightly buggy) installer, each incompatible with any method you were using to keep track of where every file on your machine came from.
Linux will never take over when every distribution, every desktop, ever file manager, and even ever program available has its own way of associating files with programs -- It will never take over when telling Gnu Midnight Commander, Netscape, Mozilla, Konquerer, and any other program whether to open PDF files with Ghostview or Adobe Acrobat means configuring each program individually.
Linux is never going to take over the desktop as long as working as a networking client is so piss poor. It will never take over when browsing the network, and attaching to an SMB share, or a Netware share, or an NFS share requires either strong administrator magic, or a user poking around in the shell as root.
Linux is never going to take over the desktop as long as printing is still such an immense pain in the ass -- printing on Linux is about as pitiful as printing from DOS was 15 years ago. The only difference is that DOS programs often made an attempt to work with available printers, while every Linux program demands either a PostScript printer, or a buggy filter manually set up to pretend there's a PostScript printer there.
In short, Linux as we know it essentially has no desktop presence at all. Given the realities of the market, I can't imagine a situation where most current Linux users would consider using a version of Linux that fixed the flaws of Linux that makes it so useless on the desktop. Linux has nothing to worry about from Apple on the Desktop, because Linux isn't on the Desktop anyhow.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
You haven't used OS X, have you? Let's talk.
Well for starters you lose all those lovely ease of use features once you start using X instead of aqua. So there goes that.
The ease of use is *not* totally lost once you start using X. In fact, for many people, I suspect the ease of use associated with the Mac OS isn't really just the cues/navigation abilities in the Finder and widget set -- though those are nice.
No, the real niceness is in the system administration/configuration/installation courtesies. It generally just seems to take less time to learn how to do these, so you get your system out of the way faster to do whatever else it is you wanted to.
OS X follows in this tradition. I installed it, and it worked. Inside 30 minutes. OK, with all the dev tools it inside 45. And oh yes, it's full of all the commandline goodness I've come to expect and love from Linux.
Secondly, you can't run full OS X on x86 platforms - just darwin. So you get an expensive and slow computer from apple that has a candy coated shell. Am I the only one that doesn't see a point?
Apple *will* somehow have to address the price performance issue if they want to gouge market share out of others. But they can keep their core advantages (enumerated above) and keep their core customre base, maybe even grow a little.
BTW, on what do you base your assumption that current apple hardware is "second rate" other than processor speed?
The deal is that since apple customers are cultist followers,
Blah, blah. "I don't understand apple custumors so they must not be rational." Great logic. I expect you to admit also think people like Minkowski and Feynman were loons (pardon my assumption that you don't understand all the theories they published).
But at least they don't have a cpu fan - that's worth an extra $600, right?
Not, as it turns out, in the mass market. But I love laptops for this reason. I hate the noise.
And, as it turns out, one of my hobbies is audio/video production -- a big market for apple. Having a quiet computer really is an asset. But you probably didn't think about that.
If OS-X does anything, it'll simply be to raise the bar for KDE and GNOME - a challenge they will be able to meet.
KDE and GNOME, great as they are, don't get anywhere at solving the underlying system administration problem. Eazel might.
Sorry, but apple has gone the way of the Amiga - thousands of deluded followers and zero relevance.
If by deluded you means that there's not hope of world domination, then your comment has truth. But if you mean that Apple's offerings don't have things worth examining -- even buying -- then you're off your rocker. The Cocoa (formerly Yellowbox/Openstep) development framework by itself is a find. The other benefits I've touted in this post are real and will appeal to people -- even some Linux users.
Mass abandonment of Linux for OS X? Hardly probable. Even if OS X was completely superior and ran on Intel hardware, the ideology of Open Source and sheer stubborn religiousness withing the
*LINUX* community would keep users -- just like the "deluded apple followers" you mention.
But don't think that means that OS X isn't something to be reckoned with -- and learned from.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.