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OS X Vs. Linux On The Desktop
saintlupus writes: "There's an interesting article about the recent web browsing stats of Linux by Charles Moore, a fairly well-known web journalist in the Mac community. He asks whether OS X is the deathblow to Linux in the desktop and scientific computing markets. He also touches on the perennial "I'll run it on my Athlon or not at all" mindset of current Lintel hardware owners. Definitely worth a read." The article that Charles uses as his jumping point is the recent stats on Linux on the desktop. That article cites .24%, but Charles article has some pieces on why that number could be wrong.
This may sound like flamebait, but it's more of a rebuttal ;)
1) Wait till early next year, when the G5s are released. Speeds are rumored from 1 gHz to 2.2 gHz, plus with the G5's incredibly awesome SMP capabilities, multiple CPU configurations will not at all be uncommon. Add to that some very scientifically friendly things like the fact that it's a full 64-bit CPU (lots and lots of RAM) and the 128-bit vector units, and you suddenly have a VERY attractive package.
2) He never claims they'll be able to. Macs and Linux have always been niche markets. He's just claiming that OS X is nudging Linux out of its niche.
3) It doesn't really need to be. OS X works so well because Apple doesn't have to support a bunch of odd third-party hardware, so instead everything works REALLY well on their one platform. Apple's hardware is by no means second-rate. The build quality and nice little touches are tops over any I've seen on the x86 side of things. Apple sees themselves as more the Mercedes of computers, where Compaq would be the Toyota. And for the most part, as long as people adopt the hardware and software changes, software vendors are more than happy to port the software (and trust me, OS X is sooo much better than OS 9.)
This offers a great advantage in that you can pick a WM that fits your style, unfortunately X11 is a very weak and, as the author put it, "clunky" base that they all must run on, and none of the choices offer the desktop ease of use and incorporation of graphics desktop users demand. It is childish to call OS X a "KDEish environment" when KDE cannot hope to offer an interface at the level of Aqua.
the only other "cool" thing i noticed with it is that you can switch back to Mac OS 9 (which takes about a good 2-3 minutes to do that)
43 seconds on my G4/466 MHz, which should be fairly middle-of-the-road Mac hardware (it's mostly disk operations anyway); I don't know any Mac that would take more than a minute.
unix shell in Mac OS X is nothing special... it's really limited to what you can and can't do in the shell
There are very few limits to what you can do in the CLI; it is essentially a full BSDish system. You can complain about what comes preinstalled, but I think it's fine considering most users will never touch the terminal; power users will most likely want their own favorite tools so it's just as well to let them download it themselves. Apple doesn't bundle make because almost all developers are going to do all of their compiling in Project Builder (why would you want to do it at the CLI when you they bundle such excellent DevTools?)
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
One point and two misconceptions, more like.
(1)(a). Mainstream scientific computing is done on big iron made by someone other than Intel. Solaris SPARCs are used a lot, for instance. My grad school days in Astronomy and Physics were spent on SGI Octanes (yummy).
(1)(b). You seem to have fallen prey to the MHz myths. Have you used a recent G3 or G4? The PowerPC architecture is *built* for heavy duty mathematical precoessing.
(2). Well, alright, point there.
(3). Sorting through this jumbled mass of points was a barrel of laughs. True, OS X won't go x86. And true, Apple makes a lot of money from hardware, thus supporting the lack of a port. Of course, this means that MS support can't send me to Intel and Intel can't send me right back to MS. If it's broke, you have only to make one call. That's as may be. Point me to reports of Apple alienating developers. They've spent loads of time and resources helping developers move to Cocoa. In fact, that's what Carbon is for. They also provide one of the best Java VMs out there. Apple is embracing (as in welcoming, not as in extending) the technology, rather than trying to quash it or "standarize it" out of existence. They even provide a Cocoa API for Java, should you wish to optimize further. They are bringing more developers on board, while making the trasnition from Classic to OS X as easy as possible. If anyone is alienating developers with their new OS, it's Microsoft.
Do not touch -Willie
I started using linux in early 97, using Slackware that someone installed for me. Then I switched to RH5, installed myself. In 98 I managed to get RH installed on a laptop! Have continued to install it myself, now running RH7.2 and also Mandrake 8.1 on a laptop.
8 50 0097.pdf
Linux has been mostly wonderful. Most of all I'm grateful for it's existence- without it I would have had to switch to NT I suppose. The think I don't like is the continual configuration and fussing it requires. In 97 I probably spent 3-4 WEEKS getting linux configured - making the modem work was hard, making ethernet work was hard, making sound work was hard, dvd was and still is hard, so on.
It has gotten MUCH better, but I still find myself spending too much time on configuration.
Recently by accident I've become the admin on an OS/X machine. "Admin", meaning I click "software update" and it updates to the latest stuff, that's it. EVERYTHING WORKS, and is beautiful besides. Movies work. I recently tried to find something on Linux to make an mpeg2 or 4 movie from a series of frames - after a day of looking and configuring gave up and looked on OS/X. Half an hour later it was done, and with the Sorensen codec - much better quality that I would have had on Linux. I'm buying myself an Ibook for Christmas.
Turning to rant mode, a second and equally important reason why I want to switch is simply that I'm mildly embarassed to be part of the linux community. Slashdot always has interesting articles, but look at the posted responses --
the words "reactionary" and "narrow-minded" only begin to describe them. People don't even read the original story before responding.
I've read interviews with Linus and certain other people in the community that seem quite thoughtful and intelligent, but that doesn't describe the community as a whole -- based on their words I almost expect the Linux types are the same people who would support a dictator given the chance. Almost. I would have wanted to believe that linux users are among the more intelligent/open minded/creative people... perhaps they are; perhaps other groups are even worse?
But even if so, it's still embarassing to be associated with the shouts of ignorance, and worse, shouts that are hurting rather than helping your own interests. How many times have we read a "PERL RULEZ, JAVA SUKS" post, then someone follows up with a thoughtful post and some hard data saying that no, java is not dog slow, (see
HTTP://www.philippsen.com/JGI2001/finalpapers/1
- java within 20% of fortran on a variety of numerical codes- fluid dynamics, etc.), only to be followed a week later with the same venting.
Duh, java has helped linux hugely - the existence of app servers in java has allowed large web sites to consider moving off of windows.
Similarly for Sun (the existence of a commercially supported high-end unix is not SO horrible for linux), for any commercial apps that dare to port to linux, for OS/X, for Mac hardware (we'll all happily accept a rumor that Macs are always slower/more expensive rather than looking at any data), so on.
OS/X is by numbers already the world's most popular Unix variant. I think the Linux world should celebrate this as a friendly achievement.
Could people _please_ stop posting this inane nonsense. Do you have any idea how foolish you sound to people who actually use the command line? That so-called experiment tested a limited set of mundane tasks that revealed nothing about the power of the command line.
/topdir -mount -type d -name '[0-9]*' -prune -a -print
.html files in a particular subdirectory that do NOT contain the word "XML". Do not search non-html files, as there are several large non-html files in random locations, and that would be time consuming. Save the results to a text file for later review, but also print them out as they are found for immediate consideration.
You want some _real_ tests. Here you go. Get out your stopwatch...
1. Retrieve the contents of an individual website hosted on an ISP (those things are always going down):
Command line: wget http://www.example.com/~someone
User-time: 4 seconds, 6 if you need to open an xterm
2. Back up a large directory to a second hard drive, copying only the files that have changed
Command line: rsync dir1 dir2
User-time: 3 seconds
System time: MUCH less than drag-n-drop in explorer
3. Find all subdirectories of "/topdir" that start with a number, but don't descend into them once they've been found, as they are very deep and that would be time consuming. Oh, and don't check remotely mounted filesystems.
Command line: find
User time: 6 seconds
System time: Just _try_ and express that with a GUI...
4. Repeat the previous, this time deleting the directory if it's empty.
Command line: for i in $( [up arrow] ); test $( ls $i | wc -l ) -eq 0 && rmdir $i; done
User time: 8 seconds
System time: ibid
5. Find all
Command line: for i in $( find dir -type f -name '*.html' ); do grep -v $i XML && echo "match: $i" && echo ---------------; done | tee outfile.txt
User time: 24 seconds
Ok, let's see how fast you do the same things with the GUI. My guess is that anyone who even managed to design a GUI that was capable of such things would make it so bloated that it would take more time to _load_ than most of my commands did to type. By comparison, an xterm loads in about a second.
Start getting into replacing text, formatting it for output, selectively copying files, and so on, and you can't begin to approach the power of the command line. Any GUI trying to do the same thing with point-and-click would ultimately be forcing you to build the command line text piece by piece anyway.
If the command line gives you the ability to tell the OS exactly what you want by speaking its language, the GUI is at best a clumsy translator. Great if you're a user with the equivalent of "See Spot Run" tasks, but there _is_ life beyond first grade.
I've literally seen people point-and-clicking through tasks like the above, manually taking days to do what I could have done in, literally, seconds. And since they're using Windows, there's nothing I can do to help them. They're just stuck with their hours of drudgery.
So the next time you consider quoting this GUI nonsense, think twice. There's a lot more to the command line than typing "mozilla" or Control-f-o to open a file...
- None of those times include the time wasted typing out those excessively long commands.
- Dragging and dropping is better than rsync, because with rsync you have to know and type out the name of the directory ahead of time. GUIs provide a nice spatial representation of the directory structure, and are very quick to scan and find.
- In order to know how to use any of those commands, you would have to spend years learning the intricacies of all the various commands, options, etc. Setting up a for loop and pipeline takes an excessive amount of thought and care to ensure that everything works as it should. A single typo can have catastrophic results (cf. "rm -Rf *.o" and "rm -Rf *
.o")
- Most people's needs are simple. They don't need to sync massive directory trees or save webpages or any complex bullshit like that. For everyday tasks like web browsing, WMA playing, and writing Word documents, the GUI is superior.
The CLI is fine for a few highly specialised tasks and little else. It is fine for batch jobs and remote administration where a Telnet prompt is all you have. For day to day use, the GUI is simply faster."The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
Actually the Power4 and the G4 are two completely different beasts. If the Mac were using Power4s I'd buy one in a second, but Motorola has completely screwed up the PowerPC line since diverging from IBM (the G3 is the same as the Power 750, the last time IBM and Motorola made the same chip).
And Darwin is just the kernel. That's all that's been ported to X86. The Quarts graphic engine is highly optimized for the PowerPC architechture, and only really performs decently when Altivec is present. That's one of the reasons OSX on a G3 is so dismal.
Allows you to prepare and deliver presentations, often just minutes before you step up to the mike - with a native Powerpoint you are leagues ahead of anything Linux can offer.
Except if you need lots of math, which looks horrible under any of Microsoft's programs. Yes, I know there's an equation editor and whatnot, it still looks like crap.
In that case the only reasonable solution is latex+pdf, which beats powerpoint any day (granted, harder to get up and running). google on PPower4 or TexPower, the stuff out there is very impressive.
You're missing the most important part -- Mac OS X software is not neccessarily going to be any more portable to UNIX than Windows software is, because 99.9% of commercial developers will target the proprietary APIs like Cocoa.
:)
No, dude. Cocoa is pretty much just a new name for the OpenStep API, with a bit added. GNUStep is working on writing a fully OpenStep-compliant environment to run on *nix and Windows, and is coming along nicely. When it's more complete, Cocoa applications will be very portable to other operating systems.
Of course, that isn't to say I'd abandon this beautiful OS and go back to Linux, but hey
Now the Dell is $500 cheaper, so i changed the specs to try to get it to compete with the 2,299 TiBook: 256MB RAM, 20GB HDD and CD-RW/DVD drive, and the result cost $2,226.00, so price is about the same. But you get the screen of an iBook!
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
from
8 82 12
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=
* Support for dual display and video mirroring: Millions of colors on the built-in display and an external display at up to 1600 by 1200 pixels
* Support for a single external display: Millions of colors on a single external display at up to 1920 by 1440 pixels
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
Darwin is being ported to the x86:
/ ar chive.html
" Preliminary support for Intel is provided, allowing developers to begin bringing Darwin to the Intel platform."
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin
Well it isn't exactly BSD, either, it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that...
There's a lot of NeXTstep there, except that the BSD part of the Mach kernel has been upgraded to a 4.4 BSD level (from 4.3, which is what it was with NeXTstep IIRC), there's quite a bit of FreeBSD stuff in the libraries etc.
I believe the GUI is based on NeXT technology, as well, at least it also uses a postscript display engine. I'm not an OS X user (yet) so I haven't got into it in-depth, but I wouldn't be surprised if the "new" APIs looked like NeXTstep, too... I hope that the non-GUI parts are POSIX, though.
Oh and Apple's product WebObjects has an awfully familiar name...
No flames on the capitalization of NeXTstep, please.