Slashdot Mirror
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.
Had OS X become Apple's default years ago (presumably in the form of NextStep), perhaps Gnome and KDE wouldn't have gotten off the ground and *Step would've become the single dominant Unix UI. Now there's no holding back Gnome or KDE.
I'm slightly tempted by Macs now that OS X is shipping. I have mixed feelings: I hate MacOS, far more than I hate MSWindows, but I loved NextStep. Apple's hardware prices decide the issue for me at this time: no OS X.
Even if iWhatevers where cheap and I ran OS X, many of the applications I'd want to run would be Unix or Unix/X apps that I could also run under Linux or BSD.
I would have to say that it is easier to write the GUI for an OS X application since it doesn't involve writing any code.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I decided to do my own little research on OS statistics
based on hits to two non-biased (OS-wise) websites: an anime
site I run (www.reimeika.ca), and the Math Department
website at University of Toronto (www.math.utoronto.ca).
The following results are completely unscientific, make
of them what you will:
reimeika:
linux ---> 3.91%
mac ---> 4.46%
win ---> 84.10%
other ---> 7.53%
utoronto:
linux ---> 3.24%
mac ---> 2.75%
win ---> 75.84%
other ---> 18.17%
These stats are for the last 22 days.
I'd like to see the number of Linux users browsing Slashdot. Just to see what a "utopian" Linux future looked like...
-Russ
Me
However, the iBook is a different matter. I can see how an engineer would be interested in one of those. Unix on a small, relatively potent laptop with lots of I/O for network use (firewire, ethernet, USB), decent battery life (5 hours or so), and reasonably priced. So I would definitely consider an iBook running OS-X (but with 256mb of RAM.. the 128mb is too puny).
Perhaps my attitude is not that uncommon, given that most reports of "engineers switching in droves" were based on watching engineeers who were away from their office (at trade shows) using laptops. But no one is moving me away from Linux!
I use Linux on my desktop for 99% of my job (and it will be 100% when we get a Citrix box running). I use Linux on a laptop for 100% of my field work. We had a loaner MAC with OS-X on it to look at last summer and we all liked it fine... but no one switched to it. We set up a VNC so I could get a MAC desktop on my KDE desktop... that was kinda cool. But when it came time to return the MAC no one cried... we just packed it up and hauled it away.
My work habits are sloppy enough to need the four desktops KDE gives me (or more if I wish) and I much prefer the KDE desktop to the OS-X version. Maybe when I can justify paying the $800 (and up) for a iMAC versus the $500 for a comparable PC, or when I can give up the clear path to hardware upgrades, or when more of the cool network tools one gets with a Linux distro appear on the MAC I'll switch. But I don't see that happening soon.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
"the engineer community is abandoning it left and right for Mac OS X."
I work for a government weapons lab and have seen no great move to OS X. And we are the largest Mac site in the world. What I have seen is people dropping their Macs, Windows boxes, and commercial Unix desktops for Linux in DROVES.
It depends on the area, I suppose. I was at the big Human Genome Project meeting this spring and there were OS X laptops everywhere. (Linux was the only other OS in attendance.) Molecular biology is a Mac-friendly area and there were a lot of Japanese attendees (another big Mac domain) so the jump to OS X for coders and informatics people is smaller than it would be in areas where Macs are unknown.
Bullshit. You aren't even in the top 5, there isn't any government facility in the top 5. The largest Mac facility in the world is Disney Imagineering in Burbank CA. Disney has a contractual obligation with Apple to never reveal the extent of their Apple CPU purchases. I know this because I negotiated that contract, and I was their sales rep. But now I don't work there anymore so fuck the NDA.