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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.
People perceive that using the commandline is faster since it gives their mind more of a workout, whereas mousing is easier and more "boring".
Umm, even if that is true, I don't see how it matters. Are you a corporate slave? Do you think 'Oh, this may seem boring and repetitive, but hey, there are integers and studies out there that prove this way is faster.' If so, you admit that base fact of economic superiority outweighs subjective experience.
Implicit in the TOGS study is the FACT that CLI is aesthetically superior, else why would TOGs respondants describe the GUI as boring?
The simple fact is that CLI Users have higher IQ's and demand more intellectual challenge and stimulus, stimulus the GUI does not provide.
So, I leave you to your corporate dreaming, your 'productivity', and I'll go off and have a damned good time with the superior, and TOGs-admitted more enterataining CLI.
Thank you.
Computers aren't supposed to be fun. They're supposed to be TOOLS. They're supposed to sit there and do what I tell them to, without coughing out syntax errors and overall forcing me to yield to the idiosyncracies of some college student's term project. Get off your high horse and get into the modern age.
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
Time blah blah money blah blah I'm so smart blah blah IQ blah blah I deserve cash
Honestly, don't you understand what hacking is about? Only through playing, playing can we reach total understanding of a complex system, and learn to maximise out own personal growth potential.
Certainly, it is wonderful the way you sacrifice yourself for corporate ideals, but don't forget moeny is only the means of survival, and not the substance.
Get out of your Ayn Rand hellhole and join us, us in the older generation with true socialist, egalitarian ideals.
I take exception with Kimbro Staken's statement:
"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.
Linux is doing a good job of grabbing commercial Unix desktop and server market share; however, there have been practically no inroads into the Windows desktop/server space, and I don't expect to see it. Rare is it the Windows/Novell sys admin who shows any great interest in learning Linux. Face it, mousing around and figuring stuff out appeals to lazy people MUCH more that reading man pages. Thus, I don't see Windows/Novell IT shops dropping their platforms for Linux.
As for the common denominator desktop, do not underestimate the power of Office. A platform can not hope to succeed in the commercial desktop space without Office. Microsoft's contract with Apple to provide Office for the Mac at parity with the Windows platform has either ended, or ends soon as the 5 year contract was announced at MacWorld '97 in SF. Unfortunately MS holds the power to kill OS X as a viable commercial desktop because it controls the number one productivity package. And since the Bush administration has pussed out with the suit against MS, our only hope is that the hold-out states will get MS broken up into OS/App divisions with provisions preventing/limiting their collaboration, and a mandate to provide Office for other platforms at parity to Windows. I seriously doubt this will happen, but one can hope it will. Or pay enough bribes to counter-weight MS's payola to Bush....
OK, I guess I've ranted enough....
Did you read the link before you posted your senseless drivel? Your text browser only seems faster because you have to think a lot more about using it than you should have to. How many times do you find yourself looking at the manual page because you don't know the correct key to, say, save a webpage's source? I don't know about you, but for me graphics provide essential feedback in modern web designs. Text browsers are missing out on the potential of the modern web; how does w3m handles the fun golf game at Electrotank.com or the helpful Flash buttons on any one of a number of professional sites? HTML is an anachronism being phased out in favour of better technology such as PDF, Flash and Javascript; your w3m browser will soon be useless for browsing the web at large.
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
It's not difficult to obtain double digit growth numbers when your marketshare is only .24%.
If Apple ported to OSX they'd become Be.
Its true, Neither linux or OSX is capable of taking Microsoft, I say Linux can in 2 years, I say OSX isnt even going to try.
As far as processor power goes, while G4 is better than pentium 2, maybe even pentium 3 which it battled, this was years ago. It cannot even come close to comparing to a Pentium 4 clocked at 2ghz.
PC motherboards are also better and PCs have better video and audio.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Is a hammer fun to use? Are a pen and paper? Celphone? Answering machine? I would love for work to be more entertaining, but there is a reason it is called work, and we have vacations and weekends with which to enjoy ourselves. Your productivity shouldn't be wasted, whether it be by playing minesweeper or having "fun" hashing out long, inscrutable commands at a shell prompt. Your naïveté is charming, but you really must learn to grow up.
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
I completelly agree with you. And actually Linux has a lot to gain from whatever positive acceptance the OS X will gain. Because whatever GOOD commercial software for OS X will be either ported to the Linux or will be run with the help of open source libraries (wrapers). I am not a specialist to judge but my guess this will be easyer to do than for example WINE (which has come a long way by the way). I am pretty sure I am not the first one to say that.
And on unrelated note. I have to say articles like this has to be taken with a grain of salt. All these journalists/analysts exist on the face of the Earth because somebody somewhere does something. The best thing that could happen to them is that thier words will end up on the mouth of some marketing guy who wants to look smart. And specific article is just a part of Apple's marketing compain to create a warm ant fuzzy feeling for the people who already bought OS X.
So yeah, the promisse to yank Windoze from it's leading positoin would look kind of lame (mainly because it has been done to death already quite unsuccessfully). So of course next thing to do is to say that supposed userbase gain will come from "those Linux users". Who run their OS on "shitty hardware". And in the substential amount have yet to figure out what mouse is for.
What can I say. Those who can do, those who cannot predict
- Back off man. I am a scientist
I know that many Chinese developers are using linux and hence, the Chinese language support isn't "laugably bad."
/etc has been translated into properly idiomatic Putonghua and implemented in big-5 encoding? And all of the major system daemons (init, inetd, syslogd, cron, etc) have been updated to parse big-5 input correctly? I would very much like to think that this is true, but I suspect that it is not.
Really? So you mean that there is a version of linux out there in which every single last configuration file in
Being able to display Chinese characters in GTK+ or QT windows and widgets is not the same thing as top-to-bottom localization. And "developers are using linux" is a far cry from "linux is in shape for use by the general population."
You've traveled in the asian countries, I see, but how about the rest of the world? Brazil is another country, that I know of, that has decent language support and a substantial base of linux users and developers.
I'm not sure that I'd consider Brazil to be a third-world country. In any case, the post I was responding to was predicting something much more momentous than just having a "substantial base" of linux users -- he was asserting that linux would inevitably triumph over Windows in third-world markets, something that hasn't happened in Brazil any more than in China, despite the substantially easier task of localizing linux for Portugese use than for Chinese.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
The point is there is no widely accepted and standardised interface for these sorts of things on Linux. To pick up on a point I saw mentioned by an AC, how would I go about changing the screen resolution on a typical installation?
/etc/X11/XF86Config. Granted there may be a gui app installed in that particular distribution, but can you guarantee that if you move to a different distro? The consistency is not there.
:).
The typical Windows user would start looking in the desktop properties. On a Mac it's in control panels. On Windows it's in control panel. On Linux it's in
The open-source ethos seems to dictate that many smaller applications from different authors are better than a big all-consuming application. I like this idea, but it means that every single unix GUI setup has different settings and applications, and this is not a good thing for the end-user.
This is why I don't like the idea of Linux on the desktop. OK, it may seem simple to the user, and this may be all well and good, but in actuality it *isn't simple*. Continuing the old refresh rate theme, what happens if the user's monitor isn't detected properly and the horizontal refresh range is set too high. If you say to a newbie Linux user "Oh, you'll need to reboot into a lower runlevel, login as root, and edit the appropriate section in XF86Config", they're not going to feel particularly confident about this Linux thing. Most Windows users wouldn't know what a horizontal refresh rate is.
The differences between OS X and Linux are huge: The Linux GUIs are programmed (mostly) for hackers by hackers. They're based on the huge estoteric heap of junk known as XFree. Whether it's the appropriate solution is not the point. The point is, it's yet another layer of complexity onto an already complex OS.
The OS X GUI is developed by a company loved by some for it's gorgeous design. It's developed by paid engineers for non-technical users. It's a window manager and desktop environment in one. It's vaguely based on an existing OS. And most importantly, it's designed so the user should never see the command line, unless they want to. Oh, and it's bloody gorgeous
I'm rambling now... I wonder if any of the above made sense...
I don't buy the argument that Linux has come a very long way in a short amount of time. Well, I am impressed by development speed, but frankly I am a bit distressed by the apparent lack of originality in the Open Source community.
KDE and Gnome are based on the same ideas as Windows and MacOS. Ideas that took a long time to develop - coding them is, apparently, much easier. The same metaphors, the same look-and-feel. User interface design has come a very long way since 1984, but there is an overwhelming paucity of applications.
The arguments for Gnome and KDE are that people want to use metaphors that are familiar, and that's true, but this argument is misunderstood. The metaphors don't need to be familiar from other desktop user interfaces, they can be familiar from any aspect of the user's life!
As an example, in The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin describes a topological user interface where documents and applications are arranged topologically as "cities" and "villages" on a desktop. The user can surf the desktop looking for the right "pile" or "town", zoom in to view details, zoom out to get an overview. This desktop uses recent insights from the behavioral sciences (to be honest to both Raskin and myself, Raskin uses cognitive metaphors, but I am not a cognitive psychologist). This is just one example.
I have earlier defended Alan Cooper's right to his patent on one-click shopping, arguing that even if it is easy to implement, it must have been incredibly difficult to invent or even have somebody code. The same thing shows up, I believe, in Linux - good, new ideas are hard to come by! I was very disappointed by Eazel and Nautilus, for one thing - it was hailed as something new and exciting, but in reality this was just the same old story - twenty year old ideas, just a bit better-looking than the competition.
In order for MacOS X to "win", it's got to beat the Intel platform, which it won't. So Linux still has the chance to win on the most popular platform. But frankly, when I buy my next computer, I'd rather have Mac with OS X than a PC with Linux, unless Linux can be made to come with something that's obviously better than the current metaphor. I can't see how Linux can win the desktops unless the Linux GUI designers make some truly radical moves.
I see a lot of competence on coding there, but it seems that the Open Source community does not appreciate how difficult and competence-demanding it is to innovate in human interface design. Those who have the competence too often are in no position to contribute for free, spending all their time raising families and working. As sort of a piece of advice to Open Source GUI designers, I suggest you drop your coding for a while and read
If you are familiar with these books and can recommend others in a similar vein, please do tell me!
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
The whole point, Mr. Anonymous Fscking Moron, is that you can't prove that your memory evolves because you can't prove that your past experience isn't fake, nor can you prove that you will have any future experiences. Try to find some imagination, loser.
so your argument is that it's less questionable that ROM might exist than the ideas of having a past and a possible future?
you sound like a real dork. get a life.
Just raise the taxes on crack.