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.
Well, I might consider OS X if Steve Jobs didn't have a perennial "You'll run it on our overpriced, single-sourced, proprietary, artsy-fartsy hardware or not at all" mindset.
The only way you can really fairly make a comparison here is by comparing OS X vs. Linux on Macintosh hardware, because most people and businesses, no matter how good OS X is, will not simply move their desktops to OS X because it requires the purchase of Macintosh hardware.
:) (and there probably won't be any time soon either)
I think OS X vs. Linux on PPC hardware is easily won by OS X. PPC Linux does not give you the ability to seamlessly run Windows software and games in an environment such as Wine like x86 Linux does. Sure, there is MacOnLinux, but Mac OS X's classic environment outclasses MOL's feature set and speed in nearly every aspect.
You also must consider the target of each OS. OS X is truly designed to be a desktop OS, with server use as a secondary function. They even offer a higher priced server version of OS X that would be more of a comparison for Linux on the server market.
I think with Macintosh hardware, OS X clearly wins over Linux. With x86 hardware, Linux obviously wins, because there is no OS X for x86 hardware
Its all in the hardware platform.. not the OS.
Three points.
... ha!) can close the performance gap with commodity x86 hardware, the scientific computing market will stick with the bang for the buck that the beige box world provides.
/never/ be ported to x86. Firstly, Apple has no interest in alienating MORE developers with yet another giant architectural switch-over. They're going to have enough trouble getting people to drop Carbon in favor of Cocoa without having to try and convince ISVs to start their projects over on a whole new hardware platform. And secondly, Apple makes the lion's share of their money from HARDWARE sales. Their position in the industry is unique, and they're not interested in being either Be (a dead OS provider for x86) or Compaq (a soon to be dead assembler of beige boxes).
1. Unless Motorola (ha!) or IBM (more likely, but still
2. Neither Linux (currently technically incapable) or OS X (incompatible hardware) are in a position to challenge MS for the commodity desktop. This situation is not likely to change any time soon.
3. OS X will
Peace,
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I'm going to go buy an OSX equipped G4 right this minute! Well, as soon as I sell some organs to pay for it...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
But normal people don't need these things. Who the hell needs MS Office except business zealots? Nobody needs anything more than vi or emacs and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the command line. With a bit of effort, I can do simple things like post emails, browse newsnet and rip mp3's too, and as nobody but closed minded GUI maniacs need some brain dead pointy-clicky interface, I don't see how retrogressing into the early 90's fraudulent GUI paradigm can do anybody any good.
GUI's are a productivity waste for dummies. Think how long it takes to move the mouse around and select some obscure option in preferences, as compared to editing rc files with sed. Any decent user worth his salt can make his PC sing with eternal, messianic, orgasmic glory as he ./configures, makes and make installs his way to ecstatic, orgasmic destiny.
Fuck this GUI shit. Look at my uid, I've been around since 1969 and used Unix since 1972, after graduating from Multics, and I still curse the day that the closed sourse idiots in Xerox started getting lofty ideas.
Sorry, but I just had to rant. This stuff makes me see red :-)
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.
The data research firm says that Microsoft's Windows and Apple?s Macintosh operating systems, hold a combined global Web usage share of more than 98 percent
And how much exactly is Apple's specific share of that 98%? 8%? 10%? Assuming it's 10%, that makes it 10 times more than linux's 1%. But that leaves Windows with ~90%, which is 9 times more than OSX!
So, not only should Linux users jump ship for OSX, but, based on the numbers, OSX users should jump ship to windows! Does tha sound right Mr. Moore, since popularity seems to be your major gauge?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Good greif, ;)
I love OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I'd hate to have them take over the world. Diversity in computing is cool and fun. Would we really be happy if Linux took over the world? There'd be no more Amiga users to poke fun at
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
To quote "Sean Connery" on SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy ''My time has come, Trebek!''
I've been ranting about this for a few weeks now, ever since purchasing my first Mac to use, and my rather surprisingly pleasant introduction to OSX.
Linux has always had two major things going for it. Free as in beer and speech, and the open source development model for the kernel. But at the same time, what it's had going against it were a difficult install (not difficult for me, difficult for grandma) and the clunky, quirky system that is X11. (clunky compared to what it -could- be, not necessarily the current competition)
Linux isn't ready for prime time just yet. It could be, but it's not ready yet. Say what you will about Mandrake, but grandma can't use it.
Now, OSX has the advantage of a pretty decent Mach/BSD core, and an incredibly impressive and functional GUI. Aqua, for being as young and closed as it is, does a damn good job at innovating in the 2D paradigm. Transparencies, dialog boxes that attach to the affected window, an actually useful style of windowshading. And all this with the environment of *nix beneath. With OSX, more than half the work Linux needs to do to make it on the desktop has already been accomplished. People may call for Apple to open the GUI, or they'll whine and complain that it's not open enough. So be it. If you want it that badly, make your own that's better. Open source doesn't have to simply follow other ideas, it can innovate too.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Ok, first off... 0.24% is not bad. I personally don't care, because that number can still go higher. I know Linus isn't aiming for world domination, nor is Redhat, Debian, or anyone else really (maybe RMS, but that's Ok.) The point is, it's there, it's usable, and people can move to it if they choose.
.24% or more or less, but it will still be there. So I personally don't care about what this article is talking about. I felt screwed by apple, and I'm never going back, no matter how nice their stuff is. There's a reason people push free as in speech, and it's because you will not get screwed over when some company like apple decides you're not worth the effort because you don't use photoshop.
As for OSX, yeah it's a fantastic product. The best OS in the world for desktop in my opinion. But that doesn't mean it'll stay that way.
Anyone remember 1984? Apple was the best desktop OS then too. They were really something to cheer for then. It wasn't just a new pretty and slick interface, it was a whole new way of working with computers. Sure, it was clunky in some ways, but Apple had the best system on the market for years.
So what happened? Well, most people know about this, but they got greedy and lazy. They overcharged. They stopped building the coolest stuff. They let the OS wither and die as we salivated over the ill-fated Copland. 3rd party developers abandoned us and unless you were willing to fork out hundreds of dollars for dev tools and docs, there was no way you were going to help the problem. They still had their strengths, but they were a shell of the vibrant company that they once were.
So here we are now. Apple's fixed things. They've got the best system on the planet. They've got slick hardware. They give the dev tools and docs for free again, AppleII style. People gush about the system left and right, and they should! It's really nice.
But who's to say that it'll be that way in two years? Apple could get lazy again. They could get greedy again. They could fire all their talent or let them leave again. And then everyone with macs will be back where they were five years ago, fretting over whether or not to move to windows.
And you know what? Linux will still be there,
I love Linux because it frees me, not just to work and learn, but to work and learn with confidence that my skills will be worthwhile, and that I will never be a commodity because I can contribute. I'm proud to be part of that 0.24% because that 0.24% isn't just something to be treated like pennies that someone is afraid to lose. It's 0.24% people who care, who can and do contribute. Linux is that 0.24%: it's people not stock options.
So you can keep your flashy system. I'm staying right here where I'm not just revenue on a balance sheet.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
The point is that you are a minority. Most people don't want to go to the trouble of building their own computers. (Have you ever had parts that were DOA?) They also don't want to install the operating system themselves, and then prey that all their hardware works. They are willing to pay extra to make sure it works when it arrives.
Personally, I think Mac OS X is very attractive. My only complaint is that Apple hardware is a tad too expensive. Maybe once I have more money, I will purchase a Mac.
I've got to tell you, KDE kicks Aqua's ass as a GUI. The multiple desktops, configurable hotkeys, tabbed Konsoles (with keystrokes for opening new tabs and switching between them), Konqueror, and KMail (with its ability to use gvim for editing) just stomp on the single-desktop, click-to-focus, barely-keyboardable Aqua for sheer productivity value.
I run OS X mostly to play. The ability to (easily) play DVDs; iTunes (hands down the *best* mp3 management software I've ever seen); Fire.app; and the fun of tinkering with a new OS.
For the past couple of days at work, I've booted the powerbook into OS X, but to actually Get Work Done I've fired up OroborOSX and run Konsole and KMail off of my desktop Slackware machine. It's not the prettiest desktop in the world when I do that, but it gets the job done and I get to toy with OS X when I need a break. I'll probably go back to booting it into Linux when I get back from vacation, though, as it's just so much easier to get around in.
Maybe those "it's the applications!" weenies are right... but OS X still seems to have a GUI that's designed around the idea that you'll probably be doing, at most, two things at a time. For a lot of people this isn't the case, and KDE addresses their (our) needs much better.
Incidentally, if you drop below the GUI, I still generally find Slackware easier to work with... it uses a lot more of the GNU software I know and love, which tends to be more featureful and flexible than its BSD counterparts. OS X also feels a bit like you're not really supposed to be running around down there under the GUI, but maybe that's just because I'm not comfortable in it yet.
Cost and openness are the key. Linux will completely dominate the non-US markets over the next 5 years. Desktops and servers alike. This squabble between OS X and Linux is laughable US-centered viewpoint. Neither OS X (nor M$ for that matter) will ever see the non-US growth that Linux will see. Cheap software on cheap hardware will win in the long run. Third world nations aren't interested in paying Apple for its hardware or M$ for its software. Nor are they able. Yet that's where ALL the people are.
I am one of the linux -> OS X converts. I dont use MS 1) because I dont trust them, 2) Weak CLI -Cygwin, while nice, still feels like too much of an afertought. OS X really is the best of of both worlds I ran run all the Linux type Apps I want with rootless X Windows, and still have access to all this geat Mac Software both old and new. Links 2002, Tax / finance, etc. And the wife wife can and does use it. The one drawback I see is that the hardware costs twice as much, but for me that hasnt been a show stopper. I dont have a problem giving $ to apple.
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
No, it isn't. Learn to recognise the difference between satire and truth, though it can be close, I grant you.
I suppose if all you do is view email and browse the web, then that isn't the case, but more advanced computer usage yields many cases where command line tools (not just a command line, it's actually the tools that one has access to that's important, like a base linux system) are many times faster.
YES! I absolutely agree, it is nice to see some people have sense and cling on to the old ways.
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 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....
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
But more specifically, it's no secret that Apple is the leading computer supplier for educational institutions. Soon, schools are going to transition from MacOS 9 to MacOS X. In the longterm, this has huge benefits for everyone. What better place to learn open source than at school? OS X is a pretty snazzy OS to learn it, too. It's got, of course, darwin, and a really slick GUI to fall back on. The kids, the ones who know they want to go into a tech, they'd probably stay after school just to learn the ins and outs of darwin. The skills learned from that are transferrable to Linux. And Linux is used in the real world. Yes, I know. Real world experience in SCHOOL. It's a first. But anyway, of course there are some major differences between the two. For example, I don't think installing MacOS X is anything like installing Linux. But nevertheless, OS X is a great starting point for kids, to expose them to the power of open source.
As for why Apple needs Linux, lets see what Linux has that Apple didn't have before OS X. The whole slew of technologies that *nix utilizes. Preemptive multitasking, protected memory, SMP. All of which are VERY important. A command line, which allows for unprecidented control of an Apple OS. A million and one Linux apps which are easily portable to darwin. And most importantly, the open source model that Linux shares with OS X. This will hopefully ensure that OS X doesn't fall behind in speed(slowness is in Aqua, not open source), stability, security, etc.
But where they both miserably fail is product recognition. Apple's trying to correct that with their retail stores, and hopefully they will succeed. Because a win for Apple is a win for open source. Well, only a win if the consumer knows that MacOS X's core is opensource, but that sort of goes with product recognition.
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!
Hi,
If anyone wants to know why Engineers might want a powerbook, look at the specs of the Titanium Powerbook - 1 gig ram - and the fact there is a clean Nix underneath.
A few months ago I did an experiment with OSX 10.1 -- basically I got my company's entire tree built just fine in 2 days. No code changed, just a few softlinks needed to be set up (Perl for example was in usr/bin instead of usr/local/bin. This tree is normally only run on Linux or Solaris's box.My next laptop wil be a TiBook -- especially now they have the CDRW/DVD combo drive.
I have been evaluating getting a PC laptop -- I can't find anything close to the TiBook -- try finding a slim design, with a 15" display and 1 gig Ram -- Sony slim Vaios max out at 512 or 384. Toshiba at 256mb. Please will someone point me at an x86 with those kind of specs, and I might go with Linux instead. I'd be totally convinced if it came with the cinema-scope style screen (2 emacs sessions side by side).
Now, for Desktops a whole different story -- we just got a rack mounted box for $4k -- twice the power of a E420, at 10% of the cost (and a 1/4 of the footprint and weight). I just couldn't fit it in my rucksack (close though, maybe in my 70 litre one)
Winton
p.s. This isn't a troll. I want a laptop with a gig of RAM (we're doing some hard memory intensive work)
"do not underestimate the power of Office. A platform can not hope to succeed in the commercial desktop space without Office"
This is exactly the reason OS X will never have more than a minority share of the desktop market and will never be ported to x86 (aside from the nice hardware profits). Apple is hostage to Microsoft. If they ever pull the plug on MS Office for MacOS, Apple is dead in the business market. If there was ever a backroom deal where MS threatened this if Apple ported to x86, that would have been an antitrust violation, proposal to divide markets.
If anything OS X will finally bring the Mac back to a level to compete with Windows at every level. This, and the growing strength of Linux (and FreeBSD, etc) will help convince hardware developers that they need to make sure their hardware works with more than just Windows and software developers that their software needs to be designed around portability.
OS X will pull both current Mac users and Windows users into the Unix world and as any Unix geek knows once you learn it on one OS most of it translates pretty easily to any other Unix OS. After all these people learn Unix enough to accomplish their daily tasks they'll be much more likely to consider the free (as in beer and freedom) alternatives they keep hearing about.
Software ported to OS X should be easy to port to FreeBSD, Linux, and any Unix OS so this should mean a lot more commercial apps and games available for these Unix platforms and more programmers remembering the things that make Unix great.
Both Gnome and KDE are very strong platforms these days. They don't have the polish of the Mac GUI but it's my experience that they are more flexible and lighter in general. They are improving rapidly. Much more so than I would have expected possible a couple years ago.
Almost every basic home or business app that could be desired now exists for Linux, mostly as opensource, including games. With the extra pull Mac OS gives us we can seriously expect to start seeing the Windows empire crack even in their desktop stronghold.
I don't think Windows or Mac OS is going anywhere any time soon but if anything Mac OS and Linux will work together to end Microsoft's monopoly. A solution to fit every need.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
As another post has pointed out on here, OS X has essentially one for the moment. The GUI goodness of Aqua alone mops the floor with Linux.
Wait! Before you mod me down as a troll, let me explain.
First, I love Linux. I've used it for 5 years, and for the last 2 or 3, I've used it exclusively on my computer here at home. However, and I say this in a parent-who-loves-their-kid-but-has-to-punish-them- anyway kind of way... Linux's desktop GUIs suck.
Don't get me wrong - KDE is a good looking and extremely functional desktop. It's really slick, and I like a lot of the KDE apps. The same goes for GNOME, although it still doesn't feel quite as polished to me. The problem is, these desktops are all clones of Windows. One of the reasons I left Windows in the first place was the annoying GUI, and these "desktop environments" do little more than mimic it.
I want a Mac simply so I can play around with Aqua, because it's such a neat GUI, and I know from others that it is as efficient as it is beautiful. I want something like that on Linux, and unfortunately no existing project really gives that to me. Most window managers are, to some extent, Windows clones. As long as that's all there is, Linux will not penetrate the desktop market much further.
Major open source projects have gotten to the point where we're playing catch-up. Clone Office, clone IE, clone the desktop, and so forth. We need to innovate if Linux is to keep momentum. Simply playing copy-cat with everything that looks neat is not good enough. Don't copy Aqua - improve on it. Winning users over from Windows isn't happening at a very rapid pace anyway, so instead of worrying about alienating them with a frightening interface and copying the one they're comfy with, why not create something new? Something so cool, so pretty, and so functional that everybody will want it? That's a big chunk of what MacOS X has going for it, and Linux should have that too.
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.
"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.
See my request earlier for a TiBook Equivalent x86 box. The closest I could get from DELL (thanks to a follow on post), came out at this price.
$3,795.00 (combo/drive, internal wireless, 1gig RAM). Maybe if I didnt have to pay the dumb Windows fee it might be cheaper.
However, this is with a 12.1 inch screen...
Apple, I can get the same for $3,948.00 -- and this is with the 15" cinema scope...
$200 bucks difference ? I have an Educational discount which wil bring this down to the same price (3700).
Winton
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
that he was mapping out the human genome on a few G4's--his supercomputers on a chip--in his basement in his spare time and was scheduled to be finished in about 2003 and start a bio tech company. Oh, then he said that with the raging speed, and blazing performance of his mega-cool, and tantalizingly awesome G4, he already rendered all the animations to his next 284 movies Pixar will release in the next 1024 years last night while he was just "taking a dump." Sure enough! "Hot fscking damn" he said--"I'm getting bored--I think I'll calculate the position of Pluto in 3026--the year a complex simulation on his G4 told him Microsoft would see its demise. You see, I'm going to be cryogenically frozen and revive myself in 3026--that's the target date. That's the plan." Meanwhile, I've left Pixar in good hands and will will brainwash the youth of the planet with the films--laden with subliminal propoganda-- I just rendered and pave the way to my triumph. I will use the genome to create hunter-killer types that will go after Microsoft. When asked if he thought Gates had plans for cryogenic storage as well, only a soft audible grunt--aparantly some veiled explicitive or insult could be heard. He was noticibly angered. He then muttered something about using his G4 to find a new element or something.
So grandma can't install Linux, well she can't install windows either.
Show me a group of people who can sucessfully install windows and all of the necessary drivers, and I'll show you a group of people who can also install Linux. Technical ignorance plagues the Windows world just as much as it does the Linux world, just ask anyone who does tech support. If systems didn't come with windows pre-installed the barrier to entry for it would be just as high as for Linux.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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.
This misses many of the points, and like many Mac users I'll point out the obvious first:
1)The Tibook is 1 inch thick and 5 pounds *WITH* the battery, the dell is 1.6 inches thick and over 6 pounds *WITH OUT* the battery. This is a big difference in size.
2)processor speed is a joke, your HD speed and graphics card make a more noticeable difference in any high end machine, PPC, Intel or AMD. Unless your grinding down massive files humans can't see these differences.
3)Why do people post screen resolutions when they talk about monitors? Color accuracy, now that is important, and can be checked. Screen resolutions are only useful when seenng how any OS chooses to draw the screen.
4)Macs can be more expensive, the dell is a butt ugly black slab, the Tibook is super cool. Yes, sexy costs. A lap dance from a super model will cost you more than a common stripper.
Lastly, The 1 gig of ram thing, how as if you need 1 gig of ram ofr a laptop,
There are very compelling reasons to max out your RAM on a notebook computer:
1. 2.5" notebook drives tend to be slower than 3.5" desktop drives, so the RAM speed vs drive speed is much wider on a notebook than a desktop, meaning that any dependance on drive speed (say for swapping or re-getting something that could otherwise be cached), makes the notebook slower than the desktop. The speed gains of adding RAM are higher for notebooks than for PC's.
2. Those little 2.5" inch drives are expensive and have higher failure rates, they don't generally last as long as a desktop drive. With more RAM, there is less head movement due to caching, which can lead to longer drive life and...
3. less head movement = better battery session life.
I was sold on the i8000 until I saw the G4 TiBook. I am glad the TiBook can support up to 1GB RAM and when I get mine, that will be the first thing I upgrade it to.
and the powerbook doesnt come with 1 gig of ram either.
At least it is capable of supporting 1GB.
I will take more RAM over Mhz any day. I cringe when I see people complaining (at various work sites I attend) that their P3 750MHz Dell notebook is slow (and they demand an upgrade), when it only has 64MB RAM, so they get the latest machine which is only 30% quicker as far as CPU goes, yet has 256MB RAM, and they think the enormous speed gain was due to the quicker CPU. Blah. Of course, being executives, they're not interested in what I said about the cheap RAM upgrade, they want whats on the pretty web site.
the 2.5k dell totally destroys the TiBook in every area, better processor, better monitor, more ram, (Tibook comes with 512 megs of ram)
Destroys? The P3 1GHz is close to the G4 600MHz in the benchmarks I've seen. "Destroys" seems to be a school kid way of saying, "my PC is 15% quicker than yours!". I like the TiBook screen for what it is (wide screen), but I also like the i8000 screen and the TiBook is capable of supporting more RAM. "Destroy" is something a 2GHz Xeon does to a 4MHz 8080.
Prove you arent biased
You were'nt replying to me, though I can tell you, after 12 years with x86 (some of that repairing notebooks for NEC and DEC), am I much more impressed by what Apple is offering. They offer extreme stability and usability thanks to high quality hardware, limiting what hardware they support and their efforts of extending the super workhorse OS, BSD.
It's the package, the hardwareOS+app meld that works so well. After all these years putting up with x86, my next machine will be PPC. I will probably never buy another x86 again (besides SBC's I use for firewalls, etc, although I might look at PPC SBC's for them also).
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
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...