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Follow-up To Critique of BeOS & Mac OS X
UnknownSoldier writes: "Scot Hacker has posted a great follow-up to his Tales of a BeOS Refugee entitled Reactions to Tales of a BeOS Refugee. (Hopefully everyone involved in implementing 'Linux on the Desktop' will eventually incorporate the best ideas of Be and Mac OS X for smoother usability in Linux.)"
Gentlemen, light your flamethrowers.
I don't care if my software is open. Open source hase wonderful advantages, but it's more important to me that software is good. OS X is the best operating system I've ever seen. I don't care if it's closed, I don't care if they had to drive a steamroller through a kitten factory to make it. It's that good.
It's amazing how people will put up with crap software just because it's open source, and denounce great software just because it's closed. Last time I checked, the purpose of open source was to create great software, not to stick to ideals.
there's more than one way to do me.
MacOS X cannot be used on existing hardware
I run OS X on my G3 Powerbook. This was pre-iBook. In fact, OS X runs on most G3 macs (and with the right Darwin kernal, it runs on most PCI PPC macs)
What do you know I wrote a novel
As another poster said, it's been a -long- time since Apple came out w/an OS that made you buy a new Mac.
;)
For most current Mac users, it is only OS X that made them do this, and it even runs on a lot of Macs from at least the G3 line onward (I use it on a B&W as well as my new G4).
Seems like a lot of old Mac users complain about OS X, but I certainly like the fact that I've never had the OS crash yet
Christina
I assume you're referring to the pseudo-database format of the befs? Very nifty idea, but it's more fakery than most people realize. Using a full-blown rdbms was too performance intensive, so while initially the befs did have an actual relational database, it eventually became lighter code that had a sql-like syntactical interface. Still very nice, I agree, and it'd be nice to see something similar in Linux.
For limited types of hardware, sure. When I last tried BeOS 4.5 (yes, I never tried 5), I was lucky that my nVidia TNT2 Ultra card was supported in 2D, and forget about 3D. Maybe Be's OpenGL implementation was one of the fastest software rendering implementations, but that can't hold a candle to proper hardware acceleration, and nVidia is currently the king in that area.
But not the G* PPC processors, sadly. Which meant that the PPC version was essentially dead, and Be was spending all their efforts on the x86 port.
I agree with your assessment of OS X, and I also agree that there are some nice ideas to be had from Be, but I just want to point out that Be was not the pinnacle of GUI or OS design (yeah, sure, it was good, but it had its share of problems, and quite a few of them). It'd be nice to see all the fancy features of Be on an OS with better hardware support, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
"NFS support is severely lacking. You can't even count on a command-line mount of an nfs volume. If I try to mount with "mount server:/local /mnt/local", the "/mnt/local" directory disappears. The mount doesn't and you can't unmount without rebooting. There is a shareware program that makes it possible to use NFS, but c'mon folks. This is a violation of some basic trust. NFS should just work. "
And it does. The Mac OS X machine I am sitting at RIGHT NOW has two NFS exports and 3 NFS imports. It does "just work". I guess your problem is that NFS doesn't use the set up procedure that are used to. This is because OS X using NetInfo for all set ups. Try using NFSManager for easy setup with no learning curve, or "NetInfo Manager", which is infinitely more powerful. Ingorance is okay and can be cured, but I suspect you are nothing more than a troll, since you outright dismissed using "shareware tools" and wanted it to work your way.
Burn Hollywood Burn
FWIW, years back I used to dump netInfo (`nidump passwd / > /tmp/passwd.dump` for example) to files which were coincidentally identical to NIS source files. Then you could rcp/scp the file to your NIS master and do a 'ypmake' to push it up into NIS.
I ran a NeXT Cube as my NetInfo master, so I could use NetInfoManager.app as my primary interface. Via the above method, the NeXT fed a Sun SparcStation 10 which was the NIS master. The hosts map dynamically updated internal DNS, adn could be used as an LMHOSTS file on the PeeCees (win 3.1 with Crynwr TCP/IP, when Microsoft was too stupid to believe TCP was valuable).
Thus, NetInfo could easily provide a centralized repository, accessible anywhere on a global NEXTSTEP network with the correct passwrods, yet provide authoritative network information for 4 UNIX flavors and several PC varietals. I think there was some OS/2 in there as well.
So, when M$ asks where to go today, some of us know that Steve, Avie, Keith Ohlfs and the NEXTSTEP community took us there a long long time ago. And most of the crunchy goodness of NEXTSTEP can still be used in OS X by the cognoscenti.
For you SAs out there, to drag adn drop an entire subnet of hosts and have them readdress themselves, remember mounts, shares, and shared printers and all appropriate domain users was a beautiful thing. Can't do that in NT, can't do that with NIS, can't even get NIS+ to work most of the time.
Copying and pasting in linux is a mess. First, in order to paste in VI you have to be in insert mode, and if you are copying code, make sure that you have :set noai... else you are gunna be fscked.
Second, Try cutting and pasting between the following applications: gnome, kde, an X app, java, a console, and any other apps you have lying around. Oh? What? It doesn't work consistently? No way!
OK, now try this: get out the gimp. Copy a selection. Paste into a KDE, java, or CLI application. What? It doesn't work? No way!
Yep, that's right folks, cutting/pasting DOES NOT WORK correctly in linux. I haven't tried in a while, but it MAY work in KDE/Gnome (not at my work machine to tell you), but until every application is Gnome/KDE-ized, and every application works well between KDE/Gnome, then it is complely useless.
This is not a flame, this is not meant as a downer to linux. i love linux and I love OSX, but don't piss on my leg and tell me its raining: linux still has a LONG LONG LONG way before it will be even 1/2 as good on teh desktop as OSX/Mac (and despite its configurability it is not as good as Windows even!).