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A Linux User At MacWorld
usermilk writes "Linux Journal just posted a pretty cool article, A Penguin Angle on the Ox: Day One at Macworld. It features a Linux user's perspective on MacWorld, OS X, Darwin, and how all these things play together. Most interestingly, he comments on the large number of open-source-Unix bigwigs who are now on Apple's payroll. There's also a pretty concise description of the difference between Apple building off of BSD compared to Microsoft trying to also reap the benefits of open source." Doc Searls' perspective makes a great companion to the report from the floor (and part II) that chrisd posted.
I think, for apple to really get in the Linux/Free Software's good books, they need to give something back. The license on Darwin is too restrictive to count, and they did rip off FreeBSD 3.2 (I realise, that is not how the BSD developers see it, but this is reality :-). Something like funding, or code, would go a long way in giving them a better reputation.
Apple's been bragging for some months now about their being the first company to put "the power and stability" of Unix in the hands of the average user and it seems that's what they did. What I'm wondering now is if this kind of stability put in the homes of millions of people will not change everybody's standard of stability. Five years ago, the standards of stability were Win95 and Mac OS 8 (I'm trying to speak for the general public there,OK? No flame, please). Neither was very stable (although I still remember 95 as being a true nightmare, whereas OS 8 was acceptable, as long as you didn't try anything fancy, such as developing on it), but since nobody had a better example, people were happy with it. Now we've got millions of mac users let loose among their friends and saying their computer (almost) never has to reboot! This could change the acceptable standards of stability, not only for Operating Systems, but also for the whole software industry.
Most people thought computers had to crash, because that's what they always did. If some start to be STABLE, where is the world going?
I don't have much to add.
Yeah I guess that's why Fermi has their own distro.
> I've heard a lot on /. about how Macs do not
...
... and just works right away, unlike
> appeal to geeks
you'd be surprised how many geeky professional people are using ibooks and imacs, including techies. the old 'apple is about desktop publishing and education' idea is really getting to be ancient history. apple's a lot geekier than they were a couple of years ago, and that's a good thing.
> That's really the appeal of the (new) Mac
> experience to many geeks: top-notch consumer OS,
> with the Unix functionality built-in.
yeah, definitely. there's also a lot of good software produced for linux/bsd that will find users on os x... as mac users find that you, you'll see the two worlds merging even more.
> In fact, here in the Physics department, I've
> watched a fair amount of people switch from
> [snip]
> (sorry) Linux.
amen. when I was working on pc's and nt, the first thing I had to do with a new machine was reinstall nt and spend hours finding and downloading new drivers. linux can be the same way, if you don't carefully select your hardware ahead of time. no such problem with imacs... you order 1,500 imacs, and they're all going to have the exact same hardware and software installed (correctly) when they arrive.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
All three markets can coexist, and should coexist. It's perfectly normal for the computer world to divide into different virtual geographies with different personalities, just like the real world. Apple's new vision is to build a line of products that appeal to people that hang out in places like South Beach or Greenwich Village. Linux appeals to people attracted to places like San Jose or Austin. Windows appeals to people that for some unknown reason spend their time in Detroit.
The biggest reason why Apple is so cool is because they know their niche and they cater to it. Opening the flood gates and bringing the bazillion Windows users and developers into the Apple world is the worst thing that could happen to Apple, because without the exclusivity that they have right now, they would be just another OS. The last thing that I want to see on my beautiful OSX system is a bunch of crappy shareware built by 14-year-old teenagers in Hungary with no design sense whatsoever. I don't want the bouncers letting people in jeans and sneakers into the nightclubs that I visit, and I don't want ports of a bunch of ugly Windows applications running on my Aqua system. If Apple's market share rises too high, then the whole mystique will be broken when the exclusive feel of the OS is lost.
The applications available for OSX are mostly designed and built by people that are very into the Apple mystique, and a lot of people like it that way. Applications for other OS's are generally not designed at all, they are just built. I keep an ugly Gateway PC in a side room for running junk like that when I need to, but it's an iMac running OSX that gets to sit in my living room. If I need real power, then I can pop up an X window on my iMac from the Linux server that lives in a closet where nobody sees it.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Yes I _would_ be surprised. Even if so, this may be a temporary phenomenon. I bought an iBook, and totally regret it. The main reasons why I bought one were:
I didn't want to support wintel;
I wanted RISC
I thought I might use some of the mac multimedia stuff if I was in a hurry.
I don't care for osx. It's good for other people, but not for me. But the single thing which has made me regret the purchase is the input mechanism. That may seem odd to some people, but this is crucial to me. The keyboard does not work like a normal keyboard, and it cannot be re-mapped as I like. By hardwiring Policy into the Mechanism of the keyboard, they've made the whole iBook a real pain to use for me. And the trackpad is mis-placed. It's good for people who drag-and-drop to work with a computer. But if you have to use the keybaord a lot, it gets in the way and fucks everything up royally. You can reduce its effect by judicious changes in fvwm, but that's not enough. I even hoped to disable it by building the trackpad support as a kernel module, but its driver cannot be turned into a module. So I might go into the driver code and see if I can make it do what I want.
The Thinkpad would have been far better, even though it had wintel and a 3-hour battery life.
Currently, under Mac OSX the output is limited to 1024x768 (even though the video card supports much more.) Yuck.
If you can only get 1024x768 under Linux, that would indicate that it's actually a hardware limitation.
If you can get more, however, that might indicate that there is hope for a BSD/Linux driver to be used as the basis for a new OSX driver that would unlock the capability of the hardware that Apple took away.
In what way is being a computer for people that don't like computers a stigma? A friend of mine attended a Usenix conference in San Diego just before Christmas. He estimated that 30% of attendees had Apple laptops running OS X.
Personnally, I think it's the best PC / operating system combination I have ever used.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
look Ma, a bash prompt
Bash does not come with OS X. However, as bash is a Gnu product and my favourite shell, I thought, let's be brave and try to install it. We'll see what issues we come up against. Anyway, I did and I had one issue to do with changes to the linker between the 10 and 10.1 build of project builder which I fixed easily. That's when I truely fell in love with OS X. Since then I've installed BerkeleyDB, NEdit, Lesstif, sendmail, fetchmail, Open LDAP and Ghostscript all from source distros with virtually zero problems. I admit I did buy an X Server (Tenon XTools) because the NEdit distro said that was the only X Server it worked with.
I love this operating system.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Of course, but the term UNIX doesn't stand for it's original Thompson implementation anymore. It has evolved to encompass a whole family of operating systems, and I'm sure you would find some old UNIX hackers to criticize *BSD, Linux, Solaris, or any other UNIX out there......
I don't have much to add.
I've owned my G4 for about 2 years now. By day, I'm a windows programming lacky. But, thanks to OS X, by night I'm turning slowly into a Unix ninja. I love having a shell whenever I need it. I'm learning C on my box. I've used Apple's free project builder for a few chapters of a Java tutorial. I'm running mySQL. I'm running Apache, and serving from my Mac box 24/7. I'm also running PHP for the odd server side script... and I hope this only goes on and on. I love that Apple has really opened up the Unix world to me in a painless way. A few years back, I honestly tried to build a Linux box from some old 486 componentry. No dice. Couldn't get the drivers to work with my hodge-podge of hardware. The beauty of the Apple OS X experience is not having to worry about configuration, etc., and getting a secure, locked-down install of Unix that the newbie need not worry about, but is free to exploit as his knowledge grows. Thanks to Steve, I may just have a C++ job at EA one day...