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Linux and Mac OS X
William J writes "Here is an article with an interesting slant on the relationship between the Mac OS and Linux. The author suggests that Gnome and KDE developers can learn from the Mac GUI. Worth quoting: 'It is amazing to me that an OS which was developed largely by volunteers (and which is essentially free) can run with unprecedented stability on the same hodgepodge of PC hardware on which another company has spent billions of dollars in R&D costs and is still unable to produce a product which can run for more than a few days without crashing -- and it costs hundreds of dollars.'"
What the heck is the point of this article? OS X is more polished than KDE/Gnome, Windows is not so stable, you can use Linux as a server for Macs... News at eleven!
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
> I was unable to get a Windows 2000 PC to see any
> Macs (OSX or 9) on the network or vice-versa.
I don't want to be tough, but I've had no problems getting my Mac to load Windows servers via SAMBA. I do it every day, and I'd hardly say I'm an expert at SAMBA. So I'd say that rather than this being an OS X or Windows limitation, this guy may just "lack the skills to pay the bills". What was the point of the article again?
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Really, people don't need management to accomplish something. Given the resources (money and time) people can and will do productive things for society.
Monkey sense
What the /. Linux crowd fails to see is that Apple customers don't mind paying a little extra money for the time and care put into developing Macintosh systems. Most Mac users don't want to get into the guts of their computer except to maybe install an extra harddrive or some extra RAM. We generally don't care about getting under the hood because the people who made the computer engineered it so we don't have to do that if we don't want to.
For Linux users I can understand why getting to the guts of the computer and the OS is so important. It's part of the computing experience for that market. Linux users LIKE getting to the very core of their computers. I don't understand why they have to bash Apple and it's users just because Apple doesn't consider them part of their target market demographic. Why would Apple market to people who don't want to spend money on anything? They are a company whose goal is to make money and they can't make money off a free OS and low margin computer components.
I don't go around bashing Linux because it doesn't meet all of my computing needs. It's a good OS for what it's intended to do, but it doesn;t come close to meeting my needs or the needs of millions and millions of other computer users... users being the operative word.
Macs just work out of the box. Ceratin people want that.
Linux only works if you configure it to work the way you want it to and have the technical knowledge to do that. Certain people want and need that from their OS and computer.
Windows has lots of games and is ubiquitous. Very few people really want Windows but it is the only option they know. It seems to meet their needs reasonably, but then again their standards and expectations of a computer might be a bit lower than Mac or *NIX users.
So, if the macintosh doesn't fit your criteria for a computing environment, DON'T BUY ONE OR USE MAC OS! Stop complaining about the price of their hardware and buy the system you need. You're just wasting energy and the time of other people.
Pooty tweet
An AC wrote:
;):
" and search for "emulator". I found about 29 entries for different computers and video game consoles.
> you're claiming that >>OSX has "a large application base"? ROFL!!!
> What are you smoking?
Okay, you asked for it
1) Most Mac applications ever written. I've found very few that don't run well under the Classic environment. This includes popular commercial packages and tons of shareware and freeware.
2) New and ported Carbon and Cocoa Mac OS X applications. This is increasing in number daily, especially since the development tools are free. Again, this includes popular commercial packages and tons of shareware and freeware.
3) Most Java J2SE applications, and J2EE applications if you obtain the necessary libraries. The first Airport utilities that were in use on OS X were Java apps originally created for Windows. OS X has the best Java 2 on the desktop.
4) Various Unix applications, many Open Source or GNU, ported for OS X/Darwin. Some of these beloved programs come with OS X, such as the Apache web server and Emacs. Others (like an X server or postgresSQL) are available for the download.
5) If you care to plunk down around $200 (ranges from about $99 for DOS to $249 for Windows NT, per operating system) for Virtual PC 5.0, you can run most any Windows, DOS, or Linux application.
6) Go to "http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/index.shtml
In short, OS X can pretty much run whatever you want it to run. I've been using it for nearly a year now. It is great, and getting better all the time.
OS X: the Apple of Mothra's Aqua eye.
When does Linux become the standard as opposed to Posix?
There are two kinds of standards: informal de facto standards and formalized official standards.
Linux certainly is not the formal official standard for anything, not even for itself, since you are not allowed to define a thing in terms of itself. POSIX is the formal standard because it went through a formal standardization process. There's an actual document reviewed and approved by experts after much discussion that says what POSIX is.
Is Linux an informal de facto standard? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what your definition is. It may be a standard for a kernel, but your system is much more than a kernel, it's an amalgamation of software from several different projects. So you end up with software that says it needs this version of a kernel and that version of a libc and you're still not sure you won't have to crowbar it into place unless you're running the exact same distro version that the packager used.
The aim of POSIX is to get beyond all of this. If you have a POSIX compliant system, and the software claims POSIX compliance as well, you are virtually guaranteed that the software will work. That's great! (POSIX is actually a set of standards, so my referal to it as a single standard is merely semantic shorthand)
But I want to respond to your unwritten question. If my powers of telepathy still operate sufficiently, I can tell that your real question is "when will Linux finally become a standard?" Okay, may telepathy is a bit rusty, it might not be you thinking this, but I'm definitely picking it up from someone. The answer is, "Linux should never become a standard." The reason is simple: standards and implementations of the standards are two very different things. Eventually Linux may implement POSIX so well that it becomes a "reference" implementation, but it will never be the standard itself.
Think about the web for a bit, and you'll understand. Because of a variety of bizarre circumstances, including certain recessive genes in most web developers, implementations have gained the status of standards. And the result is chaos. Web sites aren't written to standards, they're written to specific implementations of the standards. Unless you're using one particular browser released by a company in Washington, you will *never* be able to access every web site claiming standards conformance. The situation is even worse in word processing land where MSWord is the standard.
I don't want to see those situations occur in Unix. So please write your software to the POSIX standards instead of to the Linux implementation.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned