Slashdot Mirror
Penguin2Apple
Dark Paladin writes: "What happens when a Linux lover takes the plunge into a Mac for the first time in his life? Turns out he falls in love, to the point of abandoning Linux and taking up OS X full time. Read about the conversion in Penguin2Apple. And pray for mercy on his soul."
Actually, I've used nothing but Solaris on my Ultra10 at home for years. But, then when I had to move overseas, I sold everything, and bought a laptop. My friend works at Apple, and got me a good deal on an iBook. This things rock.
OSX really is the nicest Unix I've ever used. I can play The Sims and CivII, and with the adddition of Fink, you even get nice things like apt-get! It's great.
So, just for the record, I'm a old-skool-Unix-to-MacOS X boy, and it really does rock my socks. I recommend it to anyone. It's extremely Unix-y, but with a great frontend.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
What's there for a UNIX hacker not to love?
OSX just rocks.
From the BSD-ish UNIX underneath, to the amazing display layer and NextStep app framework,
to the commercial app support (can you say "Photoshop"[1]?) it's just super cool.
There's even source for the core OS for you open source freaks.
About the only thing that could be considered a disadvantage is that it only runs on Mac hardware.
(Which, granted, is a lot nicer and more elegant than PC hardware, but that doesn't help those of us that that have tons of PC hardware lying around.)
C-X C-S
[1] I'll reiterate once more: Gimp is nice, but doesn't come close to Photoshop.
becuase its a MAC and everybody knows Mac people are weird. Trust me, I just got "promoted" to Mac support at a rather large internet provider and all these mac heads are strange. They're like linux zealots without the command line (makes me feel like Luke when he was tempted by the darkside but recovered... from linux to windows to mac... mac heads are the recovering dark siders).
;)
I've always been the first to blurt "macs suck" but since I started teching the damn things, they've grown on me and I'm having a secret affair with OS X unbenownst to my faithful debian. Unfortunately, I can't afford a G4 else I'd have a real computer.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I got a TiBook soon after OS X came out, and was excited to try it. I had previously been using Linux on i386, but I thought - hey - Aqua looks really cool, and it's Unix, what's not to love? Then I actually got it. This was back in the X.0 days, so things may have changed some by now.
First, everything on the file system was put in very strange places - the directories didn't follow any standard convention I'd ever heard of. Next, there was no compiler! (Note - I got OS X from being included with my TiBook, and Apple didn't include the DevTools with that). So my favorite OSS tools were beyond my grasp. At this point in time, there were very few native OS X apps. Not having a compiler made it worse, and knowing that even if I did have a compiler, I couldn't get some of my favorite OSS GUI apps.
So dispite the cool looking Aqua GUI, I threw down the $30 and bought myself Yellow Dog Linux. I haven't looked back since. I have to say, YDL supports practically every device on my TiBook, and I am quite happy with it.
As both a MacOS X user, and someone who has hitchhiked in a Trabant, I think you are wrong here.
I am not sure what exactly you are complaining about in your UI rant, but I guess that it has something to do with the users/groups permission idea. If this is what is bothering you, then you need to realize that this sort of thing is required in a multi-user system in order to make things work. Just because you are unfamiliar with it does not make it bad... And if you think that Window's doesn't have the same complications... then you are right until you move onto an NT kernel, and then you are right back in the think of things. It does it a bit differently, but it is the same idea wrapped in a different cloak.
And I have been using MacOS since before version 1 (0.9.4 if memory serves), and feel that MacOS X is in the line of progression from that venerable OS. It is about as big a jump as 6 to 7 was in many ways. People complained then, as they do now, but it is all for the best.
NeXT, and it's OS failed because of market and pricing issues, not technical or ascetic ones, and I am not sure what there is to compare to NetInfo on MacOS 9 or Windows, unless you want to talk about Macintosh Manager or Active Directory, but those are just as arcane as NetInfo, and are not what "users are used to these days". I think you were trying something above your head, and feeling dumb because of it.
And Apple was trying things on their own, it was called Rhapsody (and Pink before that), and never went anywhere. Whithout Steve Jobs (or someone with equal vision) to hold the whip the project was going no-where, as was Apple in general. In buying NeXT apple got a injection of new talent, code, and vision.
I am not sure what it is you want in a UI.. and I think neither do you, but I am happy with where MacOS X is now, and happy with where is see it going.
NeXTSTEP had a wonderful interface. For its time, it introduced an astounding number of things which we now take for granted (and some we still don't):
What NeXTSTEP's crown jewel was was its development environment. Heck, it introduced the concept of a UI builder, and astonishingly, InterfaceBuilder.app is *still* a better design for large-scale work than the current forms-based crap that is foisted on us by Java and C++ and Delphi etc. NeXTSTEP's API was OOP througout, highly dynamic, and very well thought out. It had a small set of very powerful, elegant classes, rather than (Java-style) a massive array of junk masquerading as a library. Even today it is matched by few as a UI development environment. Apple was damn lucky to get the opportunity to encorporate it into Cocoa.
So you're saying then, that if the OSS community created a functional equivalent of Quartz, which they have not, then Linux as a desktop OS would be just as good as Mac OS X. Therefore Linux is just as good as Mac OS X.
Oops! Quartz doesn't exist for Linux. Mac OS X has a one-year jump on it (longer if you count the public beta). Yes it could be done, but it's not there, so if you want Quartz, you have to run Mac OS X. Period!
To the consumer, Darwin is a kernel while Linux / BSD / Solaris are distributions, which include window managers and desktop environments. None of them compare to Mac OS X. Sorry... you can argue paltry little tidbits like multiple desktops and 3-button mouse support....As I look down at my OS X dock I see 31 apps that I use regularly. Plus my Apache web server and ftpd are always running while my laptop is on.
I would like to know: apart from costing less, is there a compelling advantage to running a Pentium/Athlon - based system with Linux versus a PPC system with Mac OS X? With all the benchmarks I see posted, I don't think either hardware platform is trouncing the other in performance. More open-source tools exist for Linux, but Mac OS X is more user-friendly, with more commercial apps. And so far I have seen very little open-source software surpass proprietary software in terms of usability. Don't get me wrong, I wish it could. I want open-source to be the way software as we know it exists. But by the time it does, your hardware (and mine) will be obsolete.
So in the meantime I've got work to do, and I'm not a programmer. This is why I own 3 Mac OS X machines (and two older Macs).
"I know this was meant as a joke, but really, whats the big deal here? He tried something else and prefers it to Linux. Good for him. Whatever floats your boat. Live and let live, etc etc."
The astute reader will notice that the "pray for mercy on his soul" comment was written by the story submittor "Dark Paladin" and "Dark Paladin" is also the author and subject of the article.
He's talking about himself in the third-person in an amusingly self-deprecating way. If we can't make fun of ourselves, who else is left?
Kevin Fox
I'm not sure why I'm writing this, since it will undoubtedly get flamed. I've run desktop linux since about 1998? Or so.. Back then, linux was a toy and I used NT for work. Linux was moving so fast, I had lots of time to develop and tweak code then - in university - and life was good. I was lucky in that when I graduated, I could run linux desktops at work for the most part, and I enjoyed it. I still use linux daily for compiling applications and in server roles. Solaris is another work companion, running high-end design tools for analog electronics. I also use Win2k daily as many of the prototyping boards I use for FPGA work are win-only, along with other embedded tools.
However, 8 months ago, one of the guys I worked with got a new toy - a Apple Titanium Powerbook. This thing is the sexiest piece of hardware I've ever seen. Hell, real live women have complimented me on it. Imagine that. I needed to get a notebook, looked around, and got a Tibook myself. At the time, I had every intention of blowing linux away and installing Yellow Dog linux. Honest! However, I decided I'd give OSX a fair shake, and I wanted to learn the OS anyhow. Learnign new things is never a bad thing from techie perspective, anyhow. I give it the quick test - is there a terminal? I'll be damned. "Hey, this thing is based on BSD", I think to myself. So I type in the magic two letter command that's inspired more flame wars than Bill Gates and Osama Bin Laden put together: "vi". F*ck me. It's there.
So, I start poking around on the Apple web site, and it's the best-organized thing I've ever seen. "why can't redhat do this", I ask myself. I click on developer, and gosh-be-damned, there's links to all this open source code I'm framiliar with - even a port of my ever-so-framilar BASH. So, I go looking for some developer tools and documentation, and get the shock of my life - not only are the APIs clearly documented, but there's example code for everying from Cocoa to Firewire right there - AND, there's a free IDE to tie all the development tools together. F*ck me. This jobs guy seems to be on to something, I think. 30 minutes after being exposed to this OS, I have OpenGL example programs compiling and running, hardware accellerated even. Wow.
Fast forward to six months later. I'm amazed every day at how well the mac works. It's has never crashed on me.. the GUI can be a little sluggish, but that doesn't bother me too much, as I'm a console monkey myself. Loads of developer support. I can plug in my perhiprials - digital camera, rio mp3 player, JVC DV camcorder - and not only do they work with NADA fiddling around, but I'm greeted by a well thought out application that is ready to talk to the device with no drama whatsoever. Here's to thoughtful GUI design. Microsoft Office for OSX was another surprise - I'm amazed they haven't killed it yet, because unlike it's windows cousin, it's uncluttered and efficient. Office X has, however, crashed on me a few times. No shocking revalations there.
However, what OS X made me do was assess how much work I was accomplishing relative to how much tinkering and configuring I was doing running linux on the desktop. As I get older, my time is more valuable, and I don't have a whole day to reconfigure things anymore. I don't have to reconfigure anything with OS X. It just works. Gnome and KDE have come a long way here, but they're not there yet. I imagine they will be in the future - but this is now. There is a sacrifice in terms of the hardware available, but what's available works very well. Games aren't there, but there are more than were there for Linux - including the Canary, Mac-only games. I solved that problem long ago with a games-only PC anyhow - apply the best tool to each task.
Sometimes, I think to myself - The motto for this OS should be "It Works". Because it does just that, with a minimum of drama. Something, after being involved with computers since I was 8, I find refreshingly new. Apple has done what Redhat should have done, take a solid open source core, make sure it's consistant and useable, put a reputation and corporation behind it's maintenance and support, AND do so without alienating the community of users that spawned it. Support from large projects like Mozilla have resulted in a great communications platform for OSX, and hopefully the upcoming OpenOffice will find it's way to OS X in a similar way as well.
Hats off to Apple, and I invite everyone here to try it. It's not all things to all people, but it's solved my general purpose computing needs in a way that nothing previous has, and brought back some of the excitement about a hardware platform that I felt in the Amiga days. The combination of an exciting OS with suprior hardware engineering is a real winner in my opinion. "To each, their own".
..don't panic
How is text-editting the format of your output saving time? Where I work we use standard document templates, where you select the appropriate style per section. We use a lot of tables, and embedded spreadsheets and charts. I can't imagine any scenario where (essentially) programming the format I want saves me time. Point - click-macro are much easier.
As much as I love OpenSource many of the office tools are open-sores. Star office is good enough for me to use day to day. I can open my co-workers MS documents and I can save in MS format. This is the way most companies work because it's fast and efficient.
When I'm done with a document, BTW, that gets published, I don't send it out. It goes to a technical writer that formats it in (sometimes in Quark). This technical writer would have to learn LaTeX instead of a point-and-click program.
I use gcc, Makefiles and Emacs, because it's easier to code on Unix for Unix. But I don't have any illusions that VC++ isn't a faster development environment, just as I don't believe LaTeX could possibly be faster than word. If you use a GUI front end to LaTeX, then you're in the same boat as Word, and less stable.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
Wow - what the hell are you doing on that computer? What kind of 'development' are you doing? I've had a system with W2k on it in use daily for a year with probably 20 reboots, mostly to swap to Linux for some reason. Less than 10 were due to hanging/crashing issues.
Honestly, what are you doing?
Im am sortof tired of people gushing about the stability of W2K. If you use a few client apps and dont install too much, or limit yourself to High level (VB) programming, yea sure itll be stable.
Do anything inteseting such as sending malformed UDP packets onto the ethernet, run IIS, play quciktime movies, any serious development, have the exchange server crash, install software with less than admin privledges, etc, and you may find it less stable than you imagine.
I use Windown 2000 for network programming, building/debugging embedded platforms, creating GUI appliciations, client apps, using differing hardware platforms an so on. I am unimpressed with its stability nor security. (sometimes itll go for a few weeks without freezing. sometimes it crashes several times a day. certain network traffic will always trash it. sometimes thing start acting flakey until a reboot. Contrast this to Unix, where reboots generally dont change anything, and they certainly arent recommended for fixing problems)
Boy is this topic going to waste a lot of good electrons. I am a Linux user and Win2k user, just for the record.
... which is saying a lot. So this topic you just know is going to generate more heat than light. Nothing is going to be actually resolved ... just a lot of mud-slinging.
... because I have the source of everything Window Managers, Utilities, apps every-bloody-thing. But with OSX, zip ... nada ... nothing. Doesn't sound very interesting. Talking of Window Managers (which I can switch between) in Linux, with OSX do I just get Aqua and more Aqua or can I do the equivalent of switching between Window Managers ? And do I have the source so I can see how they do it ?
Everyone knows that Mac zealots are even worse than Linux zealots
I haven't used OSX. But being based on BSD (Darwin) I'm sure its a fine core. And it has a nice Window Man^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H GUI. Yeah it has Office and IE (good browser, but honestly I'm really starting to prefer Konq / Moz). But we only have the source for the core don't we ? Well lemme see. Why did I go from Windows to Linux ? It was because it was MORE FUN! Thats it. So why is Linux more fun
I'm sure I'd really like a Mac if I had one. But for how long. Windows 2000 became boring after a few days. How long for OSX ? Sure 95% (or more) of users would disagree with me. That's fine. However, I suspect the future of Linux is that the market will evolve into 2 kinds of desktop OS. One, for the masses (who just want to use it for apps). And one for real power users. Linux fits the latter and will continue happily in that direction (as does Win2K in a sense). Apple if it has any sense will target the first as does MSFT with XP.
Bitter and proud of it.
Ok, I could mod you down as the flamebait you are for this comment, but I'd rather respond instead.
A devotion to Free Software and free speech is far from irrational for many of us. I've told my story before, and it applies specifically to the Macintosh, so you might be interested.
I was a major Mac zealot for many a year. I believed, and still do, that the Mac was the best OS out there for a lot of reasons, most of them the reasons you state. I didn't have to mess with registries or himem or config.sys or anything of that sort, I was just able to get my work done. Granted, I was a student and not doing anything very heavy duty, but I was able to get on the internet, get my hardware working, play lots of games, and write documents all very easily. Yes, the Mac was fantastic and I could do a lot with it and was far more productive on it that my friends with PC's.
But then the dark times came. You see, back around '95-'98 or so, Apple really looked bad. Copland was nowhere to be seen and we were stuck with our crashy old OS (mine was pretty stable, but I had to work very very hard at it) with shitty multitasking. I was still very productive, but that was because I really knew what I was doing.
But in many ways that was the least of our problems.
Software vendors were disappearing in droves. I saw Mac software drop and drop from the shelves, and only-Mac stores either start selling PC products or shut down entirely. Microsoft's last Office product was crap (they later made amends with Office 98) and the games were also disappearing right out from under us. You could almost sense a deep-seated depression in the community as our apps dwindled down to those peddled by Adobe and Macromedia.
So where do I come in to this one? Well, I didn't use Adobe or Macromedia products. My copy of ClarisWorks didn't work well on friends' Office docs, I couldn't buy new games, and I couldn't afford much beyond the basic items to begin programming software.
Yes, this last was a big deal for me, because I really wanted to help. I wanted to contribute, to help heal the community by providing missing pieces. I'd seen great technologies like OpenDoc and QuickDrawGX float away, and I wanted to provide something, some way of helping. But I couldn't. The books in the store were expensive, limited, and I couldn't afford many anyway. The Apple developer docs were hundreds upon hundreds of dollars (although I later got a full CD of them for $100, but this was still very pricey) and I could only afford the cheapest tools out there. I couldn't possibly understand why Apple wasn't helping me... didn't they want people to write for their system?
So I finally broke down and tried this Linux thing my friend had been telling me about for a few years. I switched to the PC because I was sick of my crashy MP3 player and lack of searching tools (Sherlock wasn't going to help me download music!) and a complete lack of games like Quake II and Starcraft, which have since come out on the Mac. But i mainly bought a PC to try out Linux. I didn't know about Free Software when I did it, and I didn't know that all the source code was there, all I knew was that anything was better than Windows, and I was deeply disgruntled with my Mac.
This probably sounds a little absurd to you too, but think of it this way. What if the company that you depend on for all your computing needs, a company that you have invested thousands of dollars in software and documentation and time in to learning suddenly abandoned you? What then? All your practicality of "best bang/buck ratio" has suddenly gone down the drain because the system becomes a lot less useful. I could only watch as my platform became more and more inferior, first with Office, then with gaming, then with Web browsing, then with MP3 searching and playing. What next, when would my platform become totally useless?
Now, Apple is doing very very well now, and I applaud everything they've done since Jobs came back on board. But that feeling still lingers on me. What happens if they abandon me? How far in to insignificance do I want to slide? A devotion to Linux and Free Software means that I can help myself, that the community can and will help itself. We may be a step or two behind Microsoft or Apple in some areas, but we're self-reliant, and we're not slaves to anyone else. This is the rationale behind Free Software. This is why a devotion to it is both useful and practical. And this is why I'll stick with Linux despite Apple's wonderful product and Microsoft's overwhelming support. I never want to be helpless again.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Aging compared to what? Objective-C is younger than C (for obvious reasons) and no older than C++ - if it's not changed as much as C++ in the past decade or so, it's because it had fewer flaws in the first place.
Cocoa/Nextstep, likewise, was ahead of its time, it's only within the last couple of years that comparably rich frameworks have come along (with the possible exception of Be). Really, the Objective-C/Cocoa combination isn't particularly antiquated, it holds up very nicely compared to what's around now.
However, Apple needs to push Cocoa a little harder, in terms of removing some of the rough edges - it's ludicrous, for example, that the documentation for its flagship development API is so lacking in places, and the "depth" of the frameworks are so variable (i.e. you've got all-singing, all-dancing widgets that make building a GUI a joy, but if you want to do anything with networks you're pretty much on your own back writing C with the standard socket calls).