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Apple and Linux Beneficial to Each Other?
viewstyle writes "There is an interesting commentary on eWEEK discussing the 'synergies' between Apple and Linux after visiting LinuxWorld. It makes a good point that advancement of Linux is good for Mac OS X and vice versa, because of the ease of porting across the platforms (soon to get easier with the X11 on Mac OS X)." Next thing you know, most of the Slashdot editors and programmers will be using Macs ...
Not only Linux wins, but all platforms capable of running KDE win. Huzzah.
I think care needs to be taken around Apple.
While they are producing some good stuff now (lets not talk about the past will we) they are a commercial company. That much won't change any time soon
As such their "priorities" so to speak are different and opposed to those of open source, linux, and software.
We could end up just feeding apple a lot in the way of open source projects, all up and dancing in a hoohaa of joy.
What happens when apple change their mind? Suddenly they're not so supportive of OSS. The commercial climate is fickle, and it WILL change
I'm waiting for Apple to get a version of Quicktime for Linux.
they are just as expensive as new pcs these days. if you look at the price of a new non mac notebook, say a ibm thinkpad, you'll pay no less than $1600. on the other hand you can buy the lowest end 12" powerbook for $999
I write code.
Apple's hardware has always been a step or more ahead of everyone else, and linux could benefit a great deal if it could take full advantage of it. When the G4s came out, they slammed all the x86s against the wall. Of course, there's always the problem with explaining clock speed vs. flops, so Apple needs to do some marketing about that to educate people.
Yeah, good point. Because we all know IT geeks, sysadmins, software engineers, etc. -- you know, your average Slashdot reader -- are dirt poor.
--- Why yes, I am the webmaster of Microsuck.com
I think that one of the reason's OS X is having such success as a desktop Unix is that it has a native MS Office to work with. Say what you will about Windows, but I have never had a problem working with their Office products. Pay for windows? Nah brah. But I have no problem paying for something that works well.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
If together the two groups and help eachother out, that seems wonderful to me. Not every business in the same market has to be working to destroy all others. Often times a symbiotic relationship will be more beneficial than a destructive one.
At this point they have 90% of the market to shoot for. There's plenty of room for both to grow together while taking most of their customers away from MS.
More marketshare means more apps. It also means that technologies like OpenGL just might survive and keey DirectX from taking over the gaming world.
Just think, standards that are standard. Programs designed to run on multiple platforms. Sharing ideas rather than secreting them away.
Sounds good to me.
If this is as good at it gets I'm in deep trouble. One of the synergies between Mac OS X and Linux is that Matlab is available for the Mac again, after Mathworks had previously announced that would no longer release on the Mac platfrom. Very good news for me, however, Matlab for Mac OS X uses XDarwin and OroborOSX, and it's incredibly buggy. (I am using Simulink, which relies heavily on OroborOSX.)
What kinds of bugs you ask? I can't always navigate through the fields in parameter boxes (one button mac mouse and the key combos just don't do it). I can't use the letters 'f' or 'd' in comments when OroborOSX isn't in the mood (well, there are 24 other letters in the alphabet). Matlab crashes reliably if I choose "cancel" instead of "save" with the "save as" command (in a Simulink model).
And sometimes when Matlab crashes, XDarwin doesn't shut down completely which prevents me from being able to reboot from the system on my internal hard drive -- I have to reboot from an external hard drive and then restart. It happened (again) yesterday while I was working at a coffeeshop.
I'm not sure who's to blame here, and I'm really pleased that Matlab is available, but the integration of these various programs still has a long way to go.
blog-O-rama (more raving & ranting about my experiences with OS X, etc. etc.)
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Apple hardware is just better.
... built in wireless, a gig of RAM and a 60gig drive.
I'm on a 1ghz PB4, 15". It has gigE built in, 5 hour battery, built in DVD-RW, CDRW, DVD, CD
These things are just slick. They could do with a MHZ injection, but fast enough for me.
So few people understand this - if there were Mac clones there would, in short order, be nothing left of interest in the platform. The key to Apple's role in the industry is that they are the last vertically integrated, "make-the-whole-widget," software-plus-OS company around selling desktop machines. That enables them to do things and be things that give them the unique place in the marketplace. Without that unique place there'd be nothing left of them.
Of course, the vertical integration is at once the best thing and the worst thing about Apple. But clearly without it they'd be entirely forgettable and irrelevant.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
I have no idea what that means. Apple does a fairly good job of keeping their public CVS server in sync with OS X.
and where is the updates for freebsd?!
As far as I know, Apple hasn't made any. They just take a good chunk of the FreeBSD userland and ship it with OS X, without modification.
Also we give them X11 support but would they ever give us Aqua support?
:sigh: I've about had it with all the "Aqua"-related ignorance out there. Guys, Aqua is an appearance. It's a collection of graphical elements, okay? That's all. It's not software, in any meaningful sense of the phrase. When you say "Aqua," what you're really talking about is the combination of Quartz, which is the OS X display system, and WindowServer/SystemUIServer, which is the OS X equivalent of the X server, the window manager, and the desktop in your operating environment of choice.
Is Apple going to release the source for WindowServer/SystemUIServer? No. Get over it.
Tell me in what ways Apple has been beneficial to the opensource movement
Well, for starters Apple has done more to increase positive public awareness of open source than anybody else. A hundred thousand non-hacker Apple fans saw Steve Jobs stand up at the last Macworld keynote and declare that he thinks open source is great. There has been no better act of PR for the open source community.
Oh, that and the whole thing with Rendezvous and WebCore and Darwin Streaming Server and CDSA and OpenPlay and Open Directory and whatnot. Can't forget those.
I write in my journal
Key parts of OS X are still proprietary. Until they are free (or at least open), I still consider Apple an enemy.
Ugh. Enough with the communist ideology, okay? Apple spends a fortune developing wonderful things. If they were to simply give those things away for free, they would be unable to stay in business. I, for one, like what Apple produces, and I like the way they influence the rest of the computer industry-- indeed, the entire consumer products industry. I don't want Apple to go away, so I don't want Apple to make any of their core products "free" or "open." I want them to stay as proprietary as possible, forever.
And so do you. You just may not realize it yet.
I write in my journal
... that IBM can't market anything. Where I work, we have this big black computer sitting in the middle of the computer room, that cost several thousand dollars, and has a support contract that probably costs several thousand more annually. It has IBM stamped on the side.
And have you used any of their modern laptops? The best description that I have for when I got to play with an IBM Thinkpad 240 for a week is 'precision'. The hardware felt like a precision piece of equipment. Everything had tight tolerances, the tactile feel of the unit was superb, and the machine just felt sexy. The sleek black case was both soft and firm at the same time, a cool trick of ABS plastic, yet didn't feel too weak or brittle to take on the road.
If IBM still made a laptop in that small of a form factor (its footprint was smaller than a piece of letter paper), I'd have one. The American market doesn't seem to want small machines right now, though.
Oh, one more thing, there was driver support for this machine (and many of the other brand new thinkpads) for as far back as Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp, and as far forward as Windows XP. Drivers that work properly, not half-assed drivers like Compaq and other large companies provide for products they're no longer making money on.
You can also still downloadd support files for machines as old as the original 8088.
If I need some really expensive piece of equipment, IBM is definitely on the list for a vendor.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
From another thread...
Bet you it won't run OS X.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Gnome is the closest living relative to NeXT/OpenStep or OS/2 Warp...
Can't say I follow this. OS X is the closest living relative to OpenStep. OS/2 Warp... Perhaps eCommStation? But that's barely alive, admittedly. Either way, I wouldn't liken GNOME to either of them. GNOME is a pretty close relative to Windows, as far as how the UI works.
That's not a troll or a dis. It's not my style (I prefer NeXTSTEP and the Newton OS as models of good UI), but a lot of people have grown up with Windows 9x/NT, so it's no surprise that the majority of the users who like GNOME share this background with the majority of GNOME developers. Having actually used OS/2, NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, Rhapsody, OS X 10.x, Windows and Linux+{GNOME, KDE} extensively, I think it's safe to say that GNOME works the most like Windows. I could go on and on why, but that probably be over kill.
That said, I must say I'm pretty impressed with GNOME in RedHat 8. A lot of people hate RH for it, but I think it's quite brilliant. As a person who switched from Linux to OpenStep four years ago and then to OS X in the last few years, I became pampered with the ease of use, and most importantly, the consistency provided in OpenStep and OS X. Not to mention the great feature that things usually "just work." I left Linux because it was so bloody consistent, from a GUI user's point of view.
I've had my fill of other modern distros as well. RH8 is far from perfect, but at the very least, it provides a taste of what potential GNOME and KDE holds, a pointer to the kind of consistency that distros, GNOME, and KDE should be working towards. I fear it won't get much better, considering that all too many Linux developers seems to think that appearance is what is worth copying from OS X, while the way things work- how they feel, seems to come from Windows or CDE. Bah.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
That's why there exists wxWindows, which provides such a wrapper. You still have to download different binaries for each system, but you can't get much better without having applications written in cross-platform, bytecode-based languages like Smalltalk or Python.
Some projects do use wxWindows. Other people take the approach of seperating model and view well, and simply redoing the GUI for each environment on which they want the app to run. Depending on the nature of the project, this can be very easy or very hard.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
pudge is a Mac user himself. And being a Slashdot editor, I bet he even knew about Taco and Hemos. So, you see, it was supposed to be funny. Maybe not yuk-it-up funny, but all the same.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
This is a great example of the kind of attitude a lot of Linux users have. You want a machine that works as well as a Mac OS X machine? Install a GTK+ and E theme!
No matter how much lipstick you put on your grandma, her plumbing still doesn't work like it used to. Likewise, even with a shitty Aqua theme on a windowing system that can't even handle alpha without employing one of many hacks may give you those "pretty stoplight buttons," it sure as hell doesn't give you a clean or consistent interface. It's the same one you had before, exempting a different pixmap in your window decorations.
An interface is a lot more than the color your buttons are. It goes a lot deeper, into the way you interact with the computer.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
This means that when you run Konqueuer on KDE you will be enjoying the beta testing that thousands of MacOSX users have performed on Safari. This is what open source is about and this is what makes it powerful.
Go out and get sailing!
Friend, WebCore includes KHTML and KJS with tons of fixes and optimizations-- all of which have been submitted back to the project, as per the LGPL-- Kwq, the QT adapter library, and the Objective-C SPI. Apple improved the hell out of KHTML and KJS, sent their changes back to the project maintainers, and then released the whole shebang in an OS X-style package. What more do you want, exactly?
I write in my journal
Certainly they have their reasons for wanting stuff to be proprietary, but why on earth should I want them to keep stuff away from me, forever, with no gain to me, ever, unless I pay them large amounts of money? That doesn't mean I feel I have a right to their product, which is a different argument. But I would most certainly prefer a society where everything possible were free. In fact, I _want_ a utopian society where everything is free. Why on earth would I want things to remain costly, forever?
That was perhaps the most arrogant comment I've ever seen.
They basically ripped off Xerox Parc's windowing system and mouse interface ideas.
Endless Apple myths:
Ripped off Xerox
Can't use multi button mouse
Uses non-standard hardware
Is a monopoly
Put SoundJam out of business
Owned by Microsoft, a major shareholder
Costs too much
OS X is slow
Lawsuits for no reason
Rips off Linux
any more?
CmdrWass wrote: "You won't see me own a mac until the day comes that they open the hardware standards and there is good competition for hardware. In other words, until I can build a mac from spare parts, you won't see me owning one."
... can't count video cards, I guess) that Macs are less different from PCs than they used to be in the days when just exchanging floppies between Windows and Mac OS was a big pain. Now (for instance) I frequently transfer things between Mac and Linux machine with a little 65MB memory key that cost me $35 at a computer show :) (And next year, maybe 128MB will cost the same amount ...) I have an external CD burner that works under Linux and Mac OS X, scanner likewise. Enough components live *outside* the box that the computer itself isn't always as important as it seems ...
... even if no one else can produce Macs per se, Apple knows that they are not alone in the world, and the ability to switch hardware platforms without switching OS has got to affect their pricing. (Not that Apple laptops are badly priced, all things considered ... go price some non-Apple 17", super-thin, aluminum-clad notebooks;)) Even though it's not direct, it's definitely competition. And that's just for people willing / anxious to run Free software; even for Mac OS-only users, Windows laptops (which cannot run OS X) are obviously competition; people need computers, not necessarily Apple computers.
Instinctively, I agree with that -- don't want to be stuck with something dependent on one company etc.
However, a couple of things mitigate that fear:
- there are enough standard-enough parts n' ports (ethernet, CD-ROMs, firewire and USB, IDE hard drives, etc
- file formats: there are quite a few that are legitimately cross platform. Depending on what you do with a computer, they might not fill all your needs, but for many people, RTF / PFD / html / JPEG / mp3 / ogg and other very cross-platform file formats mean a lot more than the OS being used to open / use / manipulate / save them. Double-edged sword, though, since so many apps love to create difficult-to-share filetypes by default, so if that *is* a concern, it is probably a deal killer. [Ahem]
- there are non-Apple OSes that run on Apple's hardware (a few varieties of Linux, and at least the three biggest *BSDs). Now I'll admit this is a roundabout argument, but
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Macs are expensive, given, but I have to say that it is my prefered platform, and somthing that I am going to be spending so much time using, I won't use somthing that I don't prefer. It really is as simple as that
...And then see them driving a $30,000 car they spend less than an hour in each day.
I find it rather interesting to see techs whose main criticism of a mac is its price, quoting the difference between a top G4 and a top PC they've built themselves, with price differences in the low few thousands...
It's priorities. Occasionally I spend upwards of 10-14 hours a day in front of my mac. It gets -used-, it affects me, and I want to be comfortable with it.
I think the point that the illustrious Anonymous Coward was trying to make is that one is introducing an inferior GUI layer on top of a state-of-the-art one in order to run legacy applications. One of the reasons Quartz was designed around display postscript was to enable possible "remote desktop" type applications for Mac; otherwise, they would have just stuck to the usual bitmap based methods. What Quartz is is everything X11 dreams of being, ergo the "community" would be better off porting applications FROM X11 TO Quartz rather than stapling this pile of crap onto Apple's masterpiece. Also, have you ever even LOOKED into the X11 source? Some real shitty stuff, man.
No it isn't silly.
It's about seeing enough of the big picture too see a *relationship* between you and Apple. A big enough picture where you can see that what is good for Apple is good for you, and *ultimately* that Apple reciprocates and sees what is good for you is good for them.
If that doesn't exist, then Apple never can see any benefit to helping you at all, because they just want to help themselves right? Wrong, of course. By helping you they increase sales and usage and commitment (or something like that). That helps them.
So likewise, you want whats good for Apple because (hopefully) there exists a relationship in which you benefit from Apple getting some benefits.
Past examples include:
Quicktime, which Microsoft and others eventually used as the template for a media framework (Quicktime was just first)
Mac OS, which pioneered things like color desktops and UIs in a world of CLI and low res low fidelty desktops. This became mass market with the introduction of Win 95
USB, if only because iMacs could only use USB peripherals, giving USB developers a market
Firewire, if only because Macs use it for their high speed interface for iPods and DV cameras, as well as hard drives and stuff. How does this help you? Well, if you need a high speed serial interface, of course.
Then there's 802.11b, Rendevous, widespread adoption of LCDs, DVD-R, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio, iMovie, etc.
The point? Apple makes a profit making tools and functionality available that was inaccessable, expensive, or nonexistant before. That *is* benefit to you, if you want a $1800 DVD or movie studio, or a $3800 pro quality DVD, audio, or movie studio. Sure, you have to pay for it, but that's what keeps Apple alive and gives you your product.
So yes, you want whats good for Apple because there's a symbiotic (or for some, parasitic) relationhip. If Apple dies, than you (we) need someone else to come along to do this, even if it's Microsoft or your next door neighbor. Until, of course, it becomes a commodity.
Dunno if this is clear. Apple produces A, B, and C. You only care about B, but that is enough because the existence of B gives you a benefit. So already Apple cares about you, because by providing B they have your reliance upon them. Perhaps B+ is what you really need, so you want what is good for Apple so that B+ comes out. And at the end, both sides win.
Life, and certainly this marketplace, is *not* a zero sum game. Both sides can win.
GPL Deconstructed
Well, if it took you 8 months to figure out some trivial settings then you shouldn't be aloud near a computer...well I guess you can use a Mac then.
Hmmm, you are confused. Eight months ago, I took the time to figure out how to turn all that XP crap off. It took me a week or two because the damn "features" kept turning themselves on until you figured out the double secret key punch to kill them. About four months ago, I quit using office all together thanks to a job change. I would have been happy to be using anything else.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ugh. Enough with the Twirlip already. You want "free market" ideology only, okay, you ignorant twit, here it is. Luke Jr. said "free (or at least open)." That signifies an acknowledgement and accomodation of Open Source ideas, which are essentially grounded in a kind of libertarian free market capitialism. You have read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," haven't you? When disagreeing with the Open Source philosophy, it is rhetorically abonimable to muddy the discussion with slurs like "communist," because it just doesn't apply, and only the ignorant will be persuaded.
Apple. Here's the deal. Apple wants to break into the server market because that's where the money is, and they see it is as key to their longterm growth and indeed viability. After 18mos. of courting *nixers, they're still getting whupped by the likes of IBM, Dell and HPQ even. People--companies, institutions with masses of US$$$ to spend in the marketplace,--people who spend beaucoup bucks on servers have realized the value of Free (or Open Source) software. Apple isn't quite there. You, Mac zealot or paid astroturfer or whatever, you, macbuddy, you want Apple to open its code. For real. You may not realize it, but you do.
Hmm... you probably never got a .doc e-mail attachment (with something important). If you tried to convince them to send it in .rtf instead of .doc you'd get a) why do you need it? b) i see, i don't know how to do it c) did you said it was possible in MS Office d) they'd be pissed of your "amateur" approach...
1. Harrassing Aqua-ish theme makers. As Apple should know, you can't patent "look and feel" -- as their failed case against MS demonstrated.
The "harassment" was due to people copying and pasting widgets directly out of Mac OS X and passing them off as their own. And no, that's not what the failed "look and feel" case demonstrates - that case was lost due to the slack language Apple used in the contract they signed with MS. They gave MS more rights than they thought they had, and when they went to court this came out - hence they lost.
You most certainly can sue over "look and feel", due to a concept known as "trade dress". If I set up a MacDonalds fast food chain with a couple of golden-Ms, you can be I'd have a suit slapped on me within minutes.
Refusing to release a Sorenson codec enabled player or library for Linux, effectively locking Linux users out of an increasing majority of all Internet video content and thus making Linux unviable to end users
Mod -1, Boo Fucking Hoo. Apple signed a contract with Sorenson. Sorenson signed a contract with Apple. Those two companies entered into a deal whereby you're not going to get Sorenson's code for free on your platform. Get over it.
Instead of whining about it, why don't you get off your ass and write a better codec? What's that, it's hard? Well that's why people can and do build businesses around it...
3. Undercutting development of established Open Source projects, like Mozilla and XFree86, by pushing less open alternatives and thus both cutting their mindshare and draining developer talent.
Apple doesn't owe Mozilla anything - you've as much right to demand they use Mozilla as I've got to demand the Mozilla developers come over and paint my house. If an Open Source project can't stand on its own merits, why should it succeed?
And before someone replies 'but now it supports X11', the point is that they aren't the 'default' systems under MacOS -- which means "native" GUI MacOS X applications are useless to Linux
Yeah, and your average Gnome/KDE app won't run out of the box on a Mac either - your point is what? What Apple choses to make their default is their business - face it, X11 caters for a minority, and it's just not that useful to Apple's target market.
It's definitely a prudent move for Apple to ensure it runs reasonably well, since they want to see if they can expand their target market into the Unix workstation market (or what's left of it), but it's by no means their main focus.
In short: Apple is not Linux's friend, and these articles that claim otherwise are stupid and tiresome.
Apple is absolutely Linux's "friend" (in so far as a large company can be friends with a bunch of source files). For god's sake, it's Unix. On The Desktop.
Nae bother
> Excell was OK, but the data format, like all M$ junk,
> kept changing and it's very dificult to get your work back out.
Excel (on the PC) has been backward (and forward) compatible with older versions from Excel 97 on. Older versions are readable by newer versions, i.e., backward compatibility is maintained. IIRC Excel uses the same data format on the Mac and the PC, so why exactly would you have a problem with "the data format... kept changing"?
Perhaps where you work. Working in the anti-virus field, it's often policy that no .doc files go through the mail server - guidelines state that if someone sends you a .doc file, you should write back and ask for .rtf.
.doc
The turning point is normally pointing out to the sender that:
a) If they send a macro virus, they could be liable
b) They may be sending a lot more information that they wish to by using
Score:-1, Funny
You're talking potentials. Yes, you could use a 20 year old car to do the same as a 6 month old one, unlike a 20 year old computer. However, you're conveniently ignoring a little thing called reality that often brings 'theoretical' arguments undone.
Most people trade up their cars in under 5 years.
Most mac users use their macs around 5 years.
Fairly similar time periods - do the math.
As a longtime user of Mac, Unix and Windows, I respect the first 2 groups much more than the pure Windows users. Generally speaking, people chose Mac or Linux over Windoze for good reasons such as technical or design superiority, ease of use, style, productivity, TCO, security, bad experiences with Windoze, refusal to reward the convicted Redmond monoplist for its bad practice, etc, and they tend to be more articulate and intelligent than the Wintel PC crowd who either think Windows is the only thing in the computing universe or Linux is too complicated or Mac is too expensive and slow and has no software or second mouse button. Everytime a PC hothead lost his argument, there is always the last defense: why is everyone using Windows if Mac and Linux are so good?
Personally, I think both Mac and Linux platforms badly need the critical mass to break the MS monoply, and the best way to achieve that goal is to help each other. I am not suggesting that MS should be elliminated altogether, but the economy and the computing industry are desperately in need of several viable alternatives and adequate ecological diversity to be heathy and prosperous, and MS is just too nasty to be trusted to control our destiny. Without the design flair and innovation of Apple and the spirit diversity of the Open Source community, the computing world would be such a boring place.
Twirlip was far too absolute in the statement, but you must recognize there is a lot of truth to it. The whole reason copyright and patent exist in the US is because the people who wrote the Constitution recognized that one of the best (not the only) ways to encourage innovation was to grant temporary monopolies to the innovators.
... Free Mickey!
That is, unless you believe the Supreme Court of the United States
I can see some: why a mac: ;-))
a) as another pointed out, macs look good
b) if you avoid revision A machines they have a much longer life length than any PC
c) Apple did not integrate TCPA and DRM-related shit, until yet at least
d) most people don't care about the speed of their computer once they don't have to wait for it (ie 1GHz G4 or 5GHz P4, i can't see the difference)
e) big endian
why linux:
f) most of the X11 desktop managers are much faster than this bloated Aqua thing
g) gnu/linux is free
h) much more software choice with linux than macos.
blah
Hey, wait a minute.
Why can't I be a Slashdot editor/programmer? I allready have a Mac, and my speling sucks!
EDIT: Oops sorry, it's a dupe
Firstly I'd better say that until OS X, I hated Macs too. Now I never use anything else.
"An error of type 1 has occured" no memory protection until OSX. What were they thinking? Losing your work is very user friendly
Sorted.
To eject/umount a disk, drag it to the trash! I've seen Human Computer Interaction "experts" trying to defend this as good design. Talk about tortured logic...
How telling that you should say 'umount' instead of 'unmount'. Try defending that classing naming decision! On OS X, when you hold down the mouse on a mounted volume's icon, the wastepaper basket (which is in the dock) changes into an 'eject' symbol (since you can't delete volumes, this is good screen-estate reuse).
Have you ever tried using that hockey puck iMac mouse? RSI within a week, I promise!
Yes, the hockey puck was a mistake. But personally I think that trackballs are terrible, but you can still buy those for use with Linux systems!
Good interface design goes deep, I agree. Somebody go out and shoot the Quicktime player designers. In fact, any of those "brushed metal" interfaces are monsters!
I take it that your beef with Quicktime Player is its brushed metal appearance, then (because other than that, it's basically just play, pause etc). Many of the other brushed metal apps (the ones written in Cocoa) you can change the appearance back to default Aqua.
Two words: "Apple keyboards". I celebrate the birthday of my IBM M-Series keyboard, thanking the higher powers I don't have to kill my hands on a Mac keyboard.
One word: adapter.
Floppy disks. Somtimes the Mac will spit it out, sometimes it will fail to recognise the floppy at all (hello paperclip), sometimes it will not recognise the format any more. No wonder they abandoned floppies; they couldn't make them work.
So, are you telling me that 'mount' can just deal with unreadable volumes? Under OS X, if 'mount' can deal with it, then it'll happen in the GUI, cause the GUI is just a frontend for 'mount'. Anyway, get with the programme, floppy disks are hardly even nineties, let alone noughties.
It sounds like you need to give OS X a try. Would you judge Windows by version 3.1? Would you judge Linux by version 1.2? They were the first versions of those operating systems I tried out, but I've got over it.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Any project for GNUStep should compile fine on OS X.
This is not true. Many objects present in the current versions of the GNUStep libraries (base, backend, and gui) have no equivalent in Cocoa. Mainly, the Display Postscript code, but there are lots of others. For example, any class that starts wiht GS instead of NS, GNUStep handles Unicode totally different, there are al kinds of macros in GNUStep that don't exists in Cocoa because they are redundant. Supposedly there are scripts that come with OpenStep that convert lots of this stuff over, but GNUStep has made lots of additions to OpenStep, and besides, I don't have OpenStep.
Case in point: I tried to "port" the GNUStep Terminal.app to OS X (don't ask why, I have no good reason), and wound up having to basically #ifdef half the source code. I'm about 75% done with TerminalView, since it uses DPS for everything, however most of it is easily converted to Cocoa. I realize #ifdef'ing everything was the wrong way to go, but I'm learning about all the differences, and my whole point behind this was to port it to OS X while being able to submit patches back to the original developer. I'm sure that I will wind up starting over again and creating a DPS compatibility layer, otherwise the resulting code would be totally unreadable.
In conclusion, yes, some parts of Cocoa don't have any equivalent in GNUStep, but that really goes both ways. If you code for portability, it will be portable, if you code now, think later, it will probably only run on your computer, and probably only at the current screen resolution.
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
It is about flexibility and choice. I do not see KDE and Aqua as an either or choice.
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"Next thing you know, most of the Slashdot editors and programmers will be using Macs" ..and the readers would rater spend $200 on a box from Wal-Mart running Ark, Debian, or Red Hat then a WAY OVERPRICED, incompatable with most applications, and propretary format.
/. even carries a Mac section.
I still cannot believe
I can't believe Linux cheapskates like yourself keep posting the same thing over and over and over and over! "Too expensive! One button mouse! Proprietary architecture! Not Linux! No apps! It's ridiculous. You're not saying anything that someone smarter hasn't already said and spelled everything correctly.
And I can't believe that these same people keep bothering to come into this section or post to threads that are clearly marked Apple.
You know what? There are some technically savvy Mac users out there, myself included, who (when the threshold is turned up high enough!) actually enjoy and get a lot out of the discussions in this section.
If you don't like the threads in the section.... stay out. You're not adding anything useful to the discussion and just increasing the noise to signal ratio.
The bulk of the content on the site is geared to the OSS, Linux, *NIX crowd. Please join those discussions and let us have ours.
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