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Mac OS X 10.3 vs. Linux
M.Broil writes "This is a nice and fairly complete 'first look' at Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), but author Chris Gulker, who I happen to know was an Apple PR guy years ago, spends a lot of time comparing the Mac 'Panther' release to Linux, which he seems to use most of the time these days. He obviously likes a lot about Panther, but he doesn't think many Linux users will switch to it, and that a lot of 'Classic' Mac OS users may not want to move to it, either."
I came across this article a while ago
its not up to date but its a pretty good comparison
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
News Forge appears to be getting the /. treatment, so here's the article:
An early eval of Apple's Mac OS X 10.3
By: Chris Gulker
Apple's BSD-based Mac OS X 10.3 Panther offers 64-bit processor support and new features wrapped in the latest version of a GUI that has its roots in the NeXT desktop. While Panther sets a new standard for ease of use and interface look and feel, it still lacks features that Linux users have long enjoyed.
Panther, billed as "the evolution of the species" and built on the open source Darwin project's version of BSD 5, really is an evolutionary step -- not a revolutionary new operating system. Panther does offer admirable user-interface consistency and ease-of-use, but its new Finder is bound to draw complaints from died-in-the-wool Mac users,
particularly the large base of users who still cling to Mac OS 9 "Classic."
*NIX users will find this one of the most polished GUIs ever bolted onto a UNIX-like OS and probably won't have issues with the file browser. Mac developers groaned audibly when Steve Jobs presented an OS X Finder based on the NeXT columnar file browser at the ADC conference in 1998, and Mac OS Classic users continue to resist it in favor of traditional Mac windows, icons, and folders. In Panther, columnar view is the default window behavior.
Apple has taken the sleek, brushed chrome interface featured on apps like iTunes and Safari and applied it to the new version of Finder, the always-on application that provides the Mac desktop and handles chores like connecting to servers and other shared resources. Gone are many of the shiny, translucent Aqua interface widgets and light gray pin stripes that debuted barely three years ago.
Finder windows offer a new pane, called a Sidebar, that weds the NeXT-like columnar file hierarchy view with a Windows XP-like list of storage devices and common sub-directories in the user's home folder. Buttons on the customizable window allow users to select iconic, list or column views and turn the Sidebar on and off.
While this will be handy for people who are at home with hierarchical file systems, it has potential to confuse others because it can mask parts of the hierarchy, particularly when the list or icon views are selected. At first glance, files appear to live at the top of whatever directory is selected in the Sidebar -- intervening folders and subfolders are not shown. Sidebar does not have an option for the tree view common to Linux and Windows desktop windows.
ExposZ allows for one-click tiling of all open windows.
A new feature called ExposZ allows one-button (or one-click) tiling of all the open windows as thumbnails, and is a very handy way to find a specific window on a crowded desktop with many apps running.
Panther continues Apple's commitment to making it easy to use Macs in heterogenous network environments. Mac OS X 10.3 offers easy one-click access to network servers in the underlying BSD 5 subsystem. A click-to-start list in the Systems Preferences Sharing panel turns on ASIP (AppleShare over IP), SMB, Apache, FTP, and printer sharing via LPD/LPR and CUPS. NFS, surprisingly can only be turned on using the command line or a GUI config app like Marcel Bresink's NFS Manager.
Panther also discovers and connects to virtually any Windows or *NIX server, although, in practice, the process didn't always work smoothly, and occasionally not at all. Panther generated username/password errors and refused to connect to a Red Hat Linux 9 box running NFS on a local subnet. For its part, the Red Hat box could see the Mac in its UNIX network browser, but returned an error when attempting to open a directory. For some reason, SuSE 8.2 worked fine, in both directions, and the Mac happily connected via ASIP to the netatalk server on the RH 9 box.
Panther also features Rendezvous, Apple's version of zeroconf, that does a good job of discovering
I've used Mac since 9, and upgraded to X at around 10.1. Before that I used 95, and attempted Linux (but my shitty old computer didn't want to play - damn CD-Rom drives of that time).
I love 10.1 (and hopefully 10.3 once I can find 70 to drop for the students edition) - I can do 'boring' stuff on it, like run Word or Powerpoint. I can do arty / photographic things on there (Photoshop), and also run Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl to develop websites.
In addition thanks to Fink I can use debian style package management tools with ease. Damn good OS.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
Yeah, you can get a process list using sysreq. Of course, if you want to be able to read this when the screen is in graphics mode, you should configure your kernel to use the framebuffer with the same graphics mode. You can still use an accelerated X server, but the kernel will then be able to write the sysreq help screen or your process list etc to your screen even when your GUI misbehaves (which never happens for me anyway, but whatever). You can also use it to just kill all processes running on this virtual console.
>Scaling down to near-nothing or up to supercomputers.
Scaling down is easy. You can disable the GUI and the extraneous services, though if you are going to do that for all of your systems its probably best just to install Darwin by itself.
As to supercomputers, the Terrascale Computing Facility would certainly seem to qualify. If you are talking things like crays, I'd call that a limitation of the hardware support and not a limitation of the OS.
>Sourcecode modification of your gui?
Well, you can run X11 with GNome if you prefer.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
It is usually possible to tell there's something wrong with a post when someone starts ranting and raving about GIMP. Yep, it's free, and no, it's no patch on Photoshop. In fact, GraphicConverter is in many ways better than GIMP.
Great, you've got 13 000 packages (and I hope you've tried them all, too!) - but no Photoshop? How about, say, Final Cut Pro? Hmm, I feel like a game of Diablo. Oh, what's that? You can only run it in emulation?
The point is, it comes down to quality, not quantity. Professionals use professional tools, not some I'm-a-CS-graduate-and-know-how-to-program-stuff. I'm willing to assert that a majority of the 13000 pkgs are under 500k. They're probably really neat, you'd probably download them and stick them in your utilities folder and they'd never get seen again.
1. It has the honour of being the first OS to do this, I suppose?
2. Can't make omelette without cracking a few eggs etc. GCC 3.3 broke shit. Get over it.
well, it'd also be the first OS to have hardware incompatibilities with one single type of chip. FFS buddy, nobody has not killed something somewhere along the way.
Yeah, and with every point release adds more features than Linux gets in a full digit release.
that, my dear friend, is a complete contradiction in terms. Apple's hardware is shiny, but their OS utterly dominates everything else out there in the desktop stakes. that's what makes apple zealots. It's also the reason so many people continually pine for OS X on Intel. The hardware's kinda cool, but the software kicks hind tit.
"Down hill". Hmm, I can think of all the
Linux certainly has it's place in areas where organisations can develop a full system, but where you want to go out and buy something and have it all work, intuitively, and stable-y, and without spyware, and without MS groping your HD, you go buy a mac. Simple.
-- james
Linux has many high-quality desktop applications: WordPerfect OpenOffice Xess Applixware Gnomeeting Blender Maya Mozilla Nvu GIMP (ad infinitum sourceforge.net && freshmeat.net) Civilization Quake3 Return to Castle Wolfenstein Kohan FreeCraft FreeSpace Vendetta (ad infinitum happypenguin.org && linuxgames.com)
I played around with a Mac OS X computer (one of the cool looking 'lamp' ones) in PCworld the other day and was extremely impressed.
Personally I will stick to Linux because I like it but I think for a lot of novice computer uses currently using Windows because 'theres no other choice', I think should consider switching to Mac OS X.
I had always sort of them as being extremely expensive but the ones in the shop (which sells both Windows and Mac computers) were about the same price as the Windows ones.
The major problem is that as the sales guy explained to me, people don't realise a 800mhz G4 is far better than say a 1.5Ghz Pentium however when people see the 800mhz mac costing more than the 1.4 ghz PC they obviously go for the PC.
Kind of reminds me of the old saying that if it wasn't for Apple's pathetic marketing practises they would be the dominant software company of today (whether that is good or bad I don't know).
However, I think that for novice users who arn't quite ready to use Linux as a desktop (in its current form), then they should be recommended a Mac as they are atleast half way there and all competition is good for the computer industry, better than everyone dominated by one large monopoly anyway.
Nope
Or at the very least, when I try connecting to my svn server over https it still says "The Finder cannot complete the operation some data in "url" could not be read or written (Error code -36)"
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
But you can do all of that! Off the whole "OSX is BSD, but prettier" angle, all you have to do is load up ">console" mode at login, and fire up an XWindow manager. Poof, looks and works just like linux.
Given, OSX's Aqua has cleaner better solutions than that, IE, GIMP runs fine under the X11, or you can pay $$25 and get an Aqua'd version from Open OS X. As for virtual vesktops, there's a host of 3rd party apps for it, but make sure you give Expose a try first. Greatest thing since slice bread.
Mod point free since 2001
The majority of user-level processes are started by loginwindow or children of loginwindow, so killing it kills everything except the OS itself. This also returns you to the login window. In effect, this is the same as killing X11 when it locks up.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
NeXT computer was the company Steve Jobs founded after he lost Apple to CEO John Sculley and the rest of the board. It was a failure but a spectacular one, as it introduced several innovations in its GUI. Later on Apple bought NeXT, and with it its code base and Steve Jobs. And with that, the new Mac OS under development (code name Copland) was scrapped, and OS X was built on the NeXT codebase.
All from memory mind you, so hit the salt lick.
Bemopolis
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
This won't get modded up, but I would disagree when it comes to OS X. With OS X, easy stuff is easy (via Aqua). Intermediate stuff can actually be hard, as you make the transition from Aqua to the UNIX layers. Integrating the two can be mildly tricky. However, once over that hump, I'd say that very integration makes impossible stuff possible (think integration of the command line and all it offers with GUI desktop programs and AppleScript). I'm too new to get modded. :)
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.