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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."
It's a good thing to see someone with geek knowledge reviewing OSX for what it is. Some good and some bad. I've been saying for years now that there's still many areas where OSX has yet to catch up to Linux. In the tightly configured server market, as a desktop, and in sheer number of apps it's getting better, but is still a little behind Linux IMHO.
OSX pushing forward can only help push its competitors forward also, something that's a good good thing
is definetly getting quicker, and is already very easy to use. But I'll give you a (slightly altered) quote to sum up the situation: 'Linux makes the easy things difficult, but it makes the hard things easier and the impossible things possible.'
Wheras MacOS makes the easy things easy, the hard things hard and the impossible things not possible.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
What I want to know is if DAV over https is supported yet.
There is NO reason to run Classic anymore, except if you run classic hardware, in which you don't have the choice.
Dirk P
Well, I went from Linux over to OS X for my 'daytime' OS just a month ago....and upgraded to Panther as it came out too. Just thought I'd add a couple of reflections;
I'm certainly not a linux newbie, started off with a slackware 0.99pl13 and been using various disties since, and it'll still run on my servers for the forseeable future, but I have to say that as a desktop OS OSX is hard to beat.
The bundled applications in the iLife suite are really something - plugging in a video camera and spooling a tape onto disk, editing it and burning to an indexed DVD took about 2 hours. Of course, there's plenty of stuff you can't do, but the OS basically makes the easy things trivial. Most of the things iLife offer can be done via Linux, but the beauty of OS X, for me at least, is that it all works _well_enuf_ out of the box - Linux is always a few hours tinkering to get the configuration you need. It's a shame that OpenOffice isn't better integrated into the system, but that's down to all of us getting our collective fingers out and doing something about it!
With the benefit of 'fink' theres plenty of GPL software out there, so in theory at least there shouldn't be much that you can do with Linux that's not possible on OS X (OK, OK, let's not get started about Aqua), but OTOH, linux gives you a sharp set of tools for doing the more sophisticated things that are difficult to do anywhere else.
Apple PowerBook quality, in my experience, hasn't been so great - my first machine went back because it had a duff DVD drive, current one has colour deformations on the screen, but that'll get sorted over time.
In short - OS X is a great OS for those people who want to do straightforward computer things (including content manipulation) but not for the dyed-in-the-wool linux hacker. Personally, I can't see myself going back to Linux for my desktop OS...
ever since I switch to Jaguar (My Panther box is somewhere between Cork (IE) and
What I could do on Linux and still can do on OSX:
What I still cannot do (I used to be able to do it under Linux)
So my point is not to troll (only people who disagree but won't argue might say so) but just to express the following : Linux is cool, nice, may even be optimized but my current powerbook is way faster than the P3/600 Linux laptop I had before switching (I don't care about existing models). I also benefit from many quality software and from a very cool development environement.
Finally, I won't step back because I just enjoy typing this on the sexiest computer I ever owned (I also own an Acorn RiscPC, a NeXTstation, a Bebox, a P4 PC, a Zaurus and a Sinclair ZX81).
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Actually if he had taken the time to debug he could have found the offending process and killed it. It pains me to see people who would do the same thing if an X app froze up your WM become stupid when it happens on another OS. Hell, many GUI locks on XP can be averted if you have terminal services running and want to login and poke around.
Is this the ideal behaviour for most people? No. But if this had happened on an X session would this reviewer have just assumed X itself was locked and kill it?
--- I do not moderate.
I'm surprised that he reckons that vast swaths of Classic users are cling gin on. Even people who were held back by Quark not upgrading quickly enough are moving now. What's more OS X can provide a very classic like user experience if you want it to.
;learnt any *nix stuff or run any X11 programmes without OS X. OpenOffice 1.0.3 is now my Office suite of choice, although the sooner they sort out the terrible human interface the better. And that's my major gripe with Linux and other *nix flavours, is the terrible human interface. Now Aqua is not perfect but one thing Apple has managed to do over the years is keep the interface consistent and persuade developers to make their interfaces consistent with the OS. What linux needs is an Open Human Interface Standard if it want's to succeed on the desktop.
I'm also wondering about his assessment of the speed of OS X on his G4. Now maybe 16 years of Mac use has blinded me to how slow Mac OS X really is, but I find it (on a 500Mhz G3) pretty snappy and nothing to complain about. Maybe I should see the light and install Linux.
I think not though, productivity would grind to a halt as I tried to get Linux to do the things I wanted it to.
One things is to be said, I would have never
Exactly what I did.. I used to use linux on my desktop, debian, used it for quite some time, but after a while I got a little annoyed that every time I wanted to do something more "Exotic" like using bluetooth, it was a lot of struggle. With os X it just works (which is not always the case with windows either). For me OS X is the ideal desktop OS, it has the unix side, so I can use the unix tools, it runs the cool audio applications like logic audio, dtp apps and videoediting apps, it;s stable, it has a great gui and it's not windows, but the virtual pc emulation is good enough if I need to run some windows app. Which never happens. I still use linux on my servers, although I am migrating some of my servers to freebsd. I mean, OS X on the desktop, freebsd/linux on the servers: life is good.
Are people working on getting something similar into KDE and/or GNOME ?
One can create photo galleries, use advanced groupware applications, browse anything on your computer, be it a camera or a network share from the same interface, have a music player that fits in appearance with the rest of the GUI, and oh yeah, works on everything, from a Sun Ultra 2, to a PC, to a Mac G3. Yeah, there are a few niche applications where a mac may be good in, but for The Rest of Us, Linux is where it's at.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I only use Linux. My desktop machine at works runs Linux, and my desktop machine at home runs Linux. No "dual boot" or anything like that.
Is Mac OS X good? Yeah. I'd say it's pretty darn compelling, and all Linux application developers should take a good long look at OS X in order to learn to see where it succeeds.
Running Linux on the Desktop does not make my day easier. Printing, clipboarding, decent-quality video drivers, fonts, app consistency - these are all still major issues that impact the further deployment of Linux on the desktop.
The amazing part of OS X is it's integration and consistency. Simply put, it's a cohesive environment, built as if one very talented person built almost all the applications. Every Linux distribution is years behind it in that category (although things are very slowly getting better!)
It's hard to force UI and feature standards upon desktop applications in the world of open source - the distributedness and the lack of centralization of open source makes it hard to achieve that level of clarity.
So the next question is - can it be done in Linux? Is it even possible to build guidelines and services that make it possible for an open source project to achieve what Apple has done for OS X?
If I ever buy a laptop, there is no doubt in my mind that it will be a Mac running OS X.
PS - every application should have a "print preview"! Damn it!
Anyone know if PAnther has support for YP/NIS services. It was a know issue with early OSX releases and it's fairly hard find out. Believe mew, I've tried... BG: Our cxampus is about to get a nice spanknig 50 seat G% lab with 50 or som machines. Our dept has an existing infrastructure underpinned by NIS for authentication, with some samba. We'd like to be able to get some of our existing users to use new facilities more easily and beinfg able to integrate with new servers installed specifically for that lab. We really don't want to go down an LDAP route if we can avoid it, which is why I'm asking about NIS
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
Let's take DVD+RW support
;-P
If you read the notes below the table you will find:
Virtually every DVD+RW equipped Windows PC on the market today supports DVD+RW functions transparently at the system level, usually with a packet-writing driver that meshes seamlessly with the standard Windows method of saving files to any available volume.
It covers 802.11b, but not 802.11g or BlueTooth.
Maybe he made it fair for all by using the older standard. Remember its only recently that 802.11g has been as affordable as 11b.
You could be right about it being a terrible site for comparison but you havent submitted any that are better so ill assume from the comments that your a mac fanboy
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
The problem is that Mac and Linux are rather like extreme left and extreme right versus the broad middle-of-the-road Windows world. In most cases, Mac philosophy and Linux philosophy are on the extreme opposites, while Windows philosophy tries to balance them (as both Mac and Linux users would agree, their balance is actually the sum of the WORST parts of both worlds).
Take the problem of customization. Linux world is "customize everything, if anything else fails - just by tampering with the source code". . Windows is "Desktop themes? Sure, fine, but don't think we'll allow you to write your own window manager". Mac world is "So you want to have THEMES on your desktop? Well, if you are such a hacker, use hacker tools, you won't get it in your vanilla system".
Take the problem of machine life-cycle. Linux is "An old Pentium 90 your uncle gave your for free? What a fine machine, you can still run the majority of server applications on it". Windows is "An old Pentium II you bought in 1998? Well, just add a new graphics card and change the CPU, and you can still have some play". Mac is "What, a vintage PowerMac 9600? We don't care you added G3/466 and ATI Radeon, you just won't run MacOS X on it because we say NO".
Take the problem of user friendlyness. Linux is "if you are not a rocket scientist, we actually don't want you to run our software". Windows is "anything that Dell Dude could manage". MacOS is "if it's too complicated for Elen Feiss, it's not good. Oh my God, what is that? Two-button mouse? Are you nuts, do you think she can handle THIS?".
Me too. I've been a Linux user for years. I took a job at a prepress company last year, and now have a TiBook running Jaguar on my desk. OS X is okay, but it needs virtual desktops, badly.
I have a dual head setup with an external monitor and the laptop's LCD screen. I frequently have both screens covered with windows, and can't find what I want. Maybe Panther will fix this with Expose, but it's not the same as virtual desktops.
Does anybody know of decent virtual desktop software for Mac OS X?
I've tried this but it's not really virtual desktops, it's more of a kludge that uses "Hide Application" to simulate them. (Or at least it was, it's been a few months since I tried it.) It also has that gigantic desktop switcher box that uses up my precious screen real-estate.
I sure would like to find one that works like the traditional X11 notion of virtual desktops.
I never even considered buying a Mac until I had played with OS X quite a bit. The classic MacOS sucked balls and it showed when one faulty application could lockup the entire OS. As far as I can tell that's still the case with OS 9 which I've tried for a grand total of 45 minutes.
I'm still mixed on whether I will ever buy another Mac (I currently have a 800MHz G3 iBook). I look back at the Windows world and for the same price as a high end iBook or the low end Powerbook I can get a screaming fast Dell P4 laptop.
The laptop I really want (15" Powerbook w/superdrive) comes out to around $2900 when you add in everything you need like Applecare for three year warranty (yes, you MUST get this... they don't even want to talk to you after 90 days of phone support is up even though you have 1 year of hardware support.), an extra battery, 1 512meg dimm instead of 2x256 (this seems stupid IMHO) etc.
Or you have software, such as MacAuthorize, that requires the ability to dial the modem directly.
Since MacAuthorize is not being supported any more by the company which owns the rights to it (Veri$ign), upgrading to an OS X version isn't an option.
Since the only OS X-native credit-card authorization software I've seen costs upwards of $1000/seat, that isn't an immediate option for many small businesses.
There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
I'd hate to see users of two fantastic operating systems like OS X and Linux turn into bickering opponents ...
..." My response would be "Hey, I never suspected that vi or emacs could do that, but now I know how to do it."
...mac... newsgroups, but with disappointing results. The replies tend to be "It can't be done" or "Wait for the next release". The first reply I tend to translate to "I don't know how to do it", of course, and the second to "Maybe someday, when the geniuses at Apple get around to it".
...
;-]
Well, as a software developer by trade, I sorta like it.
One of the very real problems with all computer systems (linux included) is the difficulty in discovering the capabilities and limitations of the software. This is where "X vs Y flame wars" come in handy.
Thus, in the eternal unix vi-vs-emacs war, I went with the vi side. But I didn't learn much about it from the docs. Where I really learned was the flame wars. Some emacs partisan would say "Emacs can do FOO and vi can't." A vi partisan would then say "Yes it can, here's how
It's a pity that this particular was seems to have somewhat died down. As a result, the younger generation no longer has this simple, elegant way of discovering the undocumented capabilities of these powerful tools. I often watch younger people laboriously trying to get them to do what to me are simple, quick tasks.
Meanwhile, on the GUI front, the X-windows world has a flock of window managers, most recently KDE and Gnome. As usual, the "documentation" mostly consists of idiot-level intros that are more marketing that education. If you want to find out how to do something, asking newsgroups or mailing lists mostly gets you a "RTFM" response. But if you can say "Gnome can do BAR but KDE can't" you often get a reply explaining how easy it is with KDE.
With both MS Windows and the Mac GUI, you don't have this. I've been playing with OSX for four months now, and there are a lot of cool things about it. But from my X-Windows perspective, the GUI sucks. The simplest things that I do with one or two events on my linux box can take the longest time. Even a simple cut-and-paste is 2 to 10 times longer than with X, and prone to frustrating errors. I can't background a window. There's only one desktop. You can only resize windows via the lower right corner. Terminal windows don't have borders, and changing the background color is extremely difficult, so the windows run together. And so on.
Yes, I've asked on
It's all very frustrating to know that such things have been solved on linux, but the commercial guys at both MS and Apple seem to have little interest in the possible solutions. And as a programmer, I don't have any practical way to implement a solution myself and offer it to the population of Mac users, as I've done in the past with linux and GNU software.
Or maybe I'm missing something
[Note that this message could be interpreted as an example of "linux can to QUX but OSX can't." I'd be happy to see it lead to a debunking of all my comments by explaining how too get a profitable linux-vs-OSX flame war going, so I can learn how to do things on OSX that I know how to do on linux.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I will, for the sake of argument, assume that MacOS X 10.3 is far and away, across the board, the best user environment ever created. Having never seen it, used it, or cared about it in any direction, I'll stipulate to that point.
I still wouldn't willingly spend any serious time with it. I would play with it, I would wow over it, and I would commend Apple for doing a fantastic job with it, but I wouldn't do anything that would make me depend on it.
I have been the victim of the same pattern over the years with proprietary operating systems, proprietary applications, and proprietary hardware. The [OS/application/hardware] is compelling, so I invest heavily (time, data, and money) in it. I have a great time using it, it is indeed the answer to my computng dreams. Then the vendor either:
1) Goes out of business. All my work is gone. Start over, with excrutiating pain, with a new product.
2) Discontinues the product. While not always painful, this is too unpredictable for my comfort. Sometimes the transition to the new product is seamless, and sometimes not. And sometimes no new product is forthcoming. I have experienced all of these eventualities, and I can't take it anymore.
3) Sells out to a competitor. This tends to lead to very similar conditions as number 2 above.
No matter how good a proprietary product is, it inevitably leads to a dependence on the sole supplier of that product. Having been victimized by the lack of control this requires, I decided to never go down that route again.
There are a great many cases where Free software does not compare favorably in feature count or usability with proprietary software. However, if the Free software gets the job done, even if it requires extra work on my part to get the job done, I will always prefer it over a proprietary counterpart.
The GIMP may or may not hold a candle to Photoshop, but it does the jobs I need it to do (both at home and at work). KDE's UI may or may not hold a candle to MacOS X, but it does the jobs I want it to do (and does them admirably). MacOS X hardware support may be better than Linux (given that all the Mac drivers are written by the Mac vendor, I would certainly hope the support is perfect), but all my hardware works.
But the single most important reason I will continue to base all my important work on Linux and Free software is that my work will not (and cannot, short of Congressional stupidity) be pulled out from under me. I don't care if I have to work a little harder per job (which, incidentally, I usually don't). The peace of mind I get by not having to worry about the goodwill of a vendor is an order of magnitude more important to me that having a flashier tool.
There are, though, times where a proprietary vendor is the only solution, such as accessing our [horribly pathetic] UniVerse database via ODBC within Linux. We had to buy middleware from a proprietary company as an immediate solution.
However, this illustrated serious problems with UniVerse which, among many other UniVerse and IBM non-support issues, is prompting us to run trials with PostgreSQL (which are going very well).
I'm digressing too much, though. The bottom line is that vendor abuses have driven me to use, like, and prefer Free environments over even the most featureful proprietary ones.
Yep, OS9 does indeed suck balls. I have to use it every day at work (I'm using it now) and I can assure you it is as crashy as Win98 and has worse VM management. Sometimes all it takes is one app crashing, and the whole system goes down like a Tai hooker.
For me, the price is hefty, but its worth it. All I use my windows box for now is playing games. I like the UI of OS X so much better than Windows, that I'm willing to pay more for a system that rarely crashes and "just works"
Transistors and Beer!!
And this is the one area where OSX is a step backwards. Apple has fallen for what we could call the Microsoft syndrome, fallen in love with flashy graphics at the expense of a clean UI, and it shows.
We don't have to be puritanical about this. A little eye candy is perfectly harmless, although if it goes too far over the top it is distracting.
However, the old Finder was a masterpiece of UI design, built to exacting HCI standards and a coherent, ergonomically driven vision. Apple has abandoned that kind of UI design, in favor of a one that is equally coherent, but driven more by artistic vision. It makes sense I guess if you look at how their businss has changed. It's not that ergonomics aren't important anymore, it's just that they are no longer paramount. Simply put, the idea that ergonomics will conquer the world has been discredited -- decisively so. People can get by with something less than perfect, and most people will if they can get something good enough for less money.
People will pay a premium for something with more than the usual panache -- that makes a statement. Style was always part of the Mac appeal, it's just that it turned out in the long term to be its strongest suit from a business standpoint. So styling is now paramount and HCI is taking a back seat (although it is still riding in the car I guess).
So if you look at Apple products, they are (1) good enough from an HCI standpoint in comparison to the competition, (2) loads more elegant than the competition, and (3) reasonably good values. They look like the result of a business lesson learned.
Long time Mac afficiandos internalized the concept of concept of exacting HCI standards, and these are the people who groan at the new interfaces. But the fact is that they are good enough, better than what is in widespread use, and have a kind of stylistic dash that sets Apple apart.
People who are HCI purists would do better to look to open source as a long term torch bearer of that standard, because HCI perfectionism (unfortunately) is not a workable business strategy.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For OS X, they said:
Uninstallation service for installed programs: no. Most programs can be deleted by dragging files to the trash. This may leave files in the system folder or other locations.
Actually, dragging an application to the trash starts an uninstall script -- same thing happens on install. Maybe they thought they were deleting a single file, but most applications are actually directories that contain the "other locations" that they were probably thinking about.
There's a certain beauty in things just working and not bothering the user; I guess the reviewers expected to be hassled.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I run both.
OS X is the ultimate user interface. and what else runs dreamweaver / flash / photoshop / illustrator? the desktop environments available on linux cannot compare.
linux, however, is what i trust for my servers. i trust apple to make my OS secure, but i do not trust them to respect my modifications to the OS between software updates. Apple has screwed up my PHP / MySQL / Apache customization before and i was not impressed. RedHat is much better in this respect.