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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."
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
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.