Slashdot Mirror
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
Is that MacOS X has several high-quality specialised desktop applications to its name, and Linux hasn't got any.
There is NO reason to run Classic anymore, except if you run classic hardware, in which you don't have the choice.
Dirk P
sometimes I just want to give old Steve Jobs a hand.
Am I the only one that finds this remark a little disturbing? My Gods, the mental image I got from this!
He obviously likes a lot about Panther, but he doesn't think many Linux users will switch to it..
:p
Well he can put me down as a Linux user who jumped onto OSX.
I really like Linux, but I just never got on with it as a desktop OS - lots of little things used to irk me, and the frustration of trying to get Linux working with much more modern hardware (like my NForce2 board) just made me get fed up with the whole idea.
Using OSX is like having the ultimate Linux distro.. you have THE best GUI available today, there are loads of Window XP beating applications shipped with OSX as standard, and hardware integration is obviously perfect - stuff just works. Plus you can quite easily get into the underlying UNIX core, and tamper with things - having such a functional GUI, and being able to fire up a terminal and use things like openssh, pico, etc right out of the box just totally sold me.
I still use Linux on my servers though.. you just can't beat that reliability and flexibility.. though I haven't tried out OSX Server yet....
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
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
Well he does say
"I think nothing of leaving apps and files open for days or even weeks on the Linux machine.".
Now that is cool. Nice endorsment of Linux's stability. However I still think he should say that he does save once in a while as stable as Linux is it can't survive the power cord being pulled out the back or a child putting a pop tart in the CD-ROM drive
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I'd hate to see users of two fantastic operating systems like OS X and Linux turn into bickering opponents not unlike the factious Judean liberation groups in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
IMO, there's more than enough room for lots of operating systems out there. I hope some of you posting comments favoring one or the other can keep the comments purely at a technical, respectful and impersonal level.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
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 and OSX are part of the same culture.
Apple doesn't really compete with linux or the rest of the current UNIX crowd. Maybe SUN but they are screwed anyway. We are not talking about a fork of Unix but rather Apple embraceing a current implimentation (BSD/Darwin) and giving it there own "spin" by, bascially, bolting on their own propriety GUI (quartz and what ever that new metal look is called) plus a bunch of lifestyle apps.
As long as a program conforms to the POSIX stardard then it should compile on OSX just fine. If you absolutely must have all your software "free" in the idealogical sense then I think you can find a open source implimentation of Cocoa and afterstep - a standard which Apple more or less follows. Apple can's own UNIX as much as SCO can since it is a open standard.
What we are talking about is a company talking the best of open source and making it more friendly for your average consumer. This is someting that most linux distros try, the best example being Mandrake. but don't quite get right mainly due to technical (XFree86, dependency hell) cultural (pointless flamefests over which is the best editor) and social problems (not having one standard GUI, installing a million text editors, lack of propriety apps etc). Some of these problems can be overcome, but some, like the idea that to make more people use linux you have to clone the windows GUI are going to take years to get over. I for one am glad that someone is attempting to lead the way and give people what they what - a decent alterative to windows that dosen't require a degree to write your resume on. Yet still has the power of UNIX if yon need it.
OSX is UNIX. That Apple should chose this direction should be taken as compliment to Linux.
Sorry to rant but I wish for once us geeks would stop getting into pointless pissing contests about things which, in the grand scheme of things, just aren't really important. For example who cares that OSX can't crtl alt f1 to the terminal? this is just nitpicking.
Your funny statement notwithstanding, impossible things are by their very definition impossible on any OS in any situation.
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.
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
I have a TiBook. I'm typing on it now. The NeXTStep interface was cleaner than the MacOS Classic interface. The only thing that "dirties" the MacOSX interface is the "classic" look of apps that insist on drawing windows with their own application-specific goofy widgets that are designed to look good taking up all of a blurry 14" CRT screen.
Also, more time in the "lickable" Aqua world, and you will be instantly conscious of the mood altering effects of being surrounded by soft edges and clean surfaces with rich (but understated) textures when you switch back to the cold-hard Classic. It's easy to say "it's all just flash !*blink* *blink*", but you haven't really tasted both samples.
I've used MSWindows 3.0,3.1,95,XP; NextStep; BeOS FVWM, OpenLook, CDE, WindowMaker, AfterStep, Enlightenment, KDE, Sawfish, Black Box; etc.. I prefer the OS-X (still using Jaguar) interface. Keys include a cohesive window-management scheme, and *working* VFS. Also there's transparent terminals that use QuartzExtreme so that I can put a window with documentation under a Terminal.app window and type what I want based on the slightly blurred text underneath. Cocoa's message-passing for loose-types makes for a somewhat bloat-y experience, but it isn't something that scales with hardware. It runs nearly as well on a Grape G3 iMac as it does on my TiBook at twice the clock speed plus AltiVec and 32MB GPU.
That said, MacOSX is a logical continuation of NeXTStep. It is a leap from MacOS Classic. Let me say one thing: it is much less of a leap from Classic to OSX than it is from Classic to MSWindowsXP.
You can continue to run your old Classic apps in MacOS Classic if you like. I invite you to try EBay for an old NeXT cube/slab with some software on it. OSX has definitely met Classic users halfway. If you are so reactionary that you can't bear to part with your good-ol' key combo shortcuts and learn a new style, then you don't deserve to run new software that demands it. That's great if you're a "my own little world" style user who just needs Adobe apps and doesn't need UTF-8 international character support...
The bottom line is that you can hold out and save your money for a compelling personal reason to switch, but if you really want your old OS, the old interface guidelines, etc. it ain't gonna happen. Translating your comments in light of that makes your position sound more like "There are those of us who will never upgrade. Long Live Classic!" Whatever...
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
More than one previous poster has pointed out that OSX and Linux users are natural allies, and that the two systems have more similarities than differences, but I would put an even finer point on it:
;) Sony will ship a slickified custom linux with their Vaios, geared toward the multi-media heavy tasks that their product is aimed at, other companies will ship machines with stripped down, extremely easy to use "big-button" interfaces for grandma to check email and look at pictures of the grandkids. If we can just break the MS lock on the market, there will be plenty of room for a rich ecosystem of OSes to survive. If they are all commited to open standards, there is no reason why a plethora of OSes (as opposed to just one or a few) cannot both survive in the market and be easily managed by IT pros.
OSX and Linux can help each other by breaking the monoculture. There have been a few stories recently about the Linux user base being set to overtake that of OSX in the next few years. These stories are invariably followed by choruses of "Apple is dying." but consider: An (corporate) IT environment which welcomes Linux on the desktop and in the server room is a) more likely to consider alternate platforms and b) an extremely friendly environment (from a protocol standpoint) in which to deploy OSX boxes.
Unlike MS OSes, which expend a great deal of their energies in locking out other platforms, both Linux and OSX are commited to open standards; they are playing by the same rules and will always play well together. A world with (let's say) 85% Windows 10% Linux and 5% OSX on the desktop is a world where more attention and emaphasis will be given to open standards, where OSX will have less resistance to grow its share in many different market spaces, and (perhaps most importantly) a world where the barrier to entry for some theoretical new-and-better OS is much lower.
To look at this another way: As PCs become more commoditized, and as they move more toward being plug-in-and-use appliances, the OS must fade further and further into the background; it must become transperant to the user. The day will come when end users neither know nor care what OS they are using (some would argue that's always been true
The future is not a world where Linux (or MacOSX) has replaced windows on the desktop, but rather one where we have a burgeoning number of choices, and can pick amongst many tools to get the job done right. (I hope....)
-alex
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.