Bill Joy on Linux and Mac OS X

(rfm)2 writes "In a Wired interview, Bill Joy mentions he just got a new dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac with 8 GB RAM and half a terabyte of internal disk. He is clearly underwhelmed by Linux: 'Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.'"

Comments

In a sense, he's right

[rkabir]

After all, Mac OS has got solid user oriented UI... We're working on that with linux - but we've got years to go before it's set for the home user -> linux trounces for business of course :-D oh, and fp!

Re:In a sense, he's right

[Spyky]

Well certainly you have your opinion, and others have theirs.

I have the exact opposite opinion, I've been using KDE (on SuSE) as my desktop for over 3 years now. I've been very pleased at the evolution of KDE over the years. But I have to be realistic, it is still not as clean or consistent as OS X, or to a lesser extend, Windows. There are many aspects of system maintenance and configuration that are still far behind on a linux machine. The user interface has much improved in recent years, however, I still find many of the standard K apps to be inferior to their counterparts on other operating systems.

I recently (2 months ago) purchased my first ever Mac. It is now my primary machine, and I'm not looking back at all. I use the machine for all of the tasks I used my linux machine for, and more.

I agree that eye candy does not a user interface make, however, consistency in UI elements, and accessibility of configuration options *does*. And in those areas, KDE and Linux in general still falls short.

For what it is worth, I do keep my Linux box around, although I use it much less frequently. I also was quick to delete all Microsoft software off of my new Mac (Internet Explorer and Outlook).

I'm not particularly upset at having to pay $100 a year for the privilege of using such a high-quality operating system. As a software developer, I believe in paying for software I use, so I pay for SuSE updates every year or so anyway.

-Spyky

Missing the point ...

[OzPixel]

What he was doing in 1979 was academic work, and the source code was available. In the years since then, Unix has been locked away by various companies (e.g. SCO). Linux isn't about making the best user experience, it's about a return to making improvements based on freely shared knowledge.

David.

UI Guidelines for Linux?

[G4from128k]

What made Apple successful (if you can call it that) a strong set of UI guidelines that everyone is supposed to follow. Thus there are two key questions:
1. Does the Linux community have a set of UI guidelines?
2. Do Linux app developers follow them?

If the answer to either question is "no" then Linux is not likely to take over the desktops of average (= your grandma) users.

Re:UI Guidelines for Linux?

[Arkham]

1. Does the Linux community have a set of UI guidelines?
2. Do Linux app developers follow them?


1) I suspect there are UI guidelines for KDE and Gnome, but not a unifying standard. The KDE/Gnome difference is part of the problem when you're looking for UI consistency.
2) No, but the same can be said of Windows developers. Microsoft has a standard, but people don't seem to follow it with any consistency.

Re:UI Guidelines for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

1 : yes , GNOME has the HIG : http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/

2 : Yes, Gnome developers and others not core applications are now in a very intensive use of the HIG
all the core gnome applications use it _now_ (gnome 2.2/2.4), all not core applications are in use or in implementation of them (gnumeric is now hig, gimp is in work, abiword is mostly hig, evolution 2 will be, gaim is,and so on )

openoffice 2 will use the gnome HIG

it's not joke. it's very now, in suse 8.x and upper, mandrake 9 and upper, Redhat 8/9 and fedora now. and other recent distribution (end 2002/ begin 2003, mostly)

of course, it has many works to do , many application to "hig", but it"s a really concern of many opensources developpers now. many speak about in their development, many "mature project" think about

in the same time, KDE is striving to inform developpers to follow some official guidelines to do "good" kde applications.

so, is linux is likely to take over the desktop of average (my grandma don't use computer at all and only watch tv for informations) users ? yes, because many developpers and industrial player WANT that , and there are still some Huge Work to do. but it grows well.

I recommand people to read some website like http://www.gnomedesktop.org or http://dot.kde.org to know that two community, and see (sometimes) presentation of new project or improvment of old project.

I also remind that two community can HELP MAC OSX
KDE applications could be use with GPL edition of QT for osx
and fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net) help to install some gtk/gnome applications which can useful and nice to use with osx X11.app.

linux is not about reinventing "unix"
it was done years ago

it's about a FREEDOM and OPEN COMPLETE OPERATING SYSTEM and DESKTOP Environment

linux is the KERNEL
GNU/Linux is the OS
GNOME is the desktop environment (for bsd, irix, aix, solaris and other)

all is VERY much more powerful and re-conceived from technologies of 1979.

to think it's now only re-inventation of the old good unix, is completely nonsense

or maybe, he has only a Vi and some shells on a poor lonely 2.2 linux kernel ?

very strange.

in the same time : OSX is a GOOD os. not so free, but very mature.

and HO, it mostly re-imaginated many unix concept too
the kernel is MACH, not so old good "unix"

the whole os fondation is BSD, so unix, but complete rewrite (and free of at&t copyright ) of the so good old unix
the userland high level API is COCOA, re-implementation of OPENSTEP, completely NOT unix, NOT xlib, NOT xtoolkit

the whole user interface is AQUA : a re-imagination of the nextstep interface.

in plain short : Mac OSX is _NOT_ the plain old unix no more than linux

in some part it's bsd, some mach, some gnu, some next, some new apple additions

to criticize linux to simply reinvent "unix" is also criticize OSX.

thanks to read me. I use daily linux, OSX and freebsd (at work and for my own need) , to chidlishly criticize one or all of them (with some dumb comment about the old unix) is a plain insult to ALL.

and please, I urge you to think about the fact a FREE(freedom) and the need to access sourcecode is also a goal which worth to write an OS. even if already good os are available.

Re:UI Guidelines for Linux?

[Mr. Show]

I beg to differ. The only applications on Windows I fail to grasp at a glance are almost exclusively ported over from other (unix/linux) platforms. Windows application in general have a very consistent look and feel, mostly because there is only a single set of widgets (controls/dialogs/toolbars) used by all of them.

The opposite is true. Microsoft's own tools don't help you follow those guidelines, which they do publish, and even Microsoft doesn't follow them. First, you can see that Microsoft distributes their own custom widget toolset for their major products, like Office and Visual Studio .NET. To easily see this, open a project in Visual Studio .NET on Windows XP with one of their colored themes enabled. Notice that the scrollbar in the Solution Explorer or Class View on the right is a standard, skinned scrollbar, while the one in the editor window is an old-style Windows 2000 grey scrollbar. Someone is using custom drawing code there. Notice that in Office XP and VS.NET, the toolbars and menus are different than the standard operating system ones other applications pick up by default. In Office 2003, the menus and toolbars have again been changed to an ugly pastel blue, which again is in contrast to the rest of the OS.

The Microsoft development tools don't help you to write conforming UIs for their own platform, as they should. Creating buttons in VB, for example, does not make them a standard size; you must drag a box on the screen to be whatever size you want. Spacing between controls is not enforced, or even suggested, in VS C++ or VB. This leads to the well-known problem of options screens that are tremendously cluttered, with spacing between controls limited, group boxes are singleton controls, unclear relationship between options, and so forth. Furthermore, Microsoft pursues its tabbed-based options screen in Office, options screens with categories in a left tree-view in VS, and third parties to fend for themselves. In addition, MS now puts options screens under Tools->Options, while some developers put it under View->Options or View->Preferences (which MS used to do), and Netscape still uses the ancient Edit->Preferences. MS does not give developers a hint by, say, creating a default Options menu item under the Tools menu when you create a desktop application.

Contrast this with the Mac platform. The free development tools they distribute set up applications by default with all the standard options in their standard places. Options screens are standard (with a small number of violators, notably Microsoft, here and there), toolbars are standard, etc. The Interface Builder tool, which is a WYSIWYG application for building application screens and dialog windows, similar to that embedded within VS, brings up guides to help with control placement and spacing, and the culture of the development community is very much focused on UI consistency and usability, which, despite what you say, is not true of other platforms, which includes Microsoft. The only thing MS developers seem to agree on is the necessity of overly-cluttered toolbars filled with indistinguishable tiny little 24x24 icons, the majority of which are never used by most users.

8Gb RAM?

[oberondarksoul]

Does 'overkill' mean nothing to these people?

painful to say

[schapman]

as much as it pains me to say this... linux needs to drift much more to the windows/MacOS way of doing things... point and drool works for the majority of the people out there. If u need a windows driver... click on it and it goes (most of the time :P )... I think Linux has the foundation to be the ultimate OS if there is an easy setup and configuration, along with the power to drop to the command line and change anything. I recently had a chance to try out the new MacOS, and was very impressed... if I could have a windowing system like that, with all the configuration abilities of linux... the world would be a happier place for me. as it is now.. the only reason i run windows now is because im a hard core gamer.. and too many games use DirectX(in my opinion, one of the greatest things MSoft has ever made (and free :P) ), but if i could game on linux and have the ease of use for others in my household that windows provides... I'd make the full switch no prob.

Slightly Egotistical

[nathanh]

Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally.

And if Linux was entirely about re-implementing what Bill Joy designed in 1979, then he might have a point.

But the things Bill Joy designed and partially wrote back in the 1970s are functionally inferior to features found in modern Linux.

Sure, Linux and BSD share similar APIs, but it is more than a little deceptive to claim that BSD and Linux are the same design. Internally they're completely different.

This is like a 100 year old Mr Ford looking at a modern V8 EFI car with independent suspension and AWD and ABS and saying "pfft, it's not very interesting, I designed all this back in the early 1900s". It shows a complete lack of comprehension regarding the modern state-of-the-art.

Re:Slightly Egotistical

[zpok]

Well let me run with this a bit.

All this inferior-superior stuff is what you're looking for. Not me, and I doubt parent poster had any of that in mind.

Most people are looking for an experience. If you dig compiling, recompiling and using x systems on top of each other, not allowing for drag and drop between them, can't set your monitor resolution without turning your machine inside out, don't have the luxury of font management, printing, etc etc. then Linux is for you!

If you're not the adventurous type, not a programmer and don't enjoy beating your own system (see above), maybe OS X is really what you're looking for.

I don't mean to bash Linux here, but you all should stop pretending Linux is easy. It's not. It's wonderful, who would have thought it, but it's not for those a lot of Linux adepts deem "dumb" - even if they might one day give you a heart transplant.

Let me put it real simple: Linux is not for people who are not into Linux. And Mac OS X - even Windows (the horror) are systems for people who basically don't give a fuck. If I had done what mr Sun has done, I would not build a computer from spare parts and program drivers to get my linux box talking with my other stuff, I'd go out and buy a monster machine running OS X - if I were him.

So put all that superior-inferior crap where the sun doesn't shine (forgot where that was, somewhere between Lancre and Badass). That most certainly was not the point.

Hope you enjoyed my rant, Cheers!

I personally find this very interesting

[nthomas]

Q: And yet you've been famously cool about Linux.
A: Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally.

[...]

Q: All right, you win. What are you doing for fun these days?
A: I'm figuring out a meditation wall for my apartment in New York. Eight feet high by 12 feet wide, with an array of overlapping rear projectors, each with a tiny Linux box and connected by gigabit Ethernet.

Fascinating.

Linux is 1979 technology and yet runs the projectors for his meditation wall -- built by a Walt Disney Imagineer and the inventor of massively parallel supercomputing.

I should like to ask Mr. Joy why these projectors are not running Mac OS X or even Solaris. Perhaps he owes a greater debt to those kids 20 years his junior than he imagines?

Thomas

Give the guy a break

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course he's totally right.
Why should he be totally into Linux given his background. And why shouldn't he enjoy OS X on this droolproof hardware?

Give the man a good gui or go whine about something else.

I think Linux *could* one day make a comprehensive home user system - if that were a goal in itself - but I'm pretty sure most linux contributors are not the ones you should ask about the hi/gui guidelines. They don't care.

And as long as that's the situation, it's totally understandable someone prefers OS X for the everyday stuff and Linux for doing rocksolid stupid stuff like meditation walls - as long as he doesn't have to set it up himself.

I can dig linux for servers, since you expect the thing to not give you a head-ache *once you set it up*, but to do this constant maintenance on your main machine without the benefits a windows or os x machine gives you, ffff that takes guts and balls, not for me...

I'm only 26, so...

[vivekb]

Who's Bill Joy?

Re:Joy doesn't seem to work the Unix way any more.

[Ffakr]

I'm sorry, but you're kind of 'out of it'

- Classic is not bloat. It's a feature to allow compatability. Classic doesn't introduce overhead to a system unless you NEED to run an old app. I didn't have Classic installed for over a year and never missed it. It's only on my machine now because I did a clean install of panther.
- Carbon API is an equal partner with Cocoa on OS X. It is based (heavily) off of the Classic Mac APIs but it isn't bloat. It's another enviornment that has benefits and disadvantages compared to Cocoa (or standard BSD libraries). The is a reason why the Finder isn't Cocoa.. it works better as a Carbon app.
- "Vintage BSD" is often a lot faster than your vaunted Linux. I know 2.4 and the upcomming 2.6 have made big strides, but the Linux compat in FreeBSD was faster than Linux for a long time, and as far as I know, still occasionally is faster than real linux.
- Linux files systems are anything but clean. Different distros put stuff in different areas, Major apps switch install and config locations between versions. For the most part, you rarely ever need to dig into the filesystem on OS X. Apps go in /Applications, home spaces in /Users, OS X specific System files in /Library and /System. I find the layout quit logical and quit consistent. As for the unix stuff in OS X, it's where you'd guess most of the time. BTW, why should /bin be shown in the GUI when you can't run command line apps from the GUI?
- Netinfo was depreciated in 10.2 and it's pretty much not used in 10.3. Apples moved everything into the BSD files and/or LDAP. Anyway, There really wasn't much in Netinfo. Comparing Netinfo to The Registry is total flamebait and it shows your lack of knowledge.
- consistent package management on Linux??? HAHAHA If I could count all the problems I've had with RPMs..
Fink automatically handles dependencies. The system software updater tracks packages. In general, the software install tools for OS X work fantastic. Package Manager is way better than anything on linux. And don't forget the use of Bundles. It makes a lot of software installs as easy as copying over an icon [which is a directory with all the goodies inside, but looks to the user like an app]
- haha, you consider the Mac OS unusable out of the box, yet you love linux. With so many distributions of Linux, do you really believe you wouldn't have to apply as much configuration to a distro you weren't intimately familiar with?

Give OS X 10.3 a real try and come back with a comparison to Linux. You'll find a quick, responsive machine. A great bundled development environment, best of class bundled apps, and a hardware accellerated X11 right out of the box.

ffakr.

Re:Yeah, but...

[Graff]

MacOSX is fundamentally minor tweaks on proven technology and proven interface design, using a proven operating system that's older than the Mac itself. I don't see why anybody thinks MacOSX is cutting edge.

Mac OS X is cutting edge for the simple fact that it is the first OS to combine all of these proven technologies (and many more) into a package that just works and is slick to boot. Individually these technologies are nothing new but combined they represent the cutting edge of OS design.

One nitpick: the kernel is Mach (well, Mach-based), the BSD tools are layered on top of that (along with GNU, NextStep, and much more)

NOT Linux OR Apple, but Linux AND Apple

[peaceful_bill]

I'm an elementary school teacher, and run an OS X lab with 30 flat panel iMacs and a nice G4 server. We also have a bevy of eMacs and older iMacs in the classroom.

We use the Apple lease program, which let's us (a very small school district in Massachusetts) buy new technology every 3 years.

The thing of it is, last night I bought 3 decent machines from Tiger Direct, and a switch for about $700.00 I'll install RH linux on them, and use them for all sorts of stuff (web server, DNS, DHCP, SQUID, etc...). I currently use an old linux box for SQUID in my lab. problems with it == none !! Now that 10.3 is using LDAP to authenticate, I might fiddle with that in our lab.

As a public institution, I feel we have a fiscal responsibility to the taxpayers (really) and Linux has a place in our schools.

Apple has made Unix available to the masses, but the cost of entry is something to consider. *sigh*

I used to fret about Linux VS OS X and now I say how do they best work together.

oh, and by the way, if anyone has any suggestions for me, listen to this:

98% of my students have computers with internet access at home. Out of those 98%, 95% have windows machines. I have fought like hell to keep Macs in our school, but the onslaught of windows feels almost inevitable (my strategy so far, is to buy as much OS X software as I can, so replacing it with wondows stuff would be prohibitive). What is an effective way to promote the use of elseOS, when "Everyone else is using Windows" ?

I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

After "cutting my teeth" with Linux for the last 8 years (from kernel 1.2 & first slackware), I finally got tired of the administration. I learned most of what I wanted to know about unix, and now I just want to use it. OSX to me is the dream system I've been waiting for since I went from Amiga to Unix.

Unfortunately I'm not the ambitious 20-something I was when I started with unix. I don't want to recompile my kernel every week any more. All the linux I run now is imbedded (net integrator box and dreambox satellite recievers), exactly because I want the power without the maintainence. I think OSX is going to become the burnout hacker's choice of desktop OS exactly for that reason. All the power, none of the fuss. The point is that it's a finished OS. My G5 gives me an experience superior to any desktop OS with superior power than the Sun, AIX, and OSF workstations of just a few years ago. And a full unix implementation to boot! I couldn't be more happy.

Granted there a few non-unix annoyances, but for the most part, it is what I waited and worked 8 years for linux to become, today. It amazes me how fast they threw it together and how well it came out. It is definately the best example of a successful non-open-source project coming together I have seen in a long time.