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Bill Joy on Linux and Mac OS X

Posted by pudge on from the pass-the-kool-aid dept.

(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.'"

13 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. In a sense, he's right by rkabir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:In a sense, he's right by Spyky · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

  2. Missing the point ... by OzPixel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. UI Guidelines for Linux? by G4from128k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
    1. Re:UI Guidelines for Linux? by Arkham · · Score: 5, Insightful


      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.

      --
      - Vincit qui patitur.
    2. Re:UI Guidelines for Linux? by Mr.+Show · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  4. 8Gb RAM? by oberondarksoul · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does 'overkill' mean nothing to these people?

    --
    And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
  5. painful to say by schapman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Wouldnt you like to be a pepper too?
  6. Slightly Egotistical by nathanh · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  7. I personally find this very interesting by nthomas · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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

  8. I'm only 26, so... by vivekb · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who's Bill Joy?

  9. Re:Yeah, but... by Graff · · Score: 5, Informative
    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)
    --
    Sapere aude!
  10. I agree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.