An Answer To "What is Mac OS X?"

XCube writes: "'What is Mac OS X?' is a fascinating article over at KernelThread.com. According to Amit Singh it's a hacker-over-friendly answer to that question and a low-level taste of Apple's OS. The extensive article covers many details on Mac OS X: history, Mac firmware & boot loader, system architecture, kernel, startup, file systems, app environments, programming facilities, available software, and more. A great read if you are interested in Mac OS X, though some stuff is too technical methinks. On second thought, this may be a better read if you're *not* interested in Mac OS X! The author says he wrote it to introduce Mac OS X to the Linux User's Group at his work."

Comments

Carbon's roots are older

[saddino]

Carbon. This is a set of procedural C-based APIs for Mac OS X that are based on the old Mac OS 9 API (actually dating back as far back as Mac OS 8.1)

To nitpick: actually, a lot of the Carbon APIs go as far back as System 1.0 -- most of QuickDraw for example.

Re:OS X on x86, I wish

[JudgeFurious]

Well, then I'm thinking your best bet is to go out and find yourself a used blue and white G3 (can be had very reasonably priced on ebay IF you take your time and don't rush it) and follow that with a CPU upgrade. They're coming down to a fairly comfortable price for those machines. Get that B&W going about 500Mhz and add Panther. Don't worry about the price of Panther (I figure if you're going to pirate XP then why pay for Panther?) and you got your firsthand look at OSX.

I pretty much did it that way and then decided I loved this shit enough to give them $3K to see it run on their new machines. I'm not the least bit disappointed either.

Everybody's different but as far as I'm concerned to hell with Windows and screw waiting on Linux to get it's collective desktop shit together. OSX beats both.

Re:Potential Linux Switchers: Read Up

[happyfrogcow]

I'm sorry, I'm not using Linux because it's a strong desktop (it's good enough for me, i'd call it adequate). I don't fight to get the latest software, I use what works and don't need to have the hottest, newest bits running through my processor. Most security updates are irellevant as I have hardly any services running, but I update the ones I need. If I had accesories, i'd make sure they worked with Linux before buying them, or were from a company who has a history of devulging enough specs for people to write device drivers themselves.

I use personally use Linux to get away from the liscensing nonsense that MicroAppleSunSoft tries to cram down my throat and sockets. They force too much upon me. It's my hardware, not theirs. I use Linux because it is Free. I use OSX at work and MS-Windows at work because I have to. What management decides is out of my control.

"...without a call to your other Linux buddies..."

Half the fun of Linux is the community built around it.

OS X is ...

[josepha48]

.. the GUI that UNIX could have had.

I guess I'm suprised that UNIX just accepted the CDE and never really extended it to be something really cool. At its base OS X is BSD, and Panther actually comes with a version of X one could install. Personally I like OS X, but macs hardware is just to expensive for a poor man like me. IMHO Mac OS X is the uppermiddle class mans extra friendly UNIX. I'll take Linux cause I'm poor ;-)

Re:Potential Linux Switchers: Read Up

[Brandybuck]

And this was the way some proprietary software was going for a while. In the beginning, it was unclear how copyright applied to software, so the proprietarists came up with licensing instead. Like humans coming down out of the trees, this is generally been regarded as a bad move. But once it became clear that copyright applied to software, some proprietarists thought it silly to saddle their users with contracts, or to spend years in court arguing that "read-to-agree" schemes constituted contractual assent. They didn't want to control their users, they just wanted to make sure their software wasn't redistributed. Standard copyright law (plus an attached disclaimer of warranty) was all they needed.

I think Borland was the first major software vendor to use a copyright-based proprietary license (the famous "book" license). Some other companies followed suit, Apple included. Unfortunately, the old unilateral-contract-based schemes required hordes of lawyers, and lawyers love nothing better than to control other people.

Apple's proprietary software is still proprietary. But it's in a completely different class then Microsoft software. Nothing is being crammed down anyone's throat. While I still prefer Free Software, I have no problems buying and using proprietary software if the license terms are based on copyright rather than on some lawyer's delusion of how the world should work.

Re:OS-X Quartz display blows away X-Windows

[be-fan]

Um, what crappy widgets, and what horrible fonts?

Widgets are the domain of the toolkits, and I think Qt's are quite pretty. And FreeType is a much better font-renderer than the Apple one. Apple's renderer hints too little (leading to uneven color weight on normal-res screens) and Microsoft's hints too much (very forced, distored glyph shapes). Freetype has a nice mix balance between contrast and proper glyph shapes.

Re:On the Subject of Games

[inkswamp]

Two, by the time the Mac port comes out, the PC version is usually in the bargain bin, so Mac players are paying $50 for what PC users are now paying $20 for. And if you're like me, I never buy a new release when I know it's going to be half price in 6 months.

I'm not sure how long you've been using Macs, but I've watched that gap closing rapidly in the last few years. Game companies have shown and startlingly renewed interest in getting the Mac versions out either simultaneous with the PC version or hot on the heels of. I can't think of many top games that haven't had a Mac version out in a matter of days.

There are still some, however, I admit. One issue to consider is that some game companies wait to see if a game is big enough to bother porting to the Mac. True, that causes some lag, but it effectively weeds out most of the garbage and if you're a casual game player, that's a small blessing. I've played a lot of the games that PC users brag about having and IMO, it's not impressive. It's like the old Dennis Miller quote about KMart clothing (you know, back before he became Bush's little bitch): "Dontcha love these cheap clothing stores? Two of shit... is shit. If they really wanna fuck you, they'll give you three." Lots of shitty games doesn't mean much to me. I'd rather deal with a gap in the release times and know that most of what's available is actually worth buying.

And yes, I'm well aware of Half-Life, but those kinds of situations are few and far between.

Re:Potential Linux Switchers: Read Up

[drinkypoo]

I agree that open firmware is a thing of beauty. However we should eventually attain the same level of convenience with LinuxBIOS. (The problem right now is diminutive EEPROM/FLASH bios.) However on PCs you no longer have to worry about IRQs, DMA conflicts, or IO ranges, as long as you're not using legacy hardware. These days, some machines even have no ISA bus whatsoever - Even the legacy PS/2 keyboard and mouse are on PCI. Macs still have to deal with interrupts and such, they just don't bother you with it, and neither do modern PCs. I haven't had to deal with IRQs and shit since the last time I installed a non-pnp ISA card. Which was a long, LONG time ago.

Mac hardware hasn't been special since PCs went to the PCI bus and apple hardware stopped having the drivers in rom on the card. NuBus was a paragon of autoconfiguration equalled by no one but the Amiga. But now that drivers are in the software and not adapter ROM, that advantage is nonexistent.

It's also worth pointing out that until the G5, apple hardware has had poor bus architecture and slow memory buses. So while the designs are supposedly clean (I have a yosemite so I know that is a lie; I am also familiar with the IIfx, which didn't even follow Apple's standards, let alone anyone else's, and even needed a nonstandard SCSI terminator) they have usually been dated. The G5 is an exception; it sure would be nice if OSX were 64 bit though. Apple finally has the superbadass hardware, and their OS doesn't even take full advantage of it. By the time they have a 64 bit OSX, AMD's hammer chips will have come down further in price, and XP-64 will be running on them, and they'll squander their "lead" once more.

Conclusion from reading the article

[Overly Critical Guy]

OS X is the UNIX desktop Linux has been trying to be for 10+ years now. If OS X came out for x86, would the drive for desktop Linux effectively die?

Re:Potential Linux Switchers: Read Up

[Paradox]

A few things about this:

1. Apple has a unified hotkey system. In panther, all the system-wide hotkeys are rebindable. Applications override this, and they can (and do) offer to change the keybindings. There are also tools to change keybindings arbitrarily, and even on regexs of the menu items. :)
2. Apple's text widgets are configurable in the extreme. This can be accomplished both at the application level, or at a global level. Developers can override this functionality in the individual application case. You might notice that OS X text widgets respond to many C-(something) keys (C-a to go to the beginning of a line, etc...). This is because of a global config file which individual users and appliations can override to taste. It's quite possible to make the text widgets perform in almost any manner possible (although it's unlikely that you'll see Emacs or VIM behavior without an InputManager.
3. The component methodology is more pervasive in KDE because developers want it to be. Nothing restricts people in the OS X world from writing their widgets in that fashion (most do!). Few people take it to that level in OS X. Not because it's hard, but because there is seldom reason to. This is nice, I'll grant, but it's not really that much of a benefit.
4. KDE's MDI suffers from the general problems of MDI everywhere. I'd say Apple's minimalistic MDI stuff is a feature. Especially with Expose, MDI is seldom necessary. The notable examples are web-browsers. Even then, I find myself using tabs in Safari less and less. Why, when I get a better idea of what's going on with Expose?
5. KDevelop is probably more mature than XCode, which is quite new (albeit based off the venerable ProjectManager, it's a very different machine under the hood as some Apple developers have intimated to me.
6. NOTHING KDE has comes even close to the awesome power of the Developer suite that you get when you sign on with OSX. When it was designed, it was 20 years ahead of its time, and no one else has even begun to catch up.
7. As a developer, I balk at C++ frameworks. Sorry, C++ is rapidly becoming more of a nuisance than anything else.
   
   This is, of course, subjective. Since I win my daily bread as a C++ and Ruby coder, I'll leave it as obvious which language I prefer to work in.