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Confessions of a Mac OS X User
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting commentary on OSDir.com about one Mac OS X user's guilt over using it instead of Linux on his laptop, and how he's been burned by the dreaded iBook logic board problems so much that it underlines the tyranny of hardware vendor lock-in: it's not that Mac OS X isn't F/OSS, but that it only runs on Apple hardware. It also raises the obvious question: have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?"
Apple have come up with some innovative products, but their market share remains tiny. Sadly, though, many buyers have been mislead by the marketing and eye-candy, and desperately try to justify their overpriced purchases to themselves on forums around the Net. Let's see what they really mean...
"MacOS X is everything Linux wants to be."
"Despite the fact that Linux is just code and can't WANT to be anything, I truly believe that it'd love to be a single-vendor, single-platform, sluggish half-proprietary OS with dwindling market share. Linux would love to throw away its impressively growing corporate takeup for that."
"Apple hardware is for real computer lovers."
"It's no hassle to use a plethora of keyboard combos to make up for the patronising one-button mouse. Despite the fact that my hands have FIVE fingers, and multiple-buttons make Web browsing so much more pleasant, I prefer my computer to be treat me like a special-needs child."
"Aqua makes me so much more productive!"
"My non-techie friends drool over the transparency and scaling effects, even though UI research has shown that they add practically nothing to getting real work done. It feels like KDE 2 on a Pentium 200, and I can't change to a light and fast WM, but those drop-shadows must make me work so quickly!"
"OSX shows that Apple is committed to open source."
"OpenDarwin.org and its community of about 27 is surely not just a token gesture by Apple. Pretty much nobody uses pure Darwin, and all the crucial components of the system are closed and require me to spend money just to get major OS updates, but they're really helping the community somehow."
"You get what you pay for with Apple hardware."
"My iBook was made by in Taiwan by AlphaTop and has design and build quality flaws (needing foam sheets jammed in to stop the common problem of the keyboard scratching the screen). Meanwhile thousands of Mac laptop owners are trying to sue Apple over poorly-made logic boards. But it's silvery and cost far more than an x86 laptop of better spec, so it must be much higher quality!"
"...blah blah MHz myth blah..."
"Although there's truth in PPC being more elegant than x86, it's crushing that the top-of-the-range 1.5 GHz chip is slaughtered by the equivalent 3 GHz Pentium 4. However, Steve Jobs showed some vague Photoshop filter benchmarks at the last MacWorld, so being a leprotard, I'm convinced."
This joke is so not funny anymore.
Thank you.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
First off, I couldn't RTFM because it's /.'ed already.
The nifty side of my wants a Mac. The practical side of me knows that's a bad idea. Apple has had plenty of high profile problems with hardware quality lately. This applies even to iPod. Support isn't guaranteed to be good either.
OSX 10.3 may have fixed the sluggish UI problem. 10.2 was definitely slow feeling (on iMac G4s).
Linux may not be "quite ready" for the desktop, but that's a very arbitrary judgement. Given some circumstances, Linux is quite capable and ready. Given other circumstances, it's not ready. It depends on your situation. It is indeed a matter of time (1-2 years perhaps) until Linux's desktop polish reaches the level of quality that most people would be very pleased with.
Meanwhile, as much as I despise MS, their XP OS has been very good to me, both on desktop PC, and especially on my Sony laptop. It really does work well, and by using Firebird instead of IE, most issues of network/internet risk don't apply.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Linux: Silicon Valley concrete tilt-up, military quonset hut or similar general purpose warehouse. Fundamentally utilitarian but infinitely malleable. Generally not pretty or aesthetically pleasing beyond the utilitarian ideal.
BSD: a higher end business or cognicenti chic utilitarian building like a modern skyscraper with cubes or actually Apple's HQ building. More presentable and reliable yet nicely utilitarian, but the art on the walls is commercial art, nothing bleeding edge or daring.
Windows: the old house that's had add-ons for 100 years with obvious clashing and bad-taste mixes of styles like colonial combined with ranch combined with roccoco, or 3rd generation white-trash trailer decorated with velvet Elvis paintings and tourist kitsch with mail-order sun porch added. Nice if you are impressed by shiny objects or think a gun-rack is a living room accessory.
Mac OS 9: beautiful, monolithic museum or gov't building. Inspires and creates loyalty with those who don't need to worry if or how the boiler repairs are done. Not very customizable when you dig deeper or want to alter the basic aethetic assumptions but always pretty, slim and presentable. The old SGI building off 101 that is the new Computer Musuem. The NY Guggenhiem. The US Capital.
Mac OS X: the same pretty exterior as Mac OS 9 but now you suddenly find the beauty is stage dressing for the Linux/BSD-style utiliarianism. More like a Hollywood soundstage where things are tweakable yet the illusion of any aesthetic you choose is on top. Sort of the Riemann Sphere of utilitarianism vs. usability and aesthetics (the extremes of the axis have all met at infinity - if it weren't such an obtusely nerdy analogy it'd be a great marketing line).
BTW, if you find these analogies interestings you might want to read Stewart Brand's book "How Buildings Learn" - highly recommended particularly vis-a-vis design patterns, usability from an architectural (building) view - all applicable to computers and software. Yes, the same Stewart Brand as Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, and Clock of the Long Now.
Just curious by why doesn't apple port OSX to the intel platform? The only reason I can think of is that they're concerned they will lose out on hardware sales. But if OSX was available for other types of hardware I would give it a try and maybe even switch. End result is, if MacOS is as good as they say, more people would switch to it which would probably lead to more hardware sales.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Okay, here is the deal. Been running linux since like what? Slackware betas? And since then till now, I've yet to take one standard distro and have it work with the softwares out there easily, smoothly, and as responsively as I could on say Windows or MacOSX.
It isn't because of Linux. It is because different teams started and decided that they wanted their version of graphical libraries to be the best and people built their GUI's atop of those libraries. Be it GTK or QT or X11 or whatever.
Then you have all of the interprocess communication going on different protocols and the cross-compatibility goes to hell.
Sure, now Gnome and KDE are gravitating towards a common interface, but GNOME is still too slow and KDE is too bogged down with endless menus to control the WM environment.
Add to this the fact that upgrading the libraries includes a risk that my existing apps may not work without a recompile/reinstall and that my WM's may suddnely not work right again.
Add to that the fact that the process could take anywhere from a few minutes(good case) to half a day or more if interdependancies crop up.
I wanted a laptop I could depend on while on the road and away from my server and my other backup computers. This is something I'm going to take on the road with me, keep in my backpack, or take on a plane.
If something doesn't work, I can't afford to spend half a day reconfiguring or rebuilding the system or worse yet, have to recompile the kernel and face a non-booting system.
I don't want to support MS. I also don't want a high maintenance operating system which would kill my usable work time. (Time spent "tweaking" and "fixing" my laptop/computer is not considered usable work time.) So I went with MacOSX. It IS Unix under the pretty interface. The applications WORK with one another.
I've owned mine for a year now and have no complaints about it save the DVD/iDVD issue with iBooks and other non-internal-superdrive systems.
I've compiled the GNU toolset on the system and have just about all the utilities I had on my Linux boxes. I even have an X11 setup and run Enlightenment as a WM.
The fact is this: You use the right tool for the job.
Linux is great for servers. To argue this point would be a waste of time.
Linux is not ready for prime time on the laptop/desktop. It is still too fragmented as far as interoperability of apps and there are too many graphical library dependancies that too many WM's depend on.
When I go to conventions, I can work with my digital photography work on the spot. I can instantly switch my location profile to match the wireless provider in the exhibition halls/hotel/etc. I plug in a printer and it works.
with MacOSX, I get work done. With Linux, my work IS the OS. And I just don't trust Window's security for desktop or server usage.
Do I feel guilty? No. I get work done now. Do I still use Linux? Yes. Where it makes sense to: the home file server/email server/firewall system.
Linux needs a desktop. Not necessarily a unified one, but at the very least, a common standard for which all other desktops can work together with. So Apps aren't failing to run because GTK+ isn't installed or that Glib-2.x isn't installed(in the right place), or that the program failed, core dumped, and needs to be recompiled with the latest version of another library set which I can't install because another program would break if I changed it. And if I put it in a different location, then the dependancy checking system fails.
*sigh* Long Rant? Yes. But after a decade of Linux at home, at school, and at work... I've decided that if I'm spending all of my time "making the OS work", then the OS isn't working for that task.
Winged Power Photography
You "get what you pay for.." is an insult to all the hardworking OSS coders and the academic ones before them
It's definately an insult to all the KDE programmers who handed Safari to Apple on goddamn platter.
OS X wouldn't exist without open source.