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Syllable 0.5.4 Released
AtheOSParrot writes "Version 0.5.4 of the Syllable operating system has been released. The lightweight, BeOS-alike is aimed squarely at finally realising the dream of bringing an easy-to-use, free software desktop to everyday users. 0.5.4 is a significant milestone in this direction with the integration of the new desktop, which is completely unimpeded by any legacy X-Windows foundations or toolkits beneath. This is no tin-pot bootloader with bitmaps snapped on; other features include SMP, networking, ATA/ATAPI, audio & video, 2D acceleration, GCC, USB & a 64-bit journaled FS with attributes. With desktop Linux still not having dented the 1% mark, will Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE? Also reported on OSNews.com, Golem.de and Linuxfr.org."
I just installed this under Virtual PC (dont laugh).. Ok first off 5.4 doesnt work you have to use the 5.3 then upgrade to 5.4.. Additionally you need to append the flags
uspace_end=0xf7ffffff enable_ata_dma=false ata_pci_force_generic=true
on ther kenel line for grub.
GCC & the other tool chains have to be downloaded etc etc..
What do I think?
Well for starters the web browser doesnt like sourceforge, so downloading the packages is a pain. Secondly it's slow. Thirdly I tried to build UAE under it, and GCC wend Zombie....
This looks nice, but it's hardly stable... maybe in a few more iterations it'll shape up.
They should begin by changing its name
...for the BeOS and Eugenia Loli-Queru flamage to begin.
will Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE?
:P
I sure hope not!
Would be a shame to have all the countless hours spent installing my Gentoo, go to waste...
Sigs are for the weak.
All right, everybody. Brace yourselves for a flood of "what's wrong with X-Windows foundations or toolkits?!" posts!
The owls are not what they seem
Noting like the one liner comments thrown out there as quickly as possible purely to get some free mode points getting thrown away.
.54 release, AND its making significant, rapid progress. Shouldn't you be saying something encouraging like "THANKS GUYS FOR BRING An OPEN SOURCE, X-WINDOWS FREE OS TO THE DESKTOP!"
Gee, just because anyone aims to do anything doesn't mean they will actually succeed! Its not new unless it is a 100% finished product!
Come on. Its a milestone release. Quit functional for a
Or maybe "Keep up the good work"
Sheesh, no wonder people don't finish their work, pessimists get you down!
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Nope, won't be making any real waves. Face it, BeOS is as dead as the Amiga and attempts to revive it are equally doomed.
Why?
Because there just isn't any burning need for it. Windows has all the users that money can buy, UNIX has the hearts and minds of all the elite power users and the research crowd while the Mac has the fashion police in it's camp. What demographic wants to be Be compatible? What major software base is unlocked by a Free implementation? None.
Democrat delenda est
Edmund:
Yes, another great Christmas tradition: explaining the rules eight times to the Thicky Twins. The round hasn't in fact started yet. It's got to be a specific book. For instance, if it was The Bible, I would go like that [holding up two fingers] to indicate that there are two syllables in it...
Prince:
Two what?
Edmund:
Two syllables.
Prince:
Two silly bulls? I don't think so, Blackadder -- not in The Bible. I can remember a fatted calf, but, as I recall, that was quite a sensible animal. Oh, ah! It's it, um, er, Noah's Ark, with the, er, two pigs, two ants, and two silly bulls? Is that it?
Edmund:
Two syllables.
Prince:
What?
Edmund:
Look, we're getting confused; let's start again, shall we?
Prince:
No, let's not, Blackadder. I think the whole game's getting a bit sylla, to be honest. How about a nice Christmas story instead?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I hope that'll change in the future.
Why is it that all these "new" operating systems (read skyOS, Syllable, etc) always just look like some crappy KDE theme? I mean, if you're going to write an entirely new operating system, and then just use *nix apps on top of it, why even bother?
Linux on the desktop is here. It's happening as we speak and it's fine.
This isn't some "far away dream" to "someday" have Linux work as a desktop OS. It's here now. People all around the world use it as their sole OS on the desktop and get along fine with it.
So the FUD of "Linux isn't "here" yet on the desktop" is just nonsense.
It's here there and everywhere...all you have to do is open your eyes. But I suppose if it doesn't work exactly like Windows then it can't be "here" yet. Then I guess OS/X isn't "here" yet either.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
The latest Development Newsletter just arrived too, summarizing recent developments in the community. It's a great way to keep up-to-date with the project -- no need to trawl through the mailing lists.
See September's issue, and more, here:
http://msa.section.me.uk/sdn/
Additionally, a Flash demo can be found on this page.
I just happen to have some unpartitioned space on one of my drives. I think I'll try this out sometime soon. But the screenshots make it seem as if its just like linux with a new, non-revolutionary, desktop environment. Behind the scenes it may be different, but that doesn't matter to non-geeks.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Can somebody tell me something that this system is better at than, say, Linux + KDE or Gnome? What does it do better than ReactOS? What does it do better than Linux + Y (or any other X11 replacement system) does?
http://syllable.org.nyud.net:8090/ Just in case. I don't suppose their server is running on Syllable yet? That would be cool.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
Hopefully, they have made it work under QEMU and fixed the IDE driver...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
> will Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE?
short answer: no
long answer: yes
"Just look at what happened with Freedows."
Didn't Jay Leno do a commercial for them?
While on the topic of alternatives for the desktop, what's happening in QNX-land? QNX is a very nice system, POSIX-compliant, based on a microkernel, nice GUI, good scalability, several open-source titles available. I haven't heard any news about it in a while, though. Is anyone working on an open-source clone yet?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So let me get this straight: it looks just like a typical gnu/linux desktop (circa 1998), but it has less compatibility with current software and less functionality due to the removal of x-windows?
The developers should give it their best, but I see no reason to expect this to have better luck than gnu/linux in taking away windows marketshare.
Of all the typical reasons that gnu/linux is not yet the dominant OS (inertia, user familiarity with windows, games, office software, simplicity), I don't see any that Syllable does better than GNOME on gnu/linux.
Replace IE like Firefox??? That is only because firefox can basically do all the things IE can (visit all the web pages, same functionality (even more some may argue)). This OS doesn't seem to have that leverage over Windows, and as long as Redmond can keep on putting out software that is mostly self-compatible only and get most of the population addicted to it, there isn't too much chance of this os replacing windows like firefox did to IE.
which is completely unimpeded by any legacy X-Windows foundations
Or legacy applications or games...
Nah, I'm just messing, I wish them luck. Maybe I'll try it out, I always had a thing for obscure OSes.
The 'LiveCD' download link for Syllable doesn't have any files currently.
I feel the biggest reason stopping at least technically inclined people from switching from Windows to Linux is "it looks nice, but I need program XX to work." The gap between mainstream programs in windows and in linux is closing, but that has taken many years and lots of work and commitment by developers. I don't mean to negate their efforts, I just think that Windows, OSX, and Linux are giving developers enough to worry about and they don't have time to worry about another operating system.
Of course they can do whatever they want, but I wonder if they have considered that their efforts could be directed to Linux development instead. But don't get me wrong, I think they're doing a good job and their efforts should be applauded.
Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE?
Completely fail on the marketplace against it you mean?
The most common complaint about Syllable I have seen is the one that I also have, it just doesn't boot natively on my hardware. An OS that won't boot on a stock Asus motherboard with a AthlonXP 2400, Radeon9000 and plain ol' IDE drives is not going to make a dent even with Linux users.
:-P
I would love to try my hand at helping to port software over, even if it is nothing more than working on helping to get Python ported over and write native bindings for Syllable. But I don't have the time to hack away at a hobbyist OS that won't even boot on common hardware. If it only works in VMWare, it might as well not work at all for me. Even the hacked new distros of BeOS booted on that hardware for God's sake!
The syllable guys need to spend more of their time working on getting such basic necessities as actually having it bootable on all common hardware before they even think of challenging Windows. Firefox is a bad project to compare Syllable to because Firefox is built on an incredibly mature foundation that is over 5 years and millions of dollars of corporate R&D money in the making. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't Mozilla proper actually closing in on 6-7 years old now?
What would really help is if some of the Linux kernel hackers would take a break from Linux and work on the Syllable kernel. OSS does need a plan B for the desktop, and going from Fedora or Mandrake to Debian sadly doesn't count
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The hardware compatability list is so limited that the chances of this operating system competing with Windows for the desktop market is near nil.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
I was going to write a reply in response to some of the comment above, some of them said something like that there's "no need for another OS. We already have the alternative - Linux!". Well, in some parts of the world we like to have more than just two alternatives to choose from! And I was also going to make the point that we *do* need more alternatives because an OS should be *great*, not slow and bloated like Windows, or decent but still slow and in some cases bloated like most Linux dists and the BSD's. Those of you who were once Amiga users know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, before rushing to the defence of Syllable, I thought it'd download it and install it on an PIII that I happen to have for spare, just to make sure I actually was going to have a point.
But wtf? No full installation available! You can download a live CD, download a "basic CD" download the disks... But to get the "Premium CD" (with sourcecode and all the goodies), you have to pay US$10.
Well, that's it for me, I'm not interested anymore. If I had been able to download the full installation and had liked it, then I would gladly have supported them with $10 (or $100 - just got my salary!), but this... No thank you. I guess Linux (and the BSD's) are THE alternative(s) for a good reason.
I think that Syllable or not, thinking of an alternative OS that has the same relationship to Windows as FireFox has to IE is exactly the right mentality.
FireFox was the browser that was supposed to be targeted at people knowledgable enough to install it, who we're limited by the IE experience.
When we talk about Desktop Linux for example, we often talk about "easy enough for my grandma to use" which is precicely the wrong litmus test. I've been idlling on a linux distro at home some, and my goal has always been to make the Linux distro that all the XP power users want to use.
Think about it. Every windows user I know who ran or runs IE has a popup blocker installed, the google toolbar, AdAware, and has half a dozen windows open most of the time. FireFox is perfect for them, because it was targeted at them. Grandma (well, not mine, she won't touch the computer, and my grandfather is a computer geek) will just click on the three icons she knows how to use - Linux, Windows, SkyOS, Syllable, Macintosh, it's all pretty colors to her. So don't target her!
I've got an OS here. It's multiuser design makes it hard to get viruses or for your sister to install spyware which screws over everybody else. It comes with a firewall, it comes with antivirus, it comes with a multiprotocol instant messeging client, it comes with a tabbed browser, it comes with a pop up blocker, it comes with a spam filter, it comes with a word processor, it comes with a spreadsheet, it comes with an image editor. It comes with all of the things you pirate to make your pirate copy of WinXP not suck, all nicely polished and working together out of the box. It's legal, it's free, it's simple, it's featureful. It doesn't dumb things down for your Grandma, it doesn't pander you with saturated colors and friendly but unhelpful error messages, it doesn't talk down to you for not already understanding everything about it. It's the OS for people who care what OS they're running.
Build it and they will come. Be it Syllable, SkyOS, Linux, BSD, or hell, Windows.
Q: Is it possible to use Syllable in a text-only mode?
A: No, you have to use the Terminal. Syllable is designed around its own GUI and cannot support a text-only interface.
Isn't that the same mistake Microsoft has been making since Windows 95?
* "Truth" is a 5-letter word.
* "Idiot" is also a five-letter word!
* 5=5, therefore truth=idiot.
QED
If they were to show us something truly novel it would be easy for people to get motivated to participate. Syllable is functionally indistinguishable from a moden linux distro.
I just clicked the link to the main page,
On there is a link to download it, and followed for the live CD.
The link is dead!!!
from their site (emphasis mine):
LiveCD4
This LiveCD is based on LiveCD3, but makes use of a RAM disk, which makes it stable, without the need for floppy disks, or other obscure things.
It's as easy as it can get: Download - Burn - Boot!
BurningShadow - 21/8-04 18:15:15
This LiveCD does not include the possibility to install Syllable.
By downloading InstCD1 you can get a Syllable installation, similar to this LiveCD.
Username/Password for login: root/root
MD5: 6c24aba2b94e390f93af13ef259d43ae
It is no longer possible to download LiveCD4.
-------------------
There are a number of comments posted with offers of help with hosting, mirrors etc.
Anyone know where I can get the live version from to try???
liqbase
Um... Well.. actually nothing happened to Freedows.
I have been using Linux off and on as a desktop, but have been using MacOS X as my main desktop for about 2 years now. You can't even compare the two. Linux with KDE or GNOME is, no offense to those projects, barely a 9 year old child's bicycle with training wheels, while OSX is a Harley. Linux is barely at the point that Windows was with Windows 2000, and it isn't showing much signs of competing with XP-SP2 and Longhorn.
.app bundle to the hard disk, with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage the myriad dependencies or run rpm manually. Linux is a great desktop, provided you want to only use the software that you are given by the distributor and/or have someone to maintain it for you. OSX, all that is quite unnecessary.
OSX is a very fast desktop oriented OS and it is the only desktop OS capable of really competing in a market whose needs go beyond the strictly utilitarian, like the home market. When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the
I like Linux, but it really isn't there yet. The majority of the people I know at least, would be scared to death of it.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
A couple days ago I was talking to a co-worker who said that he loved to try out new operating systems. He will be one of the people to try Syllable. In addition, people who like to be different will like to use Syllable.
I agree with you that it won't be making any real waves, but I'm still going to try it.
Honk if you're horny.
Syllable aims to be a usable Desktop OS, so it might be kind of silly to run their site off of it ;-)
It's called a status-quo. And Humans do NOT like to change unless there is a justified reason to do so.
Thus...the Windows user install based will always be the popular one.
Life is not for the lazy.
It was once suggested that DEC by Apple. Use their Vax Servers and Mac as the desktop. (Vax as a big Mac?)
.
Could a Syllable desktop world with Linux Servers become a working combo.
Since applications in the FOSS world can be recompiled/ported/developed to run on both, for those applications it makes sense to have on both.
For those how want both on the same system there can use VM applications to run
Syllable on Linux or Linux on Syllable. Or they could be even more closely integrated.
Anybody have a .torrent for it?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Seriously, what's so bad about X that you want to see it replaced. OK, it isn't perfect, but it has only, in my view, minor flaws, and these are being worked on (The new XOrg seems to be making rapid progress). Some possible faults:
Drivers: good, but we still need the latest hardware support, and yesterday. nVidia's binary driver is actually very good, but a GPL one would be far nicer. Not really X's fault.
Configuration: XF86Config isn't especially pleasant. That said, most distros set this up anyway, so not really a problem.
Resources: X is "supposedly" a resource hog. Well, GPE (using X) runs fine on my little Zaurus. All the bloat is in modular extensions.
Copy/Paste: Some people find it confusing. It's not, when you remember that X has *2* buffers, one for select->middle click; the other for Ctrl-C->Ctrl-V.
Ugliness: Yes, if you are using some of the older widgets, I'd agree. But you have a choice! QT/GTK are both good looking.
On the good side, X is compatible with lots of things, it works well over a fast network, it's stable, and we have it here and now! XOrg are developing new features.
(See here: http://www.freedesktop.org/XOrg/X11R68ScreenShots )
So if you really don't like 'x' about 'X', it's better to change it than to throw it out altogether!
"Syllable is not competing with Windows or Linux."
--and--
"Syllable is intended to be a cool replacement for Windows or Linux."
With desktop Linux still not having dented the 1% mark, will Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE?
No it won't, because Linux has something that took it a lot of time to achieve: mindshare. At best, Syllable can be a training OS that is unencumbered by Unix's long history to develop things that haven't been done before. Then those ideas can be ported to Windows and/or Linux.
Having said all that, I hope the Syllable team can prove me wrong.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
But the best thing to do with it now is abandon it.
To make an OS useful requires a ton of device drivers. These guys have barely scratched the surface of what's needed. Even today, after thousands of man-years of effort, GNU/Linux hasn't achieved the level of driver support that Windows has.
Abandoning X has the consequence that lots of apps will not run on Syllable. Seems a giant leap backwards. Presumably, Syllable is aimed only at home users who just have one PC? Somebody who has a LAN is going to want X. I couldn't work without it.
The free-software community has barely enough resources to support one OS really well. GNU/Linux needs all the work we can put into it. Trying to promote a competitor will, if successful, divide our resources and make it much harder to establish any free operating system as a serious competitor to Windows on the desktop.
Finally I won't be burdened with the well designed, extensive, stable and extremely functional X windows desktop! And by not re-using either the BSD or GNU kernels and toolchains, this OS finally discards the last vesitges of existing open source software to reinvent the wheel one more time! Yay!
"while OSX is a Harley"
:-P
Yeah, a flathead Harley
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
If you can't do everything, and I mean everything without the command line then FORGET IT. I still see .profile and bash. too bad, but the next desktop should be designed by folks that HATE LINUX.
Ahh, the spirit of open source:
Developer: "I'm working on Y. It is a better version of X!"
OSS community: "You foolish mortal! You should be working on X! Not Y! You can't possibly best X!"
Developer: "I like working on Y though!"
OSS community: "You're just wasting your time, work on X and make it like Y!"
There are very specific reasons people don't use it, X-windows being one of those big reasons.
I call bullshit.
Perhaps it's cool for the Slashbots of the world to keep complaining about X. You've been doing it for years. You've been complaining about it while not noticing that X has been improving by leaps and bounds lately -- particularly now that some innovative people are back at the helm of X.Org and FreeDesktop.Org. There's virtually no performance penalty for network transparency, there's all that cool alpha compositing stuff in there now, and some very sophisticated desktops have been built on top of it. X IS NOT A PROBLEM.
In fact, by building a new operating system that doesn't have the X Window System in it, all you're doing is throwing away the existing pool of applications. The "average user" doesn't care how the window system was built; he only cares whether his applications run. And run they do, every time you boot up one of the millions of desktop Linux systems already in existence.
The only reason Linux has not yet penetrated the desktop market in double-digit percentages is because of the chicken-and-egg problems surrounding application development vs. end user take-up. It's happening, but it's happening very slowly. And it's not going to happen with a BeOS knockoff, because that reduces your application pool to almost zero.
True, Linux has a few more technology hurdles to overcome, such as automatic detection and mounting of various types of removable storage, and these problems are currently being addressed by projects like D-Bus. We're just about at the point of pulling past Microsoft in the desktop ease-of-use department. The problems are all people-related now.
If the marketshare of Windows is going to fall, it's going to fall to Linux and Mac, not to some BeOS knockoff. Stop deluding yourself.
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I think that in order to have a really innovative OS, new tools are required. After all, productivity is limited by the toolchain, and this is using essentially the same toolchain as the various free UNIXes. Won't it end up having more or less the same features and limitations as current systems (assuming that hundreds of thousands of developer hours get devoted to developing and porting)? * Make 3.79.1 * AutoConf 2.13 * AutoMake 1.4-p6 * BinUtils 2.15 * GCC 3.3.4 * M4 1.4.1 * FLex 2.5.4a * Bison 1.875 * Patch 2.5.4 * CVS 1.12.9 * Indent 2.2.9
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Its easy to look at it and pick holes (and I can see a lot of holes to pick from the comments about tar and attributes onwards) but it is still a great way to learn to program and to do stuff.
What would have happened if everyone told Linus "there's already Windows, Minix, Hurd, OMU.. why bother' ?
Alan
Or, if they bundle more applications and turn it into a suite rather than just an OS, perhaps Word*, Sentence, or Paragraph.
* May already be taken
Ick, why would anyone want to use this? Even Windows is more aesthetically pleasing than this shit. When will programers learn?
Out of curiosity, what distros did you use, and how long did you run them?
My experience using 7 distros over the past 6 years has been very mixed, to say the least, but that does not mean that there are not some extremelyy good desktop distros out there. My main powerhouse runs Gentoo and I love it. Very desktop ready. "9 year old's bicycle with training wheels" doesn't quite capture it, somehow.
So Gentoo on the high end (poweruser). I post this from my laptop running SuSe Professionsal 9.1. Again, very nice distro - clean, fast, quick, easy install, good looking. I like customization in my primary desktop, but I like ease of use and more "standard" desktop functionality on a laptop (which I take a bit less seriously).
BTW, I convinced my wife to switch from Windows and she's now using OS X, which I've configured to run with the Linux boxes on the network. To say one is a Harley and the other is a bike with training wheels simply doesn't do either justice. Perhaps with a less polished distro or less user friendly (Debian can be a real pain sometimes, as can dependency hell on Fedora) I can see you comment, but I'd reccommend shopping around a bit. Linux isn't a single thing, its a lot of very different things.
Oh why do I continuosly see outrageous claims of Linux desktop share like this? Linux not dented the 1% mark? Says who? Is this an assumption or do we actually have some evidence of this?(the defunct OS stats from Google Zeitgeist are not credible.) Are we counting retail sales? Downloads? How does on come up with this figure?
Syllable will have to go through the same uphill battles on the desktop that Linux has already gone through up to this point(sans lawsuit?). But hey Linux is still moving forward regardless, just look how frightened Microsoft is? Look at how companies like Sun are confused about this "Linux thing". I have a smirk on face everytime I see these snide remarks against Linux; I know the community must be doing something right.
I hope Syllable sticks around, doesn't hurt to have another alternative os, but it will be a long while before Syllable even enters the consiousness of Joe & Jane User.
which is completely unimpeded by any legacy X-Windows foundations or toolkits beneath.
It is Syllable that is the "legacy design" here. The entire industry is finally moving to more dynamic languages (Java, C#, Python, VB.NET, Objective C), dynamic GUI configuration (XUL, Glade, Avalon), vector graphics (SVG, Render, DisplayPDF), and client-server GUI models (XP-GDI, DisplayPDF, X11).
While one can discuss the relative merits of those technologies, relative to any of them, an OS with a GUI based on a huge C++ GUI library is an anachronism. Except for Syllable's nifty graphics, Smalltalk-80 looks like it was more advanced and flexible technology a quarter of a century ago.
They probably did have the file up but then they got this very urgent call from their ISP saying a oucple of hundred thousand people were melting the server...
Can you imagine finding a message like that on your voice mail and realizing it's been hours since they called you? :-D
Sorry, it IS here. Just because it doesn't act like OSX doesn't mean anything. No, it's not OSX...so what?
Does everything have to behave like everything else? OSX is very elegant...so what? I enjoy KDE...I think it's very elegant. Who's right and who's wrong?
OSX is right for you. KDE is right for me. But just because OSX is a nice UI doesn't mean everything else is crap.
And more to the point, Linux is the Harley...where you can tinker with it and customize it totally to become anything you want. While OSX is more like a crotch-rocket Ninja or whatever the kids are riding now adays. Very sleek, very fast...but can't really be totally (and I mean totally) customized to where you want it.
Thanks for the analogy...you just had it mixed up. Glad I could set you straight.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Bollocks.
99% of Windows users have never heard of X, sit them down in front of a Linux box running X and they have no concept that there is this thing called X and they are quite happy to sit using the machine, running Gnome or better, KDE. Installers are good enough these days that X configuration is handled automatically and the performance is more than acceptable (Gnome users quit bitching and switch to KDE).
Deleted
Word.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Just because they're aimed at being an easy to use dominant desktop OS, doesn't mean they have or will get there. Just look at what happened with Freedows [sourceforge.net].
FreeFlatScreens.com [freeflatscreens.com]
Just to get it straight... You don't believe a grass-roots effort to create a free alternative to Windows has a chance, because one project didn't see fruition... But you do believe a shady pyramid scheme to sell out your privacy for a flat screen TV is a great idea?
my password is private, but unchanged.
2) Linux and all its apps are free as in beer and runs on $200 machines, neither of which can be said about Apple. This also means that software developed in the Linux world can be easily used in developing nations on the basis of donated intel PCs, etc.
3) Closed source prevents collaboration on the software components. The Linux world is full of innovation - even within a single desktop like KDE, you will find plenty of useful widgets and gadgets that are not copied from either Windows or MacOS. But if you look at the entire set of desktop offerings, from XFCe to ion to WindowMaker to GNOME etc., then it really becomes apparent that open source is an innovation space.
Yes, Apple currently has produced the more integrated desktop experience, but like Microsoft, Apple will try to lock you into that specific experience. If you want choice and you want to make sure you will always have that choice, OSS is the way to go.
4) Closed source prevents learning - in an open environment, kids can easily start experimenting and playing around with all parts of the system, hence become the innovators of tomorrow.
5) If you use Debian's apt-get, apt-rpm, urpmi or a similar update service, all your packages will be upgraded to the latest version with a single click. On Windows, there is no comparable service and there cannot be because the software is not free - Windows Update can't even properly handle Microsoft's own products as the JPEG Office fix has shown. Open source is far ahead of the competition in this department, there is just a lack of standardization. Yes, installing packages from source can be a pain - but with almost 10000 packages for Debian, the average user will virtually never have to do that. That they can if they need to is a good, not a bad thing.
Bottom line: If all you want is pretty pictures and the slickest GUI, then hey, go for Apple Mac OS X. But there are people who care about more than just that. GNU/Linux is the operating system of choice for people with a social conscience who care deeply about the future of computing. One of the best ways to make sure open source software keeps getting better is to use it, to thank the developers who have made it possible, and to send in bug reports. But open source has no chance if its users run away once a proprietary vendor offers slightly shinier widgets. That's why I share the GNU project's attitude with regard to proprietary software, if not their way of communicating it. It is important to talk not just about the technological, but also about the philosophical aspects of free software. I am confident that end users can and will understand that difference if it is explained to them in clear terms.
That's only true if you've got a gigabit connection.
Sure, you can use nomachine, which isn't free, but otherwise the lag is terrible, and bandwidth usage is worse.
But I'm with you on the apps being the thing that carries an OS.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
They are a laughing stock everywhere but America.
Harley riders are buying into a marketing concept, the bikes are considered posing devices. Which would fit in with the predeliction for OSX I suppose.
You want a real bike? BMW, Triumph, Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki, Yamaha, Ducati, Aprilia, there's plenty of choice of makers who don't recycle 60 year old crap decade after decade.
Deleted
Wasn't BeOs going to be the big Kiosk operating system back when people thought things like that were going to be huge?
I knew a developer for BeOs back when it was still in business and they thought multimedia Kiosk type systems were going to be almost ubiquitous. The advantage was for the low latency high availability type stuff, not to mention stability. Far as I know to get this type of performance from linux you have to hack the kernal extensively (too lazy to look up the audio focused distro that has low latency kernal hacks, but you all know how to go to google and type 'low latency linux audio').
music lover since 1969
Syllable certainly looks like an interesting project but my eyes are elsewhere ... for those interested in an open-source AmigaOS should look no further than www.aros.org . While at this stage its a little low on the eye candy. It has the advantage of source code level compatibility with many old amiga programs such that you might find on AmiNet - In addition there are a fair few people porting some of our favorite linux app's too. One of the nice things is the integration of UAE - meaning binary compatibility with your old amiga games/software. I cant wait to see where this project goes once they have a complete implementation- and then they can start really adding more candy and features.
...
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
You don't want the hoops, don't use it.
The hoops are a feature.
They're designed to make the OS as customizable as possible. This is why it was originally referred to as a "metadistribution" - so customizable that you can even port it to cygwin and OSX.
Less hoops mean less more is done automatically, which means less is customizable.
Put up with the hoops and the users, developers, and documentation are more than willing to help you through them.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I wish that more of these small os groups would get together and create 1 independant OS from MS and Unix. They all seem to follow the same general ideas the Syllable or BeOS have... give the user lots of power, a new non-X display core and make it quick. But this all seems like a country divided. Nothing is ever going to take off with all of these small groups.
If the leaders of a few of these groups would get together and work on one project, there's a slim chance that it might get somewhere. If I were going to try to organize something, I'd be looking seriously at OpenBeOS, as it has all the API documentation nicely created for it. But hey, it's never going to happen, and MS will continue to rule the desktop, with Linux being a lowly contenter waiting in the wings, never to really get a chance.
kiwi
When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the .app bundle to the hard disk,
Complete novices don't install applications on their machines at all--they use whatever comes preinstalled. That's why both Apple and PC vendors sell machines with entire software suites preinstalled.
with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage the myriad dependencies or run rpm manually.
There is nothing to "manage": the major Linux distributions handle all the dependencies for you. That's a big advantage Linux has over both Windows and Macintosh.
Linux is a great desktop, provided you want to only use the software that you are given by the distributor
Yes, that's quite right. And unlike Macintosh, Linux vendors give their users single-stop solutions for all their software needs.
OSX, all that is quite unnecessary.
Installing and maintaing software on OS X is a lot of work: for most third party applications, you have to manually download, install, and update applications. If there are dependencies, you have to track those down manually as well.
Worse, unlike Windows, Macintosh doesn't even have a single, consistent way of installing or removing packages.
Linux isn't the Harley. The Harley can be customized into anything you want... except something very sleek and very fast. You can bolt all the shit you want on it, and it's still a pig. Try a distro like Gentoo, and you'll see that that's not exactly the case for Linux.
Everything you say is true. However, you seem to imply it's not the case that OSS is thriving on Mac OS X too?
And if Linux does become mainstream, do you really think Adobe and Macromedia will release Photoshop and Flash as open source projects?
Possibly you've got the impression Mac OS X is only closed source because, unlike Linux currently, OS X has a vast array of commercial software available for it.
But it also has all the open source free software available to it as well...
PS "If all you want is pretty pictures" is derogatory. An appealing UI is important.
If this Syllabus has a desktop that users would like, and a backend that does not equal Linux (from what I can gather from some comments), and if both projects are open source, what would be the feasibility of slapping the Syllabus desktop on a real Linux back-end and having the best of both worlds. I mean, the Syllabus desktop could be included with the others as an alternative, and maybe enable as defaul for some distro being sold to users.
For those of you familiar with Syllabus and Linux, what is the feasibility of something like this?
actually, didn't freedows become roots of ReactOS ?
with a "less planning - more coding" philosophy ?
First off, jack, you obviously didn't read enough. SyllaBLE, not Syllabus, is based on AtheOS, which is a completely new OS that was modelled after the BeOS.
It cannot be ported onto a "Linux back-end," because there's no notion of front-end and back-end. It's all one OS.
I have to use OSX quite a bit during the past few weeks. From listening to the Slashdot blather, I would have assumed it was several orders of magnitudes easier than KDE/GNOME with a correspondingly greater degree of flexibility and power.
Hah!
While is was a bit easier than KDE/GNOME, it certainly did not have more flexibility or power. By "a bit easier", I really mean "marginally easier". Some areas of the desktop were actually more complicated than what I was used to.
Don't mistake me for ragging on OSX. I am not. I am merely pointing out that it isn't the instinctually intuitive interface everyone declares it to be.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Furthermore, like it or not, by giving Apple control over the operating system of your machine you make it possible for them to sabotage any serious competition - look at the history of DR-DOS. Within a single vendor market they also have all the other trade and technology advantages that Microsoft used to lock out the competition, and they're not burdened by a monopoly (i.e. they are less likely to be investigated). Again, political naivete is very dangerous here.
And if Linux does become mainstream, do you really think Adobe and Macromedia will release Photoshop and Flash as open source projects?
Of course not, and I don't want either Adobe PhotoShop or Macromedia Flash. I want free SVG editors, good SVG/SMIL support in browsers, and the GIMP and Krita to become as useful as PS in every way - in many ways, they already are, esp. the GIMP. This can only happen through larger adoption.
If your job absolutely requires you to use PhotoShop, you can use CrossOver Office.
An appealing GUI is obviously important, but Mac users sometimes act like it's all that matters. That bothers me. The rampant homosexuality among Mac users is also slightly disturbing (just kidding).
You can't fix the things that I'd like to see fixed within X, because they're baked in to the design. The application is responsible for the operation of the user interface in the most miniscule detail, but it has to manage it through a narrow channel that's better suited for a much higher level protocol. It's not terrible, but there's all kinds of things that you can't do within the confines of pretty much any current window system, and X is more restrictive than most.
...). But most other modern window systems tend to retain more information about more objects all the way to the rendering engine. About the best you can do to render an arbitrary X window on a modern GPU is to render it into a texture... if you want to take advantage of the GPU for more than speeding up that 2d rendering you have to use a different API (PEX, for example) in the application... and *that* requires rewriting the toolkit to use the new API or have a window managed by one toolkit wrapped about another.
For example, it specifies the behaviour of drawing operations down to the pixel level, so that updates by overlays work well. With today's GPUs, a window system that operated on GPU objects (textures, surfaces, etc) rather than pixels and did updates by changing the list of displayed objects would work better. Oh, and it would be possible to make it work better than X over a network as well.
Most window systems have similar legacy issues, of course, and the ones that are built around really high level objects or GPU-like operations are obscure (Berlin, NeWS,
One way around this is to not write an "X11" application, but to write an application for a toolkit, and then implement that toolkit in each window system that provides the operations it needs. The Tk library takes that approach... an application using Tk (whether in Tcl or using another language binding) handles windows the same way natively under X, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, or Windows.
But this isn't adding something to X, it's breaking out of it.
I'm glad you like OSX, but GNOME is also more than there already. Even 2.6 is slick, but 2.8 is out now, and I have that one one computer. No training wheels, everything works great.
Dyslexics get me down.
Linux with KDE or GNOME is, no offense to those projects, barely a 9 year old child's bicycle with training wheels, while OSX is a Harley.
.app bundle to the hard disk, with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage the myriad dependencies or run rpm manually.
You can do way more "under-the-hood" way easier in Linux. There is way more to an operating system than look and feel (If that's all there was, I'd still being using Windows).
When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the
RPM isn't a very good package management system. With debians apt-get or gentoos emerge, installing a program is only one command away. All dependencies are solved, and you have thousands of apps available at your finger tips.
You know, I was used to Windows (mostly NT4), and I got a Mac because I heard so much good about OS X. I was lost, angry, disapointed. I hated my Mac. Why did I spend over 2000€ for this piece of crap? No, seriously...after two weeks of usage, I learnt that my mind had been deformed by Micosoft Windows. I let Windows loose, and now the OSX interface makes sense. For me it took two weeks of getting used to.
And you know what? I gave my Mac to my sister, a "Jane Sixpack" as we say in this place. She didn't ask any question. She was surfing, used iPhoto and iMovie, and whatnot.
You fail to see that once you learnt something you are inevitably linked to it. "unformatted" people don't have this problem. Ask my sister....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Syllable sucks.
How many times is there an article on slashdot about Yet Another Easy-to-use Linux Distro? I'm sick to death of it. The world does not need another Linux distribution! Get that into your worthless and feeble little brains, people. What the world needs are improvements to existing distributions. Is it any wonder why Windows-slaves give up when it comes to Linux? There is such a thing as too much choice you know!
No text
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Complete novices don't install applications on their machines at all--they use whatever comes preinstalled. That's why both Apple and PC vendors sell machines with entire software suites preinstalled.
My mom does.. sure she is confounded by some of the silly installers out there but a lot of Mac shareware these days works like this: 1) click on download link, 2) wait, 3) application is on your desktop ready to run.
Maybe novices don't install software on *Windows* because it's too hard. I will also note that a few years ago it was hard for complete novices to burn CDs or even print photos but now it's not. If you make something drop-dead simple as Apple tries to do you will have more people doing it.
My powerbook didn't come with an "entire software suite" by the way.
There is nothing to "manage": the major Linux distributions handle all the dependencies for you. That's a big advantage Linux has over both Windows and Macintosh.
Uhm, you're joking now, right? Again the mom example: when a security update is needed, the Mac pops up a window and Mom clicks "install". How does that work on, say, Gentoo? "Hey mom, after you upgrade Python, don't forget to run revdep-rebuild to redo all the python libraries, 'kay?"
And unlike Macintosh, Linux vendors give their users single-stop solutions for all their software needs.
Again, this can't be serious. Besides a few well-known projects, most open source GUI software is junk. I had a full Red Hat install on my box before switching to gentoo and only the web browser was useful for anything.
For my photography side-business, I need Photoshop. I need ICC profiles for the printers. Where's that for Linux? I don't even know how to profile the monitor under Linux.
Installing and maintaing software on OS X is a lot of work: for most third party applications, you have to manually download, install, and update applications. If there are dependencies, you have to track those down manually as well.
It is not a "lot of work". I set up my latest powerbook from scratch in a day with all the software (open source and closed source) I use.
I've never downloaded a Mac program that had dependencies (except open source command-line stuff, but Fink takes care of that).
Worse, unlike Windows, Macintosh doesn't even have a single, consistent way of installing or removing packages.
Right, because all those novices who aren't INSTALLING are sitting around UNINSTALLING. By the way, how do I uninstall the GUI on Windows? or just IE and outlook? I want to set up a server.
Get over the OS X elitist attitude. I use Windows, Linux, and OS X on desktop machines. They all have good things about them. They all have bad things about them.
OS X's lack of a packaging system is a disaster as far as I'm concerned. There's no easy way to find out every program installed on the system. (No, not everything shows up in the "About this Mac" list.) There's no easy way for Joe user to know if anything other than the Apple provided software has a security flaw and automagically update it. The better Linux systems make this trivial. On my Mandrake systems, I can doubleclick an rpm file, and will automatically resolve any dependencies and install it for me. Unless Fink has come a long way since I played with it last summer, OS X can't even come close.
And many of us don't like the OS X interface (particularly the parts that they made different than OS 9/Windows/etc. just to be different). If you don't like using OS X exactly the way that Steve thinks you should, you're SOL. It's like buying a glove with four fingers. It's great if that fits your hand, but a pain if it doesn't. I know numerous novice users that hate OS X. My barely computer literate mother (~60yo) who hadn't really used a computer until five years ago or so is fine with KDE.
I'm talking about local X here.
X is very fast for me. I see no tangable performance concerns in 2D desktop modes. Everything runs really snappy and smooth. And I run X on some machines with yesterday's tech, like Pentium 3's and nVidia TNT cards. Runs just as well as Windows 2D stuff.
Over the network, it's snappy and quick too, unless you're trying to do something like OpenGL, which DOES work, but it's slow. XVideo works in some cases as well and it's usable but it uses a lot of bandwidth.
So, I wouldn't say it sucks for graphics. Or, I'd say it sucks as much as any 2D desktop.
As a footnote, even if Doom 3 DID work over the network, I don't think a gigabit network connection would be even close to fast enough for it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
You're saying that Linux hasn't yet dented the 1% procent mark, but how do I know you didn't just pull that fact out of your ass?
I would like some links to surveys that back up those facts.
By the end of your post, you seemed to be saying that any 9-year-old can operate a Harley.
And is it really a bad thing if users have to learn a little bit about how their OS works before they start reconfiguring it and installing software?.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
"We're just about at the point of pulling past Microsoft in the desktop ease-of-use department. The problems are all people-related now."
I'm all for challengers, and Windows is hardly elegant, but any OS that *ever* invokes the word compile for *any* reason the end user sees or needs is not in contention for ease-of-use. Much of--though certainly not all of--the reason Windows is such a mess is because it supports such an astonishing number of not only current but ancient hardware & aps, more or less out of the box. It may crash far too often in daily use as a result, but your random game or database from the 80's or 90's is reasonably likely to run, as is your old Wingmaster flight yoke. This is no small thing.
Ultimate ease-of-use with adoption as the goal is a three part package:
1) Tolerable, comprehensible interface (pleasurable is a bonus; so is, for most, powerful).
2) Not only a suite of aps (word processing, browser, email, etc) but the ability to grab random stuff at the store or online and have them run. No compiling, no -switches.
3) Same as #2 but for hardware.
Send flames to...oh heck, just send 'em to me!
Feeling so good natured I could drool
ick...
I thought windows was the Harley - overpriced, slow and generally annoying!!!
OSX would probably be the modern crotch rocket - works like a dream out of the box, super fast and easy to use
Linux is like an old 1960s Triumph - work like a dog to get it running, will put a big smile on your face,but not something you'd recommend to your mother for a daily driver.
God, I wish I had mod points for you.
And on a slightly-related, but not really note: we're in the 21st century, folks. Text editors should not be necessary for software configuration.
It's a fork of the AtheOS Operating system. :)
It's been a long time.
Windows 95 and above have safe mode which runs with a default VGA driver and let you "fix" fancy pants video driver problems (can reinstall the driver, run the registry editor, etc).
Granted it is a giant pain to fix any kind of driver problems in Windows, most of the time resulting in a complete OS reinstall anyway, but the theory was there.
Isn't the fact that ReactOS is based on the NT architecture(an attempt to emulate it, at least) mean that it's antiethical to the cache kernel concept?
I dunno, don't know that much about the product, since freedows doesn't really exist...
It's been a long time.
I commend the developers for their feat, but all that talent could have been much better spent on making open source drivers for Linux or improving usability for KDE and GNOME. When Linux needs now is a completely free distro, unlike Xandros and Lindows :-( , that just 'works out of the box'. To do that, the kernel must recognize and configure the vast majority of home-use hardware, not just supercomputers. X needs to incorporate a native autodetecing utility for monitors and mice that replaces vendor tools like YaST or Anaconda.
I'm dumbfounded why my Tao Linux (free RedHat AS 3 copycat) Dell Optiplex box can't recognize my Intel soundcard... Afterall, RedHat AS 3 is supposed to work on Dell Optiplexes. After a day of scouring the net and Dell's poor and disorganized Linux driver site, I finally happened over a working driver that was listed as being for another Dell system. The average user doesn't care to go through all that trouble! I'm sure Linux can do better, but we need the support of harware manufacturers (ahem... provide GPL drivers!) and most importantly developers focusing their energy on parts of the OS that will allow for a 'smooth' experience for the enduser.
I'm actually quite impressed at M$ Win XP hardware support (the whole installation and drivers are on one CD!), but that should just inspire the open source community to focus primarily, if not solely, on the OS with the best chance of making the cut - Linux.
So you pull some never-begun sourceforge project no one's ever heard of, and compare it to AtheOS/Syllable, a very serious development project that's been making news for years and is currently available for sale.
That's about as useful as saying "Just because Perl is aimed at being a web programming tool doesn't mean it will ever get there, just look at what happened to the interpreter for this crappy basic derivative that someone uploaded began a sourceforge project for four years ago".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'm all for challengers, and Windows is hardly elegant, but any OS that *ever* invokes the word compile for *any* reason the end user sees or needs is not in contention for ease-of-use.
Some distro's do not require compilation at all. If you're scared of compilation and want to see exactly how close Linux is to ease of use with windows, you ought to try Suse 9.x, Lycoris, or Xandros, to name the 3 front runners in ease of use(my opinion only). You can use any of these distro's, I mean really use them to get serious work done(and some play) without compiling jack shit.
Great feat, but we need all the available talent in the Open Source community to make the Linux experience enjoyable for home users - namely:
:(
1) GPL drivers (preferably supplied by harware manufacturers)
2) Native utility in X.org that can take the place or incorporate parts of Anaconda and YaST to painlessly set up monitors and mice.
3) Usability improvements in KDE and GNOME that are free and completely open, unlike Xandros
If developers focused on making Linux "just work" and do so "out of the box", we'd be farther along in dethroning Windows. Little point in diverting the effort into a million projects that don't have much of a chance of ever supporting the great variety of home-use harware. Hardware support is a collosal task, and it's best to focus the effort on the OS with the best chance - Linux.
I've gotta be honest, and I could pick apart your whole vaccuous, rhetoric-filled arguement, but your whole post is so far removed from reality in all ways (Starting with your use of the word "competitive",), that arguing would be useless.
I will give you a piece of advice though: Fuck RPM based distributions. They suck hard. Debian based distributions allow you (in the extreme case of a minimal debian installation) to go from having nothing but a base text based install, apt-get install an X11 application and a window manager, and go. Nothing can touch it in terms of a huge variety of third party applications at your fingertips.
It's been a long time.
Get real! Why do people still say this crap? With a modern linux distribution you do not *have* to compile anything ever. You want a server, install the binary server packages. You want a desktop, install the binary desktop packages. Now you certainly *can* compile things, which allows for more flexibility if you want it, but you don't have to. If you don't want to compile things, you have to wait for the latest binary packages to be made available, just like any other os (except usually not for free).
You can't buy linux software in stores because, well, you can't really sell something that is not meant to be a retail product. And yes, you do have to run linux software on linux. It is as unreasonable to expect Windows software to run on linux as it is to expect Windows software to run on a Mac. Commercial vendors may start writing software for linux, but that is up to the vendors. Personally, I don't think it will ever happen to a large extent because free software equivalents are usually available for most of the silly things that commercial vendors try to sell you.
Hardware support is also quite good, and a large portion of off the shelf hardware will work out of the box. This isn't perfect, but it is certainly better than it used to be. And it is getting better all the time.
Perhaps someone neglected to mention that they were interested in a Linux distro that did this effectively. I love Linux (I'm posting this from a Linux machine which is my primary desktop), but none of the major distros I've used (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE) make software installation as easy as Windows or OS X. If I want to install something that hasn't been packaged by my Linux distributor, I have to roll up my sleeves and prove that my four years in college and 15 years as a technology professional are worth something.
Worse, unlike Windows, Macintosh doesn't even have a single, consistent way of installing or removing packages.
What drugs are you on? Windows has 3-6 different ways of doing just aout anything, and installing software is no exception. You can insert the CD and let it autorun; you can double-click on SETUP.EXE; you can double-click on the .MSI file; you can go into Add/Remove Programs and tell to search for an installer; if it's free(beer) MS-ware, you can get it through Windows Update; etc.
OS X has only three methods that I've encountered: drag and drop the .app "file" (actually a folder that looks like a file) from the CD or .DMG to the Applications folder on your hard drive; and double-click on the .PKG file and click some buttons; and if it's an upgrade of free(beer) Apple-ware, you can get it through Software Update. Your talk of dependencies makes me suspect you're talking about X11 apps written for Darwin; it makes no sense whatsoever in reference to OS X.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
if it's in the Bundle... why are we all still messing with TARs and RPMs,
someone please put package managers where they belong. then we will have a friendly OS. OSX showed us all I think. someone tell me why we don't follow.
13-4=54/6
I would have to disagree with that. i've run linux on a dual pII/350 box i've had since college. way back when, i had X running beautifully, remember StarOffice being released and using it, samba has always been adequate enough to work with, Eterm -t trans is 'r4d', gaim is great, firefox runs fine (more quickly than, and with more ease-of-mind-than) IE. and then, i decide the old version of slak i've been hacking to keep it semi-up-to-date is obsolete, and install fedora c2, throw in an ati with tv out and all of the sudden (near automagically, i might add) it does fullscreen mplayer on my trinitron, plus all the things it did before. i use xp for it's 'professional' grade applications, but RELY on linux for the rest of the stuff.
you can't have everything, where would you put it?
Are there any immediate advantages over a distro like knoppix?
Knoppix is slowly becoming polished enough for the end user to use on a day to day basis.
The link to the live CD was dead for Syllable so I probably won't bother trying it out but I don't see any advantages over knoppix immediately. I wonder if it's faster.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
i think you totally missed the parent's point. he's not talking about market share. he's not talking about overtaking windows or ruling the world. he's talking about linux being a perfectly fine desktop system for many people today, which is true.
as to your other comments: when i'm forced to use a windows machine, i easily prefer win2k over winxp. as for mac os x... not really a fan. sure, it's pretty, and it's polished, but i feel like i'm in a jail anytime i want to do anything interesting with it. give me a linux machine instead. yes, i'm not a typical "user" - i'm a techie and a dev. i'm happy with linux as it is, and, i'll say it again: it's a perfectly viable desktop system that is "here" today for many of us. if that's not the case for you, that's a shame, but it's not my problem, and, no offence, but i don't care all that much. maybe that makes me selfish; so be it.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Linux is barely at the point that Windows was with Windows 2000, and it isn't showing much signs of competing with XP-SP2 and Longhorn.
Wha? XP-SP2 is like Windows 2000 with a lollipop and a bit of duct tape. Practically the only difference is that it's uglier.
Monolithic kernel, lousy security architecture. Been there, done that, have pictures.
Beos, Linux, MacOS, etc. do not have a chance at competing with Windows in the desktop market.
.NET and porting of it to Freebsd and MacOS is confusing, as it actually destabilizes their control over software developers.
/etc directory in a tar. It is important to make this idiot proof and easy to use. Meaning... do not require any console access to get this working, though it can be allowed for power users. This is a fundamental foundation that Linux developers and distro makers fail to remember or simply choose to ignore, K.I.S.S, Keep It Simple Stupid.
The reason that Firefox was able to beat back IE where its ancestor Mozilla couldn't make it even budge, is because Firefox **looks and feels** more like IE. If you don't use tabbing or any plugins, that is. You could change the icon and people wouldn't realize they aren't using IE until they would try to do a WindowsUpdate. Also, being stable finally and having boatloads of sweet features doesn't hurt.
Neither Beos nor Linux (do I need mention MacOS?) feel or look like Windows. They are also cumbersome, have few commercial-quality applications, and they are filled to the point of bursting with zealots. You might try to suggest that they do somewhat simulate the feel of Windows, but they merely mock it. X Windows itself feels disconnected, the widgets tend to be alien and uncomfortable (yes I'm aware there are Windows themes, but the GUI design pervades even with this), and installing working drivers for your card is a chore. In fact, everything to do with BeOS and Linux is a chore. I know some sick individuals who think they're brilliant because they mount/umount drives all day.
Windows users have many reasons to stay with Windows; compatibility, familiarity, ease of use, stability (this has gotten better with time), drivers, it feels solid, and features (set aside your personal opinions on this for a moment and consider the facts).
Compatibility because almost every major office application, game and utility on the planet is designed for Windows due to its large user base. This is not to say that the Windows user base is the target because it is large (though that is a valid assumption as well), but because it therefore has a larger programmer base as well. Which is why Microsoft's creation of
Familiarity, because users have become accustomed to and fond of a familiar interface and way of doing things. I for one, for example, expect to be able to drag My Computer to the top of my monitor and get a nice toolbar for accessing my drives. This makes my life easier, and I expect its existance. Users are accustomed to the start button, quickbar, system tray, recently run programs, programs menu, explorer (and its mannerisms), the positioning of dialogs, the types of dialogs (printing, file opening, etc.) and their mannerisms, the control panel and its *exact* functionalities, My Network Places, the sound/audio setup and mixer (many people have gotten used to the way this works and depend on it for their audio needs), adding/removing programs and hardware, printer/fax setup, run/search and My Documents. To name a few.
Another, more recently, very important feature, is System Restore. Linux (and others) could similarly implement something like this using dump/restore or some sort of util based on diff/patch, in addition to backing up the
Sigh, I've run out of steam. Anyways, suffice it to say, there are many important reasons why Linux, nor any of the other OSes many have cited, will ever take the cake away from Windows. People who worship these OSes fail to grasp this, and in many cases refuse to grasp it. I'm sure I'll get flamed about this or marked as a troll. You can choose to live in your little world, but that's how its going to remain, little.
I feel that BeOS was a good try at competing with MacOS, nothing more. MacOS has its demographic, and it is okay with that. It has a beautiful interface, nice hardware, but unfortunately little configurability and a company behind
When does a dream stop becoming a dream and start becoming a cliche? Not to troll or anything, but isn't this the primary goal of virtually every linux distro floating around these days? And if "easy-to-use" and "free" are the only requirements for fulfilling this dream, I'd say most of them have already succeeded. But hey, the more the merrier :)
With all its advantages please mention the disadvantages when comparing it to other os's. like:
Apple lost me ever since the ][e with greedy dealerships, multiple $'000 price tag, closed hardware and limited peripheral market. (Though it was fun having a *cr-apple* re-assembled by a mate who shipped an apple clone over from singapore as electronic parts). I realise for those who want a *consumer grade* product and are willing to pay good money for it (though I note iMacs go for $400-$800 AUD) this may be a *sensible choice* to spend their $$$.
'... Linux is a great desktop, provided you want to only use the software that you are given by the distributor and/or have someone to maintain it for you
But I also appreciate and enjoy having my software COSHER.
PS: I realise with osx you have to a degree have this option, but how many consumers would realise they can take full advantage?
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
To me it seems like the greates hurdle for these enthusiast "fringe" OS:es is hardware support. It is *very* resource-consuming to implement support for new and old hardware. I believe this is one thing that tripped BeOS.
I think that most new ideas don't warrant a complelety new set of code from os core to hardware drivers to desktop environment. If I were to start such a project to implement my ideas of how to revolutionize the personal computing paradigm (don't worry; I won't), I would build on top of something existing, e.g. Linux, BSD, perhaps even Windows. Possibly even KDE or Gnome. A lot of brilliant minds and man-hours to tap into, and with an instant possibility for everyone to test it or join the project.
I applaud the enthusiasm of these kind of people, and the learning experience is probably invaluable. Kind of like masturbation; highly satisfactory for the one doing it but of little value for others.
Actually, you pretty much have this backwards. Linux is the only system which has good ways of dealing with dependencies. Debian showed the way, and other distros have picked up (or are in the process of picking up) the idea.
The problem, which I'm not sure you have seen, is that all apps have dependencies on the underlying libraries. And when you upgrade the libraries and apps later, it's possible to create conflicts.
Microsoft's "solution" is to throw the whole OS away every 3 years and tell everyone to buy another. Windows95, Windows98, Windows2000, WindowsXP,...
Apple's "solution" is more or less the same, except sometimes they tell you to throw away the whole computer, not just the OS.
Linux is the only significant desktop OS that you can run for years, with just an occasional "apt-get update/apt-get upgrade", and a rare new kernel install.
Never said or suggested compiling would ever be required.
"Why do people still say this crap? With a modern linux distribution you do not *have* to compile anything ever. You want a server, install the binary server packages"
Compile. Binary. Server. There goes 95% of users.
"You want a desktop, install the binary desktop packages."
Binary. Packages. There go the rest.
I can without a doubt say I will not be installing any Linux distro on my dad's computer any time soon. (Yes, I semi-regularly try some distros on dual boot with XP or 98, yes I know how to compile binaries, etc., etc.) What a nightmare that'd be when I get the call asking why his new fax or, much worse, the five year old printer from uncle Bob doesn't and *can't* work. Doing XP phone-to-relative-support is lousy enough.
That Linux software is free and not in stores is great. It excites me. It won't excite my dad. More phone calls: I have to download it? Is that like the poker site your brother got? I'm not paying anyone online. It's free? What do they want from me? Where's the box? What's GNOME? Does that run on Windows? I can get this "free" stuff where? Huh? Why can't I play bridge, I bought the game!
A huge part of ease of use is point of purchase physical in-store software & hardware sales. My dad would at minimum want a "MADE FOR DEBIAN" thingy in a gold star. This was why I posted. It's something too often missed in ease of use discussions.
The shifting of proprietary closed source vendors to online distribution is a tremendous boon for Linux. It will acclimate the my dads of the world to downloading software. Short of Windows tomorrow tripling in price AND summoning the devil AND a pissed off Wario I can't think of another shift more likely to bring Linux to my Dad and--more importantly--my Dad to Linux.
Me, I'll run Linux when I've got a reason to do so. When I get off my butt and turn the 500MHz Athlon in the closet into a print server or firewall.
I love Linux, I love the idea, but I've got no reason to use it. XP tax to play thousands of games? Deal.
Is Linux gaining? Heck ya. Will it continue to do so? Heck ya. Is the current ease-of-ownership remotely near that of Windows for the casual or ignorant user? Hell no.
Feeling so good natured I could drool
by reading the download page, it seems as if the only way to get syllable with source, development tools, and updates to the latest version, is by buying the Premium CD.
sounds like: "we released a new version, but only if you buy the Premium CD !"
okay, you can get all of that from sourceforge. thats great. i think i might try it out now. but why the hell do i need to read some random post on another websites' forum to find that out?
it looks like a great effort, and i am all for diversity in my OS choice. but please do not try to decieve.
When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the .app bundle to the hard disk, with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage
Oh vendor specific eh? So do tell us, how many non-Apple vendors use OSX's installer? What? You say there are no other vendors of OSX other than Apple? So then Apple's installer is also vendor specific, no?
You know, you may want to get current yourself before calling Linux dated. We've had Synaptic available for Debian and RPM based distributions now for what a couple years? It's repository oriented, tracks dependencies for you, is graphical, and obviously is not vendor specific. Every once in a while I, my wife, and many others just take a look to see what is new or in need of an update in Synaptic, select install/upgrade, and we're off.
So either you need to learn what is current so you can speak with any sense of authority, or you need to well you figure it out.
Aroudn here, I work in a fortune 50 company with OpenOffice.org, Evolution with the connector, and integrate just fine in the windows infrastructure.
I used synaptic, paid zero for the software, used a GUI for the install, didn't have to browse the web, didn't need to buy a CD, and didn't have to manage any dependencies. Just a few clicks and I was off. I'd say that works pretty damned well -- all of it desktop oriented, all of it graphical. All of it something any normal user can do.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
So? Both side can be perfectly right!
If you work to improve something commonly used X, everybody will benefit from it: it will be used, so this is usefull.
If you work to create 'from scratch' a new thing Y, there is a high probability that nobody (or very few people) will use it, so from this point of view it is useless.
Now of course, the usefulness of something has nothing to do with the pleasure of the developper working on it.
Shutdown in KDE.... complete and instant oblitteration of unsaved data!
KDE/X/Linux is a failure on the desktop. Those three software groups simply WILL NOT COORDINATE the best way to handle the most basic use-case there is. I've waited six goddamned years.
It's not that simple. You have to find the right binary packages for your distro in order for it to work and they often don't exist. I run Debian and often have problems finding binary packages for it, and a lot of the time when I find one, it's a version behind the current version. Pain in the ass! I have to compile source all the time.
but a lot of Mac shareware these days works like this: 1) click on download link, 2) wait, 3) application is on your desktop ready to run.
/tmp/501/TemporaryItems/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate, then try again.")
That's not a Mac invention: a lot of Linux and Windows software works the same way. People do that when the application in question is simple enough to permit it.
Again the mom example: when a security update is needed, the Mac pops up a window and Mom clicks "install".
Just like Windows and many Linux distributions.
(Of course, on Macintosh, it isn't actually that simple. My Macintosh currently says when I try to install "Mac OS X Update Combined": "Make sure you have permission to write to
For my photography side-business, I need Photoshop. I need ICC profiles for the printers. Where's that for Linux? I don't even know how to profile the monitor under Linux.
Each platform has specialty applications that only run under it. So, you may need a Mac for your particular special application; that says nothing about which platform is best for most users. (And you are wrong about needing a Mac when it comes to imaging, but that's another debate.)
Besides a few well-known projects, most open source GUI software is junk.
That's arrogant bullshit, and it's also not relevant. What matters is how many good applications there are, and there are more than enough of them for Linux (more than for OS X, as far as I'm concerned).
If I want to install something that hasn't been packaged by my Linux distributor,
.app "file" (actually a folder that looks like a file) from the CD or .DMG to the Applications folder on your hard drive; and double-click on the .PKG file and click some buttons; and if it's an upgrade of free(beer) Apple-ware, you can get it through Software Update.
The point is: most people don't have to because Linux distributions are so much more comprehensive than what Apple or Microsoft ship. That's what makes Linux easier than Windows or Macintosh.
Perhaps someone neglected to mention that they were interested in a Linux distro that did this effectively.
Linspire, SuSE, etc.
Windows has 3-6 different ways of doing just aout anything, and installing software is no exception.
You may start Windows software installs in a few different ways, but for conforming software (and most software is), the end result is the same: the software ends up with an entry in the Start menu and the Add/Remove Programs dialog. Macintosh doesn't have that consistency.
OS X has only three methods that I've encountered: drag and drop the
And then? Where does the software go? How do you get rid of it? How do you start it? How do you know what's installed?
Your talk of dependencies makes me suspect you're talking about X11 apps written for Darwin; it makes no sense whatsoever in reference to OS X.
Sure it does. IE, Photoshop, Quicktime, Eclipse, Mozilla, Office, and all those programs have plug-ins, sometimes from many different commercial vendors. Macintosh provides no consistent way of keeping those applications and their plug-ins in sync.
Another problem is that conflicting packages or installations aren't detected consistently. I have three copies of TeX installed on my OS X machine, with no idea of whether they conflict, how to get rid of any of them, of whether that causes problems. Eventually, I'll just have to reinstall to clean things up.
Wasnt the original "Atheos" licensed under GPL?
How can this new "fork" prevent free access to the source code without violating the GPL?
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
I tried reading the article, but couldn't find it, so: What is a 64-bit FS ? How does it differ from, say, ext3 ? What benefits does it give to users ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
(Muon is not the 2nd Messiah (he's fake) because he is not the first born son of God)
Interestful reading of fews pages: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22who+is+the+secoopen4free ©
Do you mean, sit out on the web as a novelty, ignored by the world at large while it's faithful rave about it's technological superiority and fabricate data to show that it's far moe popular than it really is?
I think the answer is a CLEAR YES
What sort of additional information would you think would help to clarify the situation? Information and links to download packages, source code and everything else is provided on the Development page. I thought all of this was fairly self evident.
You're the first person to find a problem with the Premium CD. We're not decieving anyone, intentionally or otherwise and I am quite offended by your aqusation.
Things like this really need a bootable CD. I would love to try this out, but creating a harddrive partition for it is not an option. Can it be made small enough to fit on a CD? That would be a good way to see if it can use all of your hardware.
Sorry, I guess I am just lazy.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Installing Binary Packages is what you do every time you run an Installshield Wizard. That doesn't seem to chase away too many people from Windows.
Iam a windows user and not the typical linux geek.Although i now know something about linux after readng about them so much in Slashdot,I simple dont know what this " X " thing all about.
probably today I will try a New oS for the first time with Syllable [hmm....i hope the live cd works ]
And then? Where does the software go? How do you get rid of it? How do you start it? How do you know what's installed?
Are you retarded? The point is simplicity. You shouldn't need to have an application to tell you what applications you have installed. You just look in the Applications folder and drag what you don't wan to the trash.
Congratulations on your effort to create a new OS.
Iam basically a windows user looking to try your Syllable [ Not even tried Linux so far].You mentioned Libsyllable to ne 1.3MB. Iam on limited bandwidth, and i would like to try the small size version and run it from my Cd without having to mess up with my harddisk.[ I do have a burner].
Now what do i download,The link,and btw can .tar, .gz be extracted with Winzip?
ALso iam on PIII,128 MB ram ,win98.Is that ok?
Compile. Binary. Server. There goes 95% of users.
Binary. Packages. There go the rest.
This makes no sense. If you want something on your computer, you have to install the software. So click the little Openoffice.org button during installation and poof, it is on your computer. No compiles, none of the hassle you seem to be implying. On Windows you have to pop in the cd and click setup.exe, so how is this any different?
Your issue with off the shelf software and hardware availability is understandable, but
a) It is something that is out of the control of the open source community for the most part. Vendors have to decide it is profitable to sell commercial software on linux, and like I said earlier, I don't think this will ever happen.
b) Nobody said a switch from Windows to linux would be painless. It doesn't matter how much usability on linux improves, there will always be a transition period when you switch your os. Once your dad realizes he no longer has to buy his bridge game, that it and a lot of the rest of his software is just plain free, I'm sure he will perfectly happy with the concept. He won't understand it at first, but that is to be expected.
Is the current ease-of-ownership remotely near that of Windows for the casual or ignorant user? Hell no.
Well, I am certainly not an ignorant user. I just spent the last week wrestling with WinXP, trying to get it to install on a new computer with a SATA drive. Funny how I can just pop in a Gentoo livecd and have it work, but I have to rebuild the fucking iso to get the Windows setup program to even start! Once it is installed, then I have to run around screwing with group policies and such to make the desktop usable for all of the people who will use it. The new XP control panel, theme, and start menu are terrible. Whoops, media player doesn't work. Let's see "internal application error", that sure is helpful. Google...oh, I just have reregister the vbscript.dll and tweak some registry entries...doesn't work. Now what? Finally, sacrifice a goat and it works. I'm sorry, some things about Windows are nice, but it not a model operating system for usability, especially when something doesn't work out of the box and you have to fix it.
Uhhh, try your distributions install cd. Since you are running Debian, I gather you are comfortable with compiling your own software. However, with Mandrake or Suse, I can guarantee you will never have to do that. When new software is released, you will have to wait for your distribution to package it, but you will be able to install the latest version without compiling. This really isn't any different in the Windows world. You can't install Office 2003 until, *gasp*, it is made available. The difference on linux is that the source is made available a touch sooner than distribution specific binaries. Since the source isn't even available for most Windows software, I don't consider this a bad thing.
Mandrake 9.1 with the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3? Don't think so windows troll boy. Only way that could happen is if you've been plugged into cooker and then you deserve what you get...
Please windows boys do your homework before posting.
I use Mandrake 10.1 and it's great...
Why not design a system using the concepts of plan9 ? it's ment to be the the next-generation Post-UNIX OS and it's has by far a very modular/Multi-User design .
I am sorry to crush peoples dreams, but this won't ever become an alternative for the regular Joe User on the desktop, no matter on how fast its boots or how good it looks.
People don't base their choice of the OS on the things it 'can do', but on the things it 'can't do'. And no matter how great the OS as performing all the tasks it does, if there are only a small handfull of critical tasks left which it can't do it simply won't be a useable alternative for the masses.
Linux by itself, even after all the hype and development, is still far far away from being a general purpose alternative to Windows, no games, pretty weird driver installment (ATI, kernel modules vs XFree drivers, etc.), no 100% Windows compability, lack of commercial applications, etc.
This are all issues that Linux can't really fix by itself, sure driver installation could be made more streight forward, people can continue to improve Wine, but until the point where commercial companies at least try to run their software under Linux and approve it as 'Linux compatible', all these today maybe 90% working solution will just result in lots of users frustration and making Linux a non-alternative.
And I really don't see any reason to believe that Syllable would perform any better, especially if it doesn't have a smooth integration of X11, Linux-compatible closed-source binary drivers (NVidia/ATI) or Windows compability, let alone things such as a reasonably marked share.
Is it still worth the development time? Maybe, after all people are doing it for fun and it can also demonstrate things which are relativly easy todo if you start from scratch, but pretty hard if you would want to add them ontop of Linux, thus it might be able to give a bit 'direction and inspriation' for Linux development. But after all, unless that thing is at the very least 100% Linux and/or Windows compatible, I really don't expect myself or any serious number of people using this OS in the next 10 years.
Not having a commandline is only a problem if the GUI is structured in such a way that it can't be scripted, or accessed remotely in an efficient manner.
Or for users with profound vision impairment.
Have you actually used OS X? It goes in the Applications folder. To get rid of it, you drag it from the Applications folder to the trash. To start it, you double-click the icon in the Applications folder. You know what's installed by looking in the Applications folder. This is pretty basic stuff; you must be trying really hard to remain ignorant of it.
Yes, there's also the Dock to deal with and yes it can confuse people, but this is no different from Windows' multiplicity of answers to some of your questions: You start them by A) double-clicking on the icon on the Desktop, or B) clicking on the Start button, and finding it in the menu (and if it doesn't show up in the menu, you click the little "expand the menu" chevron), or C) single-clicking on the little Quick Start icon in the area next to the Start button, etc. Knowing what's installed is just as inconsistent, especially with the magic menus that hide infrequently used programs from you, and Windows' dynamic menu that shuffles your most recent apps around.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
hey i really wanna try it out with the 3mb file...but i simply cannot mess with my hard disk partition [ Never done partitioning - although i have installed windows many times].And 38 Mb for running from Cd is high for me.I cant download such a huge file from my dialup.
No ,i dont want knoppix.It may be good, but I simply cant download 700 MB image file on dialup.
So any options?
Oh yeah iam a windows user.wanting to try linux.or perhaps a new OS.
Have you actually used OS X?
/Library and /usr and all those other places.
/Applications? Or is it in /sw? Or maybe your home directory or on your desktop? Or maybe you dragged it somewhere else? If it was installed with an installer, what's it called?
Typing at it right now.
[Software] goes in the Applications folder.
Well, except for all the other stuff applications install elsewhere, like in
To get rid of it, you drag it from the Applications folder to the trash.
That gets rid of the application only, but it may leave gigabytes of junk behind. Worse, it may leave other stuff behind that can really screw up the system when their application has been removed.
To start it, you double-click the icon in the Applications folder. You know what's installed by looking in the Applications folder.
Or is it in a subfolder of
This is pretty basic stuff; you must be trying really hard to remain ignorant of it.
You are trying really hard to avoid facing the ugly truth. Of course, Apple will get around to fixing this eventually, just like they have come around to a lot of other things Windows and UNIX had long before them. Of course, then people like you will go around telling everybody again that the feature didn't really exist until Apple started shipping it.
"Binary. Packages. There go the rest.
:)
This makes no sense. If you want something on your computer, you have to install the software. So click the little Openoffice.org button during installation and poof, it is on your computer. No compiles, none of the hassle you seem to be implying. On Windows you have to pop in the cd and click setup.exe, so how is this any different?"
This'll sound silly, but the nomenclature matters. Not to me, or to you, but for most change the name and it is a new beast. Windows for all its many, many flaws has hit critical mass not only in the market but in the public mind. The jump from 95 to XP might suck rocks and be no better or much worse than another install or update but the terms will be familiar. How many times have you tried to tele-help a relative or a friend get a new "windows" program installed or working only to belatedly realize the person has a Mac and is using windows as a generic term? I've a large extended family and I'm the nerd-in-genes so perhaps my experience is atypical...
"Funny how I can just pop in a Gentoo livecd and have it work, but I have to rebuild the fucking iso to get the Windows setup program to even start!"
"Nobody said a switch from Windows to linux would be painless."
Practically speaking, switching must be included in ease of use. This gives Windows a ridiculously strong leg up. Hey, I'm not happy about it either.
"Once your dad realizes he no longer has to buy his bridge game, that it and a lot of the rest of his software is just plain free, I'm sure he will perfectly happy with the concept. He won't understand it at first, but that is to be expected."
Agreed, though I fear the appeal of free is overstated. Free != freedom nor does free = revolution. Linux reminds me very much of my years spent trying to explain the benefits of being online, pre web. Everyone thought I was nuts: too difficult, not enough gained, what do online & modem & baud & && mean? Fifteen years later I noticed an anthropology prof had published a paper about online cultures. I called him up and reminded him he'd rejected mine on the same topic c1990. Jackass.
A question: is there or could there practically be a distro spanning Linux advocacy group? Paid lobbyists, funded from IBM, maybe Sun, RedHat equivalents, etc. I'm thinking specifically to approach & lobby game companies and related hardware makers but generally as well. Lobby ATI for decent drivers, SoundBlaster, educate Congress etc. Such a group probably exists; freely admit I don't carefully follow Linux-state-of-the-state info.
Feeling so good natured I could drool
Obviously the Chinese officers didn't read and accepted this site yet, so this site is behind the great firewall of China, people in china simple get connection time out to syllable.org [http]
I will not be surprised if this OS does not have Chinese developers.
You can't even compare the two. Linux with KDE or GNOME is, no offense to those projects, barely a 9 year old child's bicycle with training wheels, while OSX is a Harley.
Well, I was actually listening, curiously, until I saw the Hardley, I mean, Harley reference. LOL. That's pretty funny. You do realize that from a technology perspective, Harley is one of the biggest POS on the road? Compared to modern ICE technology in most bikes, Harleys squarely fit as the biggest, most unreliable POS around. The fact that they sale nearly as well as they do, wonderfully underlines the intelligence of the majority of the population. It sales because it's popular, cool, and US made, not because it's better. Personally, IMO, Harley is an internatinal joke when you compare to what else in on the market. Bluntly, Harley is a great excuse for the rest of the world of sneer at "dumb Americans."
Bluntly, Harley has a long history, in modern times, of being the best loser at any track. Even off the track, Harleys run like crap, and leak oil like it's a new fad. Only in the last couple of years, has Harely actually managed to progress from 1920's based technology to ~1940 based technology. Beyond that, the ONLY serious technological inspiration being injected into Harley comes from their Buell purchase. At least Buell can actually finish a race.
I'm sorry, but comparing OSX to Harley is akin to smearing a large quantity of fecal material on your computer and smuggly thinking you've done something good.
Long story short, Harley, even after the infusion of the excellent company, Buell, still is on the bottom of the list, if not dead last, when looking at motocycle goodness. The big-four rice-bikes, happily laugh at Harley all day long; and that's just for starters.