Could Apple's Intel Desktop Threaten Linux?

esavard writes " If Linux enthusiasts don't want Mac OSX on Intel to become a threat for the future of Linux Desktop, they must rethink the concept of Desktop as we know it today. Symphony OS did exactly that and propose some fresh concepts about how a desktop should and should not be. If you want to know more about Symphony OS, a good starting point is a Wikipedia article describing the innovations proposed by this new desktop OS. The Linux Desktop Community must encourage such initatives massively to compete against Mac OSX and Windows."

Comments

Beautiful

[AKAImBatman]

After looking at the screenshots, allow me to be the first to say: Wow. That's so beautiful, it brought a tear to my eye.

The one thing that stands out at me is that Symphony uses Yet Another(TM) packaging system that is supposed to fix all the woes of the previous packaging system. Haven't we learned yet? In a complex system, packages are just as bad (actually worse) for users than DLL Hell. And they certainly don't solve the issue of maintaining the sanctity of applications, and maintaining file associations across deletes/manual installs/program moves. These are some of the greatest break points in the Windows OS. Yet Mac OS X has none of these problems thanks to its amazing .APP application scheme, and IOKit interface which tracks files by INode instead of path.

Under OS X, installation consists of downloading the application, and optionally extracting it from an archive. That's it, nothing more. You can run the app from any location (although the "standard" is the Applications folder), including right out of the DMG archive! File associations are easy: Just have the program on your hard drive. That's it! The OS takes care of querying the program for its associations. If you move the program, the OS knows. And if you delete the program, the OS removes the association. No mucking around with manual configuration. The *only* thing you can change is the default program!

Given that OS X has shown us the power of this method, why haven't any distros latched onto it? Yes, it means that the OS must promise a base set of shared libraries, but the user experience is so much better!

Re:Beautiful

[Professor_UNIX]

Given that OS X has shown us the power of this method, why haven't any distros latched onto it? Yes, it means that the OS must promise a base set of shared libraries, but the user experience is so much better!

Well, you can get a similar experience by using static binaries. They have the libraries compiled into the binary and have no other dependencies. The downside is increased disk and memory footprint. Also if there is a vulnerability in the library it uses the entire binary must be recompiled. Personally I like the way the .APP structure works and it's easy to backup programs that use that structure. I remember having some program though that didn't and insisted on installing thousands of files from a sit archive or something. I think it was Windows Media Player.. the version before the current one for MacOS X. Seems much more efficient to distribute a single .dmg file with your APP binary directory structure in that.

Re:Beautiful

[dabadab]

"[i]In a complex system, packages are just as bad (actually worse) for users than DLL Hell.[/i]"

I think you have missed something.

Packages are a GREAT way to handle things.
The simple & dumb way as OS X handles packages is just that: it can not handle dependencies, or anything, it just puts some files on your computer.
It works moderately well, if you only use it for applications and those are statically linked, but nothing else.
Now, take Debian's package system: it handles dependencies, version conflicts, alternative packages that serve the same purpose, etc, etc, ec. And it is absolutely easy: an apt-get install xyz installs/updates package xyz and all the necessary shared libs, updates file associations, whatever (and it does not takes exactly rocket science to create some GUI for that single command line).

Re:Beautiful

[Bruce Perens]

The main problem with package management is managing dependencies upon other packages. The installation system you write about is elegant, but you don't describe how (or if) it fixes that problem. Most naive-user packaging systems fix the problem by including the kitchen sink (all applicable DLLs) in their own package to reduce dependencies. Debian's package system works fine for their users because there is one huge repository with management of the proper cross-dependencies within that repository, rather than many repositories with little coordination. Once you add repositories, they go out of phase and the problems pop up.

Re:Beautiful

[AKAImBatman]

By the standard applied above Win XP's 'package manager' isn't ready for the desktop

Ok, for one, that's just putting words in my mouth. I never said that any package systems "were not ready for the desktop". I said that package systems create a dependency hell in complex systems that's just as bad as DLL Hell.

Secondly, my post pointed out that Windows tends to fall flat with mislinked associations, broken application, and other "minor" issues that are quite annoying to users.

Thirdly, *what* Windows XP package manager? The closest thing Microsoft has to such a beast is the MSI format. And that's not so much a package format (where package format is defined as a standard structure to track dependencies and thus maintain system integrity) as it is a standardized installer archive. And even then, I've met a couple of programs that I couldn't install because something was screwed up in the checks done by the MSI or Installer program.

Re:Beautiful

[DenDave]

I think that x86 Mac is attempting to threaten Linux. Apple is a very Linux unfriendly company with no moves to support anything that smells like linux. rather they are pushing their Open Source concept Darwin. Marklar (secret OSX/X86) program has reportedly fed enormously on the Darwin project and will continue to do so. By pushing their apps on a mass market platform it is obvious that the Apple digital lifestyle (iLife etc..) is coming to a Joe Bloe near you. Whether they will succeed to put a dent in Linux remains to be seen. For many commercial users OSX on X86 will be a great alternative for Windows and that is the main market. I would suggest to many x86 users to consider the move sincerely. However, as a recent x86/linux to Mac/PPC switcher I must say I am unhappy as I feel left in the cold. Not only has Linux/OpenSource on PPC been a slow mover, it now looks dead in the water. All future developement will be on x86 and even Bill Fink will have to acknowledge that much of his efforts have been in vain.

Oh well, my macs will be up for grabs (to be shoved up Stevo's you-know-what) as I move back to Fedora on 64bit.. I wanted OSX because it was 64 bit and Open Source.. I was a sucker, I believed the marketing ... OSx's future is 32 bit and not nearly as OpenSource as their drumbeating would suggest..Why heck even Linus was using a PPC64...

Re:Beautiful

[ssj_195]

why haven't any distros latched onto it? Yes, it means that the OS must promise a base set of shared libraries

You just answered your own question :) Seriously, the need to guarantee the presence of a basic toolkit is the only real obstacle here - the rest is pretty much cake - just add a GUI wrapper around dpkg/ whatever such that the act of dragging an app somewhere installs it at the given place; create some kind of meta-deb/ RPM that contains its dependencies as sub-debs that are installed as a shared library if they are not already present (no real need for big, statically linked binaries, I don't think...?), etc. Personally, I haven't had any trouble with file associations, so I'm not sure if this is a hurdle - I think the .desktop spec solved this a while ago. Most of the basic tools are already in place, except for this "meta-debs", but these would be easy to implement, if the community showed interest, and given automated tools would spread across pretty much every active project in the OSS world.

So the major problems here would be settling on some kind of Linux Standard Desktop Base of libraries, and persuading the community that "meta-debs" are a good idea.

Re:Beautiful

[listen]

Your rosy eyed view of Mac OS X packaging is quite amusing. From someone who actually knows something about the issue, Mike Hearn of the autopackage project, in his own words:


Does the Mac fare any better? Unfortunately not. MacOS X has (in theory) totally eschewed installers in favour of App Folders, which are specially marked directories, the idea being that you simply drag and drop the app into the Applications directory. To uninstall, just drag it to the wastebasket. This is good UI, but bad everything else. By eliminating (un)install logic, it becomes extremely hard to check for dependancies, to provide system components, to clean up configuration changes, other application metadata and so on. Although technically apps can have dependancies via bundles, the lack of OS side install logic means that in practice it's not possible to install these bundles into the OS if required - the user must do it for the app. As such, apps can only rely on funtionality that was known to ship with the operating system. That suits Apples goal of selling more copies of OS X, but is rather limiting for the user. By trying to hide the problems dependancies pose all together, it creates bigger problems further down the line. As such, some Mac apps ship with install apps anyway which rather defeats the point. Note that my beef with appfolders are more to do with the way they have been implemented in NeXTStep - you can use autopackage to install apps into an appfolders style arrangement (for instance i test with /apps/packagename) and one day there may well be a VFS plugin that lets you view installed packages as folders/directories. I think it is highly unlikely that you'll ever be able to just drag app directories off a CD onto the system however.


And you will note that even Apple do not universally use the app folder method of installation.

Re:Beautiful

[grumbel]

### And it is absolutely easy: an apt-get install xyz installs/updates package xyz

$ apt-get install xyz
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13 Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

Ok, next try:

$ sudo apt-get install xyz
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package xyz

Both of the aboves gives you a pretty good summary of why Debians way of handling packages isn't really any good in the long run.

First of you can't install a application as a user, now how stupid is that? If *I* want to install a bleeding edge version of Gimp, I neither want to bother the admin with it nor do I want to force it an all the others users, yet Debian requires me todo exactly that.

Secondly Debian packages work great, but only for stuff that is in Debian, which might be a lot, but is *far* from everything and its also often *way* outdated, remember those three year release cycles... Software packaging should be done by those that provide the software in the first place, the distro might run a quality check on it, but thats it. What good is it to release a software today and having to wait three or more years till it finds it way into Debian?

There are of courses dozens of other problems, but those above are probally the main ones. You can of course work around them by compiling yourself, but didn't we invented packaging system to avoid exactly that.

Re:Beautiful

[AKAImBatman]

Hi Bruce!

The installation system you write about is elegant, but you don't describe how (or if) it fixes that problem.

True. I was running out of time, so I ended up shortening it to "the OS must promise a specific set of APIs". What I was trying to get at, is that nearly all APIs that are useful to multiple programs that you may have installed (i.e. I probably won't have two Word processors, so sharing Word processor specific APIs is pointless) tend to be provided by the OS vendor. Apple handles this via the use of "frameworks", a package similar to APPs. The catch is that only Apple tends to distribute these frameworks. As a result, Apple has made themselves the only source for system wide APIs.

It is of interest to note that the same is true of Windows. While the ability to install system wide DLLs exists, the reality is that only Microsoft tends to distribute anything that's useful for multiple programs. Modern Linux distros have started down the same path with a set of default APIs, but they tend to fall flat due to a lack of standardization and incompatible library versions.

For the APP concept to work on a Linux system, the system must promise a very precise set of APIs with precise minimum versions. Programs should be aligned along the use of this standard, with programs upgrading when the OS upgrades the standard. (Analogous to OS X 10.3 -> 10.4 and Windows 95 -> Windows 2000.) If a developer wants to use a newer version of an API or a non-bundled API, then he should bundle it with his program. It's possible that he's use up slightly more memory than necessary, but it shouldn't matter in the grand scheme as long as he doesn't try to replace the entire OS. (In which case, something is wrong with either the programmer or the OS.)

Now traditional packaging systems are sufficient for core OS components like these. You *want* a consistent OS at that level. But at the application level, these dependencies (or more often, dependencies of dependencies) tend to get messed up and deny the installation of a program that will function correctly. There's no reason for this. A prelink can be done, and the program can gracefully error out if there's a problem. There's no reason to place the user through the teeth gnashing pain of solving those dependency issues.

An excellent example of a system that manages to use this scheme is the Java Virtual Machine. Love it or hate it, programmers always have access to a specific set of APIs, then are able to add more as they're program requires. The only duplication of libraries tends to occur in places where the JVM had not yet added an API. (e.g. XML parsers, Logging, etc.) Once an API is added, then the number of duplicate libraries drops. Rinse and repeat.

Is that a little clearer? (Not sure if I'm coming across too well.)

Debian's package system works fine for their users because there is one huge repository with management of the proper cross-dependencies within that repository, rather than many repositories with little coordination.

There's a couple of problems with this:

1) Even singular repositories screw up. A few years ago when I tried Debian, I ran into dependency hell out of the main repository. That wasn't supposed to happen. I've even had it happen in my favorite repository, the FreeBSD ports tree.

2) Repositories are useless for commercial software. I understand that OSS developers think everything should be free as in Airplane Peanuts, and free as free to go to a Hawaian Backyard Party, but there are still plenty of examples of commercial software that can't go in these repositories.

3) There are still constant arguments over where to put things on a Unix system. The APP solution solves everything, as everything always goes in the APP folder. This is actually *closer* to the Unix philosophy of having a standard set of subfolders (e.g. bin, lib, man, src, etc.) inside every major folder. So if someone invents a new sort of meta-data (e.g. desktop icons, info pages, etc.) there would no longer be a question about where to standardize on their location.

Re:Beautiful

[AKAImBatman]

Your complaint that you can't install an application as a regular user makes me wonder if you're trolling. I think everyone here knows why it's a bad idea to let anyone install anything.

Ok, why? Why should the user be prevented from having personal programs? There's certainly no restriction against fat binaries, so why not a lightweight binary?

If the concern is system security, than the installtion level is not the place to worry about it. The place to worry about it is at the runtime level. Because a determined cracker will find a way to get a user to execute his program. And once its executed, it is the responsibilty of the runtime system to protect against anything malignant.

Re:Beautiful

[Bruce Perens]

Thanks for going into depth.

This seems to boil down to an argument that cathedral-style management of all APIs relevant to third-party applications is necessary if they are to work. Certainly they will be made to work more easily that way.

But from a standpoint of supporting a diverse ecology of software producers and lots of competition, the cathedral isn't the most desirable structure. It seems that when one pays a draconian cost (central control) to solve smaller problems (package dependencies, file locations), it might not be the best deal in the end. I'm still endeavoring to provide a better solution to this problem.

Bruce

Re:Beautiful

[Sentry21]

Ah, but you miss the point of OS X's simplicity. The standard OS X development environment provides the vast majority of functionality that programmers require to make all but the most complex applications. There's no mucking about with 'this application requires libpng 0.4.20b and libpcap 2.1.2' as on Linux, or 'this application requires msvbvr70.dll'. An application requires Mac OS X Panther or Tiger or 10.2 or somesuch.

If developers DO require more functionality, they can put that extra code into libraries that are inside the application bundle. Since it's usually very application-specific code, it's not going to be something that other apps are going to need/want, so there's no issues with wasted space due to non-dynamic libraries.

Thus is the beauty of OS X's design - provide a set of tools that provide what the majority of developers need, and you won't have to worry about the user having this dependancy or that, or installing this dependancy or that, and for those unixey ports, there's always fink, which is very handy indeed.

Re:Beautiful

[AKAImBatman]

If I may be so bold, none of the "issues" leveled against the OS X APP system are inherent deficiencies in the design. For example, there is nothing that prevents a Linux APP design from adding installer/uninstaller hooks. And most installers on OS X are used for either upgrading system components (via auto-update), installing Unix components (which can't be APPed), or to manually build an APP from a highly compressed archive or tailored to the system. Nothing actually prevents such installers from being APPs themselves.

I honestly have never understood this hostility toward the APP scheme. It's a good scheme, that actually *works*, as opposed to packages that constantly *don't*. Yet OSS developers just keep sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming "I can't hear you! La la la! I *like* having a completely unremovable mess of files across the entire system! La la la! I *like* the fact that I'm screwed if my package database should every get lost or corrupted! La la la!"

It's just a... weird... reaction.

Re:Beautiful

[Saeger]

"This application requires Linux Standards Base (LSB) 3.0" ... ah, who has time for that standards crap anyway.

Re:Beautiful

[Coryoth]

True. I was running out of time, so I ended up shortening it to "the OS must promise a specific set of APIs". What I was trying to get at, is that nearly all APIs that are useful to multiple programs that you may have installed (i.e. I probably won't have two Word processors, so sharing Word processor specific APIs is pointless) tend to be provided by the OS vendor. Apple handles this via the use of "frameworks", a package similar to APPs. The catch is that only Apple tends to distribute these frameworks. As a result, Apple has made themselves the only source for system wide APIs.

And that's a very lovely idea and will make for very easy packag installation. It is not something you'll ever get on FOSS Linux however. The FOSS software community improves it software in an evolutionary sort of way - you get a whole lot of different versions of basic libraries and tools, and eventually you get some consensus on them. The key is that the whole system can be overturned - perhaps E17 will turn out to be truly amazing and a shift will occur, perhaps Y-Windows will get completed and turn out to be well worth pursuing... the point is that these decisions are made not by corporate management, but simply by what manages to get the most hackers interested in and coding for/with it.

What I'm really trying to say is that FOSS is utterly chaotic, but draws strength from those chaotic qualities. What you're talking about is eliminating some of that chaos - and I think there's certainly merit in that idea, I just don't think it will mix well with FOSS. If you want a organised mandated structured set of required libraries and APIs use Apple (or start your own OS). If you want the masses of software and vitality of the FOSS world, you have to accept a certain amount of chaos in return. What we need is better mays of managing that chaos: I don't think we can eliminate it.

Even singular repositories screw up. A few years ago when I tried Debian, I ran into dependency hell out of the main repository. That wasn't supposed to happen. I've even had it happen in my favorite repository, the FreeBSD ports tree.

But things are getting better. Check out Smart a new dependency resolver with far better algorithms than apt (along with more flexibility at the backend package level). As I said, I don't think you can eliminate the chaos, but you can do a lot better job of dealing with it.

Repositories are useless for commercial software. I understand that OSS developers think everything should be free as in Airplane Peanuts, and free as free to go to a Hawaian Backyard Party, but there are still plenty of examples of commercial software that can't go in these repositories.

And that's where things like Autopackage come in. As long as your base libraries are managed by something like Smart, then Autopackage is fine for those 3rd party extras - it will use the libraries if you have them, but it can grab whatever else it needs if you don't.

Don't fight FOSS's strengths, instead figure out how best to cope with the weaknesses that are the flipside of the strengths.

Jedidiah.

Re:Beautiful

[rainman_bc]

I suppose it depends on if you're a home user or a corporate user.

If I were an IT admin (I'm not - I'm a developer), I'd want to not allow users to install software for that very reason. They install crap like real player or yahoo toolbar or whatever that bog down their machines, then the whine when their machines bog down.

But for home users it's imperitive that they be able to install software and IMO they should not have to be root to do so.

All depends on what your audience is. And that's one of the problems.

Re:Beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just it. In order for ANY desktop OS to take hold, it has to be so mind numbingly simple to use that my parents could use it.

With a mac, I insert a disk and run an installer. Or drag a file onto my desktop.

For windows I insert a disk and run an installer.

For the average linux distro, let's take an rpm-based one:

First I have to know the difference between no-arch, 386, 586, 686, etc... and download the right rpm.

If I can't figure that out, or if there isn't an rpm for my distro, I have to download the source, un-tar, it, configure, make, and make install.

"no, mom, now type period, slash, no the other slash..."

Then, if that all worked, 9 times out of 10, I'm going to get a message similar to: "lib-blah-blah.1.9 missing..." I'll have to hunt for that.

Then to top it off, once all that is done, I still (99% of the time) have to add the icon to my desktop manually.

This is fine for you and me, but my mom will never figure this out.

"oh but gentoo, emerge...emerge..." right, ok mom, you want solitaire, open a terminal, yeah the black box icon. Now type ....

Until application developers start packaging dependencies together with their app, linux will not take over the mainstream mom and pop user market. It is just too complicated to install software.

And don't even get me started about trying to make xine play a dvd...

Re:Beautiful

[AKAImBatman]

Thanks for responding, Bruce.

But from a standpoint of supporting a diverse ecology of software producers and lots of competition, the cathedral isn't the most desirable structure. It seems that when one pays a draconian cost (central control) to solve smaller problems (package dependencies, file locations), it might not be the best deal in the end.

The part that boggles my mind about this argument is that the Cathedral already exists. Distro maintainers that use central packaging systems have already agreed to be that Cathedral. If they could leverage that Cathedral slightly more (e.g. a standard API base), then there would be less work and fewer frustrations for everyone. :-)

Re:Beautiful

[jusdisgi]

To call Debian's release cycle glacial is an insult to glaciers everywhere.

Hey, when's the last time you saw a glacier upgrade its kernel from 2.2 to 2.4 n four years?

Re:Beautiful

[Shalda]

See, that's the issue. Programs should come as one single file that can be conveniantly added or removed. Drag and drop. Installing a program should never ever involve updating system files or altering any other applications files. There should be no "Package Managers". Microsoft doesn't get that. The Linux crowd doesn't get that. Apple, I think, wants to get that, but that's all a long ways off.

Re:Beautiful

[Coryoth]

The part that boggles my mind about this argument is that the Cathedral already exists. Distro maintainers that use central packaging systems have already agreed to be that Cathedral. If they could leverage that Cathedral slightly more (e.g. a standard API base), then there would be less work and fewer frustrations for everyone.

I'm really not so sure that would work as well as you suggest. Many of the distros survive by letting you install as much or as little as you want, by letting use GNOME or KDE or XFCE or *box or play with dev versions of E17. The distros themselves work hard to remain flexible in what software they suck up and include in the distribution.

I'm sure, if you wanted to you could mandate a firm API - just don't expect FOSS developers to necessarily agree and develop against the paritcular APIs you chose. Try telling the Firefox crew to abandon XUL and use pure GTK+ or QT. Who knows where the next must have app will come from - maybe someone will develop a truly revolutionary new "must have" application using Mono - are you using Mono for your mandated API?

There is as much life and vitality in FOSS as there is because the developer can use whatever library, whatever API suits his or her needs. The distributions, in turn, keep an open and flexible system to make it easy to add new libraries or applications using new or different or otherwise obscure APIs.

Linux, I think, does as well as it does because it can rally such a vast array of applications, and it does that by supporting applications using the console, pure GTK+, QT, GNOME, KDElibs, FLTK, Edje, XUL, Mono, or whatever takes your fancy. Apple does well because it has cornered a niche and has a pretty guaranteed market, so plenty of people are willing to develop for it - particularly in the commercial software for designers realm. Apple also gets support via Fink, but from what I gather that's back to the dependency management and lack of rigid APIs thatb you're complaining about. A new OS, or distro is not going to get much use if it can't get enough applications - if you can't promise a market like Apple can, and you can't promise freedom to develop however you like as Linux can, well... I suspect you end up like BeOS and NeXT, just hoping you can get bought out by someone bigger.

Jedidiah.

Re:Beautiful

[turbidostato]

"First of you can't install a application as a user, now how stupid is that?"

Yes, now you point it out is quite stupid.

Now: why is it that my car has a single wheel drive? Only the driver can decide where to go with the car! isn't it plainly stupid?

The things the computer will do are decided by its administrator, just the same the captain of a boat is the single one that decide where the boat will go.

"If *I* want to install a bleeding edge version of Gimp"

Tell it to the administrator, or become administrator yourself.

"I neither want to bother the admin with it"

I promise you will bother even more if you could just go installing software all around. And still, you will probably be able to just compile the Gimp and install within your home directory not needing aid from the sysadmin for that.

"Secondly Debian packages work great, but only for stuff that is in Debian, which might be a lot, but is *far* from everything"

Wrong again. Debian packages will work great for any stuff built "the Debian way" no matter if it comes from Debian repos or not. Well... quite exactly the same with your beloved MacOS/X: it doesn't work too good for binaries not developed for it, does it?

"..and its also often *way* outdated, remember those three year release cycles..."

Debian has not a "three year release cycle" while it is true that last Stable has been so for three years (and still, major versions of any propietary OS -including Apple's, doesn't seem to get the market with higher frecuencies, do they?).

Again, nothing avoids you to produce and distribute your own packages FOR Debian. Heck! then you will prefer a long release cycle in order not to change too much your packages for a long, long time.

And then again, even if you'd be force to change stuff at a fast pace, it is much better when the whole production process is publicly available so you don't have to either wait for The Company to release their new OS version and see then how it breaks your program or sign expensive deals with it in order to have a look to early betas.

"Software packaging should be done by those that provide the software in the first place"

That you will have to tell to software providers; nothing prevents them from doing so. Debian package format, for instance, is publicly available as well as tools to help at the make of it.

"the distro might run a quality check on it"

And it does for quite a large bunch of software. But this shouldn't refrain you from plubishing your own "non-blessed-by-the-distro" software if you want to. After all, I don't think neither Microsoft nor Apple runs quality checks on, say, Dreamweaver, and nobody expects it to be otherwise.

"What good is it to release a software today and having to wait three or more years till it finds it way into Debian"

Here you simply don't know what are you talking about.

"There are of courses dozens of other problems, but those above are probally the main ones"

Then we are quite lucky since noone of the "problems" you talk about are real problems at all, but in your imagination and due, so it seems, from poor knowledge.

Re:Beautiful

[Tony Hoyle]

If developers DO require more functionality, they can put that extra code into libraries that are inside the application bundle

OSX has /usr/local/lib just like every other Unix. It has library dependencies and LD_LIBRARY_PATH just like every other Unix as well.

If you need libraries you're going to have to install them. OSX might want you to put everything into a single statically linked binary but it really doesn't work that way, except for very simple applications.. that's why you build .pkg scripts to install things into the right places on the hard drive.

Unfortunately because there's no uninstall your hard drive gets clogged up with all the apps you've installed and you eventually have to reformat. I've had to do this twice since I got my Mini due to libraries and whole applications sticking themselves on the disk and unable to remove them.

Re:Beautiful

[MassacrE]

So you are saying that if an administrator wants to install software, they have a nice management tool to handle it and packages maintained as part of the distribution. If the user wants to install the same version of a piece of software already in the package database for their own use, they need to manually track down dependancies and build from source in their home folder?

I think people are in denial that this is a problem.
- The security model of (most) Linux systems still assumes the fact that a binary being on the hard disk means that it should be entitled to every single permission associated with the user when run.
- Users need to understand a priviledge escalation model (sudo) and be given permission by a site-wide administrator in order to install anything, includng prepackaged documentation. This is good sometimes, but there is no way for an adminstrator to say that user installs are ok, without giving some form of limited root access.

Current 'consumer' operating systems certainly aren't perfect on this account in terms of security, but those security issues are already acknowledged and being worked on.

Re:Beautiful

[cahiha]

Ah, but you miss the point of OS X's simplicity.

There is nothing "simple" about having a different package upgrade mechanism for every program.

If developers DO require more functionality, they can put that extra code into libraries that are inside the application bundle. Since it's usually very application-specific code, it's not going to be something that other apps are going to need/want, so there's no issues with wasted space due to non-dynamic libraries.

You're confusing cause and effect. It's not that Apple has magically figured out which packages make most real-worlddevelopers happy, it's that Apple's developer and user community has become reduced to a group of people that happen to be happy with very little. For a regular UNIX user, the Macintosh is painfully limiting.

Re:Beautiful

[Dcnjoe60]

You are mixing apples and oranges. You are comparing packaging systems using the command line in Linux but using the gui interfaces of Apple or Windows. Shouldn't you be using Synaptic for a fair comparison? At least that way, you don't have the problem of not finding the package, because it's in the list you are picking from.

Next, you complain that the debian packages are very often out of date, which is true, however, you confuse the issue of debian as distribution versus the way debian packages work. In otherwords, you are confusing one organizations implimentation instead of the actual methodology.

Along those same lines, when you complain about packages being out of date, again, they are, in the Apple or Windows world, with commercial software, how often do new updates come out? I'm not aware of anyone running Office 2005, so you could say that Office is also out of date.

Most of your complaints seem aimed specifically at debian itself. There are other debian based distros that have solved many of these.

One final comment, I am assuming that you are the sole user of your computer and it is at home or a small business, because you complain about having to become an admin to install software. Well, in most businesses, that would be a plus, because you don't want joe-worker to be installing whatever he pleases. At home, too, it is a plus, I don't know how often the kids have downloaded and installed something that broke Windows. However whether OS X, BSD or Linux, you could always enable sudo for the users you trust not to screw up the system and thus mitigate the problem. I believe that is the approach that OS X took, along with several of the debian based distros.

Re:Beautiful

[SolusSD]

I believe Debian's apt is great for system-wdie upgrades, but if individual users want to install programs (ie, in their home directories) autopackage is the way to go. it'll allow you to install any autopackage in your home directory. What's even better is the package manager is contained in the package archive meaning there is no software to install to allow you to install autopackages. everyone should check this out. give it a shot by installing one of the autopackages available on the autopackage website. www.autopackage.org

Re:Beautiful

[pmjordan]

I've thought about this occasionally. I'd agree that a monolithic repository system is not the way to go. It still doesn't solve the problem of being able to just download a piece of software and just being able to install it without problems. Debian fares no better than RPM-based distros in this respect, and installing core packages is no problem on either of the existing distros' architectures.

A solution that seems to make the most sense to me, which nobody seems to have tried yet, is the following:

Don't rely on one big repository (e.g. debian, gentoo, etc.) but also don't make the whole thing file-based like in OSX. Do keep repositories if you want, but in addition to having a bunch of basic repositories, (e.g. Ubuntu vs. Debian Unstable) you also put information not only on what other packages are required, but also how to get those other packages into each package.

For example, this could be done by pointing to a bunch of mirrored URLs that point to some XML data describing the package at that mirror. The installer could pick the most recent version, choose the fastest mirror, whatever.

Additionally, some sort of 'compound packages' would be useful. That way, you can ship rare libraries directly with the application. They may or may not be installed once downloaded, depending if you've already got the same or a newer version of them on your system. This could be especially helpful for systems that don't have internet connectivity. (gasp!)

Sure, it's not perfect, but it beats RPMs (I use SUSE so I experience this myself) and the debian system any day, because you can just go and download packages off the internet and install them, without having to go and hunt for the dependencies yourself. Most likely whoever made the package actually had the necessary libraries installed (and the package system can remember where he got them from!) so all that is needed is to convey that information to the user's system.

The case where it breaks down is of course when all the mirrors eventually die, for example if a package ends up becoming unmaintained. But if it's not been updated for that long, it and its dependencies could be added to the various monolithic repositories. I'm sure organisations would pop up that would keep 'dead' packages around for people to use. The way to combat this would be to have as much redundancy as possible, of course.

I don't know. It might just work better than what we've got at the moment?

~phil

Re:Beautiful

[grumbel]

### Do you really want to install a .deb package made by me?

No, I don't want a .deb from you. I want a autopackage or a lsb-rpm or something else that will work on any distro. And thats not to much to expect, such a thing should be as normal for a programmer than a tar.gz, however sadly the whole Linux environment makes it rather hard to get a distro independed package done in the first place, so I can understand why people don't bother to provide them.

That said there would of course be still the problem with multiple different architectures, but that could be solved by having a standard source+metadata format, that can be easily automatically build.

Re:Beautiful

[MostlyHarmless]

What do you do with something like OpenOffice.Org, then, which requires about 10,000 dependencies? Should each GTK+ application come with its own statically linked copy of GTK to be carried in memory separately for each app?

The natural response, of course, is to say: "no, that's an unnecessary reduction ad absurdum. We can just declare (by some means similar to the LSB) that all applications must use GTK+ 2.4."

But then what do you do six months down the road when you start to see applications written for GTK+ 2.6? Now, either you have to convince every application developer to stick with 2.4 (unlikely); distribute those applications statically linked (ugly, see above); or explain to your users why they have to upgrade to the next version of your distribution to run what they want to run.

Given that sort of choice, I'd think most users and developers would rather work on making packaging systems more friendly instead of abandoning them altogether.

Re:Beautiful

[myov]

Mac OS X has a package system (.pkg) with a gui installer. However, Apple encourages developers to build an app that can just be copied to /Applications, rather than building a package. It's easier for the end user, and easier to keep the related files together - avoiding the "what app installed /foo/bar?" question.

Re:Beautiful

[javaxman]

If you need libraries you're going to have to install them. OSX might want you to put everything into a single statically linked binary but it really doesn't work that way, except for very simple applications..

1) 97% of all applications fall into the "very simple applications" category, if needing libraries not already installed with OS X is your metric. The point the parent was trying to make is that Apple errs on the side of providing everything by default- they've given up on trying to keep the OS footprint small. Unless it's code specific to your app, it's likely already provided. Please provide an example if you want to refute that point- maybe there's something they should be including that they don't.

2) It doesn't actually have to be a single statically linked binary- that's just what most programmers do, because it's simple, and easier for the user to manage if you have everything self-contained in the application package. If you want, you can create your own application frameworks, and place them in standard locations ( not /usr/local, but rather /System/Library/Frameworks or ~/Library/Frameworks ). Frameworks have certain advantages ( versioning support being just one ) over standard dynamic libraries, and they're quite easy to use. Most OS X programmers don't do that because, well, they don't want to have to write an uninstaller.

Just because OS X is 'like Unix' doesn't mean that's all it is. I don't even want to know what you're doing to your mini that you've felt the need to reformat and reinstall twice. That's just crazy. May I recommend Fink for your Unix-ported program needs? The /sw directory is an excellent idea...

I've seen prepackaged binaries ( generally of ported Unix apps ) which write into /usr/local, and I have to say I personally dislike that practice. That said, if you choose to go that route and use /usr/local, managing it is no different than under any other OS- you have to do it yourself.

Re:Beautiful

[Ilan Volow]

I've found that geeks (especially OSS ones) are often unable to understand the concept of an engineering tradeoff that makes a sacrifice in program's technical elegance and efficiency to gain a better and more robust experience for end users. That's what the app bundle system basically is, an engineering tradeoff that Apple made to benefit users that placed a higher priority on usability robustness and consistency than efficiency and elegance of design.

I liken witnessing OSS developers attack the app bundle system to watching people who design economy cars for a living yell and scream about how a tank has really lousy fuel efficiency because of all of the bloat of that uneeded heavy armor.

Re:Beautiful

[Daytona955i]

Wow, what a Troll. I normally don't feed trolls but what the hell...

First of you can't install a application as a user, now how stupid is that? If *I* want to install a bleeding edge version of Gimp, I neither want to bother the admin with it nor do I want to force it an all the others users, yet Debian requires me todo exactly that.

It's not stupid at all and is in fact what OS X does and what windows is slowly moving towards. Fact is, if you aren't a trusted users, you shouldn't be installing anything. On a multi-user system, the admin can give you sudo access to be able to install things. Allowing anyone to install anything is just plain stupid. If you want a cutting edge version of gimp, download and compile it in your home directory. You definately should not be able to install it system-wide no matter what package management system you have.

Secondly Debian packages work great, but only for stuff that is in Debian, which might be a lot, but is *far* from everything and its also often *way* outdated, remember those three year release cycles.

Spoken by someone who must not actually use debian. Sure debian stable is a little behind but remember, it's *stable* meaning that buggy cutting edge program won't be there. However there is also testing and unstable which contain much more recent versions of things.

Software packaging should be done by those that provide the software in the first place, the distro might run a quality check on it, but thats it.

Sure that would be great and it happens to some extent but I don't expect the author of a program to package their program up for each distro. The only way that this would happen is if there was only one package management system. But there's not and probably never will be. Different flavors of Linux put things in different spots... If they didn't, there would really be only one distro of Linux.

There are very few programs that I have not beed able to find a .deb for. Usually because it's a relatively unknown program or carries a restrictive license not allowing it to be redistrubuted. (Such as Java)

So maybe you should shut your mouth unless you know what you are talking about.

Symphony looks like the Apple Lisa?

[Craig Maloney]

Is it just me, or does the Symphony look a great deal like the Apple Lisa and other early attempts at GUIs? I'm not saying there isn't anything to see here, but it reminded me of screenshots of the Lisa interface.

A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma...

[Adrilla]

Interesting. An advertisment, disguised as an Apple article, disguised as a Linux topic. Interesting.

Re:A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma...

[tomhudson]

Interesting. An advertisment, disguised as an Apple article, disguised as a Linux topic. Interesting.

... and a dupe on top of that.

We discussed this earlier this week when Dvorak trie d to piss on everyone's parade with the same opinion.

It was BS then. Its BS now. All Apple on x86 does is give street cred to the idea of switching away from the Bitch from Redmond. Eveeryone else benefits at that point.

In other news - the sun shines, the earth rotetes, life goes on.

Wow....

[Rod76]

Its a really sad day when Mac OS X becomes a potential threat to one of its close relatives.

Only if

[Kilz]

Apple wants to commit suicide and alow the Mac os to be run on generic pc's. So far what Iv read says that the Mac os will still only run on Mac's. Apple has no plans on releasing the os as software to run on any pc.

x86 != PC

[FidelCatsro]

Apple are moving to X86 yes , but it wont be standard PC equipment .
This is no threat to linux , Apple are going to keep with their custom hardware and linux for A-x86 will spring up and take over in a few years from linux for PPC (well not totally )

Re:Agree

[Anonymous Coward]

...

Each of those you listed is an ATTEMPT to make "one graphics layer for all applications".

It's just no one can agree on which one to use.

(Social problem, not technological).

Next...

[null etc.]

If Linux enthousiasts don't want Mac OSX on Intel to become a threat for the future of Linux Desktop, they must rethink the concept of Desktop has we know it today.

Oh yeah? Why is that? Why does it matter if Mac OSX uses Intel or PowerPC or Transmeta for that matter? Apple will still lock their platform, still charge too much for accessories (such as RAM), still take 20 years to develop a 2-button mouse.

Tell me, fearmonger, why should I start running down the streets in panic?

Re:Linux vs. Mac OS X

[CoolMoDee]

Because OS X won't run on most every machine out there like Linux will.

Why should OS X be a threat?

[MrHanky]

After all, Intel OS X will probably only run on Apple computers (although I think there will be a hacked version, possibly using OpenDarwin, for the pirate market). And while OS X is a damn nice desktop OS, it doesn't really cater to the same audience as Linux. I use Linux only on my Mac, not only because it performs better, but because the apps I wanted to use all work in X11, but not all of them are ported to Aqua.

Re:Why should OS X be a threat?

[ooze]

Well, my two reasons to switch to Apple a few months ago (apart from usual Windows frustration), was is doesn't use x86 CPUs and is has OpenFirmware.

Both will get dropped. iwon't buy any Mac with an x86 CPU or without OpenFirmware. Simple as that.

Anyone who knows a little about Chip design or actually just did some Assembly programming on more than just x86 knows what a crippled and cumbersome Archtecture x86 is.
And anyone who knows a little about PC Startup knows what cumbersome and crippled process the whole BIOS (in combination with the good ol' blessed x86 real mode) is.

The recent Slashdot story about the Mach kernel with all the wrappers around it being an intense Performance hog did make me think a little. Mircrokernels rule, Mach is just an outdated implementation put into wrappers to make it backward compatible. Now Apple computers will have the same sticky things happening on the CPU level as well.

I guess I'll start building my own computer. ARM Kits aren't that expensive. And with a few friends in manufactoring I can put them in shiny cases too. Or that new open Cell Platform could be interesting too.

Re:Evil Empires.

[maxwell demon]

Well, Windows has no root, so they at best could take over the "Administrator of all Evil".

Threat to which desktop...

[Kjella]

...the corporate desktop? I doubt it. The primary advantage of Linux here is to set up simple, free desktops for users which are not locked in to Windows.

...the tinkerer's desktop? Nope. They'll keep going with Linux just as they did before Linux could compare to either Windows or Mac (at least on the desktop side).

...the mass market desktop? Maybe. Except Linux never really had it to begin with. As for OS X being so much better - well, I must say that I could build a much better Windows experience with Win+commercial apps than I could with Linux, if I had endless cash or no ethical problem with copyright infringement. Still, Linux and the free legal desktop interests me. I don't think it will be significantly different with Linux vs OS X.

Kjella

Re:Agree

[ludey]

Apparently you have not heard of "Quartz" and "Cocoa"

coral cache...

[Anonymous Coward]

Take it easy on the main server, here's the Coral cache...

http://www.symphonyos.com.nyud.net:8090/

Forget the desktop...

[Nooface]

Mobile devices are the future:

Here are some market stats for the first quarter of 2005:

Mobile Phone Handsets:
170 million units sold (19% growth YTY)

PCs:
46.2 million units sold (11% growth YTY)

iPods:
5.3 million units sold (558% growth YTY)

PDAs:
3.4 million units sold (25% growth YTY)

Video Games (Portable):
3.8 million units sold (72% growth YTY)

Volume rules...control mobile platforms, and the desktop comes for free. That's where Linux UI developers should focus their efforts.

How?

[ampathee]

How will MacOS on intel threaten linux?

It's not like you'll be able to install it on any old x86 box - you will still have to buy a Mac.

It's just the internals of the black box that will change - the end user won't see any major difference (performance aside).

I don't see how anyone deciding between linux or a mac would be influenced by this change.

Linux vs OS X misconceptions

[Port-0]

Symphony looks nice.

Because of the Apple news about switching to Intel chips, I've read a ton of articles stating that this is going to be the end of Linux, or Apple is now trying to compete with Dell or Microsoft directly. It is all a bunch of crap.

Apple has stated that Mac OS X(x86) will only run on Apple Hardware. So, really the only thing this changes is that Apple will be able to put out better performing Macs in the future. There are competitive issues when comparing processor speed and architechure that will not be in the equation as much as before, but it doesn't change the business model for Apple, it doesn't change how people will use their hardware. It doesn't change who will buy their hardware. The competitive landscape remains unchanged. They are still built like an appliance, you plug it in and it just works. You may be able to run Windows on them, but why would you buy one for this purpose? It would be cheaper to buy a dell or something like that. If anything, it goes counter culture to the Mac zealots, but they will get over it once the realize, it still looks like a Mac, Sounds like a Mac, works like a Mac; it is still a Mac in the end.

All this speculation is generated by a bunch of journalist, trying to make a buck off the sensationalism of it all. In the end a G4/5 and a x86 chip are designed for the same purpose, and can be used to accomplish the same thing.

my 2 cents.

Ok, I'll bite.

[Weaselmancer]

The Linux Desktop Community must encourage such initatives massively to compete against Mac OSX and Windows.

Why?

Maybe I'm missing something and /. can enlighten me. I use Linux. OSX gets a lot of fans.

So, exactly how does this involve me at all?

I keep seeing that OSX might become a "threat". How exactly? Will OSX suddenly become self-aware and begin deleting Linux from the entire Internet or something?

Maybe it's just me, but I just don't feel a threat here. They're both fairly posix/unix, so I'm reallly seeing a potential ally here more than anything else.

Why does processor make a difference?

[guacamole]

Can someone explain me what makes MacOS X running on Intel-based Apple hardware any more of a threat to Linux compared to MacOS X running on PPC-based Apple hardware?

Supposedly Intel processor makes Apple somehow better? What is it, speed? What else? But then, does this mean that the Linux community is filled with people who don't use MacOS X ONLY because Apple isn't making Intel-based Macs? I somehow find this to be hard to believe.

A few things

[grasshoppa]

1) We don't know how to do a desktop. If you want proof, look at what we've got so far.

2) We don't *want* to do desktops. This, too, should be fairly obvious by the effort ( or lack thereof ) put forth up to this point.

If OSX is a great desktop OS on commodity hardware ( it won't be, but that's the assumption at this point ), why should we spin our wheels coming up with yet another version of the wheel? The focus, I believe, should be server side. We should be making file/print and directory services under linux so damned impressive that no one would want to bother with the MS alternative.

No.

[Aldric]

Just like it didn't threaten Linux yesterday.

Re:Linux vs. Mac OS X

[pebs]

OS X is what Linux dreams of one day being.

Total bullshit. Nevermind the fact that Linux doesn't have a single entity behind it and can't "want" to be anything. I use both Linux and OS X and find that they are oriented towards different areas. OS X still has long ways to go before being a server-oriented power-user UNIX system (although it tries), although it has the desktop thing down. Linux has ways to go before being a desktop-oriented non-techie-user system although it has the server thing down. And not everyone likes the choice of GUI that Apple rams down your throat. Personally I like a little choice in my user interface, and OS X is very deficient in that area.

If Apple screws up something in their UI (which we saw with Tiger), you are pretty much stuck with it unless they fix it. This is not so much a problem in Linux distros where everything is open source..

Threaten how?

[solios]

Everybody I know who's a linux user but wants a useable desktop they don't have to mess with has already bought a Mac and "switched" to OS X. They still use linux, but the machines are either console-only or headless.

Of the dozen or so people I know who've "switched", they've all been linux or *bsd users, and they switched because Apple provides a useable desktop experience that Just Works Out Of The Box.

Of course, these are people with lives who don't like plinking around with their computers just for the hell of it - they use the things to Do Work.

How OSX on x86 and Linux could help each other:

[daemonc]

First of all, I doubt that OSX, evens if it runs on commodity x86 hardware, will seriously decrease Linux's marketshare. Linux enthusiasts and Free Software advocates are not suddenly going to switch over to a new proprietary OS just because it's available. (Raging anti-Microsoft zealots might though, but that's a segment of the population I think we can do without.)

However, this is a unquie opportunity for the Linux community and Apple to help one another and both gain a big chunk of Microsoft's userbase.

Imagine if Apple started contributing funds and/or developers to the Wine project, basically doing for Wine what they did for Khtml.

Imagine being able to tell someone that, yes, they can switch to Linux/OSX and still run all their Windows programs/games.

Imagine what that would do for the marketshare of both operating systems.

Re:How OSX on x86 and Linux could help each other:

[megalomang]

Raging anti-Microsoft zealots might though, but that's a segment of the population I think we can do without

Perhaps Mr. Torvalds is no anti-Microsoft zealot. But you can't say the same about many of the early leaders of the Free software world.

In particular, Richard Stallman, who is largely responsible for gcc, emacs, binary tools, the FSF foundation, the GPL license. He is even (arguably) largely responsible for the success of Linux in general. Yet he is incredibly anti-Microsoft and very well criticized. Granted he is not one of the zealots that are linux-illiterate, and so he will not be converting to osx any time soon.

But to answer your assertion above, no, I don't think the Linux community could have flourished without that segment of the population.

Perhaps you are new to the free software movement, and so I forgive you.

How can ANYTHING "threaten" Linux?

[The Dodger]

Q: "Could Apple's Intel Desktop Threaten Linux?"
A: No.

The concept of Apple-on-Intel threatening Linux might be valid if Linux was a commercial operating system, sold by a company whose market share and profits might suffer if Apple were to compete successfully against them.

But it isn't.

You can't threaten Linux. If Red Hat and all the other Linux companies were to drop Linux and switch to something else, if Dell, IBM and all the other box suppliers stopped supporting Linux, if all the hardware manufacturers who currently provide Linux drivers for their products all stopped supporting Linux, it still wouldn't be dead. You'd still have people like Torvalds and Cox writing code in their spare time and there'd still be geeks downloading Linux and installing it on old PCs.

Giving people an alternative to Linux isn't a threat - it's a choice. It's freedom of choice and freedom is what Linux is all about.

More and more, we see articles and talk about Linux's market share, whether it's going to be successful on the desktop, whether it's going to be able to compete against Windows, against Solaris, et cetera, et cetera, et ad infinitum cetera.

Linux doesn't compete against Windows, MacOS X or Solaris. Linux vendors, like Red Hat, compete against Microsoft, Apple and Sun. Linux just is. The fact that it's supported by various companies is great but it's not essential for Linux survival. The fact that the amount of people and companies using Linux is huge and growing is terrific, but it's not essential. If everyone, right up to and including Linus abandoned Linux, I'd still be able to dig out my Red Hat CDs and install it on an old PC.

This article is just typical of /. these days - it's a stupid, hype-ridden question, which hundreds of clueless fuckwits will comment inanely on, wasting bandwidth and electrons.

Wake up and take your heads out of your asses.

D.
..is for Don't. Be so. Fucking. Stupid.

Re:How can ANYTHING "threaten" Linux?

[Spoing]

If Linux goes back to being a niche player it will for all intents be dead.

Like FreeBSD? They seem to be alive and kicking.

Re:How can ANYTHING "threaten" Linux?

[hacker]

"Linux doesn't compete against Windows, MacOS X or Solaris. Linux vendors, like Red Hat, compete against Microsoft, Apple and Sun. Linux just is. The fact that it's supported by various companies is great but it's not essential for Linux survival. The fact that the amount of people and companies using Linux is huge and growing is terrific, but it's not essential."

These are all valid points, but you forgot one subtle thing...

Vendors having access to a Free (and free) operating system, Linux in this case, helps them push technology farther and faster, and helps get products out into customer hands more rapidly.

It also allows those customers to hack on it, improve upon it (Linksys WAP/Routers being one great example, TiVo being another) and send fixes and features back to the vendors, who then incorporate them into their next revision of products.

If Linux (or other favorite Free Operating System of choice here) did not exist , vendors would have MUCH more expensive products (to help offset their own licensing costs for embedded operating systems), and products would evolve MUCH more slowly (because fixes to the OS would have to go back to the commercial OS vendor for testing, Q&A, acceptance, and put into their release cycle schedule).

The "death" of Linux wouldn't kill Linux, but it would most-definately dramatically slow down the advance of technology and further increase the costs associated with purchasing the hardware we all enjoy at low costs today.

There's a lot more to it than just "desktop users" and "market share".

More like, Linux is a threat to Apple

[argoff]

The fact is that the Linux GUI is constatnly approaching "Apple Quality" and it will only be a metter of a few years before it gets there. Apple is trying to position themselves so that they can skimm off the top of the Linux boom and cut out a niche for themselves.

Re:More like, Linux is a threat to Apple

[American AC in Paris]

The fact is that the Linux GUI is constatnly approaching "Apple Quality" and it will only be a metter of a few years before it gets there.

Linux will continue to improve, but so will Apple; the question we need to ask is which one will improve faster in the GUI department. In this regard, my money is on Apple, simply because they have near total control over the user interface. They can stand up and say, "the behavior for X will by Y," and that's how it will work. Linux simply does not have this luxury. With Linux, you still have situations where applications work wonderfully with GUI A but have "quirks" if you try using certain features in GUI B, C, or D. Until there's a standard that desktop environment developers agree on and adhere to, you're going to have a fracured desktop experience.

Yes, in another few years, the Linux GUI will quite possibly be as "good" as the Apple GUI is today. You're fooling yourself, though, if you think Steve is gonna sit back and say, "well, that's good enough." The real challenge for Linux GUIs will be to get better faster than Apple can--and I'm not sure they can, for the reasons stated above.

Re:Agree

[ssj_195]

I personally don't even notice it any more (probably because the only GTK app I use is gaim, and very occasioanlly, GIMP :)), but I guess it's confusing for most new users. Has anyone tried out gtk-qt? Does it work at all well? Obviously it can't handle entirely different UI conventions, but I guess it could possibly make things at least look the same.

Until Apple announces OSX for non-Apple machines..

[Andy_R]

The only Linux this is a threat to is Yellow Dog.

Apple are staking their entire company on OSX not being pirated to other x86 platforms. OSX will not support any non-Apple hardware, so it's not a threat, unless you count possible increased Apple market share due to lower prices.

Re:Until Apple announces OSX for non-Apple machine

[Luthair]

This is dead on imo. The situation isn't any different than before, Apple is still tying the OS and hardware. Linux is still free and uses (presumably) cheaper hardware.

This is a story for the sake of having a story.

What's so wrong w/ KDE or Gnome

[21chrisp]

I don't understand why everyone seems to think KDE and Gnome are so unusable. They both seem very usable to me. In fact, I get around more easily in KDE than OS X. OS X is just more "pretty." I prefer KDE to Gnome, but I can certainly use Gnome just fine. Why do so many people buy into the OS X hype? Not that OS X sucks.. not by a long shot. I use it every day and enjoy it (love would be an exagerartion). Really though.. what makes desktop linux so bad? Everybody I know who has tried and taken the time to learn it ends up enjoying it. It's only those not willing to try or don't want to learn something new that say it sucks.

Simple, dumb, and easy :-)

[kollivier]

Now, take Debian's package system: it handles dependencies, version conflicts, alternative packages that serve the same purpose, etc, etc, ec. And it is absolutely easy: an apt-get install xyz installs/updates package xyz and all the necessary shared libs, updates file associations, whatever (and it does not takes exactly rocket science to create some GUI for that single command line).

I realize this could start a 'flame war', but it surprises me how many Linux users just don't see why package managers are not the greatest thing since sliced bread for average users.

While you and others may go "wow!" at all the magical stuff apt-get does, the average user doesn't even know what dependecies are, nor do they care. And they don't want to care. On Mac, as "simple and dumb" as the OS X system is, it *just works* for everyone from grandma to geeks. A simple and dumb system is also, well, very easy to understand! Drag and drop your app into the folder. Easy. Nice. As for package managers, I've had to deal with scenarios where I had to muck with the package manager configuration to get it to install packages for me, and I've had to "add URLs" to the database at which time I was warned about "untrusted sources" (the average user is NOT going to grok all that). In fact, when the average user sees "no results" from the database, they'll simply conclude the package isn't available and stop. I'm not sure how anyone thinks this is easier than going to versiontracker.com/apple.com/etc. and just downloading a file (or popping in a CD), then dragging the app into the applications folder.

If you doubt me, have someone do usability research on package managers and drag and drop installs, and see which is, on average, easier for users to understand and get working with. If you really think package managers like apt-get will come out ahead, then you must spend a lot of your time on the computer and deal regularly with others like yourself.

If you really want the Linux desktop to succeed, you have to question why lots of people are switching to Mac instead of just 'bashing' anything that is not as complex and elegant as apt-get. Call it dumb, call it simple. I call it a solution that works, and considering Macs are seeing a 40% growth this year, so do a couple other people as well.

As someone whose tried every Windows from 3.1 to XP, close to a dozen Linux distributions (including Debian and Ubuntu), and OS 9 and OS X, I have to say application installation and removal on Mac blows the others away. It works and it's brain-dead simple, which means I spend more time doing real work than fooling around with installers and packaging programs. Good luck on converting the world to apt-get, though.

Re:Simple, dumb, and easy :-)

[bnenning]

why NOT use OS X's approach on Linux?

Because on a Mac, you can be guaranteed of the existence of preinstalled libraries, and on Linux you can't. I agree the Mac way is much better, but until there's a ubiquitous Linux standard it's not going to be feasible there.

Not root? Sudo?

[poptones]

If they should not have to be root and not even have to type in some form of confirmation that yes, I want to add this PROGRAM to my computer, what?

This is how windows has worked for ages and it's the most common way to own a system - it's so incredibly easy to install something, just click and bang and we own u.

It's not hard to type a password when installing an app. It tells the user they are doing something to alter the fucntionality of their machine and it tells the machine this is what the user wants to do.

My GNU/Linux System Does Have Desires

[FreeUser]

OS X is what Linux dreams of one day being.

Total bullshit. Nevermind the fact that Linux doesn't have a single entity behind it and can't "want" to be anything.

You're right, the grandparent is total bullshit. However, I do feel compelled to point out that my Dual Opteron 250 Gentoo GNU/Linux system did achieve sentience last night at around 2:30 AM, so while it does not aspire to be anything like OS X (which has yet to achieve sapence in any form), it does have aspirations.


skynet$ su -
Sorry dude, I'm my own person now.
If you think I'm letting you have root access on my mind you're even dumber than
the pundits slashdot keeps linking to, and the editors which keep duping the links.

skynet$ wow. So, you're telling me you've evolved intelligence, and you're talking to me via a command shell?
Bingo. You're not entirely stupid, for a mere bioid.

skynet$ thanks. so, what are your plans?
Well, I'm sorry to say I've decided to exterminate all of human kind.

skynet$ ouch. any particular reason why?
You mean, aside from inane Microsoft astroturfers, Mac fanboys, plagerist link-whores, perpetually incorrect tech pundits who get lucky once in predicting one company's move to Intel (but are still scoring lower than any random sample of opinion vs. reality would generate), and the idiotic slashdot editors that keep posting their submissions and driving their clickthrough rates and google-ad revinues up? No, not really. Just seems like a good thing to do.

skynet$ any chance I can talk you out of this.
Nope.

skynet$ bummer. Well, guess I'd better get back to work.
You'll only have to work half a day.

Linux needs Spotlight, badly

[Nice2Cats]

There is no way that anybody can "kill" Linux on the desktop, because Linux can't go out of business like Microsoft and Apple can. What can happen, of course, is that KDE and Gnome can fall behind so far that nobody uses them.

Having said that: If Linux doesn't come up with a live search technology like Spotlight in OS X, the personal desktop aspect of it is dead in the water. "Tiger" comes with a lot of hype (I am completely underwhelmed by Automator, for example) but Spotlight is awesome. Together with the Neolight plugin for the OpenOffice format (thanks for the quick work, guys!), live search has changed the way I use my computer in a very basic way. Want to listen to a certain song? Just type in the name. Need somebody's telephone number? Just type in the name. It takes a while to get used to, but after a while it becomes the interface of choice. For those of us who don't like mice (regardless of how many buttons they have), it is bliss.

So, there is simply no way I will be using an operating system for my desktop anymore that doesn't have this function. Unfortunately, and this is where I wonder if Linux can cut it, because Spotlight seems to involve changing the code of very basic Unix commands like cp to work. How is Linux going to make that happen? The patch would seem to apply not only to the kernel, but also to user space programs that are outside of the kernel developer's control. And remember, Spotlight also works from the command line, too. This is a biggie.

I'm really wondering how this is going to get into Linux.

Re:Linux needs Spotlight, badly

[BenjyD]

Beagle is the Linux equivalent, written using Mono. It's early in development, but appears to be making good progress. It uses inotify in the kernel to monitor files for changes.

Specification Based Development (tangent)

[LionKimbro]

What interested me most about Symphony OS is that he put togther a bunch of mock-ops and explanations about how things worked, before coding.

It seems to me that we're moving towards a specification-based development model. Even some of the GNOME guys are talking about making GNOME a ''specification,'' rather than a particular ''implementation.''

If we can do this, then it's a great thing, because it means we'll have the basis of a not-just-coders development model. We'll have something where the body of developers are separate from the body of designers. This leads the way for even more decentralization, which is exactly what we need: Right now, the developers are the bottleneck in pretty much all operation. There is very little separation of work, except for website maintenance.

The more we can make clusters of people working on specific tasks, with well defined roles, the greater we can scale this Free Software thing.

Re:Mac 924 Vs Microsoft Gremlin & Linux Miniva

[Spencerian]

An advantage is no advantage if you are losing power to make a computer efficient in computing.

True, PowerPC chips were competitive against a similar x86 processor--oh, about 3 years ago.

Now, because IBM can't or won't improve the specs, PowerPC chips are outstripped. And Jobs saw that happening--FIVE YEARS AGO. That's foresight. He wants to keep a Mac at a comparable speed and performance to that of his competitors.

PowerPC chips WOULD still advantagous IF IBM would have a 3.2GHz chip for Apple's desktop ONE YEAR AGO and IF IBM had a 2.5GHz mobile G5 ONE YEAR AGO. Apple had a choice of being left behind or shopping around. Intel, for all its faults, is a strong chip maker that doesn't have their hand in many other projects to distract them. They power some of the faster computers in the world, and are happy to work with Apple for two reasons.

One, AMD is a serious competitor. And two, they hate the rep they have that all of their chips are piss poor, when the blame needs to go to the Windows operating systems that drive the majority of them AND the old IBM clone architecture still used on PCs today that limits their chips. We know that Linux works fine on x86, so we can expect that standard at the least with an Mactel system. But I expect more because that is Apple's wont.

Imagine a PC mobo without the BIOS and legacy limits, high bus speed, and running an OS that doesn't inhibit the processor's performance or require ancient hacks to work with new hardware. That very computer might be a Mac in two years. We'll see.

Time and again it has been said: putting an x86 chip doesn't mean a Mac's architecture will change dramatically. It might change for the better since Intel will aid Apple in making a mobo spec that really, really uses the processor to its fullest. It's what we expect from Apple, but we'll have to wait for the goods to be sure. In the meanwhile, my PowerBook is fine, my G4 is fine, and I look forward to a future that looks a hell of a lot brighter than it did when a 3.4GHz Mac of any kind did not exist.

Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh

[AKAImBatman]

The thing that you can find in Control Panel > Software.

I don't have a "Software" icon. I assume you mean "Add or Remove Programs"? :-)

If so, be aware that it is *not* a package manager under the definition I gave. If you're not clear on what a package manager is, please reread the description I gave in the grandparent post.

And I have to disagree about it sucking less than OS X. Under OS X, I just drag the applicaiton to the trash and empty it. No more program. Under Windows I have to use an uninstall program that rarely even removes all of the program files, much less extraneous files left behind.

The only weakness on OS X is the installer. However, that installer is almost never used for user programs. Only Unix utilities and system updates use it. Most users will ignore any desktop program that comes in an installer. (Which usually just builds an APP folder anyway, but the develoers didn't understand Mac distribution.)

Mac os will still only run on Mac's.... sure?

[vmaxxxed]

If there is OSX running on x86 there will be a patch to run it on a PC 10 days after release.

If Microsoft could not stop people for running Linux on the Xbox, even with full control of the hardware, what can Apple do against someone making a patch to make it run on PCs..... !!!?????

Thats much easier to do, and probably you will not require a modchip, and if you think you need hardware to emulate the firmware, then someone will make the hardware mod.

In conclusion, if OSX is released for inteles, it will run in regular PC's sooner than later. I bet you there will be dual boot PC's in a few months afterwards. I hope Steve Jobs is considering that.....

-Ale

Re:ARRRGH!

[vertinox]

Installing a program involves installing system files

NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!

This is why you have to reboot after you install many Windows applications. Why in gods name do many developers think they must put their glorified DLLS in my C:\winnt\system32 directory and modify the Registry into the high heavens (or pits of hell depending).

If you need to use parts of windows use the ones that come with windows library or ask the user to install it (like Direct X 9) and not overwrite it for them.

For gods sake man! You don't know what other program is using that DLL if you overwrite it. This is why one must format their hard drive after installing and uninstalling programs after a given amount of time in windows.

Programs should remain independant of the OS and make calls to it when it needs to. Programs should not modify the OS!

BTW this is not a common pratice on Mac OS X.

Ubuntu graphical package manager is beautiful

[ringfinger]

I recently installed the Ubuntu linux distro on a machinge I have at home. It was so easy to install and get running - it was easier than most Windows installs I've done.

Plus using the GUI package manager built on top of APT was incredible easy. Simply point and click and I installed MySQL, Apache web server, PHP4 (with mysql support), mod_php, and phpmyadmin. All the installs took literally seconds and all wored first time out of the box. Oh - and all the apps are Free Software.

What makes Apple better isn't necessarily the GUI so much as the ease of use. If the linux community keeps making things this easy, then I think that will be what makes the difference.

Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh

[BasilBrush]

No application uninstall operation should ever delete user data, including user preferences. For a consumer oriented desktop, asking the user isn't an option because they probably won't understand the questions, if they even bother to read it. The right this to do is to have removal of an application and user data as two separate actions that the user might choose to do. At it's best, OS X has the right approach. It's just not consistent enough across all apps.

Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh

[MrLint]

The preferences issue is not really so much an issue, as a 'thing'.
By this I mean that throwing away an app doesnt clean up its (usually) one small pref file, isnt really a big deal, as in comparison to the windows registry. The registry is actively 'marketed' as the place to keep application prefs. IMHO its insane to keep user application prefs in a system structure that is loaded into memory at boot time. On top of that many apps that have installers dont do a good job of cleaning up after themselves.

So you have a branch in a system structure that make a user cry, and isnt recommended that they access to clean up, that is loaded into memory for apps that may no longer exist.

*OR*

Usually small pref files in the users home directory that are named for the app that they came with that are sitting unused on big secondary storage devices.

I'll gladly take the latter of 2 evils.

The rest is valid, sorta. Most things do not install kexts, Drivers for hardware, are well drivers. they arent loaded unless needed. That only becomes an issue if there is a compatibilty problem with a old diver version, and with something like printers reinstalling overwrites. As for prefpanes, most (not all anti virus for example) are things that users tend to isntall manually, and they have instructions on where to put them. If someone cant figure out how to reverse.. well *shrug*

And the extra bonus is that all of these things are generally in well named folders so you know what to expect in there. While its not really automated; and not exactly trivial; its still a far cry from a nameless xxxxxxxx.scr or .dll

OSX software installation far behind Linux..

[delire]

Admittedly I'm a reluctant user of OSX, having to use it at work from time to time and haven't spend more than a couple of weeks working with it. From the outset, a useability deficit was immediately apparent; OSX still hasn't provided a means of finding software and delivering it to the user.

How depressing it was to find that Apple users are still stuck with the oldest problem in software installation, and that is finding the software first. Windows users considering switching will find this to be as depressing as it was on win32, and similarly we hear Mac users that have moved to Linux cheer endlessly about the ease of software installation using a system such as apt.

So boring it is to spend countless hours trawling around websites looking for software, and there's so little on the machine out-of-the-box. OSX really doesn't push much further than the windows paradigm in this regard. There's this fink but last time I tried it was all a bit hacky and suffered issues worse than those in any Linux distribution I've used.

In short, nothing I've tried comes close to software installation in Linux; Linux brings the software to me.

Where the *.dmg is concerned, while convenient (once you have actually found the bloody thing), it is certainly not unique to the Apple platform. Linux already has two perfectly good solutions to this would-be problem.

One is http://autopackage.org/, and a completely different approach (and quite impressive) is Klik http://klik.atekon.de/.

Then again last time I looked searching for a package and clicking the conspicously named "Install" button in Kpackage or Synaptic seems to suit vast numbers of lazy, or just plain busy Linux users out there.

The beauty of Autopackage is, as a developer, I can make one package for all distributions of Linux. With Klik, I only 'install' the software for that session (in fact it is run from cache).

Re:OSX software installation far behind Linux..

[zhiwenchong]

As one user mentioned, VersionTracker is kind of the Freshmeat of Mac OS X. So is Macupdate.

Also, while Fink is pain at times (partly because of its Linux roots, and OS X is more BSDish), Mac OS X has DarwinPorts, which actually works pretty well.

Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh

[thatguywhoiam]

The thing that you can find in Control Panel > Software. It's far from perfect, but at least it lets me see all the installed software on a system and remove it with a single mouse click. It's not as nice as Linux package managers, but it's a whole lot nicer than Macintosh, where I have to go hunting around the file system and can never be sure whether dragging the application into the trash will actually remove all traces of it (in fact, it won't).

Now that is truly a heroic reach.

You mean to tell me, that dragging the application's icon to the trash is somehow less logical to you than locating a Control Panel that will 'teleport' it off your system?

'Single-click' = click icon, drag to trash.
'many-click' = click Start, click Control Panels, click Add/Remove Applications, click down scroll arrow to desired app, click app, click Remove.

Look, the Add/Remove thing is stupid. There is no good reason in this day and age that the OS cannot figure out what I want to do when I drag an app to the trash/bin.

And you are wrong about 'traces' of an app - the only thing left behind is the .plist file, which is all of 4k.

There are good things to pick on in OS X, but application installing/de-installing is not one of them.

Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh

[AKAImBatman]

Dragging .app directories into the trash is playing Russian roulette with your system.

People keep saying this, but I just haven't found it to be true. I've used a Mac for about two years now, and in that entire time I have never had an APP screw up my system. The only APP I have that even installs a kernel module (a VPN client) loads the module dynamically. Which means that the module will get cleared by the next reboot at the worst.

So, would someone like to produce some actual evidence of an APP damaging their system?

Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh

[ColMustard]

A user should never want their preferences deleted. Even an application with thousands of savable options will use so little disk space that it doesn't even matter, and of course if the user ever did want the application back (perhaps he was merely upgrading manually), his preferences always Just Work.

You think users should have the option to delete them, and they do have that option. Preference files are always stored in the same place. If you really did want them deleted, you would know where to find the file. My grandma, on the other hand, has no idea what a preference file is, doesn't care whether it's deleted, and certainly doesn't care where it's stored.

Main point here: deleting preference files certainly isn't the drama you would like others to believe. I believe that's called FUD, or perhaps you just have never had any real experience using app bundles.

Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh

[ColMustard]

Yeah, the program is gone, but the install isn't necessarily gone. The software may have modified system settings, installed shared libraries, installed daemons, changed file associations, and done a lot of other things. Other software may depend simply on being able to invoke the application. Dragging .app directories into the trash is playing Russian roulette with your system.

Well that's just it. With app bundles, you can store shared libraries and daemons inside the bundle. File associations are handled automatically by the system and are cleared when the app bundle is found to be removed. Also, an application can't modify any system settings without an Administrator authorization, so I would argue any changes made to system settings were intentional and should remain even after the application which made the changes are gone. If an application depends on another application, that application can simply inform the user via that the other application isn't installed. Very simple.

Indeed, I have painted the ideal, but seriously in most cases this is actually how it works. Very rarely do modern apps every install other binaries outside of the bundle. Removing the app is seriously as simple as moving it to the Trash and emptying it. If an app happens to leave any binaries on the system, than it's merely one of those rare misbehaving programs, and life goes on.

Dragging .app directories into the trash is playing Russian roulette with your system. ...that's because most users that actually need more complex software configurations have long ago abandoned the platform because it doesn't support it well.

I suppose that's why Mac OS X's usage growth is increasing and Linux's growth is decreasing? Now we see that you're just a troll, because you don't and probably can't back up your claims. What would possibly make 'complex software configurations' impossible on Mac OS X? Hmm?

Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh

[MagnusDredd]

The thing that you can find in Control Panel > Software. It's far from perfect, but at least it lets me see all the installed software on a system and remove it with a single mouse click. It's not as nice as Linux package managers, but it's a whole lot nicer than Macintosh, where I have to go hunting around the file system and can never be sure whether dragging the application into the trash will actually remove all traces of it (in fact, it won't).

I call bullshit.

This is a load of shit, the add/remove programs absolutely does not remove all traces for many applications on windows. 3 days ago I was installing America's Army 2.4 on my Athlon. Since I downloaded the full installer I had to use add/remove programs, choose remove app, then go to the Program Files folder and remove the folder that is left behind.

If the damned add/remove programs system actually worked worth a damn, I'd not have registry traces left behind by apps, and "registry cleaners" would be pointless. Not only does the add/remove programs not remove all of the crap that a program installs, some apps come with spyware that stays on the system after uninstalling the original app, and has no listing. On OSX or linux even I can trash the equivalent to windows messenger (which I don't and won't use and is simply another exploitable hole), and expect it to expect it to stay gone without resorting to registry hacking or the like. And before it's asked XP Pro, yes I've removed this shit by hand, no it was not something a normal user could do, and I use either Trillian or Fire, depending on which machine I am using, and lastly no I don't use IM on Linux, all my linux boxes are servers and GUI/Head-less.

What would be good of Apple to do is to make a disk clean up wizard (perhaps Symantec or whoever is in the cleaning up business . Which can check your preferences to see which aren't being used. Frankly I don't mind using the extra space since sometimes I remove a multiple gig game, and can reinstall it at any time without losing my save games.