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Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon vs. Mac OS X Leopard
walterbyrd writes "Linux magazine has up a decent article comparing Gutsy Gibbon to Leopard. 'The stereotype for each OS is well known: Mac OS X is elegant, easy-to-use, and intuitive, while Ubuntu is stable, secure, and getting better all the time. Both have come a long way in a short time, and both make excellent desktops. So we have two great desktop operating systems out at roughly the same time. Let's see how they stack up against each other.'"
"...and getting better all the time?" Just a little positive spin there. Most people don't describe an OS as getting better all the time but rather "crappy now...and nowhere to go but up"
More than likely, the truth. Lately Linux has been big on exposing, and then fixing, it's faults. You see, the problem with geeks is that when we fix a bug with an ugly hack, we forget about it. An honest assessment is often welcomed, and rapidly followed by a better fix.
For example, look at the ESR rant about cups. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html Part 2 goes on to say how cups developers contacted him as well. And have you seen cups lately? It got better. So, I think the article will point out some significant faults. And I bet you won't find many of them next year...
The real fun part will be looking at this article in a year and see how many Linux faults got fixed, and how many Mac faults are still there.
I move a window to the edge of my screen and it snaps into place at the last second so that it's exactly at the edge of my window. I can keep any window I want on top of or behind other windows so that I can work with two windows at once without having to constantly Alt-Tab between them or make them ridiculously small. When I browse an audio CD, it displays the tracks in a series of folders that shows me what the files look like ripped and encoded in all of the audio codecs I have installed ready for me to drag and drop onto my hard drive. When I zoom in on a jpeg, my photoviewer applies an algorithm to blow it up without pixelating it. When I want a piece of software I just pick it out of a list and it's there... oh wait. I don't remember any of that from using a Mac.
Okay, "Just Works" just like on a Mac... hmm... I put my thumb drive or a data CD in and the mounted volume appears on my desktop? Media just plays for me right in my browser? My music organizing software recognizes my MP3 player and offers to load it for me? No wait, it didn't care what brand I used. I actually had a much easier time mapping to a printer shared from Windows than any of the dozen or so attempts I've heard of people making on a Mac, but I'm willing to assume they were all nincompoops or picked a printer that wouldn't have worked for me either and call it a push.
But seriously, I can't hardly think of a Linux user-unfriendliness headache that I haven't seen dramatically improve in the last two or three years, at least not one I care about. If you don't believe me, try installing the new Nvidia manufacturer drivers. It prompted me to kill my X server first, warned me that it didn't mean by dropping to single-user mode, found my kernel sources without any help, said something about them being a little off and creating a new kernel interface for me (again without any help on my part), then offered to update my xorg.conf file for me, which it did, beautifully. I swear the only reason that driver install didn't do everything it had to do without asking or informing me is that the average Linux user would have considered it rude. Maybe if (assuming you haven't) you used a Mac long enough to discover all its warts and you weren't trying administer 8 machines, use Win98 as a webserver, and get Linux to run CAD software on a shoestring budget, you wouldn't have Macs up on a pedestal.
Finally modding someone offtopic when they rant about what "Begging the Question" means: priceless.
Oh come off it. Linux is cool and Mac is cool. I'm using Mac right now for general stuff and have Ubuntu ready to run in parallels. Sometimes I just want things to work, sometimes I want a lot of control and the ability to do much more complicated stuff. Geeks need to make their peace with simplicity because sometimes the simple choice is the better choice, and geeks just have the benefit of understanding more complex stuff as well when they need to.
The author, as such, appears to have slept through the last 30 years, in which the original Macintosh established the desktop metaphors Microsoft poorly reimplemented and Linux re-re-implemented many many times over.
By that reasoning, nothing is as good as what Xerox has, because they established the fundamental metaphor first. Nevermind they didn't take that project out of the prototype phase themselves, they must know better than Apple because they did something with a mouse first. It's simply not accurate to say ideas cannot be built upon and improved by anyone other than the first. The first one to establish something doesn't *necessarily* follow the most prudent evolution of the ideas. What the state of things 30, 20, 10, or even 5 years ago isn't automatically overriding of the situation of *today* (though certainly heritage influences the current, hence Microsoft being able to moderately screw up and lag in innovation and still maintain a lead).
As to the statement that there exists no meaningful HIGs in the *nix desktop world, that's just not true. Gnome and KDE both have their own HIGs, and if you stick to that software, the HIG is consistently obeyed. Ubuntu by default presents a pure Gnome environment, and generally you have to pick something out special to deviate. OSX and Windows are not immune to this. In OSX, if running an X11 app, it sticks out like a sore thumb and almost certainly doesn't follow the Apple HIG. Even without X11, some companies like Lotus release software that doesn't follow the HIGs (Notes looks equally hideous and out of place on all platforms). The point being, you can't fault a wide architecture for giving choice, and compare it against a specific implementation. You must compare a distribution to OSX. If you said Apple lays a better framework than Gentoo for a coherent HIG, then I'd have to admit it. Among the various Ubuntu flavors, each has picked and preferred a HIG. OSX, Windows, and Linux platforms can all be subject to misfit applications that refuse to obey HIGs or even use the most common toolkit. The following behind HIGs in the Linux desktop world is not so small as to be counted out.
Try not to state subjective experiences like snap-to-screen-edge or focus-follows-mouse being far more efficient when this clearly can only be true for you.
Obviously, it can be true for more than one person, but I think you must have misspoken, that sentence didn't parse to my eyes. The power to do these things in a relatively standardized way is not a bad thing, however you slice it. Windows can do focus-follows-mouse, and no one accuses them of trashing the user experience because of it, and subtle edge-resistance isn't going to hopelessly confuse someone not expecting it, and certainly a non-default option of it won't.
Ubuntu just as good? No. Free software just isn't there yet. If it were, Dell, HP and Acer would have dumped Microsoft quite some time ago in the home market. People want cheap and easy. Not necessarily good, just cheap and easy. Linux doesn't even qualify as that yet - the market has spoken as always.
By your logic, OSX 'just isn't there yet' either, because the market en masse hasn't ditched Windows entirely. The market reality is that an intrinsically better platform is *not* going to automatically win over the market magically. The market reality is one of a great deal of maintaining the status quo. Microsoft from a business perspective got their product out there in the most accessible form early on, and because so many people use windows, so many people will continue to use Windows, even if you can claim it to be worse than the competition. Application developers are in the same boat, they target the platform that is popular, helping to contribute to a deadlock of microsoft. Microsoft's technical work in the mid 90s was on par with the Mac experience, and the Linux experience was no where to be seen. By the time OSX and Linux could be argued as being superio
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Well, I can tell you from personal experience that if you have reasonably common hardware (and Apple hardware is still not quite 'reasonably common', despite using Intel chips) Ubuntu is an OS that 'just works'.
Yes, you sometimes have to work around things on exotic hardware, very new hardware, or if you're trying to do something very specific that is outside the mainstream. In order to get a system that 'just works', you have to buy hardware that's known to work well on Linux. That's it. Stick with hardware that's been around a bit or has vendor support (like Nvidia graphics cards). Get an Epson or HP printer (and install Stylus Toolbox if you have an Epson printer). Use the well-supported Connectix Webcams. Get a scanner that's known to work with SANE. You get the idea. If you follow these guidelines, you will find that Ubuntu 'just works' every time. Or, if you're not quite so ambitious, go out and buy a machine that has Ubuntu pre-installed. Dell sells them.
Unfortunately, people don't realize this and then dismiss integration issues as Linux being 'too immmature.' That's crap. If all your hardware is known to work well under Linux, you won't run into these integration issues.
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