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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.'"
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.
Well, I'd say that Ubuntu is elegant, easy-to-use and intuitve, while Mac OS X is stable, secure and getting better all the time.
I don't want to troll... But both visions are true....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
So, being based on UNIX ideas, wouldn't that constitute as being based on UNIX? In fact, several certified unices doesn't share any original AT&T code at all. And FreeBSD, which is based on one of the original unices, is NOT certified UNIX. I don't think having the same code as original UNIX should be a criteria for being UNIX-based.
-- Linux user #369862
I got a new laptop a couple of days ago, so I thought I'd try Ubuntu. Once I got the live CD to actually boot (which required some digging on the 'net and fiddling to change the driver loading order) X wouldn't start. At that point I gave up and installed Debian Etch, which worked first time.
Off and on for about 10 years I have tried various Linux distros (Red Hat, Mandrake, and now Ubuntu). In the past I always ended up going back to Windows because I was not able to handle all the issues I ran into. I tried, usually for weeks/months but in the end became so frustrated I gave up. Feisty and Gutsy have been the first Linux distros that I had virtually no problems with. I have no thoughts of getting rid of Ubuntu. I Dual Boot, XP/Gutsy mainly for games and my wife's college requires office 2003 or newer. I much prefer Gutsy to XP.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
(I can't comment on TFA, it seems slashdotted but here's my opinion.)
I can say that they are both impressive, and both have their share of problems. Both could learn from each other (OS X probably more so from Linux)
OS X.. it's polished, integrated, (UNIX) powerful, and easy to use (stays out of my way).
But if you have a problem... start hunting for preference files and deleting them.
Why an addressbook would completely crash mail and iChat, in this day and age is beyond me. Restarts due to updates are entirely too frequent.
Ubuntu... it's good, again (UNIX) powerful, extremely easy to keep updated. Editing config files is a blessing and a curse. With one edit of a file, I've configured a Microsoft mouse (they make good mice) in under 30 secs. On OS X I had to download a file, install, restart and configure.. yawn.
I needed to connect to the Mac for file sharing and Ubuntu presented me with a GUI scp! I hadn't been that excited about an os, since working on UNIX for the first time. I was very impressed.
But on the other side, my screen resolution is different each time I restart...
Considering that I only use Ubuntu for one thing and one thing only (ET:QW) it doesn't bother me too much, since the game sets its own resolution.
All that being said, they are both light years ahead of at least XP. Not sure about Vista, since I've never used it.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Not only has Gutsy (Ubuntu Studio style) been my first installation of Linux that I've actually been able to do music production work with, but this Tuesday I finished my first musical cut that was completely performed, recorded, produced and rendered in Linux. I'm still not ready to ditch my main production system, but I'm doing a lot of production work and rendering on the Linux box, which frees up the other system for what it does best. I've got the two system connected via TOSLINK cables, so I don't have to do any AD/DA conversion at all. The Linux drivers I found for the Mark of the Unicorn audio hardware are slick as hell, stable and sound great. I even use the Linux system as my clock master, and the systems sync up nicely.
Now if I could get Gigasampler or any of the Native Instruments synths or samplers to work in Linux...
I don't really care for the whole "Jack" audio engine thingie, which seems pretty kludgy, and it took a good while for me to figure out what it wanted from me, but some of the open source music apps that came with Ubuntu Studio are definitely for real, once you get past the fact that they didn't have some big corporation pouring money into making them look slick. After Christmas, when I've got some disposable cash on hand, I'm going to check out some of the professional, non-free (as in "expensive") music applications that are starting to become available.
No, it's not as smooth as Leopard, but it's getting there. And now that Eve-Online has a Linux client, I don't care if Microsoft ever fixes Vista. I just don't need it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But between OS X being official UNIX and GNU/Linux being UNIX-like, which one is easier to actually compile the kind of written-for-unix(ish) code that desktop users have access to?
/etc so hard to find in finder? Maybe I'm just giving up to easy, but I have a hard time getting over the single mouse button.
The other day my friend asked me to install some free software game on his MacBook... I think it was called Bos Wars. The webpage for the game claimed that it supports OS X but I couldn't find a binary, just the source. Downloaded that, read the INSTALL.txt and discovered that I'd need to install SDL and about 5 other libraries. And I'd have to get scons. I stopped manually fetching dependencies in the 90s (ok... it was 2001), and just told my friend he should install the game in his Ubuntu installation under Parallels. (We ended up playing Nexuiz I think).
Even if I'd had to compile the game from source code in Ubuntu, it would have been a lot easier. Most of the source code that us regular folks have access to is free software, and most of it is developed on GNU/Linux first, and ported to other platforms later. If you ask me, at least as far as consumers are concerned (not talking about big iron) GNU/Linux is the new UNIX. In that sense, it's more UNIX than some expensive certification.
Every time I sit down at a Mac I inevitably end up swearing at the lack of a util I'm used to having (why no wget?). And why are folders like
I've been a Linux user/fan from the very start, having used many distros (Slackware, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, several others), including in very large production sites. I've also used Solaris in a large deployment. In the past year, I've become a Mac user, and done all my development on it.
:P), and with a bit of hacking, it works great. I will keep the distro up, using it to manage my home's central storage array, and as a sunray server, general purpose testing and such.
.kext approach better than linux's modules; just seems to work better and more consistently.)
This past week, my Macbook was off for service (battery issue, power cord, and cracked edges), and I installed Gusty for the heck of it, to see how the distros were coming along these days.
It's definitely the nicest Linux distro that I've tried. But I still find myself popping to the command line, editing GNU configuration files, compiling modules, editing sources.list with additional repos, fighting isues with Flash not working on the latest Opera (still unresolved), and so forth.
I do like it. I even managed to get up SunRay server up with it to play with a few of the dozens of surplus SunRays I have (takers anyone?
But when my Mac is back tomorrow, it will become my primary desktop, hands down, once again. The user interface, the clean design, and so forth, make for a better daily experience. (I've done some hacking with drivers for a test hackintosh, and I do like the
So as impresed as I was by Gutsy, I will stick to my "develop on OS X, deploy on Linux" approach. (And for deployment on a server, the distro is less important; I generally prefer Debian as first choice; often I have to use CentOS for virtual dedicated hosting, which works, too; for a server, Ubuntu is probably third choice. As a Linux desktop, it's first choice, but as discussed, I just keep falling back to using OS X as the desktop, and Linux as the server.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Computers are cheap because Compaq reversed engineered the IBM PC and fought the battles against IBM. MS did supply the OS, but this was the essential issue. Compaq still had to come up with a legal BIOS, which is did. One has to imagine they could have come up with an OS as well. In any case, this started a boom, lead by the likes of pheonix technologies, to create a clone market.
In the midst of this, Apple kept it's original mission to supply a good competing computer. The architecture was different, which meant it did not IBM software, and therefore most people went with the cheap clones, which happened to have MS DOS. Those that were not attached to IBM, went to other machines. Apple competed in an environment that included many different platforms. Apple did not compete in the IBM PC market. It just had to keep prices and quality high enough so that people who were not satisfied with IBM PC market, and were looking for a better choice, would include Apple in the search.
It is a anachronistic mistake to assume the state of the world in 1980 was similar to the state of the world today. It was a much more dynamic time with competition sparking genuinely interesting innovations. Unix was still a big player, and ATT developed a Unix microcomputer which was really cool. Apple did not kill this machine, MS did not kill this machines, cheap clones did, which happened to often run MS DOS, as MS Windows was still quite a joke.
In fact in the midst of all this, Apple was a good citizen. The machines could run CP/M, for example. The machines could boot without a DOS, and one could load any number of options. The machine could buy EEPROMs. Later, when the machines were powerful enough, and the chips included a PMMU, Macintosh user could run Unix.
What most people focus on it the Linux connection, which is philisophically opposed to the Apple philosophy. open standards, build your own box, do everything yourself, which is where we were in the 70's. This philosophy has it's place, but is not the entire world. Apple machines could run *nix, and a damn sight better than most of the PC junk, but the code is not there. Likewise, in every story about *nix, some fool always complains that *nix won't run because some driver does not exist, or it takes forever to set up. That is the whole point!. *nix is a build your own system. It offers the ultimate flexibility, but at a price. If you need a driver, write it. That is was OSS is all about!
In the end we lost a lot of good functionality due to the MS shenanigans, but also gained some accessibility. Apple is part of the old culture, which has it plan. MS is quickly becoming the Nouveau riche neighbor you wish would move away. At some point *nix will mature, and run well, and at that time it will support all the cool hardware, not just the cheap hardware. MS does a good job supporting cheap hardware. Apple does a good job supporting mid price systems. *Nix needs to find it's own niche.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The UNIX pedigree (I use the term loosely) derives from having a chain of descendents that reaches back to AT&T Unix. BSD (on which OS X is based) has this, but Linux does not.
Linux, BTW, is proud of this, and it also helps when they get sued by stupid copyright trolls like SCO. Linux is UNIX reimplemented from scratch, and thus, technically, is not UNIX but Unix-like.
I tediously explain this to every one of my employees when I'm training them on using their new Ubuntu laptop.
And then I tell them, "But basically, it's Unix."
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
>Technically speaking, OSX has a valid claim to being Unix, but could be accused of not
>necessarily being true to the 'spirit' of Unix. Linux is absolutely not a Unix, but on
>the other hand, people can certainly fairly claim Linux to being true to the spirit of Unix.
Absolutely! After all, if it isn't hard to use, it isn't in the spirit of unix. Really, lacking compatibility with other versions of unix makes it *more* in the spirit on unix, as historically and currently unixen have had huge compatibility problems (thus autotools/autoconf).
Also, since OSX takes a subsystem that was horribly designed and whose implementations were buggy and broken, X11, and replaces it with a modern, slick, robust, and efficient subsystem, aqua, it is *clearly* committing the cardinal sin of unix. Given historical precedent it would be *much* more unixy to instead standardize on the bad design, and then try to fix it with a bunch of extensions which are in themselves problematic and inconsistently implemented.
Seriously, people who talk about how great the unix system design is have no understanding of the internals and how they compare to other modern operating systems. Everything is inconsistent and many things are fundamentally broken. Linux's approach to unix has been largely to take something broken, and add more broken and incompatible parts to it.
Now, I use and develop on Linux quite a bit, which is why I *know* there are so many things wrong with it. However, there is a reason why I use it, and it has its strong points. Permissive licensing, lots of drivers for commodity hardware, and a very efficient kernel are some of Linux's strong points compared to other OS's. System architecture is just not one of linux's strong points. Comparatively, OSX and solaris have a *much* more impressive unix architecture. Windows also has some strong points in some of its API's, although not the core win32 windowing API, which is disgustingly crufty).