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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.'"
I think I just had a geekgasm from just reading the title.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
I dual boot Mac OS and Ubuntu now and I have to say I found it far easier to install than previous linux distributions I've tried. That being said, it took me hours of work just getting it up to what I would consider basic functionality.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
both UNIX- based
OS X Leopard *is* certified Unix (r). Ubuntu (and Linux) is not based on original AT&T Unix code nor is it certified Unix. It is a unix-like kernel.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sshbHTDSwCk
;)
Gutsy indeed!
Read my Very Short "Stories"
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)
Er... it comes from NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP is the Mach microkernel overlain onto BSD. Surely you realise that BSD constitutes UNIX? You may want to do some more research on that particular topic.
Admittedly, though, no, Linux is a clone of a clone of UNIX, and shame on them for it.
The Ubuntu OS exceeds the Mac OS in Gibboniness, whereas Apple seems to have cornered the market on Leopardiness. The overall Toucaniness and Salamanderiness of the offerings is about the same.
"Leopard is an Open Brand UNIX 03 Registered Product, conforming to the SUSv3 and POSIX 1003.1 specifications for the C API, Shell Utilities, and Threads. Since Leopard can compile and run all your existing UNIX code, you can deploy it in environments that demand full conformance -- complete with hooks to maintain compatibility with existing software."
... Leopard wins!
Recursion (n): See recursion
You're partly right ... linux is "UNIX-like", OS X is UNIX certified.
Moreover, not only is Mac OS X Leopard UNIX based, it IS UNIX. Its got the certification and everything.
Isn't this like comparing apples to apes? :P No, seriously, the blurb was too stupid for me to bother reading anything more. Someone was really just digging for three-part stereotypes for the two OSes.
For linux, technically speaking, you are right, it isn't derived from any code that can be called 'Unix' and carries none of the certifications, and probably wouldn't pass the certifications as is. Pratically speaking, the linux kernel+GNU userspace is clearly Unix inspired and architected such that a Unix user is certainly familiar with the situation. GNU particularly makes clear the distinction (GNU's not Unix after all). Unix-inspired may be a more precise term.
OSX is to an extent the exact opposite. Technically speaking, it derives from BSD code (actual Unix code). Technically speaking, it implements the appropriate APIs and can run a program that runs on Unix. I want to say even before X11, Apple legitimately got the Unix moniker to describe their platform, but I recall there being confusing around this point. The addition of X11 out of the box makes it more complete, and less of a technicality. However, the fact of the matter is the extensive use of a non-X based graphical architecture and the almost universal situation is that NeXT derived APIs are used and required, and the underlying pieces that are true to a Unix heritage are nearly moot. A user accustomed to Unix will find OSX fundamentally different.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You know, if we'd been buying Apples crap all this time instead of PCs, Linux never would have had a chance. Apple are much more ruthless about locking down their hardware and software than Microsoft ever were.
Windows has a monopoly on a software method of jury rigging a bunch of hardware from different manufacturers into something resembling a modern computer. Apple turns the computer into something more resembling a television.
Apple aren't better than Windows when it comes to freedom and monopoly. Far from it, MS has always been the lesser evil, that's why they succeeded in the marketplace. Apple is a bullet dodged that is currently ricocheting back.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Yep, counting on apple is pretty risky, you never know how long those startup tech companies might last.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
About 20-25 years ago, there were massive debates about what was and was not "Unix". The means chosen to settle this (since it wasn't quite clear who to invite to the duel :-) was to develop a set of standards that would capture 'Unix' -to ensure application portability-. To avoid the trademark wars of that generation, the name chosen was POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface based on uniX) After much work, a bunch of standards were produced, including one covering the API, another covering common shell and utilities, RT unix, PThreads, etc, etc. (In this era of success for the Open Source movement, it's worth nothing that the concentration back then was on source code portability. It's hard for me to imagine the growth of the OSS movement without having this standard source code API to build much of that work on...)
The other thing that came out of this effort is a means to verify conformance. Note that word, "conformance". This is the term used in the standard, and if you want to talk about whether some operating system meets the standard, it's the word you should use, too. When you hear someone say 'compliant', you should ask them if they mean "conformance, as defined in the standard, or just some term made up by the marketing staff to confuse the buyer/user." An informed technical person will know the difference.
Conformance is rigorously defined in the standards, but I can informally summarize it this way:
-- Conforming Application uses only facilities within the standard.
-- A Conforming Implementation implements the whole standard (no subsets, unless allowed by the standard!).
From the POSIX effort and X/Open merged activities, there's a "Single Unix Specification", which is a proper superset of the POSIX standards and includes facilities not formally standardized by ISO. The Open Group (http://www.opengroup.org) both maintains the SUS and conducts a certification program against the specification.
It is good to see Apple go through this and pass (apparently Apple tried earlier and hit a roadblock/inconsistency.)
So when someone -now- says "Unix" they should mean a conforming implementation of the Open Group's Single Unix Standard. That includes POSIX conformance. And it should mean that the vendor has the certificate to prove it.
Now what about Linux? Last I heard, there were still inconsistencies between Linux and the SUS, so LINUX won't pass the POSIX part of SUS, and therefore isn't legally "Unix", nor is it a POSIX Conforming Implementation. My understanding these differences aren't trivial, but are in corners that the average user won't bump into. But the differences in the API specifications does have a significant impact on the implementation (kernel), and that's why the Linux community has stuck to its incompatibility with the POSIX standard.
dave (worked on POSIX standards from 88-94, primarily the Ada binding...)
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.
Mac runs on Mac hardware. Hardly what I would call a fair test to what Linux has to stand up against.
Although Macs have switched to Intel processors I bet OS X wouldn't be as easy to install on all the PC configurations that Ubuntu has to deal with which I think is a point that most people miss out on.
Even if you were comparing Gutsy to Windows, even XP doesn't have driver support for my old web cam and TV tuner card which is really out of date. Gutsy does it out of the box because the support for the third party hardware is kept there, which keeps me from having to buy new hardware just to get back what I already had after an upgrade.
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.
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.
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
That's utterly absurd.
It boils down to this: "Apple turns the computer into something more resembling a television." That's exactly right, and framing it as a Bad Thing(tm) is not unexpected, but certainly ludicrous. Linux wouldn't have gotten off the ground on Apple machines, no. That would be contrary to the computer-as-an-appliance model.
Under no contorted version of reality would Apple ever be the sole vendor of computers. If everyone followed the Apple model, you can be absolutely certain that Linux would have a better hold on the marketplace. Getting the hardware and software from the same people (IBM, Apple, Amiga, SGI--the "dinosaurs") would have ensured that some cross-compatible development would go on; a common reference design for low-end competitors to cut costs, and customizable for each vendor.
Most computer resellers wouldn't have had the resources to develop an end-to-end solution on their own; the thought of using something free and not having to get in bed with another corporation would have clearly been desirable. Microsoft won because it got there first, not because it is or was the "lesser evil" (are you kidding me?!). Microsoft solved the problem of manufacturers having to do their own OS and support, making it cheap for them to enter the market. There was no such thing as Linux; there was no cheaper option, so they sucked it up and signed on with MS. It was the cheapest, easiest path.
If the other model had succeeded, you'd see all kinds of companies jumping at the chance to have a free OS that they could have tweaked to their desires, and be beholden to Microsoft for security, connectivity, or making their products functional. It's the detached expectations that created the 800-pound gorilla. If each company were expected to develop and sell a wholly working product like Apple does, the budget brands would be using Linux to do it, and there'd be no OS monopoly--just several different OSes that worked together.
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.
The Mac is capable of empowering users (even seasoned Linux users) to do far more with much more efficiency, but one must accept the application of its metaphors rather than demanding that it work the way they want and complaining bitterly when it won't.
This was rated +5 Insightful? How is it insightful to say that you can get the most out of an interface by using it the way its designers expected you to?
The rest of the post is just a trollish assertion that if you don't recognize the inherent superiority of the Macintosh, you either have no taste or just don't get it.
Here's an idea that platform partisans will never get: Tastes differ. To each his own.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Hang on, you originally implied that with Linux, you didn't have to install third-party applications. So, it turns out you do have to manually install applications.
Where is this feature on a Mac? Well, www.versiontracker.com would be a start. And that helps you decide what to install. On Linux, how does a new user decide which package to use? A package manager in itself is not going to help much. Most Mac apps are extremely simple to install (usually drag-n-drop to applications folder) - so I don't see how that is any more difficult than installing using a package manager.
How does having a package manager equate to applications being "automatically installed", as you imply in your earlier post?
but they still don't do 100% of what every user wants to do with their computer.Tell me - what application bundle does do 100% of what every user wants to do with their computer? There are certainly plenty of things I want to do that I can't under Linux. Hell, there are tons of things that I want to do, that I can't do on any platform, because those applications simply haven't been developed yet.
Under Linux, it's much closer to "feature complete", as far as application availability.Utter horseshit. under Linux, you can't even get many types of app - for example, there are no Photoshop-class image editing apps, and no professional video editing apps. Frankly, your contention is ridiculous. Consistency of quality and usability is also much better with Mac apps. If a new user chose a Mac or Linux app at random, it's likely that the Mac app is of better quality and usability. Having a ton of average-to-poor apps available hardly compares to having many first-class apps available.
... and then they built the supercollider.