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Is Apple Killing Linux on the Desktop?
Domains May Disappear writes "Chris Howard has an interesting commentary at Apple Matters on recent trends in OS market share that says that while OS X has seen continual growth, from 4.21% in Jan 2006 to 7.31% in December 2007 at the same time, Linux's percentage has risen from only 0.29% to 0.63%. The reasons? 'Apple has Microsoft Office, Linux doesn't; Apple has Adobe Creative Suite, Linux doesn't; Apple has easily accessed and easy to use service and support, Linux doesn't; Apple is driven by someone who has some understanding of end-user needs, Linux is not,' says Howard. 'Early in the decade it seemed that if you wanted a Windows alternative, Linux was it. Nowadays, an Apple Mac is undoubtedly the alternative and, with its resurgence and its Intel base, a very viable one.'"
linux has apt, apple doesn't;
Badass Resumes
When it came time for me to buy a new machine, and I was dead set against another Windows box, I bought a Mac. It gave me the best of both worlds. I get most of the best non-GUI Linux packages (or at least most of the best) via the BSD ports collection, a number of Linux GUI packages with Apple's X interface, great integration of virtualized Windows applications with Parallels, all the Mac specific software, and the Apple store is a 5-minute drive away if I need more help than I can get online.
I can run Linux in Bootcamp or Parallels, so if I really want something only Linux can deliver, I can have that too.
Mac is sort of the "universal platform", IMO, and a year later, I consider it a very worthwhile investment.
Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Obviously Apple Matters is going to have a bias towards OS X and that should be taken into account. However, that said we've been reducing both our Windows and Linux systems in favor of OS X for some time now for many of the reasons outlined in the referenced article.
I'd like to add in another reason why Linux is not growing as fast as OS X use: fragmented distros. Supporting multiple flavors of Linux is simply a pain in the ass and the typical end user of Linux is likely to have their own preference (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc...etc...etc... In fact, last time I looked there were over 1000 different flavors of Linux and BSD and with the exception of OS X (a descendent of BSD) every single flavor that I've tried out of that 1000 all required significant effort just to get the OS up and running with wireless networks, not to mention all the various voodoo required for the printer support.
No, for me it is all about getting work done and I don't want the OS getting in my way or becoming an impediment to accomplishing things and I don't want to have to spend time with all of our students on various flavors of Linux. In retrospect, the last project that we worked on with a contractor got developed for Red Hat and in terms of system support, backup, management and more I really wish we had developed it for OS X now. That is not to say that we will not develop our algorithms cross platform, as that is our goal to release them totally open source, but for anything that is going to be developed for intensive use or for further development it is going on OS X and taking advantage of all the platform specific pleasantries such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation, Quartz and more.
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Only if the user can afford to...
Cheap Dell laptop ($600) + Ubuntu
vs.
Cheapest Mac laptop - $1100...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Linux runs on all hardware by design. Mac OS X doesn't.
Apple hardware is significantly more expensive (I spec'd one about a year ago).
Linux market share has increased by 117%, while Apple's increase is only 74%.
OS X sales can be counted, Linux downloads more or less can't.
Also, those must be US-only figures, surely? OSX 7%!?
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
I'm a programmer at a university, and when my boss asked me what type of laptop I wanted, I chose a MacBook Pro because of OS X. I can run all of the normal OS X applications, compile and/or run almost all Unix tools, and virtualize Windows (2000) for when I need to run something in Windows. It's the perfect platform, and you're seeing a lot of more technically adept people move to it for that reason. Is OS X perfect? No, but it really is easy to use, and it means I don't have to fight with my computer when I want to do something unusual. Is there a price premium? Yes, but my employer paid for it, so ha.
Thank you very much, Mr. Kinder-Gentler 2nd Fake Steve Jobs!
I expect we'll be migrating ~150 or so Linux desktops to OS X over the next several years. Linux is nice and will remain in production for our back-end servers and for computational clustering, but it's more expensive to support than OS X and supports commercial software the user community wants. This is at a technical university on the east coast.
But on a more serious note, the part about Linux not having Office and Adobe and all that jazz is bogus. Ever hear of VMware? Lets you run Windows or Mac on a Linux box (or Linux on a Windows box, or Windows XP on a Mac, for that matter). Works pretty decent, provided you have enough resources to handle it all,...
I really enjoy the Ask Slashdot questions that are yes/no.
From 4.21% to 7.31% is an increase of ~73% of market share for the mac.
From 0.29% to 0.63% is an increase of ~117% of market share for linux.
Isn't that a bigger victory for linux?
The relative market share increase of linux being about 1.5 times that of the mac...
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
But isn't OS-X...under the Aqua interface basically a *nix platform? So in a way, can't we possibly...if we wanted to be REALLY anal about it and help shove it down the throat of M$.... claim that with the migration of the Apple OS to the OS X platform from the classic OS (os 9 and prior), that we have actually dramatically INCREASED the adoption of *nix on the Desktop??
Because Apple won't licenses for it, it isn't even a consideration.
Now if only OSX could install on regular hardware so us peasants could afford it, maybe their growth wouldn't number in the single-digits.
I see Apple iPods on the street every day. I see Apple iPhones on the TV constantly. I know Apple is the company to buy my technology from, because everyone else does. Therefore, when I come to make a purchase as boring as a new PC, I know Apple will make one I want to buy.
Sincerely, the average consumer.
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
I liked Linux and was slowly switching until I got to see how nice OS X was and became (as it was released/updated). There is a very good chance I spent most of my time on Linux at this point if it wasn't for OS X. My brother is probably the same was, as are many others in small IT department I work at. OS X provides us the unixy goodness we love (command line and such), with a great GUI that's easy to use and commercial software and things "just working". I've been on a Mac for a few years now, yet I still discover nice little things (like my Mac keeps separate mute statuses for when I have headphones plugged in and not plugged in, so it adjusts automatically as soon as I plug my headphones in.)
If you are not a hardcore FOSS person who wants the source to everything they run... OS X provides a fantastic environment for a great many people.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It's much easier to measure OS X adoption since most of it is just purchases of Mac computers. It's impossible to do the same with Linux. Who knows how many Linux users there are out there. I've never registered my copy of Linux, for one.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Apple has Microsoft Office, Linux doesn't; Apple has Adobe Creative Suite, Linux doesn't; Apple has easily accessed and easy to use service and support, Linux doesn't; Apple is driven by someone who has some understanding of end-user needs, Linux is not."
Well gee, that doesn't sound like APPLE is killing Linux on the desktop. That sounds like Microsoft, Adobe, and Linux itself is killing Linux on the desktop.
Then again, are people really buying Apple so they can run Microsoft Office and Adobe...? I tend to doubt it. The last two points are a little more valid than the first two, but that isn't something that Apple is doing WRONG, as the headline implies. That's something that Linux is doing wrong. Or, at least, that is how it is being perceived by many would-be end users.
The Macintosh started with a larger user base. Taking that into account, the percentage of increase is 25% larger for Linux than for OS X.
Take heart: Apple is actually killing Linux slightly less than it used to.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
1. The enemy of my enemy is my friend
2. Linux will get cool stores, too
3. OOO is just as good as MS Office
4. KDE 5 will look just like Aqua
5. Gimp and Adobe work alike.
No, it's not flamebait, just reality.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Linux can run on any desktop the only desktops that apple has is a $2200 mac pro and $600 overpriced and underpowered mini that is just a laptop in a small case without a screen build in.
the mini $600 1gb of ram cdwr / dvd slow laptop 80gb HD low end laptop cpu and GMA 950 add $200 to get a dvdwr + 120gb hd and to move to a 2.0GHz 4MB shared L2 cache Intel Core 2 Duo from a 1.83GHz 2MB shared L2 cache Intel Core 2 Duo also you have to add your own keyboard and mouse.
The imac are laptops in a desktop only AIO.
Honestly, I have never thought of calling my operating system manufacturer for support.
Perhaps it's because I work in IT, and I'm smarter than your average Tier 1 support monkey... But I can't imagine a normal person saying "I can't connect to the Internet, let me call Microsoft".
Then again, I could be completely off base.
So now, Mac OS X has grown by about 75%, and the Linux market share has grown more than 100% during the same time?
... how? By making it grow 100%?
Apple is killing Linux exactly
Maybe the article isn't as stupid as the summary. But based on this summary, I got better things to do than to read it.
The reasons? 'Apple has Microsoft Office, Linux doesn't
...leading the charge to annoy another whole segment of users.
When the trend is UPWARDS, I.E. when Linux is being used MORE than before, then why does it make sense to use the word 'killing'? Surely if the trend was downwards this would be sensible, but not the other way around?
And also.. it's very easy to blame others for your problems. What problems are those? Well, they are the plusses of Apple's and Microsoft's solutions. They are those software or productivity suites that those respective companies have which Linux does not have. It is not Apple or Microsoft's fault they have those things as much as it is Linux's fault for NOT having them, or for what they do have simply not being as good. You can only blame yourself for what you lack in comparison to what is the widely accepted and used norm.
It's all a geek dream anyway, that people doing work for free is going to somehow outperform people who do their jobs to get paid and rely on that payment to sustain the quality of living they are used to. Not to mention that during this time that the people are writing free software they have to be working for a living; working on other projects and with other distractions. It just doesn't add up that Linux could be better than Apple, or even Microsoft, despite how completely fucked Vista seems to be so far.
Now, I know there are many ways you can tear up the logic in this post, and I freely encourage you to do so. But ultimately what you need to do is explain why, if my logic is flawed, the situation is as it remains today.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Linux share is going up. Therefore, nothing is killing it.
Since OS X's is also going up, it would seem they're both taking market share from Windows - which probably still has > 90%.
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The difference is that my sister really likes the look of her new slick white macbook (almost as much as her new slick black iPhone) and it will look even better when she takes it to classes at those cool stores.
The Eee PC is slated to sell 5 million units in 2008. That is more than Apple sells in a year.
Nuf sed.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Linux comes with a fully features graphical editing tool which is lovingly called the Graphical Image Manipulation Program. Apple and Windows are packaged with bare bones, stripped down graphical editing tools.
The point is, "Linux" is a lot more than just the Kernel is nobody is "Killing" it. Ever.
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if there's one feature about Ubuntu that I love more than my Mac is that you can install a TON of applications from Synaptic or via the awesome Add/Remove app. OSX on the other hand, if you want to install some new piece of software, be prepared to pay for it, or to get a really useless trial version.
The reason people are buying mac is because they want something new, and when it comes to purchasing a computer your only choices are OSX and Vista for most people. I'd bet anything that if we saw more linux pcs at stores like best buy and walmart, the cheaper linux PC would CLOBBER in sales, because people really do care about cost.
I took one look at the statistic and thought: Wtf?
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8
0.12% of all devices that access the internet are IPhones? How many did they sell?
0.63% for Linux, which means that only six times as many Linux computers are used to access the internet as IPhones.
About one persent for Linux and about seven for Mac: I would buy that. Sounds reasonable, since many open source guys I know use a Mac for desktop stuff.
But with those numbers for the IPhone the numbers look more like something someone pulled out of their a**. Plus all the computer lab computers at our universities got converted to Linux over the past years. And our university is not Linux friendly in any way. So I imagine that this would happen at many universities and colleges.
These are all the reasons Microsoft gives for using their product, and I expect if their product wasn't riddled with bugs and annoyances, you'd be a closed MS shop.
I think the bottom line is that Linux is, and always will be, a bit of a hobbyist and/or experimentalist bleeding edge platform. It's like the difference between commercial radio and amateur (ham) radio: the former is all about "getting work done," as you say, and so it's streamlined, standardized, and widespread. The latter is about experimenting with new ways of doing stuff, about cooking it up at home by yourself, about trying out your individual creative thoughts and ideas. So it's idiosyncratic, quirky, customizable, and thinly spread.
Each has its place, of course. Without streamlined standardized production platforms, people trying to get stuff done who don't give a hoot about computers and software would be endlessly frustrated. Without weird individual experimentation, advancement stagnates. (I don't doubt that one of the reasons OS X is so much more useful than, say, OS 9 or, God forbid, that bombing monster Mac OS, is because it was goosed by Linux coming up fast from behind.)
Who "markets" Linux? When was the last time you saw a television commercial on regular broadcast network TV where someone was comparing Linux vs Windows from an end-user's perspective like Apple does for Mac vs Windows? Never, right? Well, until someone starts marketing Linux with TV and radio ads that target the average joe and make him aware of its very existance, Linux will NEVER take off in any numbers that amount to anything outside of the geek microcosm.
This is a third cousin to "why end users luv monopolies until they strangle you".
Apple has *A* platform, and to a point, MS has *A* platform. A single entity talks to itself reasonably well.
The price of choice among variants of the Free OS types will always be the interop. concerns.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
When people say Linux doesn't have something, its because they are lying.
Apple's increase from 4.21% to 7.31% is (7.31-4.21)/(4.21) = 73.6 % relative growth in market share
Linux's increase from 0.29% to 0.63% is (.063 - .029)/(0.29) = 117.2% relative growth
So actually, Linux grew faster over the period in question. Though I am deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to calculate market share to three significant figures.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Fink is a package manger based on debian aptget. there's thousands of free packages there. and because the mac environment is so homogeneous they build seamlessly without surprises, many downloadable in binary form. works great from the command line or from the gui. Easy to keep up-to-date
then there's darwin ports and a gnu-darwin if you want other package managers.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...because it's like with browsers - I'm an Opera diehard (ok, so maybe I like to go off the beaten track but it saved me from IE before Mozilla was ready). As Firefox usage grew, using Opera became a more and more pleasant experience. Why? No more IE-web. Every Mac user is a non-Windows user, and once they start thinking cross-platform more will support Linux too. Not all of them, but it's a very good start. At least you won't be met with blank stares of "There's something other than Windows?". I've managed to switch, but not without pain (and Wine, and Windows in a VM) and it'll really only get better from here. I'm not worried.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Linux was never and will never be a viable desktop OS. Ni Ni Ni.
Mac OS/X is a better desktop for most people. You have fewer hassles with just about everything. Where Apple falls down is in hardware.
They lack an affordable and expandable desktop. You can not buy an Apple will match the graphics perfromance of a good PC with say an NVidia 8800GT or ATI 3850.
And of course the downside of using all the great Mac resources that you wrote about is that porting to anything else will be a pain. But the same is true for anything but QT or GTK.
I on the other hand really want an Asus EEPC.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... is some numbers, broken down by distro and amount of time used. Apple might be getting a fair number of people switching from Mandriva or CentOS (neither of which are quality distros, IMNSHO), but I doubt they're getting too many long-time Debian or Ubuntu users.
I used to be a fan of Mac OS X before I actually tried using it. Once I used it (10.3.9, which is what my girlfriend has) I found it to be very fragile underneath the GUI. For example, packages have no "uninstall" option...wtf?
I still like OS X better than Windows, but that's not too difficult.
http://outcampaign.org/
I have an iMac (got it for "free"... traded 2 old laptops for it) as well my trusty old Linux/XP dual boot box.
My opinion? Based on my needs, OS X is just too crippled to be of much use. I mean, if you're just someone who wants it to "just work" and don't care about lock-in, then OS X is fine. But meanwhile for those of us who don't spend the whole day surfing the net or using Photoshop, macs are pretty much paperweights.
Sorry if your experience doesn't match mine, but it's the only one I have authority to speak on.
Mac OS X is the success of Unix on the desktop, period.
There are a lot of geeks who are reluctant to admit it, though. Most people pinned their hope on Linux + GNOME/KDE for delivering us from evil. While GNOME and KDE brought Unix miles ahead in terms of GUI usability, neither matched the elegance and power of the NeXTSTEP interface developed years before; the evolution from NeXTSTEP to OS X has further secured this lead.
The defeat of their favorite candidate for Unix GUI Savior left many geeks unwilling to even consider or support the idea of OS X as a real Unix, as an improvement to Windows or existing Unix GUIs, etc. Sour grapes, basically. The whole experiment goes to show that in software, as in government, in the ideal case you want a well-backed tyrant with his head screwed on straight. That's Steve Jobs.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
My Apple buying story.
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Linux's strength is in it's staying power. It's not going anywhere. You can't kill it the way you can a start-up company... or even a large and powerful company.
It's still largely a hobbyist platform. (Remember, I'm talking about Linux on the desktop, not on the server.) But given a time-span long enough, Linux is bound to be a major player on the desktop (possibly even the dominant player).
The economics of Linux don't place the same value on a perfected user experience. But it does place some value on user experience. That value only goes up over time. What was the most user-friendly Linux distribution in 1996? What was the installation like back then? Now compare that with installing today's Ubuntu or SUSE or Fedora or Mandriva or almost any distribution that you randomly pick off the front page of distrowatch.com. The difference is huge, and the user experience can only continue to improve.
If Steve Jobs is the great master of the user experience, what will happen to Apple if when he quits or dies? I don't know the answer to that.
But I know what will happen to Linux if Linus Torvalds dies... Pretty much nothing. Linux is analogous to the internet. It keeps getting bigger and better, and it has no weak link. The same cannot be said for Apple or Microsoft.
I think the Linux and OS community has more to do with it than anything.
The Adobe equivalent is a minor issue in most business environments. I've seen acceptable replacements on Linux for most of what business's do. The killer in my situation is the Office Suite equivalent. Open Office does not have the capabilities to support 90% of our users. [Mainly it has to do with file sharing capabilities]. MS Office supports this and Open Office doesn't, so we are stuck with using Windows and MS Office.
There has been of late a serious discussion about starting to use Apple OS-X, but I don't think it will happen very soon, but I do believe it will happen before we switch to the Linux for desktops.
We have tried switching some users to Linux desktops with moderate success. But so far the difficulties users have had doesn't out weigh the price tag of an OEM version of XP. The Linux desktops we have deployed use MS Office with codeweaver. So cost wise it hasn't been a big money saver and it hasn't been deployed to a large enough scale to determine maintenance benefits.
Our servers are all Linux though, with the exception of a print server. There constantly was a problem with running printers on Samba and cups, about 3 months ago we moved half of them over to MS systems and problems were reduced dramatically. Almost as dramatic a change as switching users from IE to Firefox.
I can definitely say that switching to Linux servers has been a plus, with the exception of print servers.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
I recently bought a Powerbook and have gotten into OS X. I really like it, and it's great for doing certain things. I can see why the experience is a lot different than just slapping an OS X theme on your current OS. I've used it for a month though, but I can see why the people who generally like Windows would gravitate more towards Linux. The apps work in a way that's more familiar to them, and the variety of applications that Windows users expect is there.
With OS X in terms of the normal shareware and freeware apps you find, you're not going to get what you would on Windows, and Linux's offerings are more in line with that as well. There are multiple versions of software to suit many niche needs, and they have more complex options. On OS X, everything is geared towards integrating with the desktop and the usual applications. On Linux and Windows, everything is made to be extensible and support a wider variety of hardware and hacking options than the usual stuff for OS X.
Personally, I go back to Linux often when I'm not just browsing the web because there are still more emulators I can use for games, and for development use I find I have a wider array of libraries and examples to choose from for what I'm doing, the applications I use integrate better with each other, there is more support for a wider variety of formats in each application I use, and most of all, because I am not stuck using commercial software that restricts me in certain ways from doing what I want. I find that on OS X, and to a lesser degree Windows, a lot of artificial restrictions are enforced on proprietary software, and I can't do what I want.
For myself and my family, we're set up on Linux, and most of my friends use quite a lot of open source software just because it lets them do what they want and doesn't enforce artificial restrictions. For my family it's because I can lock things down in a way that makes it still easy for them to do what they want without a lot of prompts or greyed out options, and I get a software platform that works the exact same no matter what their hardware is so it's easier for me to support.
Twinstiq, game news
I'm going to try Linux next. I figure that I will pick up a $400 Thinkpad T41 and throw Ubuntu on it. If I'm going to have to compile programs from the source I might as well do it "natively" under Linux, instead of doing it with Macports or something similar. I tried Slackware back in the early 1990s but it wasn't all that attractive. I figure that for what I want to do with the computer (security audits, basic malicious badness), Ubuntu should get the job done. The main thing driving my interest in Linux at this point is Kismet. It seems to "just work" under Linux where as in Microsoft land you need one specific NIC and in Apple land it doesn't support 802.11g yet.
For those of you guys using Macs and OSX for security work, is my perception skewed? Is there some simple way to get the good apps (nmap, wireshark, etc) working under OSX that I've missed?
That being said, Apple has fewer hardware options than your generic PC. For example, due to the melting-down ATI video card that shipped in my Mac Pro desktop, I've decided that I will do everything in my power to avoid ATI hardware in my systems in the future. It would seem that my only choices for my Mac Pro are the low-end nvidia card (Which I have in there currently) and the ATI video card that I more or less expect to have the same overheating issues that the last one did. Apple support denies that there's a pervasive problem even though you can find dozens of people who are having it on various Internet forums. For that, Apple gets a frowny face :-(
So my next PC purchase is likely to be a case and a bunch of components and my next OS is likely to be Linux again. I tried Apple, I mostly like them but they do not entirely fit how I want to use my main system.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Apple runs on expensive hardware; Linux runs on whatever the hell you want it to run on.
Not until I can put a system together myself and install OSX on it. ... Legally of course.
I just bought a MacBook Pro, and half the allure of OS X is that instead of dual-booting Windows / Linux, I can dual-boot Windows / OS X. OS X is like Linux++ for me. It's like every Linux distro I've ever used, but with a usable and consistent GUI layer on top of it.
No
Just because the boxes happen to be x86 now doesn't mean OSX is any more accessible than the PPC days.
To companies considering migrating from Linux to OSX or even Windows to OSX, you have to ask yourself one simple question, are you prepared to sacrifice your hardware vendor flexibility? If running Linux, you are not strongly locked into any hardware or software vendor. With MS, you have software vendor lockin, but are at least spared hardware lockin. With OSX, you are locked into software and hardware. If Apple does anything you don't like, you're stuck. IBM/AIX is that way, HP/HP-UX is that way, and Solaris is *mostly* that way (though Sun has been changing that picture), so it's not exactly an uncommon scenario and to an extent, not unreasonable, but being unaware of that circumstance ahead of time could leave you in great pain if things do not continue to align with your strategy. In fact, I'm reasonably confident that a large part of Microsoft's success in the NT4 days despite being technically uninteresting compared to a lot of established players in the space was the hardware indepedence. Of the serious contenders of the day (free x86 *nixes didn't have the commercial backing yet, leaving commercial Unixes as the vast bulk of the competition), only NT and Netware were hardware vendor independent. That's a very significant situation.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Anyhow, it looks to me like the penguin took a bite out of that Shiny Apple. His eyes are a little glazed over too. I wonder what's up with that?
I dream of many pies in Bill Gates eyes...
On the other hand, Linux will not grow unless the issue of software and versions changes. Often times, one has to struggle to make software work. I recently gave up on trying to get my TV remote control working on Linux (Mythbuntu 7.10). The card works fine. Even after following all the manuals on the internet, I failed!
I was installing the Hauppauge PVR-150, which by the way, is "supported" out-of -the-box! Not for the remote though. On installation, Linux will inform you that it has detected and loaded the modules to make the remote work though it does not!
I suggest the following, let the Linux platform get a set of hardware to support and support them well...from printers of every class, to scanners, TV cards and all the hardware one can think of...just one example from each class...then brag about those. When this happens, one can expect to install a particular piece of hardware and have it work flawlessly.
Linux zealots should also realize that people install and expect software/hardware to work...not to fidget with configuration files for the whole day.
This is where Apple beats us all. Get a software, install using a particular install method and see it working.
For Linux, it's a debate covering versions involving the kernel, associated packages, windowing systems, and whether it will be RPM, DEB or TAR packages. This is not to forget the distro involved
Overall, it's a mess in the Linux world. The results as shown in the introductory piece are not at all surprising to me.
I continue to use apple because although they can't do alot, I know that I will be in the forefront of the next big thing, with a pretty machine. Be it Visicalc, or Excel or MacWrite, or pagemaker or iTunes, I know that I will be able to do work that matters. It might be closed, I might have to pay, but I will have the capability. Of course, I will have to give up all those millions of programs for MS Windows, but hey, if I have to run it, it is pretty cheap to buy a PC just for that purpose.
Linux has a great development platform and makes a very inexpensive server platform. As much as there is talk about free, the one workable GUI is in fact not free as in beer. The one thing that could make Linux the desktop winner is to have a company, perhaps Red Hat, create a reference machine including desktop, applications, and hardware. The machine would not run MS Windows natively, so, like the Apple, there would be no issue of piracy being the sole purpose of non-Windows PC. Just think of a re-imagined ThinkPad integrated with OSS calendaring, Office applications, etc, all included. A good deal as the machine would have everything the consumer expects. Now just imagine the folks at Best Buy trying to sell this machine for $1000 when the PC costs $600 and the Apple costs $1300.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Actually i would say they have been fighting in different desktop areas, Apple is in the Hardware + software expensive combo experience, Gnu/Linux is in the "runs in everything if proper drivers available", maybe in the future OEMs like Dell try to steal this Apple market using FOSS offerings (like a very customized Ubuntu installation for instance), but until now it has not been the case (sold only to hobbyists).
Also think this way, since Microsoft is a desktop monopoly anyone who steals them market share (no matter who) is a win, because it breaks the Microsoft junk cycle and forces both users and developers to "think different", so next time they make an IT purchase they may be more open to alternatives than otherwise.
def greetings(x): return {'friend': 'Howdy', 'enemy': 'Dye [sic]'}.get(x, 'g0 4w4y, l4m0r')
I switched from Linux to a Mac a couple of years ago. What I found was that I was spending a lot of time on system administration and wasn't benefiting myself or anyone else. There were too many cases where things wouldn't work unless I dug down and found an obscure file to update to make things work. And no, I'm not talking common ones like /etc/resolv.conf. The free software answer is to modify the code to improve the programs, but I don't have the time to do that. I tried a Mac that I inherited, then bought a Mac Mini, then finally a MacBook Pro. I still have my Linux computer, but it is in my closet turned off for over a year. I've installed Linux on a couple of desktops at work but don't really use them much, and when I have problems I'm reminded why I switched to a Mac.
I will say that Ubuntu is a lot more convenient than the plain Debian I used to run and I might like Linux on the desktop if I tried it again. I've found, though, that I have a lot more apps I rely on on the Mac than I did with Linux so it would be a lot harder to convert back to Linux than it was to come to the Mac.
Linux has OpenOffice, that does everything Microsoft Office does! I've been using Linux for about 2 years now, and I'll never go back to Windows or Mac! I think Mac OS is being designed for fancy GUI and ease of use. Windows was a copy of Mac's idea, and Linux is an operating system that is designed for security, stability, and customization. While the GUI could use some fine tuning for regular computer users, Linux is still an excellent OS for the people who are willing to take the time to learn how to use it.
According to the summary of the article, Linux its market share, but Apple hasn't. Doesn't sound like dying to me, or even ill health.
This is my sig.
i think it's awesome that Apple is doing well.
it's all about choices and options.
apple is just another option.
if someone bought me an Apple i'd use it, but i'd still dual boot to my linux too.
in the mean time i'm very happy with my Debian/Lenny. everything works and it just keeps getting better.
To me, Linux is just completely and utterly *boring* coming from OS X. Linux's desktop effort has consisted entirely of following Windows and, more recently, Mac OS X. Show me a modern, usable, attractive Linux desktop that does something other than give me a task bar, start menu, system tray, and "My Computer" icons. I'd love to see the Linux desktop community forge ahead in new territories.
Unfortunately it seems that the FOSS development process at an extremely large scale is not very good at fostering that kind of innovation, only imitation.
Windows was Microsoft's effort to fight back against the GUI interface of the Apple Macintosh. Back in the old days of DOS, the Apple Macintosh was the "windowing operating system." UNIX and X-Windows systems also did graphics, but generally only for CAD (Computer Aided Design) applications.
Linux has never fought in the graphical environment and ease of use space. Traditionally, its strength has always been that it is a great Unix replacement. Today, Linux dominates the university and scientific computing landscape. Additionally, Linux is a great operating system for many focused, special purpose projects. Projects like embedded web servers, routers, and even small portable computers like the Asus Eee PC. In many of these applications, neither the Mac nor Windows are feasible alternatives.
Since the mid-80's, the dominant PC in the market has been an IBM Compatible PC running Microsoft Software. The Graphical arts people have always used the Macintosh, because initially it had good and easy to use graphics. Unix and Linux have dominated in almost every special purpose application environment that the other two architectures could not accomplish.
The new effect is that the Mac, Windows, and to a lesser extent Linux, can all run the same desktop applications, or at least the same types of desktop applications. The result has been Microsoft pushing the .NET languages, hoping to create such a large application monolith, that no one will ever consider switching from Windows again. In practice, people want a simpler, more reliable alternative to Windows. For ease of use, Apple is winning. For cost, adaptability, and reliability, Linux is winning.
Linux was my desktop for several years, after leaving Windows. But I got tired of spending evenings getting audio and video to work, Fink lets me run a good amount of open-source software under OS X (e.g. postgres), I have Linux either onboard (via Parallels) or ssh, and OS X runs X windows. And the hardware is just so gorgeous.
Wow -- someone writing on a Mac-oriented website talking about how Macs are better than the alternatives?
Say it isn't so! What's next, Steve Jobs saying Apple is superior to Windows?
I started off with Linux, I had Linux for years, until I needed a laptop. Linux sucked on laptops -- honestly, I couldn't say if it still does -- because it couldn't do WiFi very well and power saving was a mess. So I bought an iBook. Then an iMac. Later a MacBook. Now I have an Ubuntu server in the basement, but that is all.
Because, by now, OS X has pulled ahead so far that I can never see switching back. Time Machine is the Leopard killer app: I don't do backups, the machine does backups. iChat AV lets me see my family thousands of miles away. TextEdit, the standard editor, does ODF. iTunes is hassle-free. I can still use vim. Oh, and it doesn't hurt that the machines have a nice design.
I still use VLC and OpenOffice (NeoOffice) and Firefox, but I don't need Linux for them, either.
So. On the server side, I'm sure Linux will do great, because Apple's prices there are psycho. I'm sure that is where the increases are that people are quoting here. On the desktop, I think the penguin missed its chance. If somebody asks me what laptop or desktop to get, I tell them to avoid the hassle and get a Mac.
desktop market. Since then the number of folks using Linux on the desktop has certainly increased:
http://www.itfacts.biz/linux-desktop-market-share-to-reach-6-in-2007/723
It was predicted to be 6% in 2007 and I'd wager that is pretty close.
Of course, that doesn't count Linux users like myself who purchase through the retail channel only once out of every 4 downloads, and the much larger number who only download free copies of Linux. This "0.6%" also never takes into account the fact that a single download of a Linux distro is often installed on more than one computer.
So, all this report is comparing is the retail channel sales of Mac, the only way one can get it, with the retail channel sales of Linux, which is usually the choice of last resort among Linux users.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Apple has a $1000 desktop and it is built with some laptop components. Not many laptops have a 3.5 inch hard drive. Very few $1000 laptops have a 20" monitor.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
My wife and son have Macs. I use Linux, I tell you, there is so much more you can do with Linux than you can with Windows or Macintosh. I've tried to use their computers but there aren't enough applications available, every time I want to do something I can't find an easy application to do it. Obviously I'm not talking about office applications and stuff like that, but playing media on a mac is painful unless it is directly supported. There is no real choice to play music but on iTunes.
And yes, I know Mac is based on Darwin which is based on FreeBSD, but the UI is not X11 and is thus crap for anything but local display. Try running a Mac's control panel applet on a different system. Oh, sure, maybe you can find a VNC server for it, but good luck.
I will agree that Linux suffers from chaos in the light of so many distros, but freedom and creativity are chaotic.
Lastly, I doubt that Linux on the desktop is less than 1%, from my own experience, I'd bet at least 2%-4% for a number of reasons: computers run longer with Linux so a computer off "their" radar as unusably old may still be in use with Linux. Many Windows P.C.s become Linux boxes right away or over time, this creates a double error: a missed count for Linux and false count for Windows. Lastly, you download Linux, there is no financial transaction to track installations.
No, for me it is all about getting work done and I don't want the OS getting in my way or becoming an impediment to accomplishing things and I don't want to have to spend time with all of our students on various flavors of Linux.
What does your student's GNU/Linux preference have to do with getting your work done? As long as you can exchange files with them everything should be cool. I can understand how Windoze users and the impossible myriad of application/OS combinations is a drag, but OSX and GNU/Linux get along fine for the most part. You should be able to standardize things around web service, sftp, Open Office, latex and other common things.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I wouldn't necessarily call the Mac Mini underpowered. The CPU is, after all, dual core, and quite fast for non-intensive uses (about what you'd expect in a $600 computer).
However, with RAM prices being what they are (last I checked 2GB cost about $50), I'd expect 2GB of RAM and a significantly larger hard drive for that price. The fact that they use notebook components to save space and power is neither here nor there.
...Apple spends a pile of money on advertising and producing pretty, slick, expensive machines, Linux does not.
I also wonder how these people take into account the number of people who run linux on macs. One of my friends was running gentoo on his macbook for a while.
what's that now?
1. I don't think mature Linux users will care. Linux is a great tool and does some things that osx can't do. At some point the killer Linux app will come along that will drive adoption. This is pretty much how it's always worked. This is how Linux is gaining now.
2. Stealing desktop share is a moot point. Apple has been trying for as long as I can remember to switch windows users and it doesn't work that well on its own until Vista came along.
3. Right now, Linux is the third alternative that will probably make either osx or vista look better to most. It's the shouting (advertising) that makes Apple products more viable. If Ubuntu could afford Apple-scale advertising, then you would see even more adoption.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Even at Slashdot, parent should get a Funny.
This is a major point - Mac OS X has many, if not most, of the good parts of Linux, plus great Mac hardware and a nice interface. I was surprised when I spoke at a LUG meeting last year, I believe that there were 9 laptops there total, and 8 were Macs. I moved my primary desktop to Mac about a year ago from Linux. I still use Linux under Parallels, and have it on other machines here at the house, but I use a Mac for desktop & development work.
Do you have ESP?
First, some basic questions as to measuring Linux installs. Very hard. No bar-code events in many cases.
/. about the really stunning popularity of Linux AND Mac sales on Amazon.
Also, there is a totally different distribution chain. Macs are sold in stores or on-line. Linux is often distributed through social networks, such as the telecentros in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Extremadura, Spain; or in thin client networks such as at this public middle school in San Francisco; or via free giveaways, such as this guy who gave out 16,000 Linux computers in Berkeley, California; or via the numerous municipal and national migration projects to Linux, such as in Munich, Madrid, and Extremadura Spain; or via Nokia's N880; or the OLPC; or the Asus EEE PC, or the Everex PC.
The other problem that I have with this guy's article is that it is contrary to recent reports even here on
It is a totally different business model. The fundamental problem with TFA is that it does not understand this fundamental different.
Uhmmm, Guess what? some people don't mind paying for automobiles, especially if they are good automobiles. The trouble, my friend, is that not everyone can afford a new high end Hummer, BMW, Lexus, or [your favorite expensive car here]. There is a huge number of cheaper automobiles on the road for a reason. MOST people don't need Photoshop, they need a photo organizer and written instructions on how to connect their camera to the computer.
In the LARGEST portion of home computer use requirements, the Mac does nothing better than a Linux system can, nor does a Windows system for that matter. When users can make an informed decision, Linux is the best option for a huge number of people. Don't tell me that Linux is difficult to use or learn. I know better than to fall for that stupid argument. There is a huge number of home computer users that don't know how to use Windows or OSX, so they will struggle along with whatever OS is on their computer despite your arguments.
The sales issue stem from brand recognition (or lack of) and the sales person's quota target or incentive scheme. Instead of getting Ubuntu for their current hardware, people want to enjoy the feeling of an 'upgrade' since we (MS) have been telling them this is the best way to get better performance for years if not decades. With that buried in the general public's social subconscious, the trip to the store results in a Wintel purchase or a Mac purchase, depending on which guru in a sales uniform they talk to.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Linux desktop usage has increased 240%, OSX has decreased 13%..
/.
Where do these numbers come from anyway? Buried as inacurate... oh, wait, this is
Apple Matters on recent trends in OS market share that says that while OS X has seen continual growth, up 74% from Jan 2006 to December 2007, at the same time, Linux's share has risen only 117%. There, fixed that for you.
So, which is more like your ass, OS X or Linux?
Citation needed.
(The article is blocked by my company's filter, so no reading TFA here, unfortunately.)
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
Why naturally.
Let me swap an OS from a megalomaniacal, anti-competitive, protectionist bunch of incompetent smacktards who wouldn't recognize a robust scheduling system if it knocked them upside the head with another OS by a bunch of latte-drinking, turtleneck-wearing metrosexuals who do nothing all day but sit around the local Starbucks writing press-releases, please.
And let's not get started on the mindless linux zealotry and intentional obfuscation by the grumpy old Unix hackers who are offended on a personal level that the mindless, unwashed masses using a "kiddie distro" like Ubuntu are actually getting the same things done easily that they've been struggling with for decades.
For many people and companies, myself included, WINE's ability to run WoW on Linux as a "platinum" app shows technical expertise, but a lack of vision. There would be much more interest in the project (and possibly a cash infusion) if they publicly declared something like "WINE v0.9.xx will fully support MS-Office 2003 on Linux by this summer..."
Wishful thinking on my part... I doubt that CodeWeavers (a big sponsor of WINE) would allow that.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Seriously, those of us who use linux (the majority I'd wager) use it because it's cheap (indeed, free), it works in so many different environments and we can fix it, if it's broken, from the source code level and up. By making the switch to Apple, the n00bs are trading one Master for another. Another crappy OS who does it's best to save you from yourself. Maybe a little 'under the hood' work by those n00bs would make them smarter about security and such.
And personally, if Jobs isn't the Antichrist, he's His personal secretary.
Pax Vobiscum
ROFL! Yeah, Apple is the problem with Linux desktop adoption. Just keep telling yourself that.
>Guess what!!! some people don't mind paying for software. Especially if it is good software.
You hit the nail on the head.
I've said this before here, but my experience with "free" DVD ripping/re-encoding software has totally changed my mind about the whole "free and open" software movement.
The problem seems to be the old one: Too many cooks spoil the soup. In my efforts to find a free DVD ripping/re-encoding software I downloaded many "free" tools. Not only did none of them work (I always ended up with audio/video sync issues), but most of them required the installation of numerous other pieces of software (codecs and the like), written by other folks.
In the end, you end up with a bunch of discombobulated software on your computer, the problem you were trying to solve still is unsolved, you don't know which piece of software isn't working right, and you couldn't get real tech support even if you did!
I think I've just about given up on "free" software, except maybe Firefox. I want to buy a product that someone is willing to stake their business reputation and livelihood on. Not an uncoordinated collection of hobbiests' works. This goes for operating systems, too. Maybe especially so.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Could you point me to where I can find evidence to support this over/under-estimation?
I'm not a Linux fanboy, even though I use it. Conversely, I'm neither a Windows or OSX hater, though I don't use either one. The fact is this, I don't have a grand in US dollars to spend on a really pretty PC (Apple). I could, however, scrounge up enough spare parts from around and about to build my own PC. However, again, I didn't have a couple of hundred dollars, minimum, to buy an operating system and associated office software (Windows and Office). I did, though, have access to a broadband connection at a friends house who also owned a DVD burner.
Thusly, I have a really inexpensive PC with a damn good Linux distro (openSuSE) that provides me with everything I need while I pauper myself through college as a middle-aged white guy (MAWG).
So, to Apple and Microsoft; bite me.
I'm just saying...
Oh, for the days when sig's didn't have to be cute...hey, wait a sec.
So... Apple has some great software (and some not so great software) and is easy to use and Linux desktop distributions don't. How is that Apple's fault?
Seems to me more like the lack of software, support, and easy-to-use interface are killing Linux on the desktop, not Apple.
X11 is on your OS X install disk. Then install Fink and get access to 8,226 OS X compatible UNIX programs.
If linux has 1 person using it and then gets 1 more person than they have a 100% increase. If Apple has 1 million people using Apple and gets 100,000 more people to use Apple then its a mere 10% increase.
Wow! 100% is so much better than 10%! How does Apple stay in business?
I think this isn't true. Apple will not kill a fly if they persists to use proprietary hardware, which is stupid.
Being Windows Vista the crap that it is, I don't understand why Apple doesn't release a Mac OS X version for the PC.
Personaly, I own few Dell workstations. I'm tired of Windows and all their errors, bugs, spyware and DRMs but I will not buy new hardware for at least 2 years or when my Precisions 690 becomes old and unusable. Apple should understand that their hardware, even if it's nice looking and good, are out of range for several people.
When Apple understand the advantage they have over Microsoft at this time, and at this time ONLY, and finaly decide to release Mac OS X for PC, then we'll have an interesting and an affordable real OS alternative. I, without a doubt, will buy Mac OS X for all my PCs. Apple can become the future of IT if they THINK and create a PC version (which isn't difficult since their OS already runs on Intel hardware, just remove few proprietary hardware checks and voila!).
Apple... just imagine the numbers!!! $$$$$$$$$$$$... but the time is NOW that Microsoft just screwed up all the thing with their crappy Vista.
About Linux... I don't think it's a real affordable alternative at this time. Ubuntu people are doing a big effort and they have the vision... maybe in a couple of years... For example, I was unable to setup my 3 monitors with 2 nVidia cards on X... Tried hard, read all the howtos, manuals, tutorials, etc... but nothing, I was able to activate just 2 displays at the same time. So, stuff like this makes Linux a poor service. On XP the 3 displays installed like a charm... no config editing at all, just few clicks and the 3 monitors are running perfectly.
I purchased Vista Ultimate... it's crap...
I installed SuSE, Fedora and Ubuntu... didn't worked with my 3 displays (none of them)
Now I'm using my old and venerable XP, but I want to change it... will try Ubuntu 7.10, but if there were Mac OS X for PC... ohhhh! baby! sure I'll move to it...
I'll not loose the hope about this... I know that in a some time, Apple will open its eyes.
...or, at least, close enough.
Any Unix like, POSIX compliant* operating system is welcome as far as I'm concerned.
As soon as OSX is able to run on my non-Mac platform, has a proven track record of stability and performance in a production environment and is free I might just start using it myself.
"...$600 overpriced and underpowered mini that is just a laptop in a small case without a screen build in."
I don't think so. I tried to put together a system like the Mac Mini for a special purpose. I wanted it small, quiet, CD/DVD ROM, network, USB, etc. To get it quiet I had to buy an expensive case that acted as a heat sink. When I summed it up, it came out to cost more than the Mac Mini and it had less CPU. If you get too much CPU on those Micro ATX form factors, they need fans. And the cases are larger. That's when I realized I could just get a Mac Mini for the job. Furthermore, I found it used on ebay and saved more.
This just sort of jumped out at me...
'Apple is driven by someone who has some understanding of end-user needs, Linux is not.'
Linux _is_ driven by someone who has an understanding of end-user needs. The Linux end user just happens to be programmers and sysadmins. Why does something have to be reduced to the lowest common denominator to be considered a success?
To put it a bit differently (and paraphrase a famous quote), Linux is user friendly- it's just picky about who its friends are.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
I think the article's analysis is way off. Linux isn't losing ground to Apple, except in the sense that it's losing potential converts from Microsoft. Microsoft is losing ground to both Apple and Linux. So you have to ask, what does Apple have that Microsoft and Linux both lack? I think the answer is Apple's sudden appeal to a younger generation of users. It probably has a little to do with the iPod and a lot to do with Apple's excellent TV marketing campaign.
I have been using Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, VMS and Windows of course for many years. I do a lot of programming on all flatforms. I always feel it is funny that some one claim one is better than others. They all have their pros and cons. Just make them do what they suppose to do.
On the other thought, what a boring Friday afternoon, let's just...
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I just recently got a Mac Mini. I haven't had time to really mess around with it. So far, it has things that I like. But my Linux habits are hard to break. And it has nowhere near the software easily available for it. The main thing that I love is the video. It is much easier, for me, than Linux video. I can actually see the Mythbusters' videos on the web. I know that Linux can do video, it just isn't as easy (at least with openSUSE and/or Fedora, haven't tried Ubuntu).
while vista was getting more and more off schedule there were a ton of articles of how this is the prime time for linux to take some percentage points off of windows - I was really rooting for linux. It just didn't seem that any of the distributions tried to take the lead - i think ubuntu is getting there ... on the other hand apple released all of their machines on intel and just came out with a couple of updates - they definately are trying with their marketing ... oh well anyways bought a mac and kept the linux server in the backroom
Okay, it seems that my country is only country in a world what is running GNU/Linux on it's schools, ministry, home computers etc etc. That 1% amount is just JOKE! :-DDDDD
If i convert my PC's to windows, GNU/Linux market share might drop under 0.55% ;-)
I'm gonna set myself up for flaming here, but I think Linux on the desktop missed it's window of opportunity. And it was at least three years wide to boot. Think 2001, xp just released, OS X finally coming out of beta. Both UI's were clunky and the consistency of UI for the native apps was poor. Had there been proper unification and standardization of the major linux apps as far as the UI goes I think there could have been something seriously different than what we see today. I'll give the gnome devs some credit for trying to do that (that's why Sun adopted it) but that wasn't enough. It took Vista 5 years and OS X at least 3 to come up with something uniform, attractive, and usable. (OK initial Aqua release was very "lickable" :-) but not very usable due to speed issues). Now with the refined and well thought out Aqua on Leopard and the not as good as Aqua but still damn good Aero (but mostly just properly standardized) interface on Vista the linux desktop doesn't have a chance to edge in any more. And from what I can see MS is paying attention to their UI more and more (although what I've seen of Windows Mobile 6 doesn't impress me) and unless something amazing comes out of the open source community this situation isn't going to change. So, bottom line, does it matter that Apple is edging out linux on the desktop? It seems to me it was largely by and gone anyway.
..around!
You know why? Because Linux runs on any "ol" computer while mac os X runs on...well...macs!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
So all those advantages explain why, in the same two years, Apple's share of the market increased by about three quarters while Linux's more than doubled?
I used to be a pretty hard-core Linux on the Desktop guy. Every PC I ever built or bought (laptops) dual-booted Windows and Linux. At one point in college, I was even writing my essays in HTML to print from within Netscape 4, as there weren't any decent Linux word processing software (that was free ;)) circa late 1996.
I kept Windows around because there was-and-is a lot of stuff that Linux doesn't do well, if at all; Photoshop (GIMP wasn't a contender until GimpShop, too little too late), Office, Final Cut Pro, StarCraft, etc. OpenOffice (NeoOffice) is finally to the point where it's almost an Office replacement (in my line of work, I have to volley a document back and forth a dozen times or more between my office and third parties', with Track Changes and Comments and those aren't in OpenOffice).
I returned to Mac (my last Mac previously was a PowerBook 5300/100 with System 7.5.x and MachTen (http://www.tenon.com/products/machten/) around OS X Jaguar, on an iBook G3/600. That thing was indestructible (fell off the back of my motorcycle at ~40mph and survived outdoors for a week before I recovered it, still works 4 years later), and led to a PowerBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook (engineering school tote-along), iMac, Mac mini HTPC...
What I love? Running Perl / Apache / PHP / MySQL / etc. in a comfortable "native" UNIX environment, while still having all my GUI goodness with Mail.app, Safari.app, Preview.app, Office 2004, StarCraft (yeah, I'm way behind the times in gaming, don't care, don't have time), etc., all a click away as native apps. Plus, now with VMWare and Windows, I can keep around the software I need for school (XILINX, Visual Studio Pro 2005, etc) on one platform. Front Row is a great HTPC interface. AppleScript lets me automate flipping between it and my Elgato EyeTV, with the sleek little Apple remote control. Awesome industrial design (Macs are pretty; most PCs look cobbled together, with the possible exception of the VAIOs).
I haven't run Linux in years, except at the office where we setup a big Linux file / backup server. Even my home server is now an old PowerMac G4 with matched (and software mirrored) internal hard drives and OS X Tiger Server. The UI is better, the third-party application support is there, and most software I want is either a single-click .dmg install or no more difficult to install than it is on Linux (through Darwin Ports and fink), often easier (fink vs. yum, for instance).
Most servers I'd deploy would still be Linux, as Apple's hardware is expensive in that market niche and there's no value add (I'm going to be running the same AMP software stack regardless of OS X or Linux as the underlying platform). But on the desktop, unless you're totally cash-starved, there's no compelling reason for me or most of the techie people I know to run Linux on the desktop, and lots of good reasons to use OS X instead.
This is a trend that's been building for a while (I jumped in 2002, the biggest geeks in my circle jumped shortly thereafter): http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/29/1818256
geek. lawyer.
Here are some compelling reasons to install linux on the desktop: 1. Simple/free licensing 2. less susceptible to malware (?) 3. A multitude of freely available/downloadable software 4. Lower risk of vendor lock-in (depending on software choices) Other than number 3, how many people REALLY care about these other than the people who've already adopted linux (or attempted to) At best, linux provides a decent user experience but certainly no better and often worse than either Windows or OS X. And although there's all sorts of desktop and server goodies for linux, they're often harder to configure. Choosing linux also forces you to swim against the tide more so than OS X. With either linux or OS X it can be difficult to shed dependence on Microsoft in a world where .doc is the default standard for document exchange and an .mdb is an all too common means of sharing database info.
You already posted in this story with your other sockpuppet. Being made to post only twice a day because you have negative karma for trolling does not mean you can game Slashdot by posting with multiple accounts.
Right now, you cannot clone, download, or virtualize cars. So, THAT analogy I don't get.
Maybe Linux developers who don't want to outright sell or enter the vicious retail market should try "rentware". I know some choose to go for donations (donorware?), and some choose to give away things, but...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I recently conducted a survey of the different studies about the state of Linux adoption and wrote an article about it. The studies I found could be easily divided into three very distinct groups. The first was hobbyist/fanboy/zealot/etc stuff with a lot of problems in the used methodologies etc. The second was what consultancy and market research companies said, using most commonly quite complex aggregation methods from available secondary measurables. Very nice, but they leave a huge amount of room for errors and even twisting the results. These were for this year between 8% and 16%.
/. now about this article is plain childish to be honest. On top of that most of the people avoided the real message of the original article which is not the percentage but the explanation of the reasons. I have to sadly say that I can stand behind most of them as well.
The third group of studies that I found was most interesting and used mostly data aggregated from the information of internet usage. I also could find least number of problems within the credibility of these studies and curiously they seem really to be the most reliable ones around in the big picture. Guess what for 2007? 0,8%.
After spending some hundreds of hours studying the question "what the hell is that percentage number" I have to say honestly that I stand behind that number of 0,8%.
You see, many fanboys and zealots want see the world through their own shades... Most of the discussion here on
Macs were the perfect solution. They ran our geeky unix software. They ran powerpoint which most prefer for presentations. Wireless just worked.
After a brief stint with macs, I'm back to linux. I love free software. I love the fact I can customize the GUI easily. But most of my colleagues couldn't care less. They just want their hardware to work. They will not listen to argument about free software and proprietary lock-in.
Here's an aside about OS X that's relevant for people who work with PDFs, which includes scientists but I'm sure a lot of other people too. One area that OS X beats linux in handily is Preview, their PDF viewer. Preview does the following things that are much harder or impossible to do with linux software:
In summary, I love Linux, but I do believe that the article/summary have a point and that Apple's significant resources in (1) spending money on proprietary drivers and (2) developing software that is in some cases superior is cutting into Linux.
The right designer-developer-packager-distributor group for Linux with a usable desktop just hasn't been formed yet. The Linux culture itself probably won't be able to design the package in a way to make it easy to use for the average non-technical person. It's definitely going to take an ``outsider''. With the right stuff, Linux or other free operating systems should do quite well.
I've spoken to someone here who was trying to explain to me why Ubuntu is far easier to use than Mac OS X. He was definitely someone I consider to be within the technical Linux culture. I'm a software support person so what I think about the Ubuntu desktop is meaningless. If he could have convinced one of the secretaries that Ubuntu was easier than MS Windows or the graphics designer upstairs that it was easier to use than Mac OS X, that would have meant something. If he failed in his effort to convince them and considered the problem may actually be that Ubuntu isn't that easy for non-technical people to use and that non-technical people aren't necessarily idiots, then that would have meant something. The point is that, like other Linux fans, he was speaking to someone familiar with Unix flavored operating systems and free software instead of speaking to a typical user of desktop PCs. Rather than looking for a different perspective, he was looking for a confirmation of what he already believed.
If a Linux developer wants to make something useful to people in other fields, then they're going to have to work with designers who are going to care more about the users than the developers themselves. That's right, I said ``designers''. The concept of design in the Linux oriented slashdot world is too often greeted with contempt. Design is not just a pretty or impressive interface, nor is it the kind of spontaneous feature accumulation loved by so many people on slashdot. If you want Linux to be accepted on the desktop, y'all are going to have get over your animosity toward design and designers, and you're especially going to have to get over your animosity towards non-technical end users.
I've just returned from a small town in the middle of the Philippines. Recently, two interesting things have happened. 1) XP will no longer let you get updates if it's been pirated, 2) the software police have been raiding even nothing little towns, and *confiscating* computers with pirated software. They are forced to pay ~$250 US on each copy of Office and they don't get media. They have to download it for every machine, which is really hard when you have slow and unreliable internet access. Microsoft is forcing them to look at alternatives, and OpenOffice and Linux are being looked at, and used in some cases.
My point is that in the West, OS X is great, and is so much better than XP. In some parts of Asia and elsewhere, OS X isn't really an option. They just don't have the money. The way it appears to me is that in a few years, Linux will be the only viable option in some places, and many of these places have a *lot* of people.
Roughly a year ago, many people STILL had not heard of Linux... Yet I thank distros like Ubuntu and Mepis for bringing Linux to the masses..easily. The LiveCD to Desktop/Laptop install method has revolutionized Linux distros. And the increase n hardware support has also been very helpful. So sure, Apple may be gaining shares.... no big deal. I'm just happy that people are seeing alternatives to the M$ empire.
-Cnik
As a photographer, I have to take issue with #5. GIMP still doesn't support 32-bit color, something that used to be considered a minor shortcoming but is now a major issue even for an amateur like myself. It's essential for scanning analog media, and it would also be quite handy for working with raw images. There's an old fork of GIMP called CinePaint that has 32-bit support hacked in, but even in 16-bit mode it lacks a lot of recent optimizations and features.
I run Linux on my macbook. It has a key keyboard compared to others I've tried (Dell, Lenova). The lack of a 3 button trackpad is somewhat annoying, but you can configure the X11 synaptics trackpad driver to do many many different things. (things that OSX does not even offer without a 3rd party driver)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So, Linux more than doubled it's share and Apple almost doubled. I don't see where Apple is killing Linux here. Linux is still not mainstream. I've gotten a few friends, who are somewhat technical, to use it and they love it. When the average user asks me what to get for a new computer, I tell them to get a Mac. They can do all they want and not have problems that they would on Windows or Linux. (different problems, obviously)
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Couldn't you just as easily say that Apple has grown by about 74% while Linux has grown by about 117%?
To be more to the point, however, OSX and Linux really fill VERY different markets in terms of end user it seems to me. I use Linux because I'm the kind of person who likes to have total control over my computer and fiddle around with all the little bits of everything that's doing anything. That makes Linux great for me and OSX a very (in my experience) poor choice. On the other hand, for people who want an OS that just handles everything for them with a shiny veneer, OSX is just the ticket.
Put it in a different perspective like so: currently roughly 8% of the desktop market is non-Microsoft. Among those non-Microsoft users, the ratio of Mac to Linux users is roughly 10:1. Now, as somebody who uses Linux, and when recommending computers will recommend Linux to anybody with strong technical skills and tendencies, and Macs to anybody without, that ratio seems just about right to me. What it says to me is that 90% of the population just DOESN'T want to have to fiddle with anything more complicated than a pretty point and click dialog (nothing wrong with that), while 10% enjoys more intimate control over their computer.
Now, if you take into consideration that OSX and Linux are much more similar--and compatible--on many levels than Windows and ____ (fill in the blank), hopefully the train wreck that is Windows will eventually just die quietly and we'll be left with two good operating systems that share a great deal of fundamental compatibility while catering to distinct market segments.
Well, that's my take anyway.
Linux continues the Unix tradition of disarray and persnicketiness that just does not appeal to normal people. I'm glad to have an interface tyrant, even when I disagree with his decisions, because I've lived in the alternate universe of complete lack of restriction (and direction).
I am fixing to build my own xMac over the next few weeks, since Apple continues to refuse to do it themselves. I'll even buy a 'family' edition of Leopard so I can put a sticker on the case and have a technically "Apple-labeled" computer. I'm just looking for the most compatible and least hacky hardware combination for the task before I go on teh newegg spr33.
although the ipod does work on linux, the iphone doesn't. when you have two killer pieces of hardware - of course you're going to see a larger growth in the market. and Apple can attribute its' growth on hardware - not software. if Linux could support the iphone - it would see more growth than it has seen. i bought an iphone and had to, much to my chagrin, load up a machine with XP (because I didn't have a recent enough copy of OS X.) if Apple would open up the iphone so Linux could support it, I would simply use Linux.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
Surely there's a four-digit-/.'r here somewhere who can enumerate the appropriate laws of the cosmos that will ensure this never happens!
Save us!
Ok, just in case not, how much are Minis going for now?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Point #1 is valid in that it doesn't hurt Windows so much as Linux and Mac having superior features and stability is going to drive Windows in that direction. They are in fact tag teaming Windows in a sense. It'll be good for everyone and it's what competition is for. Linux and Mac should be friendly. Point #2, Linux isn't likely to ever get cool stores because there isn't the same cash flow involved. Profits make stores possible. It doesn't have the market share and since even the flavors of Linux are based on open sourced software they can't charge a lot for them, although some server versions are quite expensive. Point #3 No it isn't just as good but that isn't the point. It's like electric cars that have a 100 mile range. They'll only work for 95% of the people. Non professional and most professionals can get by just fine with Open Office. It's very much like Mac if you got people to try Open Office for a week most wouldn't waste their money on Microsoft Office. Some still would because of the "what if" factor. It's very much like electric cars. Gee what if I need to drive a 101 miles? If you go to the store a couple of times a week and pick up the kids from school you're probably fine. Same with Open Office. Point #4 Non issue. Who really cares about Aqua. I always go into prefs and shift even XP towards performance. Not as slick? I use software and couldn't care less about the look of the OS. If it'd give me a 10% performance increase I'd go back to shell commands to open apps. I realize that's not normal but the point is how many minutes a day do you spend crawling around in a shell compared to inside a given software. Yes there's more to it like switching between open apps but my point is software performance is more desireable in a real sense than pretty effects. Point #5 I guess you can refer back to point #3. A lot of the same issues. For what non pros do Gimp is just fine. Some pros can get by with it but for your average person that needs a painter or photo retoucher there's nothing wrong with Gimp. Pros aren't likely to switch but the vast majority of users aren't doing it professionally. There's more to Photoshop than most people realize and your average user will use 2% to 5% of what it's capible of. It's largely wasted on most users so they are wasting their money when Gimp is free. There are other painters out there like Dogwaffle that are open source and fun to play with but Gimp is the only one that is at least in the range of Photoshop. It lacks some pro features and I personally can't get past the interface but it's far more user friendly than Blender so I'd use it if I didn't have the money for Photoshop. I'd probably be using Blender if I was still in High School. The point is there are perfectly adequate open source softwares available. Are they as good as the closed source? No. Why would they be the closed source has had 10X to a 100X the resources thrown at them? Thinking of it in that way the open source versions are pretty staggering. I may use Photoshop and Maya but I use Open Office on both my PCs and Mac. It does what I need and it's less hassle to use than Microsoft Office. I can aford Office I just prefer Open Office. I got my first copy of Word back in the late 80s and ironically other than the speed of the computers, spell check took forever, I preferred it back then over the recent versions. It did what I needed and wasn't suffering from bloat. I need a word processor not something that reformats my document for me when I slip and hit CTRL+Shift+D, it's been a few years but I think that was the short cut that used to make my like a living hell. Back in the days of one level of Undo I used to slip every once and a while but I typed faster than the computers of the time so I'd have several words entered before it could reformat making Undo impossible. Used to drive me nuts.
On those figures Linux has grown 117% whilst Mac has grown 73.4%. World Domination is finally in sight!
For now, yes it is, but once Steve Jobs is gone the path will clear. Be it in ten or twenty years, once Jobs is gone Apple will once again lose its way and Linux will be able to continue onward and upward just as it always has. Some of us actually remember what Apple was like without Jobs at the helm. As it is, this just gives us more time to get Linux on the desktop polished and really ready.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You build a good desktop for the same price and apple does not have a mid tower.
Or was it video killed the radio star?
-- Boycott Shell
Linux is getting killed by OS X in the desktop arena. Consumers want either a black box that works right out of the package (Mac) or a product that offers such universal compatibility (with minimal effort) that the product can run in almost any hardware configuration (Windows). Though Ubuntu has made great strides, Linux offers neither. While you or I may not find it difficult to get a Linux desktop or laptop running, my 90-year-old grandma would, and she's more representative of the consumer base at large than you or I.
granted, i'm in the minority. if we add up all those who want to control their own digital destiny, and those who hate monopolies, and those who like to hack their environment, it'll still be a vanishingly small, and shrinking, minority of the general population who "just wants to get work done."
``this is called "progress".'' --lazarus long
Hmm lets see as far as Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suites are concerned anyone ever here of crossover office by these guys
http://www.codeweavers.com/because I know that it will run MS Office and I am pretty sure it will run Creative Suite as well and if not I know it runs just plain Photo Shop. Not to mention who understands user needs more than the users?
Who are the Linux users? Hmm lets see, a good majority of the time they are the people who write the distros so that theory is all shot to he||!
Thanks please play our game again!
...Apple always got Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.
Apple are selling a complete system (hw + sw) in a sexy package that's the reason.
The recent "explosion" in Apple sales is not due to supported sw. but due the fact
that it now can run Windows.
I recently parted company with an employer. That employer developed and sold Linux and BSD based network appliances. When I started at that company, there were maybe one or two Mac laptops, with the rest of engineering being Linux or BSD and the rest of the company on Windows. Today, probably two thirds of engineering is OS X and maybe 1/3 of the rest of the company have switched. Every engineer gets to choose at upgrade time between a Mac or a Thinkpad, and the shift in just a few years has been dramatic. Of all the engineers (100+) only one tried OS X and switched back in the entire time I was there, and he was a huge Linux on the desktop developer as his hobby and switched back because he had trouble finding drivers for Macs and was unwilling to give up his hobby.
Now think about this. How many of those engineers do you suppose code in their free time as a hobby, or at least provide valuable bug reports and feedback? How many do you suppose are now coding their hobbies to run on OS X primarily instead of Linux? How many decided not to solve a Linux on the Desktop problem because Apple solved it for them and it no longer bothers them? How can OS X not be hurting the effort to develop Linux on the Desktop.
And I see Linux falling behind as a desktop more than I see it catching up. I use Linux and OS X daily (actually WinXP too). I think this is due to several factors. First, Linux is still primarily a server OS, and when it comes to the point where a large change is needed to help Linux as a desktop, it is resisted by most Linux developers because they want to minimize changes to keep their server as stable as possible and keep the footprint small. Also, Linux is a distributed effort. No one party can really break it, but no one party can make a decision to break with the old and do something really new, unless they can make it 100% backwards compatible or they can get the other major developers on board. OS X's weakness is that Steve Jobs can say, "I want the menu bar translucent dammit!" and it happens. OS X's strength is Steve Jobs can say, "I want drag and drop package installation with packages that work across different processors and that are super easy to use" and it happens. Can you even imagine what it would take to get all the major Linux distros to switch to using OpenStep packages and to allow drag and drop installation and uninstallation? Redhat would want to use RPMs no matter what and all the server oriented developers would scream about bloat. It would never fly and since not everyone would be on board you'd end up with a mix and have a less usable system than Linux has now. And there's another thing to consider, remember all those Linux on the desktop suing engineers that switched to using OS X on the desktop? Guess what, they are now firmly in the camp that wants Linux optimized as a server, since they still use it for that, and OS X has solved their desktop needs.
Realistically, I see hope in only a few areas. The OLPC project is an example of both of them. Linux is great for specialized devices that are willing to break from the all purpose computing mold and for the really low end market. Don't get me wrong, I love my Kubuntu desktop, I just don't see it keeping up with my OS X desktop. Every revision to OS X adds a few more things Linux has always done right. Every revision of Kubuntu adds more polish and new icons and some new applications, but never any fundamental new features that matter to me as a desktop user. I wonder why the hell they aren't copying things from OS X (aside from icons and expose). Where are the system services for the love of Buddha? Linux developers have had 8 years to copy that feature but I still can't install a simple grammar checker that will work in all my applications. All I can conclude is there just isn't any one person with enough sway to say, "we're going to implement a big change, it will hurt for a bit, but we'll do better in the long run." It just seems like the users that care about having a really advanced desktop have all moved to OS
Too many bugs!
-- Boycott Shell
You can't kill something that is already dead. From my perspective (financial software development) it emitted its last dying gasp approximately 3-4 years ago.
It pains me to say this, but I made a living with and used Unix on the desktop for just about ten years and I'm still glad it's dead. Mac OS X is so much better at GUIs, and if we didn't have that I'm afraid I might just use Windows instead (with cygwin and Emacs, naturally).
For me it's Linux and Solaris on my servers, MacOS on my laptop, programming Windows to pay the rent.
I was part of the effort to keep Unix on the desktop alive, believe me. I work for a company with a premium product in our space that used to run on Windows and also on Solaris/SPARC. We fought to keep our Solaris port alive, we did our Linux port on our own time, but nothing was able to produce a viable user base of paying customers using either.
Probably the Apple products bring the salvation for windows users, providing many creative (relative!) ways to work easier and efficienter. But they provide *one* way, that might fit for the masses, but not for the ones who are used to be able to choose from dozens of windowmanagers, configureable ones into the smalles detail, and so on. Heck, my ipod doesn't even allow to delete files on-the-go. No sloppy focus? Or no *choice* for it? Where are we, in the sixties? A friend of mine said if he wouldn't need hibernate/wlan and stuff he would run already solaris on his macbook for long. Or linux, and accept having to configure something all the time. So he has now macosx - and no choice.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
For some reason I don't trust that site in this case. "Apple Matters": "Apple is the best", nothing new here I think. Just like Windows versus Linux comparisons on microsoft.com ...
Not too often we get 3 news items in a row with a similar theme.
-- Boycott Shell
I'm looking towards the monster new KDE version coming soon as well.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I see OS X as a good easy introduction into the world of Unix. So much that runs on Linux runs on OS X and vice-versa that the growth of either benifits both (and other Unixs). Linux isn't going anywhere and I'm convident that fully open source will win out in the end.
I used to have some linux boxes. I really like linux, its really flexible and stable as a server
However, as a Desktop it can be really dificult to set up. It is hard to make a stable, upgradeable desktop enviroment. For example, take kde 3.1, upgrade to 3.2 (with built in tools, like apt-get) and then kde 3.2 is not configured the way you like it. Then you realize this app doesn't work, the other app crashes when doing that thing.... I mean, its cool to have the latest, but as a desktop, a machine you want to work without having to spend hours configuring it, it DOESN'T work.
That's when I decided to give a shot to Mac OS X. It was a BSD based, fully POSIX compatible Operating System. It was the power of UNIX aimmed for average people. I know this is not what an average user would be interested in but I can run GCC, GDB, and all the development utilities I used in linux without bothering to configure X11, KDE, sound, wifi, -insert your favourite hardware here-.
What can I say, I love it!. Even the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard was painless. My photos, apps, preferences, almost everything working as in tiger.
My dock is the freakiest dock in the world on a mac. I've got VMware fusion, x11, xcode, the terminal... stuff like that.
- Linux is seldom reported by itself; the numbers usually include work-a-likes like BSD. OS X is BSD. Therefore, a true measure of the Linux-like system penetration would INCLUDE all OS X implementations.
- Even taken the numbers as is, Linux has more than doubled; Mac usage (the real numbers shown - not OS X) has not.
- You can pretty much cherry pick statistics to support any position you take, the OP has done exactly that here.
Linux would be dead on the desktop with or without Apple - its just unusable for the average person, supports little hardware, and it's hard to get the nice extras that you can for Windows AND get them working.
The Mac is just speeding the execution.
In fact, I'd say that as the Mac/Windows competition heats up Linux will get squeezed out.
Go back to math school!
The growth of Linux was 117% compared to Apples 73% increase in market share.
Sure it is peanuts. But just wait and you'll see that 2008 is the year of the Linux desktop 8^)
Why do people constantly leave out the iMac? I am a Linux guy, and think my 24 inch new iMac is incredible. It saved tons of space, looks awesome, and functionally it is great.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
All these stats are usually compiled based on website visits to a particular group of websites or in some instances just one site. Have you ever stopped to think that the average Linux user just might have different browsing habits than the "average" joe blow user? I am certain the majority of people frequent a lot of websites I would consider crap and have never visited. There never has been an accurate way to measure the actual number of Linux desktops in use since it can't be tied to any sales figures.
Scratch that, you did mention it towards the end. Either way, iMacs are awesome Desktops. My Linux desktop is strictly for programming and work. I do all that plus all my multimedia stuff on the iMac.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
I'm pretty sure all of you on /. will hate me for saying it, but I don't care for Linux at all. It does not offer a good user experience for your average consumer, it is not an easy to use product, and it does not provide all of the advantages Windows and OSX provide. Linux is for geeks and that's probably where it'll stay. Linspire is probably the easiest Linux distro because it comes complete with many codecs and programs and makes it easy to install new programs. Other than that, Linux is just a pain to deal with and I see no advantage to using it over Windows or OSX. And apparently it's market share is fact enough that it's not that great.
Holy shit, we've been doing it all wrong! Don't you see? We're running around with our office suites and media players and web browsers and games, when it was SFTP that the world has been screaming for all along!
Oh, and Many Other Useful Things! How could we possibly have missed Many Other Useful Things?
How did the IT industry ever get off the ground without SFTP and Many Other Useful Things? Thank you, Twitter! Thank you for showing us how wrong we've been about our billions of end users!
From what I can see, it probably has a lot to do with Apple's PR. Its difficult to turn on the televisions these days without seeing an Apple commercial. Another point to be made is that you can go to popular computer retailers and buy Macs right off the shelves. I would imagine a large majority of consumers don't buy directly from the manufacteurers. All in all, I just don't think Linux is out there enough.
Disclaimer: I have been using OS X and Ubuntu on *daily support basis*, so I know what I am talking about.
In short, they are different beasts. OS X is nice, but it is black box, and in the end you will loath it. As any other OS, it has lot of bugs, including VERY annoying ones which you can't fix even with having support contract with Apple and Adobe. It will bite many people and I bet lot of people will regret their jumping on OS X ship. Apple will also experience bigger problems with dealing of bugs when user and app base will grow, as it does already now. However, Apple and OS X strenght is integration. I wish Apple the best, I just wish they would not be so annoyingly similar to Microsoft as they were in last year - all standard stuff, supporting OOXML, closing DAAP, etc.
For Linux, problems are two - user base and apps. Linux is capable of working for lot of people, however, vendors still doesn't see too much financial initiative to hook off from Microsoft, just because if they will sell Linux OEM, they will have problems with OEM price for Windows. If there will be OEM base - which I think will come, thanks to Ubuntu and Dell, there will be ports of Adobe CS and other, very specialised stuff.
So, for now, Apple is sold better than Linux desktop solutions. It could be true. However, I think it is not the end of desktop of Linux. For me, it's only now getting in shape that I have no shame to show to others.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
sockpuppet alert
On the subject of networking, does anyone know if any Linux distros really use ZeroConf ubiquitously like OS X does? I'm a Kubuntu user and I like Kopete, but it is really annoying that I can't auto-discover users on the same LAN for chatting. Kubuntu also can't automatically find the network printer, which uses ZeroConf. The Macs on my LAN can all find these services (among others) and they're really useful. I know there are several mature ZeroConf implementations for Linux and the OLPC project even uses it to autodiscover other XO laptops and collaborate in various applications. Is it just Kubuntu that is behind the curve, or all Linux distros, or is it just Linux apps that haven't integrated the functionality?
Apple can garner market share from Microsoft which they are slowly doing but Apple isn't hindering Linux take up on the desktop at all. At this point in time Apple gains traction from those disillusioned with Microsoft with discretionary money to spend. Until the time comes when a Linux based OS can compete head to head with the best of MS and Apple, the avenue into consumer desktop space will be at the low end of the market as delineated by price point. This is where Walmart comes in.
Walmart has made a few efforts to sell Linux based PC's at the low end. Some efforts have been better than others depending on who put the packages together but all have been failures. The latest effort, the GreenPC is a dismal failure due to the horrid GreenOS which leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of consumers who took a chance on Linux based product. I didn't have to be, many other distros would have been a better choice but the gOS is what was schleped out to market.
While several Linux incantations have come along ways towards being a consumer friendly OS, in most regards any computer so saddled is still the good bit of a mechanics special. What the low end of the consumer desktop market needs is a friendly, concise and if need be, limited distro that serves the subset of what most people want to do most of the time and do it well as an integrated whole that simply works. Sometimes less is more.
In what remains of consumer desktop market space available, this is the niche to be filled. Alas, I have yet to find the Linux based distribution that can fill it.
It could be a good idea if no-applecentric blogs and websites could take a time to check their google analytics and upload their own information for browsers and OS.
Mine:
ar---o.c---nk.net
1. Internet Explorer / Windows 73.44%
2. Firefox / Windows 19.90%
3. Firefox / Linux 1.91%
4. Safari / Macintosh 1.29%
5. Opera / Windows 1.23%
6. Mozilla / Linux 0.86%
7. Firefox / Macintosh 0.43%
8. Konqueror / Linux 0.37%
9. Firefox / (not set) 0.12%
10. Opera / (not set) 0.12%
A very inexpensive product, CrossOver Office, makes MS Office no big deal on Linux. The biggest advantages Apple has on the software side are beautiful and very quick graphics and that a lot of things just work, even in 64 bits, that are still a pain in Linux. To get flash you have to build a 32 bit stack and run Firefox in 32 bit. Some Java programs don't work right in 64 bits, especially their GUIs. Compiz on Linux apparently interferes with Java GUIs. Add to this that some OS X tools are dearly missed on Linux. On the flip side a lot of Linux goodness doesn't quite work with find or macports at least down on Leopard. This is my short list going back and forth between OS X and Linux.
I might run OS X if I could buy a boxed set and run it on the hardware of my choice. Otherwise I'll just continue to run FreeBSD from which Apple derived their OS, and Linux - all on hardware of my choosing.
Too lazy to create a sig...
The enemies of Linux aren't Apple or even Microsoft, but the fragmentation and confusion caused by the many different distributions out there. Also, since Linux is driven by noncommercial interests, for the most part, it isn't targeted towards nontechnical users, isn't tied to any particular hardware platform and is sorely missing a services infrastructure. That's is a great pity, because Linux is a beautiful idea, except for the fact that the market or target audience just isn't there!
I want Linux to succeed among nontechnical users, but for that to happen, a number of changes will have to be made.
1) Standardization. The various distros need to converge and be forged into a very solid and highly polished unified distribution, a product if you will. This standardization will have to cover every aspect of the operating system.
2) Branding and marketing. Linux needs a common denominator, a product name that people will remember and desire. If there was a Google Linux, I'm sure it would get a huge following, for instance. But there isn't - just a bunch of quirky distros, I'm sorry to say.
In many ways, Apple is the opposite: it's a very tightly run ship, and ultimately, there is only one captain on the bridge: Steve Jobs. This would be a very bad thing if Steve was just a dictator, a greedy tyrant. But he isn't. He has a very positive side that eases the pain of the bad ones: he knows how to bring out the creative energy in people, and how to transform that energy into great products that people want. If there was no Steve Jobs, Apple would be just another mindless computer maker, another Dell or HP, and the Mac OS would be a buggy, slow, messy piece of junk just like Windows. But it isn't, because Apple knows how to meld all this into products that a) are technologically sound and b) succeed in the real world of commercial software and hardware.
What I have just written may offend many Linux people, and for that I am sorry. But some people perhaps need to change their thinking around a little. As much as I admire the Linux movement, Linux will never be a household item, or embraced by people who are more interested in using their computers in creative ways and less interested in tinkering with them, unless the changes I mentioned above happen. Does that make sense?
Somebody needs to step up to the mike and say: "This is the way forward. Let's create products for a mass market, products that people will care about and use in their everyday life!"
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
I was a heavy linux desktop user from 1996 to around 2006. I got my first Mac, a Powerbook G4, in 2003, but it was lacking in speed compared to the Linux systems I was using at the time. It was primarily a bang-around portable that I used when I wasn't around my linux desktops. Laptops in general were slow back then, though, so it wasn't really the Powerbook's fault.
Then I got my Macbook Pro in 2006. Suddenly my laptop was faster than any other machine I had, and I started using it as my primary machine. My linux box at home got relegated to server duty, and I found myself plugging my monitor into the Macbook Pro to do all my stuff. It was fast, stable, and could run all the UNIX applications I was used to with minimal hassle.
Since then I've acquired a Mac Pro and am completely on Mac for desktop. As much as I love Linux, you can't beat the stability and multimedia architecture that Mac OS X has to offer.
I mean, may Linux distros still have a hard time dealing with two applications trying to play sound at the same time. That's just sad and incredibly annoying.
Because I have NEVER HEARD of those programs.
"Office, Scrivener, Coda, the Adobe suite, Garage Band, iMovie, and iDVD."
Well, not true. By "Office" I presume you mean that useless piece of shite sold by Microsoft. Ok, I have even tried to USE that. That was the word processor that self-immolated when I played with the cursor keys too much (adjusting a table). Never could figure that one... Oh, it ate the document when it happened...
The rest I actually have to "Google":
Scrivener: An editor. With an integrated cork board. And a "vi mode". For fourty bucks. Of course, its from "Literature and Latte".
The Adobe Suite: um... "creative tools for quiche eaters". I went there, and indicated what I do... Here it is: Go to the Product Selector: I create images for publication (graphics, diagrams, I mostly use the troff set currently), also I generally use Tex so I choose Design/Print Publishing; I do simple Web pages (mostly information publication, static web) and a bit of UI design (what use is software WITHOUT a user interface, after all?). And, I prefer the UI to be "behind" either Apache with CGI or TCL/TK, because I hate the work. So I choose WEB/Web Developement and WEB/User interface Design. I don't really deal with Photography (other than tossing JPEG files into a movie or onto the web) so I have no picks in that category. I do author DVDs (simple shite, mostly I just use boilerplate and go), so I choose Video/DVD-authoring. And TADA, the fucking quiche eaters want two thousand five hundred dollars.
Garage Band - Have you EVER heard me "podcast". No? There is a reason.
iMovie, iDvd - Not what I do with computers. But, ok, the ONLY sensible thing here. Make family DVDs. But... why don't I just go and buy a direct-to-DVD camcorder, and give the mess to my 17 year old nephew?
So, with Garage Band, iMove and iDvd you have something that will interest my nephew. With a 2500 dollar price tag on the Adobe software, you have something that I will never buy, given that my use is simple, and WORKS NOW. With the recommendation of "Office" -- well that CAN'T be a recommendation, because I have actually used the product and it is shite (Outlook good, Word, Excel, PowerPoint - Shite).
This is going to convince me that an Apple OSX system is worth buying? Maybe you have convinced me to buy one for the nephew, though...
Although I *did* see a feature of the OSX that I liked -- the transparent terminal...
Come on, flame away! I am utterly sure that the Mac Fanbois can't hold back...
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I think it's rather the opposite: the Mac is a good stepping stone on the way to Linux: when people are tired of getting nickled and dimed and DRM'ed by Apple and add-on products, when they're tired of the limitations of the Mac, they can move up to Linux.
I will never buy an Apple computer (again). The two main reasons I give for this are 1). There support staff is just plain rude and often insulting 2). Their prices are inflated. The first comment is a personal opinion so I will not dive into. This second, however, is not. Apple's products may be worth their price to some (but they are not to me). To me a computer is a tool, not a show piece. Why invest in Apple, when I can pick up a Dell with an Intel Core 2 Duo, 2gigs and a 750gig disk for about $699 or a Mac mini for about the same cost (1 gig and 120gig). It isn't much better on the notebook scene either.
For me, if it comes between a Vista computer or a Mac, I would easily get the Windows computer. From here I have the choice of either installing Linux (or with Dell actually getting it preinstalled) or running a compatibility layer on the computer with Cygwin (or Unix like tools with SUA or Powershell). I would also run a VM (with the cost I saved I could get 8gigs of memory and a 2nd disk).
Somehow your post reminded me of the difficulties with determining Ron Paul's popularity ;)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I'm a big Linux and BSD fan for a long time. OSX was just like Windows to me. Something not fun, something closed-source, something commercial, etc. Hacking the kernel and userland tools was the thing I was having a lot of fun with.
But when the first Mac Mini was released, I bought one. Why? Just to try it, because it was a nice-looking small device, because it wasn't very expensive, and because I could install OpenBSD on it and use it as a replacement for my Soekris Net4801. It was never bought in order to replace my PC.
The PC was a brand new AMD64, it had very fast disks, plenty of memory... The PC hardware was way more powerful than the Mac Mini.
Anyway, I started to play a bit with OSX. And more. And more. OSX is very simple to use. It just works. That Mac Mini was a revolution, as if I rediscovered computers. I realized that I was previously spending more time in installing, upgrading, googling, hacking, etc. software than using that software. For the first time, I used pre-build software, pieces of puzzle that were ready and designed to work together... I felt no more interest in understanding how all that software works because that was no more needed in order to use it. I discovered a new pleasure with using a computer.
And while the PC hardware was way more powerful than the G4 Mac Mini, the Mac Mini became my main computer. And the PC became a test server / build machine / Windows machine (for some devices than unfortunately require Windows, for pro audio software and in order to test web sites with Internet Exploder).
I recently upgraded the Mac Mini to an Alu iMac. The PC ditched. Why? That alu Imac is just the perfect computer I've ever dreamt of. With VMWare Fusion, it perfectly runs Linux, *BSD, XP and Vista, i386 and amd64 versions, in parallel with OSX. That's a perfect developpment environment.
It was also a revolution for my daughter and my girlfriend. They used the PC before. They played with tons of KDE and Gnome software. They had fun, but no more than that. Since the switch to the Mac Mini, even with no additionnal software (only iLife and some freeware games) they had *real* fun. I recently had them try Ubuntu Gutsy, and they hated it, they said it was a giant step back. Although I use it at work, I share their feelings. Using Gutsy (not installing it, using it for real) without Google is difficult. Using OSX out of the box, without any help from the internet is possible. You might think it doesn't matter, but yes, it does. It means that the later is a desktop operating system.
For a server, I don't see the point in OSX, though.
{{.sig}}
I first started using Linux in about '93. It was great and I used it for many great things since. Around '98 I trashed my Windoze partition as nearly everything I wanted to do I could do using Linux... some things with a fair bit of pain, like WordPerfect pulling the plug on the Linux version. The first few compiles of Star Office/Open Office were brutal (it has been much better recently). OK, so I resigned myself to a laptop with Windows as a second machine. Windows was a piece of crap, but it had a working word processor and spreadsheet.
I suppose if I summarize what I find annoying about Linux, is that I was finding a lot of churn -- apps that came with a distro ended up changing as one on project got ahead of another. The main Linux distro only supporting their releases for 12 months, forcing you onto the upgrade treadmill if you wanted that bug fix. One of the reasons I loved Linux is that I was able to get ten years out of my hardware investment. But, I am finding more recently that much of the stuff I want to do with Linux requires fairly new hardware.
My brand new IBM ThinkPad with NT in 2000 had been only getting an hour on a battery -- the used iBook I picked up that year got six hours! I actually found a solution that didn't get in the way of getting my work done. And later with WiFi installed, I was still doing better than five hours. A couple of years later ThinkPad came out with a new version that was supposed to have WiFi built in. It never did work properly, and the user interface seemed sooo bad after having used the Mac. I only had that TP for about six weeks and I turned it back in -- my next lap top was a PowerBook.
With OS X, bash, and the X server, I could do many of the things that I had done on Linux... in fact I had it set up so that I used the PB as an X workstation initially. Then came the crack down on security where the next release of Linux disabled that feature by default. I dug out vi and changed the configuration so that that the PB was still my X workstation for while. But, by the time the upgrade over-wrote the config file on Linux and disabled the feature on me again, I'd decided to change the way I do things. I was getting accustomed to the OS X UI and it was slowly eroding my interest in jumping through hoops to get an inferior UI.
I kept hearing how this release is going to be it, the one where Linux is going become big on the desktop. Ok, I thought as little as a year ago, I will configure IPtables firewall on Linux using the new GUI. Splat... as I hit wall after wall. In the end I dove into vi to set the configuration I needed. And it worked great, until a few weeks later I ended up using the firewall UI to tweak a minor parameter unrelated to what I had used vi to add, but the UI chose to delete my vi added parameter presumably because it couldn't understand it. This isn't the only experience that sucked... I could go on. Over the years I'd gotten a number of people to switch away from Windows onto Linux. But invariably, these people switched to a Mac within a couple of years. The getting of a GUI for Linux has been over a decade now, and we still haven't arrived there folks. Even as Linux coders poke fun at the expression paradigm shift, it is exactly what is happening.
Why is Mac OS X gaining a lot of mindshare these days?
1, the user interface is designed around how people think (moreso than Windows or Linux).
2, the tools are generally provided for advanced users to get what they need, and the UI responds gracefully and doesn't usually break in such a circumstance.
3, the whole hardware and software integration, plus the reasonably intuitive UI, results in a predictable environment conducive to getting work done.
4, there are a fair number of really good, really powerful, really easy to use apps for OS X.
5, OS X is "UNIX", and that is what some of us really liked about Linux.
The guys working on Linux are doing a great job. Some of it is trying to make Linux more like Windows -- that
Isn't it obvious? People choose Apple over Linux because they don't want to spend their evenings recompiling their kernal or whatever and memorizing arcane commands like: /dev/device /cdrom
mount-r -t iso9660
chmod a+x my_file
ls -l my_file
rpm -qpl my_new_file.rpm
That might look like a barrel of all night fun for some of you, but it's PITA goobly-gook to the majority of humankind.
I first used Linux back in 1994 while working in a Windows world to pay the bills. I have since worked in IT supporting both Windows, Linux, and Sun boxes. I was total geek and at home had all varieties of the same boxes and spent a lot of time tweaking, compiling, working on constant compatibly issues. I had used Mac and supported Mac's off and on since 1986. So I've had a long history with all these platforms and a couple others.
I've since grown tired of being a geek at home and doing recording and using a computer like are regular user at home. I no long have Linux boxes, Linux is a pain in the ass to run. Constant updates, that create incompatibilities, that create more incompatibilities, lack of drivers, applications that are okay if you don't work in real business world, and IMO poor non-intuitive user interfaces. I like Linux on servers, but on desktop it never made the grade with me. If I only had old hardware or slim budget then the hassles of Linux would be worth the trade off, hence why Linux is mainly popular outside the U.S.
I still had my old Windows 2000 desktop doing fine I avoided XP, but decided to get back into Mac's when OS X came out. Long story short Apple did what people have been trying to do since Unix came out make a easy to use GUI and support tools for desktop Unix. I now have Mac's only at home and a Window and linux laptops for work. Now at home my computer is a tool to get things done and something I have work on so I can get some work done. OS X has a great interface and lots of utilities to handle all the maintenance tasks. Sure sometimes I want to do something and can't because OS X won't let me, but that isn't too often. I have to remind myself that is the cost of ease of use and being able to get work done. All the application I need for work have Mac versions. For recording Mac just work 98% of the time, no driver issues or config hassles. Even when I plug in one of my Window external drive or connect to a Window network all the file sharing just works no config issues. Mac's schedule maintenance scripts and update checks so I don't need to think about that in general. The journaled file system is a nice safety net and recently save me after a power outage.
So for those that want to use their brain cells for creative tasks and not for constant tweaking to keep their computer happy Apple Mac's and OS X are perfect. If on a tight budget or limited hardware then use Linux.
As for Window I never been an MS basher because of MS and Windows I have been employed for a long time, BUT... MS needs to grow a pair, rewrite Windows from the ground up and not worry about backwards compatibility. That backward compatibility has caused too many problems. Being I go way back with Apple I have seen them multiple time make major OS changes. They give developer years of warning that things are going to be breaking start prepping to port. Then they give users a heads up things are going to change you can choose stick with what you got or be prepared some old app's aren't going to work. Linux has gone thru the same but being Linux users are so used to have the cycle of update code, recompile, workout issues, repeat they don't even notice major kernal changes much. So MS bite the bullet rewrite Windows from scratch and life will be good for Window's users.
It certainly makes sense that MacOS is a serious competitor for desktop users that have legacy/pop needs, and probably makes quite a bit of sense for other niches too. It'll never make a much sense for the niches that needs trustworthiness, hardware upgradability, etc. So, on the surface, there's no reason to suspect that MacOS even could kill Linux on the desktop. There are parts of Linux's desktop market that MacOS doesn't have the capability to even address.
And the lack of observed evidence, goes with that lack of suspicion. The article doesn't show any evidence that Linux is going away. Even using their own figures-of-unknown-origin, Linux's share on the desktop is increasing.
What's going on here? How could anyone look at the figures (TFA's own figures!) or think about how the platforms are used and who needs them and why, and think Linux is getting killed? I smell a troll.
The best part:
Riiight. Apple's media player apps' compliance with DRM is an end-user need. Good one."Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
"Twice nothing is still nothing."
I'm as big of a linux fan as the next guy but seriously does he think that most people considered linux as the alternative to windows in the early '00's? Up until maybe 2-3 years ago with the emergence and popularity of the *buntu distro(s) you either ran Windows or you ran the Apple flavor. Linux was a distant third at best. I dunno maybe it's just me.
Linux enjoyed a higher percentage difference of the market share percentage. I.e., Linux more than doubled their share, while Apple did not.
Linux usage is on the rise... but how can you draw any statistics from point-something percent. That's not even a statistic, it's a footnote.
Looks what's happening here... iPhone... Playstation... Nintendo Wii... THESE are going to kill the desktop. Linux will fall of the list, just like SunOS and BSD did.
programming myself into obsolescence
A few reasons why these numbers do not tell me Apple is "killing" Linux on the desktop:
1. Apple's market share did not quite double. Linux did.
2. Apple and Microsoft products come pre-installed. Linux seldom does.
3. Free-as-in-beer Linux wasn't really fit for consumers until Ubuntu Edgy Eft, and it has improved a lot since then, especially in becoming laptop-friendly. Apple had a head start of several years eroding Windows market share.
That second point is particularly important because aftermarket add-ons seldom have the penetration rate OEM products have. It is a much higher barrier to require installation.
Another important point is that, despite Apple and Linux share growing about as fast as it can, Windows still has 90%+ share in the Internet user population. No other product has yet reached a point where its growth means a sharp decline in Windows share, because the base they are growing from is so small.
Microsoft has at least two years before Apple can take significant share away form Microsoft, and, by then, Linux will not even be where Apple is now, even if it grows as fast as possible. But if Microsoft falls below 80% on an accelerating trend of share erosion, with more than one copmetitor taking share away from then that will be a big crisis for them, even though they still numerically "dominate" the market. Reversing a trend like that is very hard.
I wrote parts of this stuff
http://luiscosio.com/how-to-adobe-photoshop-cs2-on-ubuntu-10-steps/
After a few minutes of recursively going back to the source, I found this on the Net Applications web site:
So now who can tell us succinctly and accurately what Net Apps's network consists of? Which sites are measured and which are not. What do they count, cookies, urls, gets? (It's probably proprietary information.) Is this any kind of reasonable sample? I would think that their customers constitute a horribly biased sample; just 'cause we don't know how it's biased is no comfort.
Maybe my vote's not being not being heard -- or maybe my vote is outrageously exaggerated. Net Apps brags about six news sites, and I do visit one occasionally. How is that counted?
As for me, I recently bought a Mac mini for my home desktop. It's small, it's quiet and when I update the system, nothing bad happens. It replaced an Ubuntu laptop with hardware problems. Once in a while, it's frustrating when you want to do something that Apple decided you don't really need to do. For serious work, everything I use is Linux -- which over the years kicked the hell out of Solaris in my line of work.
As for others, I'm amazed at the proliferation of Macbooks among my colleagues. Every month someone else turns up with one. Will this kill Linux on the Desktop? It'd be a real threat if Linux wasn't a server OS. But we'll have to see what dumb things Apple does over the next few years. If it dumbs down the system too much, lusting after Windows users, Apple might lose the very thing that makes Macs attractive to Linux users. In my case, Mac's X11 is just good enough for me to make use of.
On the other hand, when I think of Ubuntu, I think of little annoying things like not being able to choose your packages on install -- well, you have choice, take everything, or take only the basics. When I think of Fedora, and how you're out of date, and often out of luck every year, I get really annoyed.
Srry, I wrote the subject line before I RTFA'ed. Oh them Apple lovers (sick if you think about it, and they must all have tiny penises). No, these numbers are based on one company - Net Applications, likely from their "hitlinks" product.
I went to a hitlinks site the other month to see if my punk band, "Domains May Disappear" was available. When I went back to buy it, somebody had taken it from me. I think this hitlinks stuff must have gotten hacked by Mac using squatters.
A while ago I bought a macBook for my teacher. I recommended him to get an external DVD writer (LaCie). I was surprised when I found out that apple's DVD writing software did not allow me to write to the external DVD writer. I had a big argument with the guy at the genius bar about why is apple crippling its own software since BSD does not care if the drive is external or internal. I was required shell out more money and buy a third party product to accomplish that. I ended up putting linux on it and had no problem using k3b.
Apple made me dump their OS, and I am happy, sine I dont use Word (biggest POS written in history of software) or any of the crap you mentioned!!
When it comes to vendor lock, apple make microsoft look like charity workers
After being somewhat forced to use my brothers laptop over the recent weeks, which has some version of Mac OS X installed on it, I can only say that I am very, very happy not to have to use that as a Desktop at home.
It all made me blush fiercefully, made me feel like a computer inadept newbie who could only struggle their way through anything new they have to learn.
While I did like is the clean look of a Mac OS Xs Desktop. The overall appeal. However, the feel just simply can not make up for design choices (like the menu bar at the top of the screen) that kept me guessing every step of the way. Basics - like which menu to use for what, how to really open certain applications, and how to close or minimize and even maximize them properly for starters.
Maybe - if I had to spend a whole year with this, I could learn to accept it over time.
But I'm much more inclined to ditch it in favour of the XFCE4 Desktop on Linux I'm normally using, instead.
Mind you, this is personal taste.
Leopard cub
I couldn't read all 500 replies, but I thought I would say something...
Linux has little nuggets like Crossover Office ($40). I could go on and on...but what I hear is that more and more companies are dedicating resources to making their products work with Linux, why? Because Linux is growing in the market FASTER than any other option.
It will be another year and most everything you want on Windows will be available (and more stable, more reliable, faster, etc) on Linux.
Besides, how hard would it be to port Microsoft Office to Linux when Microsoft Office for the Mac is essentially Microsoft Office for BSD?
But who would want to pay a couple hundred for Microsoft products when Open Office is available and does just about everything Microsquat's Crapware can do...?
Even if you have to have a more fully featured office product, Star Office is available for $70...not $170...
--E--
Linux and Mac are polar opposites. How can Mac be eating into Linux's market share? The "problem", if Linux has one, is that it is too geeky. That's why everyone on /. loves it. News flash: only 0.29% to 0.63% of computer users read /. Linux desktop appliances could take off, if they ran Office pre-installed and IE 7 finally breaks HTML coders from designing for IE only.
... still leave you with the problem that the built-in pointer on a laptop is 1) single button and 2) trackpad. I much prefer a Thinkpad with a pointing stick and three buttons. Similarly, the keyboard layout (pageup/pagedown keys, placement of capslock, ctrl, and alt keys, arrow keys, home/end). Sure, if I had a Mac Mini and wanted to plug in my own peripherals, it'd make a decent Linux box. But MacBook / MBP? No, sorry. Yes, used one for six months, and bought an iMac for the folks and an MB for my wife. I'll play with 'em, but they're not really usable. For this hard-boiled Debian GNU/Linux geek.
- Office: OpenOffice.org was preinstalled on my Ubuntu, you could also go with AbiWord (which is in fact a full suite of software, AbiWord is just the word processor)
- Adobe: GIMP(shop) and Inkscape; evince and gnash (which IMHO does need some work, but what doesn't these days; maybe it's just me)
- iMove: Kino and Pitivi Video Editor
- Coda: Quanta Plus and Screem HTML/XML Editor
- GarageBand:Audacity
- Scrivener: No idea what that is, had to look it up on WP. "for writers." Seems that it can be replaced with OpenOffice.org Writer and a good folder hierarchy (nautilus), assuming the average user is a writer or needs that level of complexity. Or one could use "jotter" and "sticky note" programs like Gjots2 Jotter, which has hierarchal organization.
- iDVD:GnomeBaker and k3b (Softpedia loves k3b!)
There are plenty more programs for each purpose, these are just popular/installed on my machine. Had to do a bit of poking around on Wikipedia to find out what your programs do.$ make available
Computers like the Asus EEE are signs of the future. When computer hardware is around $200, where is the profit in that for Apple? It's nice and dandy if you live in a rich country and can afford to buy a Mac, but 90% of the global hardware market still belongs to commodity PCs. Since Vista has priced itself out of the commodity PC market, what's left? Linux and the *BSDs.
Problem is, I'm a GNU/Linux user, not a BSD/Unix dude. Fink has a half-assed (or 1/6th-assed, based on package selection) Debian-ish selection, but really falls flat (no slight meant to the folks putting in good work on it, they just can't compete with 1000+ Debian developers). Mac Ports / BSD Ports is more complete, but tends to have a distinctly BSD flavor. What I found was that what I really, really wanted was a Debian GNU/Linux userland and graphical desktop. Not half-cocked Debian + bits of BSD on top of Aqua / OSX. Gave it the good go (9 months) on an MBP.
So I dumped Mac and picked up my Thinkpad running Debian testing/unstable. Much happiness.
Its easy to compare market values for Microsoft and Apple. Since they
both are sold on the market. Linux based software isn't all commercial,
and being Ubuntu has the ability to run Office suite, with the only limitation
being having the MS Office license agreement. How does one honestly compare
market values???? I run multiple partitions on my Windows machines so I
have the ability to run anything I want. 98% of the time I use the Linux
base distros - with the ability to run the MS products also. I use the wording
ability to run. But with the advent of OO.org I have no limitations.
I have no expense limitations also. And beside I never access the internet with
my windows partitions, mainly for security reasons. Secondly Linux base distros
operate so much more effectively and faster on internet and/or network connections.
Apple? Now that the mac is a dual core pentium and OSX is unix based. Why not
it works and a lot of open source is available for this nice OS too. And
one can add partitions and install ubuntu with it also, or better yet
us Vmware Fusion, and run anything you want. Cost factor. Open Source Linux
Distros - Run better - Cost less in the long run.
Until We Meet Again.
Nisqually Pauli
The referenced stats for this article lack two key items: an "other" classification, and and explanation of how OS is being identified. A definition of the sample would also be useful, as browser/platform distribution can vary quite strongly across websites.
A competing set of web client statistics shows Linux at 1.77% of all clients, and (if you do the math) 2.16% "other" or unclassified clients. Missing, if you've any experience running yoru own website, are the various crawler and spider types which can account for a significant volume of traffic.
Regardless, it would appear that actual Linux web client share is somewhere in the 1% - 4% range. Given 1.26 billion people on the Internet, I'd estimate 12.6 - 50.4 million Linux users. More or less (or most or cat or dog....).
Karsten M. Self
Bonjour for services hasn't taken off in a big way on Linux (or Windows outside of Adobe Products/iTunes for that matter). However, most Linux distros now ship with Avahi which is fairly mature but there are comparatively few programs that can use it (its main use currently seems to be for autoip configuration). Some distros also firewall it off by default (but Kubuntu isn't in that list).
I've noticed music programs (Rhythmbox, Amarok) often support it but they are trying to interoperate with iTunes which is another issue again.
By the way I think someone said they might work on a Kopete bonjour plugin a few weeks ago.
I'm also a little sad that OSX has dropped default support for printers annouced over CUPS broadcast but thems the breaks. If you know what you're doing it's possible to renable it (and set your Macs to broadcast too but that's another story).
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy and nothing more...
Don't you the 12 habits of truly effective pirates? (SchlockMercenary.com)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
of the 13 million or so XBox 360 owners that are on the internet.
It has Sony listed which is obviously referencing the PS2 and PS3 and the iPhone but no 360.
You missed the tools and the point. If you need to install the major linux aplications and auto compile apps and dependencies try http://www.macports.org/. The mac is really versatile. The point is that You have a BSD environment with a powerful user interface and a good software base for multimedia. Eventually you can run Windows applications if you really can't avoid it. I don't know about all the cocoa stuff but it also looks nice. If you have trouble with the configuration of your system stop complaining and use the tools available on the net.
Linux has SoftMaker Office.
From Piratebay you can find a patched version of Leopard as a VMWare virtual machine. Guess what? The sound works. Also does the networking.
Killing Linux on the desktop? There was never nothing to kill, Linux has never been alive on the desktop.
TFA is very shallow and offers nothing new but a few numbers and a nonsense bash against linux. For starters according to their data, linux adoption has more than doubled, not diminished as the title suggests. Anyway, why is most people thinking in black and white? The future is not Win or Mac or Linux. It's not like it's Linux' aim to dominate the desktop market, kicking windows and mac to the curb, but to provide free, feasible alternatives. At most we should aim to a healthy balance between some free and some proprietary options so the market gets truly competitive and no one will get their way with weaselly behavior. The way I see it no OS should be so dominant as to distort markets and damage the users to the benefit of some entity, not even Linux or some sort of FOSS.
Greetings, programs!
i call shenanigans. writing software under os x is vastly less complicated than writing software under windows or any linux deployment i've tried (fedora, ubuntu, and yellow dog, among others). leopard was an especially noticeable upgrade in this regard: "instruments" (like "dtrace", but it doesn't suck), xcode (which is basically just a nice frontend for gcc), and interface builder have all seen *huge* improvements. they're all free (as in beer), too: they actually come with the OS. apple's the only company i've seen making an honest attempt to make developing software easier and more approachable for everyone- from the hardcore code monkeys to people who are curious and just want to get their feet wet. visual studio's okay, but it's way too expensive and the learning curve is ridiculous; software is supposed to make your life *easier*, and apple's dev. software is a great example of a good way to layer an interface so it's not intimidating, yet it still permits advanced users to do exactly what they want.
and, of course, if all this fancy GUI stuff makes your blood boil- well, there's always a terminal, and good ol' gcc...
Hard to believe we once expected the same commercial software on Windows to one day run natively on Linux. Nowadays it isn't even a thought except for the flash player and the web browser.
IDC sells reports with comments like the following for thousands of dollars:
"Despite the dominance of the Windows platform, Linux adoption continues to grow in the region in both the COE and server operating environment (SOE) spaces," says Antony Lee, market analyst, Software Research, IDC Asia/Pacific.
"On the desktop side, IDC sees Linux share more than doubling, from 3% today to 6% in 2007, while Windows loses a bit of ground."
So, people who scientifically design and implement surveys reported that GNU/Linux was the size of Mac on the desktop a few years ago and it is still growing rapidly.
see this excerpt. That was from 2005. If the share was 3% then and growing rapidly, how can the NetApps share of less than 1% possibly be true unless NetApps' universe is unrepresentative? That was before Dell and ASUS jumped in.
So. There are no signs of GNU/Linux on the desktop slowing down any time soon and Chinese Linux Market
We know there are millions of GNU/Linux desktops there, because Sun made a deal to supply millions of them. see Sun story (2003)
Turbolinux is also in China in a big way. "According to the International Data Corp. (IDC), Turbolinux's market share in servers in China was 62 percent in 2004. On the desktop, it holds a 25 percent share. "
see http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170700943 (2005)
GNU/Linux is huge in China, a country several times the population of the USA with a huge growth in GDP. Hundreds of millions there will be first time computer buyers within a few years and they are not locked-in to M$
Numbers are not too much different in the BRIC (Brazil Russia India and China). There, governments are activly promoting GNU/Linux by using it themselves, putting it into schools or insisting on open file formats.
"Sun executives were meeting with Brazilian government executives and were told in no uncertain terms that the government would not consider any technology that wasn't open source. " see www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3697166
So Brazil was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused Sun to open Java.
BRIC is 2.65 thousand million people. see http://www.xminc.com/mt/archives/000177.html Many are poor but rapidly industrializing and hungry for IT. Are they going to want a bloated OS or a lean, mean, computing machine? Do not be misled by NetApps. Unless their clients are audited and deemed to be representative of the world somehow, they must be considered way off base.
China is huge. If you look at http://google.com/trends and enter linux,windows you will see that other OS has a steady lead over time with Google. Now, zero in on China. Interesting, eh? Now, zero in on Beijing. Whoops! Where did the lead go? Beijing is a huge city and the seat of government. Stories about that other OS taking over there are overstated, even at $3 a licence.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Apple and Windows are sold in a very measureable and exact way, Linux is not. Windows numbers get inflated, e.g I have been trying to buy a laptop and over the past 2 days surfing, zilch but Windows Vista or they don't sell you one. OK, so you buy 6 Macs or 6 laptops and the numbers shipped and sold can be accurately determined as 6 in each case. You buy one copy of Linux if you are so inclined and you install it on thousands of PC's == Total of precisely 1 if you are counting. I go surfing with Linux, behind a Linux firewall and my IP address is the same whichever PC I use, the platform/browser is the same, so I'm counted as having one Linux PC according to statistics. I have 7 PC's with Linux and on 2 I have a number of Linux virtual machines as well. I am not alone either, vast numbers of people download and run Linux on multiple PC's and not one copy is sold to any of us.
of course this is purely my opinion, but if you disagree, of course, you are wrong
Mac OS X vs Linux user interface isn't even a fair fight. seriously. KDE and Gnome are sad kludges in comparison
BSD vs Linux underpinnings. a closer comparison perhaps, but still not even close. BSD wins in a landslide.
Linux kids, feel free to be wrong about this.
Windows users, you embarrass yourselves with this choice. sheep get fleeced
Linux v MacOS:
System P1 P2 DeltaP
MacOS 4.21 7.31 73.63%
Linux 0.29 0.63 117.24%
Linux grew 59% faster relative to starting base
This is an old error we stats profs teach our classes about--don't look at volume growth only, we teach, look at growth relative to the size of the organism when the growth began. Sure, an apple tree grows more leaves than a tomato plant over a summer; but relative to how big the tomato was in May, its growth is much more impressive.
Someone can take those percentage growth numbers, "extrapolate" them for several more periods of time, and come up with when Linux will catch Mac. The most likely interference with extrapolation like growth i can see is--plain BSD [not transformed into MacOS] may grow even faster.
Sorry for not posting in my name--i haven't thought of creating an account before and for now i'll just make this quantitative observation. Kind of sad i didn't notice someone had already done it, because it's the kind of thinking we ATK types should apply to such "news"
1)- the imac has a built-in video camera (arguably useless to you, but we're comparing price here)
...maybe you should spend less time complaining about simple economics, and more time reading spec sheets.
2)- the imac has no less than three USB buses (one high-speed for the camera, two other buses for random peripherals)
3)- the imac has a firewire 800 bus
4)- the imac natively supports 802.11n
5)- the imac also supports optical audio in and out
when you take into account the fact that apple hardware is of a significantly higher build quality (there's a reason they consistently rank first in third-party product testing- just check consumer reports), the mac is looking like more and more of a better buy.
Until I can paste with a built-in physically distinct* middle mouse button on a MacBook, I'll stick with a generic laptop and Linux, thanks!
.
* That means a button that is not part of some other button or part of the trackpad, etc. An actual, for-the-purpose, and separate-from-other-objects (in the usual fashion) middle mouse button.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I cannot believe you had the... what's the brit word for it... bollocks? whatever, to compare Packard Bell to Apple for hardware.
You've just compared a Dodge Neon (with a turbo stuffed in it!!11!1) to a Corvette. Yeah some of the numbers are the same, but you've still got a rolling turd.
Seriously, spec out a Dell XPS with the same stuff that's in the Apple and you have a real comparison... and very similar price.
And also, you can't compare a 22" screen to a 24", as the price jump between those two sizes is significant (assuming you choose reasonable quality).
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Every 3 months or so my wife's laptop would start failing in some obscure, inscrutable way that could only be fixed by reinstalling Windows. (Maybe there were other ways, I dunno; the problems seemed mostly to be registry corruption but also occasional lost files.) Reinstallation took upwards of 14 hours, almost all of which was reinstalling the numerous applications. This was, as you might expect, a pain in the ass.
I finally got sick of it. Apple had released OS X not so long ago and it was UNIX through and through. I figured that with UNIX underneath it would probably not break as often as Windows. So I bought her a Ti Powerbook. I knew she'd have some issues with the conversion, so I got her the prettiest laptop they sold, figuring that fashion could make up for at least some of that.
There were conversion pains. Mostly we had to find software to do the things she needed to do; some freeware, some paid software. It took months for certain software, notably the Palm Desktop, to be ported to OS X. OS X 10.1 had this annoying habit of forgetting your printer configuration. But she was up and running in a few days and I probably spent about an hour on support issues in the four years she had the laptop. (It's still being used daily by a relative.) To call that a major improvement over Windows would be an understatement.
Meanwhile my Linux laptop was getting pretty old in the tooth, and I really liked hers. It was UNIX, but there was a lot more polished software available for it, and sound and video and wireless all worked without being all fiddly. So about six months later I bought myself a 12" Powerbook.
That was the best laptop I have ever owned. It was durable, compact, had lots of good software, and just kept running for five solid years. (It's still being used daily by a different relative.) I upgraded it to a MacBook purely because it was too slow to run various photography-related software packages I use.
What's more, when we got my wife's new laptop -- the last of the G4 Powerbooks it turned out -- I got to try out Apple's migration facility. It's so slick it's scary. Plug firewire into both laptops, put the old one in "target" mode (where it pretends it's a firewire disk), and let it chunk along for about a half hour. When it's done you have your old desktop, including drivers and software and settings and data, on a newer faster machine. The experience is so good it made me very, very angry at Microsoft. Every new box I get from Microsoft requires another of those all-day installation and data copy fests.
I still use Linux every day, both at work and at home. But not on the desktop. It's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's more work than it's worth when there are more polished desktops available -- and I lose nothing by running MacOS X; all the same tools available on Linux are there, on top of the polished GUI stuff.
But what surprised me more than anything else when I got my first Mac laptop was that I stopped using the uber-fast Windows desktop system entirely. The Mac worked better for just about everything, even though it was a fraction of the speed. The silly thing ended up looking like an octopus with all the USB and FireWire stuff hanging off of it. Windows still does some things better than the Mac (notably Windows software development, of course). Most of our PC games run only on Windows. But for most of the day-to-day stuff the Windows PC plays second fiddle.
Linux on the desktop was, until a few weeks ago, a distant memory. Linux on the server, though ... well that's a different story. It hosts my website and my e-mail and databases and more. It's the embedded software in my DVRs and NAS systems and even my new e-book. I have more Linux-based systems in my house than Windows and Macs combined.
And that new Linux desktop? It's an XO
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Windows has all the apps mentioned, still Apple/OSX is really appealing to me because it has a UNIX shell, it has all the Unix stuff you want (darwin ports, and many by default), and of course it runs X by default.
:). But that points a little farther from the original topic.
And then again, it can run windows too, without the need of Vmware and all the "windowed" thing it needs. Parallels kicks butt, even though that I do not need it as I run my win apps on win, Linux apps on my Linux, and mac stuff on my OSX laptop.
And while I wonder why I would still get "usb 3-2.2: can't set config #1, error -32" on random occasion from my belowed linux kernel - OSX works with the hardware provided, and that is nothing like Vista horror, or why-doesn't-my-tunercard-have-sound and hybernate-sucks-with-nvidia minor looking huge linux problems.
Also the hardware is really sexy. Almost all the hardware. I hated the switch of ipods to black plastic from the mini (nicest ipod ever) and now with the new keyboard I am enjoying the cold metallic feel again
But then again, even though I understand people switching to apple, I still have a Linux desktop machine with debian, kde and prefer to do most of my console work from there. It is just the laptop I prefer working all the time; without finding out what went wrong during the last hybernation, that provides me with a black screen with green and magenta blocks and an unreadable error message with distorted font. That just looks like crap in front of clients. It is nicer to pull a macbook out, open it and have everything on it in working order after 5 seconds, then wait until their windows machines boot in (2-3 minutes).
How can you ever be sure that the underlying software platform is correct when trying to prove scientific and mathematical concepts?
In science and math openness isn't preferred over proprietary for any ethical reason, it's because it's absolutely fundamental when using computers to aid proofs that you are able to exam the underlying platform to the absolute core.
It's simply not good enough for a rocket to fail mid-air because of a difference in handling some math function on one OS compared to another and then bringing out the excuse "Well sorry, my OS was proprietary so I just assumed it worked right". You have to be able to prove right back to the absolute fundamentals that something is correct.
It may be the case that some scientists may prefer using Macs for checking their e-mail and so forth, but open source software is never going to lose it's place for actually "doing" science and math because it is the very openness itself that is the key factor in choosing an OS for such a task - not UI/application/company preference or any such thing. As a result any serious scientist is still going to have at least one Linux/BSD box even if they have a Mac one as well.
So Linux grew 117.2% and Apple only grew 73.6%. and this is good for apple... sure ridiculous way to look at, but from what I can tell so is the article.
It's all statistics, and personally I'm not sure that comparing proportional increases in market share is very relevant if they were very different to start off with. Keep in mind that in absolute user number terms, Macs still gained a lot more users than Linux.
If each OS gained the same absolute number of users every year then Macs would be getting a larger number every year and Linux will always be trailing, and trailing by increasing amounts after each iteration. If the number of people who take up a new system/OS is directly proportional to the number of people already using it then yeah, it is a better result for Linux.
I'd be really surprised if that was the case. Chances are something else that's unrelated will happen well before the relative usage of each system is even significantly different, and huge numbers of people to migrate to either one or the other.
Anyway, I think the whole OS race thing is a bit pointless -- I don't care if Linux is popular or if Macs are popular, as long as my OS of choice works well for me and doesn't stop me from doing what I want to do. What matters more than anything is that there's diversity of OSs available, which all implement similar APIs and standards. This would prevent people from getting locked into any one particular OS, and it'd make it much easier for developers to write portable software.
Ever since I got hooked into this industry (Don't remember now whether it was the Altair or IMSAI we built in high school.) there has always been this hubris. "Our product solves all your problems now*." and the punch line, "*real soon now."
...)
There was one of the original car analogies back in the 80's to represent the hubris, you remember the one about Cadillacs costing a dime and fitting in your pocket?
The truth is, the computer industry is just another part of the industrial revolution, another face of the development of the engine. But we, the engineers, still have no real hold on what a good OS or language is. Cocoa is getting close, the promise of Interface Builder not quite as cruelly broken in XCode as the promise of VB was broken in VS. But the promise is broken, because we still aren't willing to admit that software systems are just, well, systems -- tools, meant for use and not for worship.
Certain fringe teachers at BYU back in the '80s sold me on the idea of software tools. No company I've worked for has ever allowed me the time to build tools, partly because the OSses are designed to help the company that sells the OS (and maybe, until the capture is complete, 3rd parties) to sell you more tools.
Sure, Mac OS X is more open, and in a better way than MSWindowsXXX was more open than the old Mac. But I still can't use it to build my tools in a reasonably efficient manner.
(Dashboard? Kanbenshitekure.)
Everybody's selling a framework, but the framework costs tons of time to learn to use effectively. A tool I wrote in BASIC took about a hundred lines and was done in an afternoon. Sure, it didn't let me tweak the font and all, but I could build teaching materials with it and save myself time. Trying to reproduce that tool on the old Mac took me about 6 months, after about a year of trying to find books to give me an introduction I could figure out without dropping $3000 dollars on the dude ranch or whatever that's called.
Yeah, in retrospect, I suppose it would have been cheaper for me to have mortgaged my first child, borrowed the $3000, plus another $1000 for plane fare and just gone. But it shouldn't have to be that way. Mac OS X is still in the same spot. Likewise Java, and just about everything else available. When you find yourself wanting to go the next step to do your real work, you're dropping another chunk of gold to buy that next step. (And quite possibly mortgaging something that you really shouldn't mortgage to get the gold.)
M$'s junk? Well, sure, BASIC was a shallow learning curve, until you realized that you really did need a larger font for the younger students, and then you _still_ hit that wall where Micro$oft wants to $ell you their framework de jure.
Mac OS X is not as tightly focused on Apple's bottom line as M$WindowsXXX is focused on Steve Ballmers' bottom line, but it's still focused on a small group of existing enterprises, tamed and civilized areas.
But if computers aren't helping us to be pioneers, they aren't fulfilling their potential, and they aren't helping us improve the world.
That is what's missing from Mac OS X, and that is exactly why the thousands of divergent distros is all the more reason for using Linux and BSD wherever you can. Lot's more people to help cut through the jungle.
And if you think about how hard it is for the real pioneers to get a meaningful return on the time and money they invest, perhaps this whole argument about which gentlemen's agreement (license) you sign up with makes more sense, too.
I know, the wife (or the wife within if there is no literal wife) wants a picket fence in a secure neighborhood. But each of us faces our own jungles. The picket fence has always been an illusion. (So is the wife, but
I fear I am not making sense, so I'll stop here.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
In the meantime, Landon Fuller is doing an admirable, if duplicated, job of single-handledly porting Java 6 to OS X based on the efforts for BSD.
Java 6 was released more than 12 months ago for other platforms. "fake" and real Steve may dismiss Java as irrelevant but the truth is Apple have dropped the ball.
I develop Swing applications and it's frustrating that we can't use new features of Java 6 because we have to support OS X's legacy Java 5 implementation.
The majority market share is still Windows. While Apple lags with Java it's hurting Linux AND OS X. Much as Java-haters on this site would like it to disappear, Swing is still an option for cross OS deployments in the enterprise, offering a rich client alternative to web-browser environments. At times the option of supporting an application for Win32, Linux and OS X with native toolkits is not viable. More likely it's mandate Windows-only or use Java.
Some of the news on the site you linked refers to that.
The other is mentioned on the mklinux site, isn't it?
(I remember this, having used mklinux in a classroom environment back in '98. One of my coworkers was hassling me because it wasn't even intel-based linux.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I use linux on my laptops, but I have a CS degree so I can. To make my desktop span two monitors with different resolution I had to edit my xorg.conf file by hand. None of the gnome tools could do it. It took me a long time figure out how to get my microphone to pick up sound so I could use skype. My laptop wouldn't suspend until I hand edited /etc/defaults/acpi-whatever. I even had to change the prefs on the volume widget in the panel so that it would actually adjust the volume of my speakers. These are all things that work out of box on any other platform.
Apple isn't killing linux on the desktop. It has never even been close to being a viable desktop platform for non-tech users.
huh?
amateur _is_ the only way to experience radio.
It's kind of like, do you run your own server, or do you just surf the web?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Sound like your installation in b0rked.
Normally both of the 2 bigs desktop environment GNOME and KDE have a system of plugins that gives them support for other way to access data than the standard system :
KIO slaves in KDE and VFS plugins Gnome.
It's those modules that let you type "ftp://" "sftp;//" "smb://" "webdav://" or "nfs://" addresses or that let you freely browse a ZIP file as if it was a simple directory.
These modules are not only used by the file browser, but by all other application from the desktop environment :
For exemple under KDE (openSUSE running here), not only can I browse my files while away from home using SFTP, I can even remotely edit them because KATE (KDE's nice text editor) use them too.
And probably after a couple of versions, this modules will be available for any other software by using project like FUSE : currently FUSE can mount anything that can be accessed by a KIO slave. It's only a matter of time until someone write a nice plug and play automatic wrapper that dynamically mounts network KIO objects as needed to access them in non-KDE and non-GNOME application (for example OpenOffice.org's own webdav module isn't on par with the desktop's one).
But for now if you must copy locally your files before using them with application that are part of your desktop, you should check if those modules are correctly setup to be usable from within those software.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you mean apt-get, Macs do have it. Not only does Macs have Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get but it also has Redhat's RPMs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Very even handed tagging.
;)
Who says Slashdot is biased
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
because a single button mouse in a major pain in the neither regions to use in X.
So my two button trackball won't work for me? When I moved from Windows to OS X when I got my MacBook Pro, I though having only one button instead of two would make it a hard move. So I got a two button trackball. However I found I actually have 3 buttons now. The regular click, the command click, and the ctrl click when using the trackpad. I even got to where I can do both the command click and ctrl click with one hand.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Funny. If Chris had said the exact same thing here about why people choose Windows over Teh Lunix... he would get modded down into oblivion. But when he says it about Apple, he becomes a Slashdot darling, quoted right on the front page!
Apple, winner of "Slashdot's most favored monopolist" lifetime award! Woohoo!
So I suppose just because Apple is driven by (I'll give you this much) a genius with an ^opinion^ on the end-user's needs, Leopard is much superior to the OS that was actually ^written by^ the end user?
Is there a multi-button option for people with Apple laptops who want more than one button?
Yes there is. Macs can use two button mice with both buttons working. Macs actually have three buttons, indirectly. The regular click on the button is the left click, then you can also hold down the command key while clicking which brings up one context menu and holding down the ctrl key while clicking brings up a different context menu.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Actually if OS X actually had a reasonable X Windows it would be a good replacement for every desktop in the office I work at.
I don't know what you mean by "reasonable X Windows" but OS X does have X11
FalconShould there be a Law?
how different, powerful, and possibly competitive linux would be if it would have started as just one distribution and once it gained significant market share, then split into the different camps?
i mean right now ms is somewhat vulnerable and it's a shame to me that linux, especially ubuntu, is not in position to knock it down a little.
Is it 5:30 yet?
they're killing Linux on the laptop
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Middle click is quite important in X.
I don't know what a middle click, in X or elsewhere, is but my MacBook Pro has 3 clicks. A simple click is the left click, then by holding down the command key while clicking brings up one context menu and holding down the ctrl key while clicking brings up another context menu.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I bought five Mac mini machines with touch screens a few months ago mostly for front-end use with my Linux systems. While I love KDE and GNOME, there is nothing else out there can match the sheer ease and fluidity of the OS X user interface right now. In my little world the Macs do most of the front end work while the Linux boxes do most of the back-end stuff (as well as some front-end stuff both on-console and through TightVNC and JollyFastVNC). Also, OS X has X11 and Telnet/SSH on it and runs as an X-terminal and Telnet terminal for the Linux GUI apps. And there's Safari, FireFox, and Opera for web connectivity and Linux-based web apps from Apache and Tomcat. So it's an insanely great front end for my Linux boxes!
...and see if the logic still holds up:
The reasons? 'Soviet Russia has the Red Army, the US doesn't; Soviet Russia has the KGB, the US doesn't; Soviet Russia has easy to find lines for bread and easy to find secret police, the US doesn't; Soviet Russia is driven by someone who has some understanding of the needs of the collective, the US is not,' says Howard. 'Early in the decade it seemed that if you wanted a Chinese, Soviet Russia was it. Nowadays, Soviet Russia is undoubtedly the alternative and, with its resurgence and its AK-47 base, a very viable one.'"
hmmm... I think the writer is taking this a bit too far. Perhaps Apple's success will help Linux. Either way, the logic is definitely poor, as is demonstrated by a few quick changes of the nouns (using the same logic).
I keep hearing this, and I wonder how grounded in reality the comment is.
All I can contribute is that I was laptop shopping today, and out of curiosity I looked at PC vs Mac prices. As far as I can tell, Mac laptops are + $600 or so for the same spec laptop.
If you're willing to pay extra for the Apple experience or whatever, fine, that's cool. But let's not pretend Macs are at price parity when they're not. Nothing Apple sells is at price parity with comparable products from other vendors.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
Well, I'm just a stupid photography student, but...
I use linux as a file server at home. It's great for that, but being involved with any sort of multimedia on a professional level, I just can't use linux as my desktop. It's too much of a pain.
Ah, yes. I had edited my post, and accidentally deleted that part. For a standalone editor I generally use Crimson Editor. Although its feature list is nominally similar, it just isn't as nice to use.
I liked Crimson Editor but I preferred TextPad, on Windows. On Linux I liked KATE and on Macs I like TextEdit. However I haven't done any coding on Linux or OS X yet.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A few days earlier, a poster set another thread going concerning products that weren't actually tested by regular people, and so while these products made perfect sense to the engineers who designed them, they didn't make much sense to the average consumer. The Curse of Knowledge Bogs Down Information. I pointed out that EMACS is a good example of this. It sure as hell is a capable system, but — whew! — is it ever hell to learn! And how many people to this day still complain that they can't program the clock on their VCR?
How many of you out there could put one of your grandparents in front of a unix command line and expect them to get it? Unless they were/are a computer scientist/programmer, I'm willing to bet that 95% of you would say it'll never happen. In a previous argument a few years ago about this subject, a friend of mine was trying to show me that there were GUI desktops available for Linux that were as good as Apple's Mac OS X (Then Jaguar).
I asked him, "How do you get it started?"
He answered by going to the terminal, typing the command, and up came the desktop — which was not as esthetically pleasing as Mac OS X. Indeed, it was reminiscent of Windoze 95. (I use "Windoze" to avoid copyright infringement on Microsoft's name for their desktop)
I asked, "Could you teach your grandmother to do that?"
"She hardly knows how to turn a computer on! Much less start the desktop from the command line-" he retorted.
"-BINGO!" I interrupted.
end of argument
Things have improved for the Linux GUI desktop selection! But it still lags far behind. As my above-mentioned friend demonstrated and grudgingly acknowledged, I find that the GUI's available have been designed assuming that the operator knows enough of what's going on to finish tweaking it for their own system setup. The vast majority of people out there lack this technical skill. I found the rendering of fonts and graphic ornamentals to be less than visually pleasing. And before anyone argues that eye-candy is a waste and demonstrates a lack of technical understanding — a comment that clearly supports my position — I would ask how many out there have tweaked their terminals so different colors are used showing text in their terminals. How many of the elite use VIM with syntax enabled so when they edit code, everything is color coded? (For that matter, how many of you understand what I just said?)
In the thread I link to above, "Curse of Knowledge...", one fool commented how he didn't like Mac OS X because he didn't like how one accessed the command line through the Terminal program. Hello? Just how do you access the command line in a Linux GUI desktop environment? You open a terminal window.
Prior to Apple's OS X, the only way to get a GUI on any unix-system was to use X windows. I know of many people — and personally know four — who bought Macs after OS X came out, and then proceded to turn off Aqua because having a GUI was not for "real computer users." They installed X windows and used that as a GUI, then complained that Mac OS X was inferior because their X windows were crashing fairly often — but no more often than they did on their Linux boxes. I labeled them Luddites. Since then, all the four people I knew and many on the net who admitted to doing so, have gone back to using Mac OS X with its native GUI because it works so well. And remember: these people had the technical knowledge and skill to do this!
It was said that there was a lack of commercial software for Linux and that was the reason why the Linux GUI desktop never caught on. My above argument clearly shows that I feel this is only a minor point. How many people would quickly point out that NeoOffice or OpenOffice are good suites to turn to as alternatives for MicroSoft's Office suite? While Office certainly has shortcomings, brought on by b
Whew! This water sure is cold!
I'm sorry, I need my right and middle button even when I'm not using an external mouse.
I had no problem opening this reply in a new tab to type it on my Macbook Pro. I simply held down the command key while clicking and the new tab opened right up. I can also open a new tab to type a reply by holding down the ctrl key while clicking then choosing "Open link in new tab".
What actually drove me nuts was the little things, like not having normal buttons for PgUp/PgDown, Delete etc.
Holding down the fn key while pressing the page down key pages the page I'm looking at down one and holding down the command key while pressing the page down takes the window down to the bottom of the last page.
I know there are shortcuts for that, but hey, I want to concentrate on what I'm doing and not on remembering wild combination for what should be single keys
I switched from Windows to OS X in August and within a few weeks I had no problems with the above.
And for drag and drop install/uninstall - ha! 99.9% of what I need is available from Apt
I can install software using the same methods software is install in Linux. MacPorts allows me to install RPMs and "Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management."
Should there be a Law?
I really don't see a need to expect OSX and Linux to kill each other off. I've been using Linux since the 0.9x kernels came with Slackware. The fact was that as much as any open source OS gained ground, you had the market open to whatever got the merit and mindshare for the job. This has happened to a great extent. OSX is seeing ports of games from EA using technology borrowed from WINE. At the same time, Apple has given things back that are benefiting open source OS's: WebKit (itself from KHTML), LLVM improvements, what have you. I am not 100% comfortable with how Apple behaves with the things it keeps closed, but in the meantime, I very happily use MacPorts and open source software whenever I can atop my MacBook Pro.
With Qt 4.x and KDE4 showing great promise for portability between Windows, Linux, and OSX, and not to mention the latent potential of GNUStep to make apps portable between OSX and other Unices, the opportunity for any platform is getting better. Unix and open source both offer Apple too much for it to ignore, and vice versa. If Apple wants to keep their slick Aqua interface closed, that's fine by me as long as I can migrate my data and key applications. And hey, there'll always be KDE4.
Windows is something I am now able to almost completely avoid.
Openoffice and AbiWord don't matter because they aren't "office." They're plenty useful, but they don't have 100% Office format compatibility, and therefore aren't good enough for Mr. Average Joe.
Same with the Adobe products, really. GIMP is still not good enough for print work, but really it all comes down to industry standard formats and applications. Go into a graphic design interview with GIMP/Inkscape experience but no Adobe experience and see where it gets you.
None of the listed applications hold a candle to the iLife apps for "just getting things done." They aren't as slick, as easy to use, or as integrated.
As for Coda, I could use BBEdit, SubEthaEdit or Textmate + Transmit + CSSEdit Plus + Safari + an SSH client to do the same thing as well, but it's nice to have it all in one tightly integrated window.
Scrivener is, I admit, a heavily niche program, but I've seen novelists switch to the mac just for this program. To truly get the flexibility, features and organization of Scrivener, you'd need not just the things you listed, but also a 200 dollar copy of Final Draft for the screen writing features.
Shinma
Yes, we have package managers too.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Fink is hardly a replacement for apt-get, well at least if you want something to actually work.
What's the problem with it?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Actually, distros with patch servers (such as Ubuntu and Fedora) can get a rough measure of installed base - by counting unique IP addresses downloading patches. By this measure, we know that between 6 and 12 million Ubuntu desktops are active on the Internet, and about 2 million unique IP addresses host Fedora machines. (And if you calculate those machines alone to handily exceed the claimed "0.63%" share calculated by NetApp, you're already smarter than they are! ;-)
Its always been about OS stability and Apps availability.
Different demographics.
:)
The cute 20 year old college girl - with the flowing blond hair, sparkling white teeth and a honey tan - who has a Mac won't ever use a Linux box.
Get over it.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
"'Early in the decade it seemed that if you wanted a Windows alternative, Linux was it. Nowadays, an Apple Mac is undoubtedly the alternative and, with its resurgence and its Intel base, a very viable one.'""
I wanted a FREE alternative to Windows [Linux], Mac OSX does not offer me the freeDOM I want, show me the source and stop licking Gates' boots.
Let me correct that for you...
Early in the decade it seemed that if you wanted a Windows alternative, Mac OS was it. The only that's change since then is that now, the only viable alternative is Mac OS X.
There, that's much more accurate.
Face it, Linux has only in the past year begun to reach a state where it might be a viable alternative to Windows, for a select few people running a select subset of the available hardware, and it's still not fully there, yet. Like it or not, wireless is a fact of life, and without access to drivers, Linux is spinning its wheels. Don't even get me started on playing DVDs under Linux.
As for myself, I'm not sure where I fit in, because my two primary machines are triple boot Mac OS X v10.5/Fedora 8/Windows XP Pro. Which means, of course, that they both came from Apple, Inc. These two machines meant wins for all three operating systems (yes, I personally paid for two full retail copies of XP Pro, curse you billg!).
My third primary machine is a music recording workstation, based on a Power Mac G5 that runs Logic Pro, and does double duty as a test server when I'm not recording (which means it runs either some form of Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server or Linux, depending on the task at hand). My regular servers are a mixture of Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, OpenBSD, and some form of Linux, with the occasional Windows Server throw in the mix when I need to test something.
On the other hand, an iPhone has replaced my Nokia Internet Tablet *and* my Palm smartphone.
The choice in distributions is worth more to linux then having one unified "distro". From what I have seen, distributions usually just do the packaging of the various programs. Distrobutions are the ones that package the .rpm, .ebuild, .deb, whatever files. They don't actually write the applications themselves usually.
Quite a few of the applications are usually done by the GNOME/KDE/Xfce/etc devs. That is why we have all these apps starting with a K in them! Look at the long list of apps that are "official" for GNOME. Same for KDE. It is up to the KDE/GNOME/Xfce folks to make a "unified" interface as far as the user is concerned with GUI.
Getting things to work on various hardware (not printers and some other things) is up to the kernel developers. These things get written as kernel modules. So problems with hardware X is either one of two things, the kernel lacks support for hardware X, or whatever distro you are using fails to properly detect/autoconfigure the kernel to load the drivers for hardware X.
The rest of the applications are done independently or are part of the GNU tools. Examples of independent apps include Firefox, The GIMP, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc. The GNU tools are things like cat, make, wget, etc.
In short, distros just do the packaging, and change a few/alot settings on the window manager to give the distro a unique feel. Yes some distros do alot of work as far as auto-detection of hardware, but there is much more to the opensource development process then just the distro.
A lot of the strengths of linux comes from the fact that various distros are able to try out things, and other distros are free to copy, or not to copy. In reality there are only about 10 or so major distros. Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, ... the big names (I'm not going to try to give a full listing, no need to create any flames). There are hundreds of distros, but for all practical purposes, there are a limited selection of distros designed with new users in mind. I'd not be counting things like CentOS, gentoo, slackware or puppy linux for this "problem". CentOS is more or less a server distro, and puppy linux solves a unique problem. Gentoo and slackware are just.. um.. not something I'd hand the CD to a new user and say "go install it". This is another example of why a single "super" distro just won't cut it. Finally you have to remember that alot of the developers are doing this work on their own time, its hard to dictate to folks what they have to work on if you are not paying them ;)
All posts released under the GNU Free Documentation License
I am an old (started with Cobol on IBM 3090...) developer that is the lucky owner of a Macbook running MacOSX and a Sony Laptop running Fedora 8. More importantly I am surrounded by people who are plain simple users. I am very impressed with MacOSX: the MacBook is the only computer everyone can really use and - wow - close the lid, the system suspends, open the lid and you are back to where you were. I am still struggling to get my Atheros wireless card restart after suspend on my Fedora/Sony laptop and I have already spent quite a few hours configuring the beast. MacOSX is a very good proof that a nix based system can be used by anyone when painless OS/harwdare coupling is available... and that is good news for Linux. I wish that when my next Fedora installs, it detects that my laptop is XYZ and better auto-configures. I also wish,that instead of trying to run buggy non-secure Windows apps on my Linux box, I could run MacOSX apps. Then I would get my MacBook running Fedora. Sounds feasible, no?
For 8 years, I ran Linux on the desktop, because I was a geek and that's what we did. Then one day I was doing work at a customer site, and my laptop died. I grabbed a spare imac to finish up my work, and was very impressed by the experience. The next day I went online and bought a powerbook, that was 4 years ago, and I haven't looked back. Linux runs on the 350 servers in my datacenter, but not a single machine in my home anymore. I'd never consider OSX for a server, and I'd never consider Linux for a desktop. Computers exist to help me run my company, I don't exist to run my laptop.
7.31/4.210.63/0.29
SZERVÃC Attila -
we are comparing a microkernel (with certain parts of which are closed source,by Apple, and which also costs a fair dollar amount) to a monokernel which is moreless owned by the world and which we are able to view/inspect/compile all source code as freely as we wish.
I learned linux after a very brief period with Windows XP. It just keeps getting better for me. I've had to use Mac a fair bit too as both my parents now have one and my gf has one and I frequently use it too. But I have to say, as far as desktop customization and usability in my experience, OS X can't touch Gnome and Ubuntu.
As he mentioned in his article, one could interpret the numbers by saying, Linux more than doubled its user base in this time strip. Although he does not give this view big credits, in my opinion it counts. Why? Because Linux achieved this with no (or at least close to zero) bundling of hard- and software, as both M$ and Apple do. So the whole growth rate of Linux is driven by a conscious decision, a real opt-out of the 2 big OS's. This trend is picking up speed, not loosing it.
On the other hand, the hard/software bundling with Linux is still about to come. In about a year, we will see even bigger growth rates for Linux. Why? Take the EeePC. Asus wants to ship millions of these in the next year only, most of them coming with Linux pre-installed. Take the OLPC, which will ship in high numbers as well. This will have a high effect on the Linux user base numbers.
Given that Ubuntu and its flavors growing more and more popular as well and non OS related software is becoming more mature in areas where it is not competitive right now (take Adobe packages), Linux on the desktop will be more of an alternative every year. As well, Apple kind of delivers mostly to the high-price segment. If they do not change that course, the growth of Apple will reach an end pretty soon. And while Chris Howard writes:
Wasn't the Google Android platform Linux based?
I say, lets discuss this subject in another year...where i live in germany, apple suffers from a bad image. there products are regarded as toys stupid people buy in order to appear superior. gnu/linux (by which i mean ubuntu) is on the other hand regarded as subversive and the future of computing. consequently i know many teenagers who have changed to ubuntu and don't go near windows or osx or other pieces of proprietary software. do they understand what stallman's 4 freedoms are about? probably not, but they still use ubuntu.
their cheapest computer is something like $1000...and if you want it to actually include a monitor, I believe the price for that is another $1300.
I don't know where you got that number, but I can buy a Mac Mini (barf) for $600. Add a keyboard and mouse, and a monitor and that's less than $1000. Best Buy has a Mini for $600. A 19" LG monitor is $200. An Apple keyboard is $50. And a Kensington wireless optical mouse is $40. That comes to $900.
FalconShould there be a Law?
7.31/4.21 < 0.63/0.29 Why /. is utf-nonaware???
SZERVÃC Attila -
This article is typical Apple Fanboi stuff.
Apple has Microsoft Office.Linux has OpenOffice, which integrates with MS Office at least as good as MacOffice. In fact, OpenOffice runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. Why does the author use MS Office as a justification for MacOS superiority and not MacOffice? Hmmm...
Apple has Adobe Creative suite. WOnderful. Linux has Gimp, Openoffice, and tons of other stuff that can do more than Adobe Creative Suite.
Apple has easy to access and easy to use tech support. So does Linux. Did this guy actually research his article? Linux has anything from Forums to Paid For support.
Apple is driven by someone who has an understanding of End User Needs. So does Linux. Ever wonder why Apple and Linux "feel" so similar to use? Heck a friend demoed OS Leopard for me this very week. Very Impressive indeed. I love it, but it feels eerily familiar. And before anyone goes and jumps on the "Linux is Copying Apple" bandwagon, I bet it is a two way street.
And then there is always the following:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Ubuntu+Linux%2C+MacOs&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0Ubuntu/Mac searches
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Ubuntu+Gutsy%2C+OS+Leopard%2C+Ubuntu+Feisty%2C+OS+Tiger%2C+Ubuntu+Linux&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0Feisty/Tiger/Gutsy/Leopard/Linux Searches
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Ubuntu+Gutsy%2C+OS+Leopard%2C+Ubuntu+Feisty%2C+OS+Tiger&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0Gutsy/Leopard/Feisty/Tiger Searches
So what is the issue here, exactly? I wonder what marketing speak such as this really gains when it is so full of holes...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I actually don't mind paying for software - if it earns me money. Now, paying the prices that they ask of me, at the outset, even before I can afford it... that's another question.
Same here. I'm hoping to start working early this year as a photographer and I'd like to get Photoshop CS3. However because I'm on disability I'd rather not have to part with the $800, or however much CS3 cost. Right now I only work with film and I'd rather use the money to help pay for a DSLR. So initially I'm going to tryout CinePaint. If it doesn't work or work well but I'm able to have an income from photography then I'll go ahead and buy PS. Then I'll first buy an old upgradeable version then buy the upgrade version of CS3, that's save me a few hundred dollars.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Some of you probably know or remember what it's like being poor. I don't really give a care about market share*. I want information and power, i want it constantly, I want it for free, and I want it now. Give me Linux, and give it to everyone else with a cranky p3 or duron. Soon there'll be nigerian kids learning about chipsets in middle school while you "first world" freaks will be getting wiped by the iDouche in the waiting room for your iTransplants.
Ubuntu has 100% compatibility on Dell laptops. It's as easy to install as OS X. If you try it and if you don't like it, don't worry, because you didn't pay for it.
*For the economically inclined: In this case, low market share doesn't entail low usage! Linux is effectively free-as-in-beer and so is the community-based tech support, so how are you going to do Linux's accounting?
I don't think anyone wants the masses of 'average joes' on Linux, yet.
:)
The Linux user base is layered, today's users will be tomorrow's developers.
And yesterday's users are today's developers.
And the very first users of Linux are now kernel devs
So, it will take some time until an 'almost average joe' can program Linux to be useful for a 'less than average joe'.
But, the trend is there.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Nice thing about developing for OS X is that it is free (well, you don't pay extra for it).
Only if you don't value your time: OS X programming is both harder than Linux programming and the skills you need to acquire are not useful for much else.
Why then does Adobe have Photoshop for Macs but doesn't have it for Linux? The same can be said of many commercial programs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
if you get Ballmer and Woz as the PC and Mac people. The reason for this is that the people in the current adverts are ACTORS. RMS isn't an actor. So you should be thinking of what actor you'd have playing the Linux group.
As it happens, yesterday I had my first significant contact with OS X. Many of my family members had that weird thing from before OS X that wasn't really an operating system, so far as I could tell judging by how it managed its memory. It always struck me as paint program masquerading as an OS.
It was jarring to sit down in front of Leopard after a decade-long Apple hiatus. It works great *and* it's an OS, too. Nice trick. Meanwhile, my relation had managed to orphan ten years of email in Microsoft Outlook. (His previous system was still a Windows 2000 machine; XP never set foot there, nor was it ever missed.)
What proved to be the crucial link in the chain? Thunderbird. We managed to export 1GB of Outlook mail archive from the PC to a (BSD) network drive, then access the mail archive from Thunderbird on his new Mac. Sweet. I briefly tried to install a plug-in to do this on the Mac Thunderbird, but it didn't take. Then I installed the PC Thunderbird on the PC side, and Outlook export was native (at least, given that we had Outlook already installed on the same machine).
The Thunderbird export is more than a tad on the slow side (doing what, I couldn't say: the disk activity was not high, seek noise was not high, the CPU activity was not high, nor was the network traffic or disk on the network share very high), but after a relaxed dinner, we discovered it had worked fine. Changing the freaking Thunderbird profiles to accomplish this, that was ugly. My eyebrows must have looked especially bushy as I launched Thunderbird from the command line with the -ProfileManager option (had to do this on both the PC and Mac because the option key trick didn't work on Leopard). At one point my relation asked me the pointed question "are all open source programs like that?" Fortunately I was able to mumble the answer into my thick grey beard.
I've always thought the Linux on the desktop movement was a crock anyway. I've been running Linux on the desktop for almost a decade now. Why on earth did it become a banner of significance? Why does it have to rock the unwashed to validate its accomplishments? On the grounds that if we don't fight those battles with the wifi and video chipset vendors, Linux might fail altogether?
The thing with Apple (and yummy in general) is that it's very much a 1:1 proposition. I'm a bit old fashioned. I happen to prefer hanging my crash boxes off a different power switch. I also like to hang my suppliers off different power switches, so none of them get too big for their britches. Debian today, Ubuntu tomorrow.
I have to say, though, that in the world of 1:1 propositions, from what I could see during my first day in the trenches, Leopard rocks. The Berlin wall was around for 28 years. It was a mere 23 years between my first experience of the original Fat Mac and my first experience with a Mac acting like a real computer, though I admit I'm a bit late to the party.
"Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management" on the Mac.
FalconShould there be a Law?
let's be honest about this, the reason people are buying apples is because of product placement in hollywood and on the tv.
When I bought my Mac I bought a Mac instead of a Windows PC for 2 reasons. First I wanted something that works consistently. After buying and using Windows PCs for 10 years I got sick and tired of constantly having to have them worked on, fixed, or having the OS and all the software reinstalled. The only PC I didn't have these problems with runs NT4.0. However it has, had, it's own problems.
the average person does not know enough to make an informed decision between osx and windows (as if the average person knows what osx is).
That's true with Linux too, unfortunately.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Not exactly. They also care about ease of use, and Linux is not, nor has it ever been, easy.
That depends on the distro. More than a year ago I bought a new PC with Linspire preinstalled. After setting it up I booted it and when the desktop was ready it looked like Windows. It was pretty easy to use. Heck, to connect to the internet all I had to do was connect the PC to my router. Linspire automatically configured the connection. I even got a pop up saying updates were available and did I want to download them. And now with Linspire's, Click N Run, CNR, that's all that's needed to install software, a simply click. After locating what you want to download and install. Not only that, but CNR allows people to download legal media codecs. Some have to be paid for but they are legal.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I've been saying this for a couple of years now. I was one of the very early Linux adopters and loved it because it was lots cheaper than the Unix machines out there (I worked on Digital UNIX on the Alpha). Suddenly, I could have Unix at home!
Now, I write embedded code for a living, mostly on small devices like set-top boxes and mobile phones and the like. I do it all on the Mac. The toolchains that I use are all portable, and build nicely on the mac, so I can choose between Mac and Linux freely.
I choose the mac. Why? Because I need to get the work done, not fiddle with the OS. I don't have time to try to bang out a new xorg.conf to support that second monitor. On the mac, you plug it in, and poof, up it comes. Don't even need a reboot. I don't have time to find out why when I close the laptop, everything goes to hell in a handbasket. I don't want to spend a lot of time trying to get wireless working. I don't want to deal with the details needed to get a VPN working.
Sure, Linux is great, I code for it all the time. But when my personal productivity drops by using it, the love affair ends. I'm in the real world competing with other engineers, I don't have time to fix my tools.
Seems fairly likely that an OS with tiny market share will grow more slowly than an OS with more share. Linux and Apple should be able to sew up the OS market pretty tight between them - Apple for the rich and pretty, linux for the rest (like me).
I have been using Linux on my desktop for around 4-5 years. In that time I have used several different distributions including Slackware, Redhat, SuSe and Ubuntu. As I use it in both my personal environment and at work I have to use a broad set of applications. Since OpenOffice 2.3 was released it is finally something which works very well with many of the formats that we need (doc etc) so its not a problem any more. For most users OpenOffice is actually more like Office than Office 2k7 is, there is still some room to improve on things like speed, removing some bugs etc but it is happening and its happening very fast. The area where there are problems with Linux on the desktop is a serious lack of any reliable, fast exchange (RPC over HTTPS) email client, evolution just does not cut it for stability and cleanliness, every day no matter what the distribution I will have a crash, or the system will bog down, or my email filters will stop working again, these are bugs which have been raised over 2 years ago and still exist in the software. I really respect the fact that there are so many people trying to improve the product but in the areas that count its not getting much better and that is stability and performance. How can anyone in a corporate environment be without reliable email? I am happy to pay for support for my distributions in order to pay for developers to work on problems but I want to see value for money, most distributions offer value for money but are simply not really understanding the corporate environment properly, I feel that Redhat and Novel are good in that area but evolution is still a pile of crap.
...is that I can't get one with a TrackPoint pointing device.
You know, the little "clit mouse" that sits in the center of the keyboard. I've loved this type of pointer since I got my first Thinkpad. Your hands never leave the home position on the keyboard.
I hate trackpads but, sadly, that seems to be the way the world is going. When my last options for Windows laptops with TrackPoints die away, I'll be first in line for a Mac laptop.
People get the stuff they think works for them.
Most people are sheep, and only can think of "commercial offerings".
My desktop has been running fine for over 10 years.
And I haven't cared for commercial offerings in 10 years; it's so DAMN convenient to just install a package I want to use or try, without worrying about licenses, costs, seats, cpus or whatever shit the vendors are thinking of this time of year.
# Adobe: GIMP(shop) and Inkscape; evince and gnash
What are the colour depths of Photoshop and GIMP? PS CS3 has 32 bits per colour change whereas GIMP only has 8. Can GIMP work with CMYK? Only with a plugin. Does PS? Natively. So, if you want print then you need PS as GIMP won't do. However Film GIMP AKA CinePaint can do it. I plan on working in photography and I'll give CinePaint a try but if it doesn't work I may have to get PS. As for Inkscape, it is for vector graphics not photo editing. I'll also try Inkscape, as well as Blender.
FalconShould there be a Law?
for apple to kill linux on the desktop, there would have to be a linux on the desktop to kill. As this article points out, only something like 0.63% of people browsing on the internet are using linux.
I don't see this as really a big deal. Linux just isn't a desktop platform. It is used for servers, and for workstations used for developing software for linux servers. This is Linux's niche. There's nothing wrong with that... I'm just always surprised that so many linux users are convinced that Linux is going to take over the desktop market at some point... I can't even imagine what events would have to transpire for that to become the case.
Open source companies promote Competition.
Closed source companies promote Collusion.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
All around me people are using OS X, from Uni to friends. And one thing really annoying is their behavior. It's not a SO, it's a religion. And like fanatics they try to make me see the word to their eyes. Well i think OS X does look good and its functional and everything else. But i can't install it on my computer so i guess me and OS X never will get along. I have the same pc case for like 5 years, the soundcard for 4 and everything else changes according to my needs( or money ). And that's one thing that i will never abdicate. Apple will never make OS X work outside their sandbox, because with the need for lots of drivers clients would loose the "it works, bitches" feeling. OS X won't ever win the race because you can't use it on non mac hardware and mac's are expensive has hell so they will never be ordinary. I even bet that if it was less expensive ppl wouldn't buy then because they are a bling bling.
Agreed! How can Linux be dying if it's gaining market share?
I do think OS X as an offering is hurting Linux for the desktop by stealing developers away and allowing them to refocus their extra-curricular programming on things other than desktop Linux (like Linux as a server or applications on OS X).
Or it could go the other way, Linux taking developers away from OS X.
Though I don't right now I want to do some programming for myself, for a graphics and photography business. I'll be doing it on and for my Mac however eventually I'd like to work on a port for Linux. Does it really matter though? What should matter is having a robust and diverse market place. I want more choices not less.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Using the articles numbers, during a 2 year period, OSX use increased by 74% while Linux use only increased by 117% in the same period, so Apple is killing Linux. Sounds like fanboy logic to me.
Using real numbers, both combined are less than 10% of Windows numbers. There's gotta be room for more fanboy logic there.
One more interesting piece of information. Apple had a 15 year head start on Linux. They even had a couple of years head start on Windows. I wonder if that has any bearing?
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
BSD isn't so confused and conflicting as Linux distros. There are 4 major branches, and each is very openly a different train of thought. Free, Net, Dragonfly, and Open.
FreeBSD and NetBSD spring about from the same original 4.4BSD-lite2 codebase but go in different directions from there.
FreeBSD is focused on usability and reliability. No hand holding.
NetBSD focused on portability. No hand holding.
DragonflyBSD branched from FreeBSD over the direction of SMP. No hand holding.
OpenBSD branched from NetBSD over the focus on security. No hand holding... if you are looking for hand holding, go away.
DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are both rebranded FreeBSD with emphasis on creating a effortless user experience. So if you are wanting to play with a BSD variant, and want a little hand holding, the options really just come down to these two.
OSX is also a variant of FreeBSD, with emphasis on playing down it's heritage and playing up the fact that you can run Photoshop on it. I'm not sure if deleting help requests counts as a refusal to hold your hand or not...
I'm using FreeBSD as a desktop, and I am the only person I know who does (in person). I know a few Linux users, and about half as many Mac users. Generally speaking, the user percentages are a lie. It really depends on where you look. Linux and BSD users don't have a need to troll the same sites that alot of these statistics are pulled from. They also wont use catch-all sites (like news sites) that generally support only Windows (and sometimes Mac) users. Macs generally sell better than Linux PCs, because Linux isn't typically sold. Linux, which is free and downloadable, typically replaces Windows on x86 boxes, with Windows getting credit for the sale.
One other point of note. Alot of Linux users will also be using User Agent Switcher to masquerade as a supported browser/OS combination to avoid the hassle of being told that a website doesn't support them, even though it would work fine had they not scripted such an obnoxious obstacle.
The article is absolutely right. And it won't get any better for Linux unless massive changes are made. I've been saying this for years now, and outlining what I firmly believe are critical for Linux becoming mainstream:
1. One Desktop environment
2. One main distribution
3. One main package management system
4. Reduce the duplication of Linux based applications. If all developers get behind one application, it means it will be better produced. Splintered development gives great choice, at the cost of quality code imho.
5. Better UI - Linux is still far to geeky to use, even though the likes of Ubuntu has made great strides (and many other distributions as well).
6. Popular software MUST run on Linux. Photoshop, Office, autocad, quicken, Dreamweaver are the big ones.
7. More hardware manufacturers MUST write quality drivers for Linux natively
8. More games developers MUST port their games to run natively on Linux, without performance drops.
9. The kernel development team MUST start to improve the Linux kernel for the desktop users, and not corporate business. The 2.6 kernel has seen the Linux kernel developers playing slaves to the corporate interest, at the cost of desktop users imho.
10. A stable API, one that is NOT constantly changing from distribution to distribution, or over the years. I can pretty much install a 98 based application on XP, MOST Linux applications circa that period would NOT install on a modern Linux system.
11. Whilst Linux installers are VERY good these days, when you're talking partitioning, you're asking for much trouble with the average user, which leads me to my next, and final point...
12. Linux MUST get a far larger share of OEM manufacturers...
Things that will NOT change, and that will always hamper Linux...
1. Unreasonable copyright terms (by terms I mean length of copyright ownership)
2. Software patents, which are ALL blatantly illegal.
3. Microsoft corporate sponsorship of US government officials
You may disagree with me, but I think in the long run, history will prove me 100% correct in each and every point. The sad thing is that the vast majority of Linux geeks are so far up themselves, and so far in denial, that they'll never admit the above points. And that is another MAJOR weakness imho.
I'm being bluntly honest here, because I'd LOVE to see Linux become mainstream, and have these applications running on it etc. I'd love to see the Microsoft monopoly broken. I'd love to see Free Software become widely accepted, and the ideals of the FSF appreciated and understood by the majority of the populace.
But, as the parent article says, it'll never happen. Apple, even for the many areas that I dislike it, has a very good idea of what its customers want, and how to deliver that to them. It has the support of 3rd party applications, games developers (not as strong as it should be I admit) and hardware device driver developers. It's sexy, easy to install and maintain and most importantly, easy to use. Apple hardware is now as powerful as Intel based hardware, and the cost of Apple hardware has plummeted. True, it is still more expensive than PC based hardware, but not by a huge margin that many Windows geeks would like to imply.
That's my 2.2c worth, inc. GST.
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
I used Linux on my desktop for most of the nineties. Then, I bought a G5 iMac. Initially, I looked for ports of the software I used on Linux. Now, however, I use nothing that I used on Linux. More importantly, none of the software I use on the iMac is available on Linux. Approximate equivalents, yes, but if Linux is only offering that -- not something obviously different and better -- why switch back?
I really need to replace this aging G5 machine. Once, I thought I'd run Linux on it when Apple moved on. it looks like that won't happen, since no distribution seems to fully support the hardware. In particular, Ubuntu has walked away from it after never really getting things right for my machine (the last revision 20-inch G5 before the switch to Intel).
When I do buy new hardware, I'm almost certainly not going to run Linux on it. I keep up with developments in the Linux desktop area and I simply see no incentive to do that.
The fact that I can take a 15-minute drive, walk into an Apple store, walk out with a new machine, drive home, plug it in, plug in a cable and migrate over my stuff from the old machine, and then go to work is a very comforting thought. I''ve installed Linux dozens of times, built distros from source, etc., but why would I do all that again to get second string results?
To really compete on the desktop, Linux needs to compete with Apple in software polish and innovation, and then make itself available in the retail channel. Linux might be free, but it's visible only to people who already know it exists. Better to selling it for $30 in shiny boxes.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
"But the good thing about that is when you want to do the unusual stuff, you probably already know how to fight."
That post was great. And fighting these days is pretty easy, either google or go straight to ubuntuforums.org.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Does this mean that 2008 will be the year for OSX on the desktop?
I love my Ubuntu, but it can't possibly go on for ever.
What will happen in 2017, after the release of Ubuntu 26.10: Zany Zebra.
Z is as far as you can possibly go!
after that, it's game over man, game over!
Apple can keep their game going on for much longer. Ubuntu may run out of letters, But apple won't run out of cats. I can't wait for OSX: Pardofelis marmorata. that is going to be a killer OS!
-I only code in BASIC.-
I gave up using Windows in 2002. I switched to Linux and tried every distro under the sun. I even worked on some Linux projects and was actively involved in helping to advance the movement. During this time Apple kept getting better and better. In November of 2007 I finally broke down and bought a Macbook Pro. One week after using it I wondered: "Why the hell didn't I do this 3 years earlier?" I absolutely love my Mac. It just works. I plug stuff in and it finds it. If it doesn't, I can go to the manufacturer's web site and download the drivers. I don't spend 27 hours dicking around with my laptop trying to get something to work. Now, I just use my computer. I still run Ubuntu on a desktop system at home. It is stable and does the job. But, for my laptop, I'll never run Linux again.
It uses BSD as its core and Apple is willing to do DRM - so "content providers" will help rather than hinder Apple in making sure said content (read entertainment of people) can be seen on Apple.
In my anecdotal experience, desktop Linux is driving Mac sales. Whenever I point a frustrated Windows user towards Linux, they never go back to Windows. Some of them stick with Linux, and some of them buy Macs, but all of them learn that it's not really all that hard to switch. Those that end up as Mac users will have no difficulty switching back to Linux if Apple stops being worth the price premium to them.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
>you're likely a bit too lazy to put in the time required to find what does work and is free
.AVI files from my DVD collection, with no luck. Since my billable time is about $40/hour, that's $1600 worth of effort.
I wiped my PC just before Christmas, so I can't go back and look at all the different packages I installed attempting to get ripping/re-encoding to work, but here are some I remember:
Ripit4me
Gordian Knot
AutoGK
There were at least 4 other pieces of software I tried but I can't remember them. Most of the packages during their install installed other pieces of software also, like codec packages and the like. Ripit4me is just a front end for the usual DeCSS software but I can't remember it's name either.
I also spent lots of time on the Doom9.org forums looking for help. Interestingly, one of the main topics of discussion is about audio/video sync issues.
Ultimately, I spent probably 40 hours off and on trying to get clean
Then I went and bought the ripping and re-encoding software from Slysoft, for $80 ($40 per package). Worked like a charm.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
First of all, I use Windows, not Linux, because the primary purpose of my PC is for entertainment, and all the game titles are for Windows, not Linux. I understand there are some emulator out there, like WINE, but I don't want to take a performance hit eating up cycles with an emulator.
.VOB files just fine with a DVD player. It was something in the re-encoding process when I tried to convert them into .avi files that introduced the sync problems.
My big games are the entire Call of Duty series, which I play online using my Windows PC.
I don't think the audio sync issues were a result of ripping, because I could play the
They are anything but bogus - I went to the doom9.org forums looking for help only to discover lots of other people with the same problem.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I would recommend one tries out Krita first though when it comes to a Photoshop alternative.I personally find most KDE applications are very nicely integrated with each other. That said, I haven't seen a alternative (doesn't mean there isn't) for iMovie.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Apple's market share by about 74%. Very impressive. Linux grew by roughly 117%. Obviously, in short order Linux will be the only OS on the planet. Something about, "Lies, damned lies and statistics" comes to mind.
>You really lost me with that one. If that dynamic actually worked Open Source could not have come
.avi files, and never got around the audio/video sync issues. So I went and bought a commercial software, and lo and behold, it worked right out of the box. In retrospect, I'm not surprised. A bunch of hobbyists that produce flaky software don't have anything to risk. A company, especially a small one, that puts out a shingle and sells a product for money has a lot more risk if they sell defective products.
>into existence in the first place. How has that dynamic helped Internet Explorer be a better browser?
>How has it helped Windows in being more stable, less prone to viruses etc?
I ended up buying DVD ripping/re-encoding software from a small company called SlySoft.
You are right - you don't get much support from a company like Microsoft, because it is so big that it doesn't respond to problems that little people like me have.
But generally I find that when you go and BUY an product, if it flat out doesn't work you go back to the person that sold it to you and they will make it right or give you your money back. And because of that risk, they generally produce a product that does at least generally what they claim it will do.
I tried at least half a dozen pieces of free software to re-encode DVD rips to
I understand what you are saying about the necessity of software developers making use of codecs and other plug-ins. But the fact is, I don't care how they make it work (or not, in my case). I just am not surprised when you go to install a software package which, as part of its install, installs software packages from two, three, or more other authors, and in the end, it doesn't work. And then, when it doesn't work, which piece of the puzzle do you blaim?
>Finally "uncoordinated collection of hobbiests' works" either gives you
>away as a partisan or demonstrates that you have not done much research on the subject.
I've got a BS in Computer Science and have been working with computers since the days of dial-up BBSes. So I guess I'm a partisan. But my recent experience with free software to re-encode DVDs made me that way, because an "uncoordinated collection of hobbiests' works" is exactly what all the tools I toyed with felt like I was using. I guess the reality is I now make enough money that I don't have to tinker with free tools to get the job done. I gave up with the DVD re-encoding after about 40 hours of effort. Then I bought the SlySoft ripping/re-encoding tools for $80. Commercial software FTW.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
No.... FREEBSD is killing Linux on the desktop! Ha! Ha! Ha!
>Thanks to idiotic IP laws, DVD rippers are essentially illegal and can't be produced by
>established (and therefore sue-able) entities
Then why was I able to buy commercial software to do it from Slysoft for $80?
It's not that the software isn't available, it's that I couldn't get the FREE stuff to work. And a quick browsing of the Doom9.org forums shows that I'm not alone, either.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I don't know if apple is really killing linux.. I think it's not possible counter something like linux.. but I am sure about ONE thing.. while you wroted this post you had at least two fingers in your asshole. greetings!
Linux desktop is a joke. It didn't have to be a joke, but it is. Apple may be morphing into the next square-jawed gimlet-eyed goon ("You'll eats yer spinach, and you'll likes it!"), but they understand how to write a decently secure multi-user working environment. Linux doesn't seem to understand WHY it needs to learn, while Microsoft is forgetting how to do a simple Seven Ball Juggle and other skills they nailed down forever in the Nineties.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
The version of Photoshop that runs on OS X is written in Carbon. This is a Mac-only API. To get Photoshop running on Linux would still take a whole lot of work.
I don't know, but it does have UTF underware.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
From what I've been reading, the thousand-odd posts this article has garnered so far could be boiled down to two: 1: "I tried every distribution of Linux and it sucked [insert reasoning here] so I switched to OSX. Now I'm happy as a pig wallowing in it's own poo." 2: "I tried every version of OSX and it sucked [insert reasoning here] so I switched to Linux. Now I'm happy as a pig wallowing in it's own poo." Taco should have just posted those two comments as ACs and locked the board.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Maybe it's not for YOU but you are not at all the majority. Many many programmers are switching to Macs because they come with many of the things a programmer needs out of the box. Any open web development(php, ruby on rails, perl etc) can easily be done on a Mac without installing any other software. It comes out of the box with apache, mysql, RoR framework etc.
There's also DarwinPorts which is much like fink and you can easily install most command line programs with a simple command "sudo port install xxxx".
Add to that gcc and a good and free IDE for developing Mac applications, OS X is a great platform for developers.
Linux on the desktop isn't viable unless Google itself brands a flavor and produces a PC for the masses. Period. End of story. Sorry to say it, buts its clear a day. -sammy w/ iPhone
Hi there,
You are totally wrong in every way. This should be obvious to anyone who has been on slashdot for any length of time, so I'm always surprised when I see someone who doesn't quite understand the key feature of linux. Next's interface wasn't that special, it was nice. Yipee. OSX's is a candy cane version of that. Personally, I think its ugly and clumsey. But thats all opinion, isn't it? But what isn't opinion, is that Apple isn't going to save you from any evil, because it has no better plans for you then MS does. Put briefly, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are both dictators cut from the exact same cloth.
Whenever I see someone who is so obviously proud of their Mac ownership ("Look at me! I think DIFFERENT") its incredibly sad -- the truth of the matter is that you buy an Apple, you are just a slave to a different master. Hell, you can't even choose what computer to run OSX on. A victory for OSX is a victory for Steve Jobs and no one else on this world.
Apple users are a little bit too old to be buying into the fairy tale vision of Steve Jobs. So you don't like any of Linux's interfaces, and don't care to write your own (and who would blame you really).. you can't stand windows, and you like OSX. So you suck it up and fork out the tons of cash required to buy an Apple. So far you are just fine -- right up until you start ranting on the Internet about how Steve Jobs is going you save the world and make the lambs lie down with the lions. Thats just plain delusional. You can use your OS because you like the interface, but this rubbish about the Benevolent Dictator Steve Jobs is such utter rot, I am tired of hearing this nonsense and I'm sure anyone who actually has a clue is tired of it too.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
...Linux will be a small-percentage OS.
You also missed an extremely obvious item in your comparisons..
The Mac mini is TINY! The Dells are big, loud, f'ing BOXES! Did you look for more than five minutes at the Apple store before pulling this lame Dell comparison?
Here, how about you try actually reading the details.
Yup, wireless G, bluetooth, gig ethernet, firewire, DVI, infrared remote. Build a Dell with those parts, for $600, PLEASE!
The Inspirons have some pro's too, like cheap monitor, K&M thrown in, larger HD capacities, big box (depending how you look at it), etc. PLEASE consider all features though when doing these price/value comparisons between Apple and Dell hardware though. the mac mini is $1300 Click "compare specs" on the mini page. Yup, there's a $1200 iMac next to two Mac minis, for geniuses like you.
Now that you understand a bit more about Mac hardware, go look again at the Dells. They might have some really decent machines in the gap between Apple's mini and iMac...
I've got nothing against Dell, I just hate these horrible comparisons with Apple.
It's a simple equation, really. People - the mass market, as opposed to coders, hackers, and IT managers - need a computer that lets them do their stuff easily. It should be easy to learn and fun to use. Windows is not easy to learn or fun to use. Customization is tricky and requires some schoolin' and practice to accomplish. The system completely locks you out of places MS doesn't want you messing around. If the average guy gets through the interlocks he could be in deep doodoo. Linux is fun to use if you like playing around in the guts of the computer, don't care much about GUI, and you're into full tilt customization, but it is not easy to use. If you don't know what you're doing you can break it really easily. Joe Neurosurgeon just wants to do his taxes and send email without having to think about it too much. OS X is easy to learn and fun to use for non-geeks. The average doink can figure out how to customize a few aesthetic and cosmetic parts of the interface without breaking it. The system protects me from myself unless I'm smart enough to circumvent the boundaries. In other words, the average dumba$$ like me can function just fine on OS X with very few problems and actually enjoy it. That's the mass market experience in a nutshell.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
I'm off by an order of magnitude, it's about 1 in 158 machines. That's still a lot of computers, but doesn't look so great. At least it's increasing.
Still, I've been tempted to switch. I've owned Mac in the past, back when they had the sucky OS underneath of it. I just haven't gotten back to it. Linux and Windows does everything I need it to. Unfortunately I have stuff that only works with windows.
Many open source apps I use are not well supported (Openoffice, Amarok, Gimp, Inkscape, k3b.
NeoOffice is a good Mac port of Open Office. And MacGIMP is also a Mac port. However if it's like GIMP it only has an 8 bit colour depth per channel. While that may be fine for the web, it's seriously lacking for print media. For print CinePaint aka Film GIMP is better. How well it's supported on OS X I don't know but I've be finding out rsn. If it doesn't do what I want though I may end up getting Photoshop CS3, which you can't get running on Linux without jumping through hoops. I'll also try Inkscape and Blender. The others I don't know about.
the OS X interface is awful
I guess it depends on your taste. Neither I nor many other Mac users have a problem with it. Of course my favorite OS was Amiga.
MacPorts packages didn't compile 50% of the time.
I haven't tried it yet but I'll go through to see what's available. If I find some good software I'll go ahead and try it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I suggest you try out Krita [koffice.org]. It has 32bit colours, CMYK etc.
Thanks, when I get my Linux PC running I'll try out Krita.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yes he did, in particular he says he does not like mac, alright, fine. Did you read the rest of the post?
All posts released under the GNU Free Documentation License
Were you comparing the $2999 Dell XPS M1730 to the $2,799 17" MacBook Pro?
I don't recall what model of Dell I used. I looked for one than had the same or close to the same CPU the MBP had and a 17" LCD. From there I configured the Dell to be as close to the specs the MBP had. I did the same with the HP.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Wikipedia
Much effort of free software targets markets other than those targeted by Apple and Microsoft (i.e. average consumer markets). Free software is often scratching itches that other software isn't.
I dont recall any such shootouts or any Linux development or testing within Apple.
There may be others but the only Linux I know of that Apple worked on was MkLinux.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Standards don't matter either because they don't support internet explorer.
$ make available
Before going CS3 I'd recommend giving Pixelmator [pixelmator.com] a try.
That's but Pixelmator has the same limitation as GIMP, it's only 8 bits per colour channel.
There are a few issues that I see frequently brought up by Mac users.
After using Windows almost exclusively for the last 10 years I had hardly any problems making the switch. The one thing I don't like is the maximize icon, in Windows it actually makes the window take all of the screen real estate, but not on the Mac. The only way, that I know of, to get a window to use the whole screen is by dragging the edges.
The dock has a few issues
I have the Dock set on auto hide and rarely use it.
The mouse acceleration curve feels very wrong
I don't use a mouse on my MBP, I have a trackball but haven't set it up yet. So for now I just use the trackpad.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If I remember right, the KDE guys also include the proper name in parenthesis, so you might see an application listed like "cd burning (k3b)" -- that strikes me as a nice balance of catering to the average degree of ignorence,
I agree, that is good.
FalconShould there be a Law?
VLC is a wonder, but for now, it's one of those application that neither use KDE's nor Gnome's filesystem plugins.
So until there's a (for exemple FUSE-based) system wide support for remote location handling (as it's the case in Mac OS-X or as it's the case with the limited support for SMB network acces in Windows), you should use some player that does use the plugins :
In KDE, Kaffeine is a player that uses all the infrastructure, including the KIO slaves for remote access.
And it uses XINE as a media decoding engine, so it's very good.
For VLC, either you'll have to wait until someone creates some automatic mounter like I mention in my last post, or alternatively you can try asking the developer to either introduce suport for KIO slave or Gnome VFS or to add the interesting networks in addition to the current HTTP/UDP/etc.. network protocols).
Until that happens, Kaffeine is a good alternative.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I am a developer, and I use a Mac. In particular, a 17" Macbook Pro. Why? Because that's what everyone else in the company is using, and I was told to. I have used Wintel for many years, and have used Linux as well. Here are the pros and cons as I see them, as a professional developer: The hardware (guts) are high-end but basically standard. So what costs the extra money? In part it is the engineering. Apple put a LOT of effort into making sure the outside is simple and elegant... and that takes a boatload of engineering on the inside. The same with OS X, but less successfully. Everything "just works", I suppose... but not always well, and Apple's oft-vaunted OS interface has some real deficiencies. Even worse, most of them are problems that don't seem to have any real justification. I should specify here that I am referring to the latest available OS X 10.5 (Leopard). For example: I am currently making my living as a Ruby on Rails programmer. I love RoR. But the "IDE" (it isn't really) of choice on the Mac is Textmate. Textmate does a lot of things really well, and very simply. But much of that is done via plugins, and it does not do some other things well or at all. In contrast, RadRails (now Aptana) is not as snappy, but does a better job as an IDE. And Aptana is "free" open-source. Textmate is not. Even so, programmers who are long-time Mac users tend to go around glassy-eyed as if stoned, saying "Isn't Textmate WONDERFUL???" The answer is: No. It is not wonderful. It is very cool in some ways, but has some real quirks, and some serious shortcomings. From a long-time Mac user's standpoint, it probably qualifies as "cool" because there are not many (or perhaps any) real alternatives. Apple's keyboard is non-standard and in some ways non-intuitive. The Home and End keys are mostly dead weight; they do absolutely nothing in most software. There is no hard-drive light, and the little "busy spinner" seldom shows up... so there is very little indication that anything is really happening. When waiting for a program to start, or some other time-intensive task, you find yourself thinking: "is it working, or somehow locked up?" If I have a window open on my Mac, then open another window, then close the top window, the window now showing in the foreground (the one I stared with) does not have the focus! I have to click on it to give it focus before I can scroll or type or whatever. That is not just a minor oversight... it is contrary to some of the most basic interface fundamentals. There are a great many thing on the Mac that are not configurable (at least via the GUI menus), that can be adjusted any which way in Windows. The items "just work" just fine... but they may not work quite the way you want them to. Having said that, if one can get used to the Mac's interface shortcomings, and the cost (pretty high for the hardware performance), then the Mac is, in some ways, the best of all three (Mac, Windows, Linux) worlds. Why? Because with Parallels (or even better, the most recent VMWare Fusion), you can run Windows or Linux under OS X. Just TRY to do the same under Windows or Linux. Not only that, but the performance of the virtual OS under VMWare is pretty darned good. Better yet, you can double-boot your system and run your other OS will full Intel hardware access: play Windows games with full performance, for example. And if you do that, it can still be run under VMWare. So yo don't have to give up your Windows or Linux... you can actually have all three in the same machine, with few compromises.
Why? As a programmer, the only thing that annoys me somewhat is the fact that the Mac version of Java lags behind other platforms. Other than that, there's nothing to complain. You've got Fink and MacPorts, OS X comes with a free, awesome IDE, it does X11 out of the box, I can run all these dumb apps in whose formats people send me files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop), it integrates well into Windows networks, Windows virtualization is seamless (using Parallels, IE6 runs on my Mac as if it were a Mac app), Mac OS X has integrated backup and virtual desktops, it supports all kinds of scripting languags out of the box (from AppleScript to Ruby), and I have access to a lot of great, polished Mac apps (iPhoto, Keynote, Adium, Quicksilver, Interarchy, BBEdit, Pixelmator and so on).
Not to mention that I can also boot my Mac into Windows or Ubuntu if I want to.
As of now, Macs simply provide the best of all worlds.
For Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
For every other app:
http://www.atomicbird.com/mondomouse/
There are other, free apps which provide the same option.
Personally, I find it amusing that people often thing that Mac OS X is not configurable. It is, it's just that not every option is exposed in the UI. Which is a good thing, by the way. Insteade of offering thousands of options, the OS should provide sane defaults, and only expose things in the UI which most people actually need to configure.
It's like complaining that Ubuntu is not configurable because the UI doesn't expose ever option Gnome provides.
It's not the OS which is at fault here. You're just inexperienced and possibly unwilling to learn.
I don't get it. Aptana runs on Macs. So... You're complaining about the fact that some Mac programmers prefer Textmate to Aptana? You want an OS where Textmate is not available so everyone would have to use Aptana?
I'm not sure I understand your argument.
Also, for the disk activity light, try this or this.
In a properly working Mac application, clicking "zoom to fit" zooms the window size to fit its content, while clicking it while holding down option (actually labelled "alt" on newer Macs :-) should maximize the window.
Although I can hardly see many reasons for maximizing a window, except for stuff like IntelliJ.
I think it doesnt matter of percentage. what matters most is the reliability, effectivity and etc... Kanati Inc
He have had the right mouse button since OS 9. Just the mouse itself was not included until 2005, but you could buy your own and plug it in.
I've been seeing some people actually go the other way. That is, they've been migrating from OSX to Ubuntu. Not huge numbers for sure, but what will happen is the following:
They have a G3 (occasionally, but not so much anymore) or G4 (more often).
They get tired of 10.1/10.2/10.3 and want to update to 10.4 or 10.5 (Not just to run the latest-and-greatest, but also because there's apps that require a fairly recent OSX version.) They find that it is not compatible with the system they have (especially if they look into 10.5, since it requires like a G4-866 or so minimum.)
They either aren't made of money, and cannot afford to buy a new machine. Or, they buy a new machine and want to see what they can do with the old one other than just keeping the software frozen in time as it were.
The surplus store I work at, the legal dept. will not officially sign off on putty any commercial software on any machine (common sense says putting the same OSX version on a Mac that it shipped with should be OK, but the license doesn't actually state this explicitly. And everyone knows Microsoft wants people to have to rebuy Windows as often as possible). So, Macs and PCs alike get Ubuntu on them. Surprisingly to me, probably around 1/4 of the Mac users that come in will see the Ubuntu-Mac and comment they are already running it on at least one of their Macs. About another 1/4 to 1/3rd will click around a bit, then ask if it's free (yes) and ask where they can get a copy. Quite a few of them in fact have come back and commented they successfully put it on a Mac and that they liked it.
My advice -- get Ubuntu 7.04. 6.06, despite being the last official powerpc version, is ghetto compared to 7.04 on PowerPC. And 7.10 has a stupid install bug; who wants to have to go to a forum just to get the OS to install? 8-)
Has it occured to anyone that Apple and Linux are aimed at two VERY, VERY different audiences? Look at who uses Apples, and look at who uses Linux. I have yet to see the two user groups meet.
No wonder so many people have problems with their debts.
If the current rates of growth would continue the number of users of both kind of systems would be roughly the same in 10 years.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We (ahem, ahem, have to post as AC) have around 500 Linux desktops internally, but we are not allowed to parrot about it.
I am sure that this is the case in many companies, since such practices tend to spread.
... I can rest assured that Linux is not dead, and am almost certain it is growing significantly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's not so bad, there's OpenOffice (I know I know) and for Creative Suite ... only Pixel Image Editor is Photoshop alternative on Linux - http://www.pixelimageeditor.com/
Photoshop for Linux? Wine? No. http://www.kanzelsberger.com
1. DRM Free and copyright/license/royalty free digital music format (Ogg Vorbis)
2. The built in convenience of being able to convert your DVD to a playable image file via a network
3. Easy export of almost any device except RAM to the network (Think X for displays, Pulse audio for sound, Sane for scanners, Xen for live migration of virtual machines)
4. Easy to hack OS (can't easily hack Mac OS X to do your bidding at all levels if you're not a coder) if you're not a coder
But, I'll also say my needs are not mainstream. I have a luxurious system completely comprised of Linux boxes at home that do so many things you just can't do in Windows or on Mac OS X. With all that, said, I'll say that Mac OS X is nice. It just doesn't work for me on a few levels.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Then they should be developing a Linux version. Adobe had already developed versions for Unix, both SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris.
Adobe developed Photoshop for UNIX and it flopped. That's probably why they think that Photoshop for Linux is a bad idea in the first place.
And what was the market share of IRIX and Solaris then versus the market share for Linux now? I bet Linux is a lot bigger now than both IRIS and Solaris were together then.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I use Linux almost exclusively. I've been a huge Debian fan, and lately I've been using Ubuntu, because I *like* the name. And, it's a damned good distro.
Ubuntu (and the most recent Fedora, apparently) are significantly better than MS-Windows. The standard interface is cleaner, it's much easier for new users to figure out, and it's generally a more pleasing experience. The applications are perhaps a different story, but I have my doubts computers have done anything to help productivity for most of the things people think. (I believe most office suites have destroyed office productivity. I've had to help people figure out ass-useless things like inserting goofy graphics into a memo to think we weren't better off with Selectric typewriters and Xerox machines.) Using MS-Windows itself is painful.
OS X is a horse of a different species, temperament, and hue. It is, like NeXTStep before it, a pleasure to use. It is easy, consistent, beautiful, simple, and efficient. Many of the applications written for OS X also possess those traits. We are *finally* back where NeXT left off in 1993.
I still use Ubuntu. Why? Because it fits my philosophy and general outlook. I enjoy it. I like to see Linux and associated project progress. I'm an optimist, and I believe Linux and the associated project will one day surpass even OS X. So for me, there's Ubuntu (or Debian, or any number of other Linux distros.)
For everyone else in my family, there's OS X.
Why? Because I don't like supporting them. With MS-Windows, I'm constantly fixing their damned systems, or helping them figure out the most trivial systems administration tasks. With Linux, I'm constantly installing some new piece of hardware, or telling them where to find a piece of software in the "add/remove software" utility. ("Ooo, I just bought a webcam!") With OS X, there's no fixing the system, because it's never broken. Hardware just works. (There have been a few exceptions, but not nearly as many as with Vista; and I've had to work hard to get some hardware installed on XP, as well.)
In general, OS X has three major advantages over Linux: looks (obviously), software installation (the OS X software installer is *nice*, though it seems to lag behind Debian in package management), and single-user desktop administration.
That being said, I think I'd rather administer a network of Linux boxes rather than a network of OS X machines. Of course, that's probably just because I *know* how to lock down, manage, and control a network of Linux boxes. It might be just as easy and flexible under OS X, if I took the time to figure it all out.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
To each his own, I guess...there are after all people out there that actually like plain rice cakes.
There's a reason Bud's the number-1 selling beer, and it ain't 'cause it's good, because it most certainly is not good.
It's because it's all some people know. Try introducing a Bud guy to a good beer, and you'll hear words like, "It's too bitter," or, "It's too thick," both of which mean, "It has flavor." (Yes, while "watered-down bear urine" is a flavor, it's not a good one.)
Same thing with Folgers. There are a *lot* of people who actually drink the stuff. (Here's a shout-out to my Dad.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
A lot of fanboi-ism is based on the same drive that makes people root for a football team. "Hell, yeah, the Bears are gonna take the Superbowl!" (Superbowl and Bears are both football things, right?)
I'm definitely a PS3 fanboi. (I love the Wii, too. It's *fun*! Mostly I just want to see the XBox die the horrible, bloody, faintly embarrassing death it deserves. Die, XBox, die!) I'm also, to a certain extent, a Linux fanboi. (I recommend Macs to anyone who asks my advice, though. Why? Because I'll end up supporting the damned thing, and I end up helping MS-Windows users a *lot* more frequently than I end up helping Mac users.)
So, as a Linux fanboi, I really wish to see my team take the Superbowl. I know the stats, and I can use it to defend my hopes and desires. Linux does, after all, hold the record for rushing. And if you try to defend the pathetic record of MS-Windows, I'll club you over the head with my Heisman trophy. (Okay, technically it's not *my* Heisman trophy, it's OJ's. He's a Linux user too. Don't piss him off, or he'll go all Sweeney Todd on your ass.)
Really, though, there's a certain amount of economic inevitability with it. As the commoditization of the operating system drives the per-unit cost toward zero, the only way to make money of the OS is to use it as a value-add (gah! I can't believe I just said that!) to hardware (Apple's approach) or to give it away expecting nothing in return. Eventually, this is what Microsoft is going to have to do, in order to maintain sales of MS-Office and their various server products. (Notice the $3 crippled version of MS-Windows offered overseas. This per-unit cost is *significantly* closer to $0 than the $100+ retail cost.) So really, they will expect sales of other products in return, but the net effect is the same: a near-zero-cost OS.
The problem is that it's not just the operating system. The entire software stack is getting the free software treatment. The only question is, can this development model sustain itself for all pieces of software? If so, Microsoft is in for a world of hurt.
I mean, that's assuming they even make it to the play-offs this year. Their offense is looking kinda weak.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
You should care because, not only is it years old, but it wasn't true then, either. It's still not true. Lordy.
I've got Firewire and USB2
It was a few months ago but the cheapest modo with built in Firewire and USB2 was more than $100, there were some for less but they were missing Firewire and a Firewire card was more than $50. When I got the Linux PC it only came with 256MB so I also bought a 1GB card for about $90.
800GB hard drive
The HDD was only 40GB so I got another one that was 750GB for between $200 and $300, I don't recall exactly how much it was.
2GHz Dual-core CPU
The cheapest CPU I saw was about $80, a 2GH Celeron D if I recall right.
After pricing all the components I realized it was cheaper to just get the prebuilt PC. I'll admit that prices online such as at Newegg may of been lower but I can't see them being that much lower. And I have a problem buying something like these online, I want to look at them before buying and I want a local brick and mortar store I can take something back to if there's a problem with it.
I'm just saying macs are really expensive
For the past few years now Mac prices have been comparable to Windows PC prices. Macs have of been overpriced in the '80s and '90s but that's no longer true. The problem with Macs, which is a marketing problem, is that Apple doesn't offer that many Mac lines. If you want a desktop or tower that's expandable then you have to get a Mac Pro, which starts at $2500. If you just want a consumer model that's not expandable there's the iMac, which is an all-in-one and starts at $1300 if I recall right. Or you can get a Mac Mini for $600. But then you need to get a keyboard, monitor, and mouse as well unless you already have them. Since most people who replace their computer will keep the monitor, people tend to keep monitors longer than computers, someone can save there.
However Apple doesn't have anything that's expandable and upgradeable for less than the Mac Pro.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The fact that you can't copy and paste more than text reliably between applications is killing Linux on the desktop. What kind of ass backwards OS can't handle that? Oh, and not easily being able to install 3rd party applications is laughable to. Sure, if the app you want is included with the OS or is in some kind of repository it's easy, but if not, enjoy having to compile it. LOL. Linux is a farce on the desktop.
The available "desktop" environments on Linux seem to largely be trying to reproduce an environment that's more like Windows desktop/application centered approach than like a traditional user-centered UNIX environment.
This has the advantage of familiarity, but it does raise the question of why the average user would be attracted to a poor copy of Windows (no matter how good it is under the hood) that's more of a hassle to use and also suffers from a shortage of applications.
1. Ogg is just as available on OS X as on Linux. It's a third party plugin, but then so is EVERYTHING on Linux when you think of it.
4. What kind of "hacking" are you doing on Linux that you think doesn't involve being a coder?
Adobe clearly has decided that it isn't worth the effort porting PhotoShop to Linux. And since Linux software development has gotten a lot easier than Solaris/IRIX development used to be, difficulty of creating a Linux version can't be the issue. So what are you getting at? What do you think is the reason they aren't doing it?
I was arguing Adobe should release Photoshop for Linux. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if they were working on one. It took more than a year for them to develop and release Photoshop for Intel Macs once the Intel Macs were released. And it's only been lately that Linux has become a viable platform for the average user.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Those who claim that the Linux growth is more impressive because it is more than Mac OS X's growth, think of this:
Let's say I write an operating system and I'm the only user. After a few days, there are five people who use my OS. This is a 500% growth within days! Why wouldn't you admit defeat of every other OS out there?
Basically, what I'm saying is that the percentage of growth means nothing if the amount of users altogether isn't significant.
Steve Jobs owns your sorry asses.
Yes, there is some technology behind the license. (Though there hasn't always been. More on that in a sec.) The current trademark holder is X/Open, who will sell you a license if your OS passes a bunch of compatibility tests. For obvious reasons, systems that started out as forks of the original Bell Labs source tree don't find it too hard to pass these tests, and they've all gone through the process. But you don't have to use AT&T source to use the trademark. You just have to pass the tests and pay a fee. Any OS, no matter the origin of the source code, is eligible.
It would be perfectly feasible to create a UNIX[TM] distro of Linux. Spend some money knocking out the little incompatibilities that separate Linux from "real" Unix. Then spend some more money to pass the tests. But no Linux vendor has bothered to do this. Why? Because it's expensive, and nobody gives a shit. How often do you see Sun or IBM touting the fact that Solaris or AIX is "real" UNIX[TM]? It's just a minor compatibility issue.
Only Apple fanboys care that OS X is "real" UNIX. You might think that developers would care, but if there are any applications that require strong UNIX[tm] compatibility (I'm not sure there are, but perhaps there are some I don't know about) would be targeted at servers, not desktops. Apple does sell a few servers, but it's not their bread and butter.
A developer targeting a desktop (which is mostly what OS X runs on) mostly cares about the GUI. Hey, guess what? OS X uses a different GUI API than all the "other" Unixes!
(Don't bother mentioning that you can get X Windows for the Mac. No sane developer who wants to target the Mac marketplace is going to use any but the official Apple APIs.)
Note that the UNIX[tm] wasn't always available on this compatibility basis. A long time ago, I worked for Zilog and Convergent Technolgies, both among the first companies to sell Unix boxes when the OS became commercially available. We did not have the right to say that our Unix-derived OSs were "UNIX[tm]". This wasn't a compatibility issue: AT&T wanted to keep the trademark for its own products.
This led to some weird situations. At Convergent, our 68010 port of Unix was called CTIX. (Basically System V, with a bunch of BSD features.) As I said, AT&T wouldn't let us call this puppy "UNIX[tm]" — except that there was one system that we OEMed through AT&T, that was sold under their label. On that system, "CTIX" was officially "UNIX" despite being the same OS!
Bottom line: the difference between Unix and Linux is not specified by any software person. It's specified by the lawyers. Does anybody here take their word on these subjects as gospel?