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OSCON 2008 Roundup
An anonymous reader writes "Infoweek wraps last week's event with Inside The OSCON 2008 Conference, which pulls together interviews with Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin, MySQL's Zach Urlocker and Sam Ramji, who directs Microsoft's Open Source Lab. Best quotes: 'We will make a significant attempt to elevate the Linux desktop to the point where it is as good or better than Apple,' from Shuttleworth; and 'If I would start a business tomorrow I'd do it in the netbook marketplace. I'd build a dead-simple $200 device that targets sports fans, women over forty,' from Zemlin." We discussed Shuttleworth's better-than-Apple proposition while OSCON was going on. Update Jamie noted this OSCON Summary Video that might also be worth your time.
I will tell you why apple has better eye-candy than everyone else, and it's because of Core Animation. If you haven't seen it, you seriously need to look into it. It is everything you could want in an eye-candy library, and makes doing cute little things simple.
For example, when you do a search in a textbox or browser or something, OSX not only highlights the text, it makes it jump out for a second (stretch then shrink). It is really cool. I'm sure it annoys some people. It could be done on linux, but it would take a couple hundred lines. With core animation, it takes 10 or 15, and then because of the modularity of the whole OpenStep GUI system, it is easy to pass that capability into other programs.
Until Linux has a similar programming system, it will be hard to give it the same eye candy. Think about it: suppose I am trying to set up some effect on a windows machine. I know it will take a day or so of coding, so I am going to be careful to set it up and plan well before hand. If it turns out nice, I'm going to feel pretty good.
Whereas with core animation, if I suddenly think of something cool, I can just try it out. If it looks good, then great, if it doesn't, I can tweak it or throw it out until another good idea comes up. And you don't have to be an expert, it is pretty simple once you get it. So even the B-rate programmers can come up with this stuff, and the non-graphics programmers (documentation is still pretty horrible, however). That is cool. In fact it is one of the coolest things I've seen in programming in years.
Qxe4
Macs don't "just work".
People try them because they are told they "just work" and they pay highly for the privilege. When they discover that they have been lied to they are assured to "stick with it" and once they are heavily invested they are afraid to pull out because they don't want to lose that investment. Then they try to enlist other people so they don't feel so abnormal.
In other words, it's a cult. And if you find that too hard to believe, keep in mind that the leader of this cult is Steve Jobs. If you can't see that he is a cult leader then you're already lost.
How we know is more important than what we know.
apple may be a cult... but linux is a debilitating addiction:
http://xkcd.com/456
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
This just is flat out wrong.
This is like claiming that Apple has such polished desktops and product design because they have really good artists and industrial designers.
It is the management culture at Apple that makes those things happen and the people doing it are just the tools they use. And the same goes for Core Animation and the rest of OS X's UI and imaging technologies.
Just take one look at the visual abortion that is KDE 4.1:
http://www.linux.com/var/uploads/Image/articles/142661.png
Core Image isn't going to do anything to make that UI nightmare any better. There are fundamental problems that go far beyond the rendering tech used. There is a complete lack of even the most basic UI design concepts that have been developed over the past 20 years. Font rendering and layout problems, colour usage for UI elements, shadowing and light source consistency just to name a few of the most glaring errors.
A year from now KDE and Gnome will be just a train wreck of UI elements with some more random bling thrown in a continuing futile attempt to 'prove KDE/Gnome is ahead' of Windows and OS X.
Core Animation would do nothing to help the mess that is KDE/Gnome. It would just add additional pointless bling.
I totally agree with you. I just started hacking around with Cocoa, and I am pretty blown away by how elegant it is.
Objective C is pretty amazing, too. (I couldn't speculate about whether developing for Cocoa with Java is fun or not).
It's a total cliche, but it's true: You only get one shot at making a good API. If it has warts that you want to get rid of later, be assured that millions of developers will have written code that depends on those warts.
Yeah it's basically due to the easy modularisation of the apple API due to Cocoa (objective-c). THat makes programming for mac so simple. Linux has an equivalent to this in Gnustep/Etoile with Objective C but it is lacking developer manpower. I am convinced that with a lot of developers backing gnustep/etoile it could easily replicate the mac experience on linux and surpass it.
From your answer I can see you have never used Cocoa. A house-framer with a 12-oz hammer isn't going to have to work twice as hard to get stuff done as one using a 21-oz hammer. The tools a person uses are extremely important. A person who is tired from fighting all the time with the GUI-toolkit is not going to have the energy to be creative about how it looks. The GGP had a better point: it is not enough to just create 'prettiness,' it more importantly has to be functional. And that is where you get the double win with openstep: not only is it easy to make pretty, it is easy to make usable. If you so desire.
Qxe4
Don't hold your breath:
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/catastrafont.html
A few more years Linux fonts will suck in an equally but completely different way.
Actually it's both. Without good managment, the project will go every which way like an ADD child with multiple personalities. Then you get things like feature bloat, inconsistent UI and general visual clutter. I could probably add to the list as well. But without good engineers, you have an inflexible UI API that developers don't want to deal with, and end up with less 'flashy' apps. And without good artists, your project will make the users' eyes bleed. No one group is significantly more important than the others. If any of them fail, the project will be majorly set back.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Yeah, I agree, it needs a lot of work. It will happen, let me tell you why. Microsoft is going to be out of the picture (even their stock-holders have no faith in them: check their stock price). So what is left? OSX. Imagine you are Dell, HP, and Lenovo. What are you going to do if you can't push OSX, and Microsoft is dying? You start pushing Linux. Maybe this won't happen, but it isn't an unreasonable scenerio.
And it can be done. Each one of the problems you have listed can be overcome, and furthermore OSX has showed how to solve a lot of those problems. It's going to be a lot of hard work, but it can be done. And incidentally, I don't even think Interface Builder is that great. It gets the job done, but the latest version annoys me.
Qxe4
We're not talking about the people who "just like it", we're talking about the people who claim it "just works". It doesn't just work! The fact is that for the vast majority of people who get on a Mac for the first, second, or even 20th time, they damn thing doesn't "just work" it doesn't even "just kinda work". What it does is anything but. So stop speaking shit. I challenge everyone who has never used a Mac to go to the Apple Store and try to perform the most basic of tasks.. hell, try to switch from one maximized application to another. Enjoy the learning curve. They don't.. just.. work..
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you're going to troll(?) at least do it in metric please!
"Anonymous Coward" is very well known in the MacOS programming community.
What exactly doesn't "just work" in your estimation? How are we defining ""just works"? If you take a Mac from the Mac store and sit down and use it (i.e. don't install a bunch of garbage on it before you figure out how to use it), well, most people find it pretty intuitive. You say you have problems switching between "maximized" applications -- which applications are those? Most OSX programs do not start up "maximized", and usually switching applications is a matter of clicking a window behind the front one. Or clicking the red or yellow dot in the upper left hand corner of most windows and then clicking the window behind. Most people figure this out pretty quickly. If that's your best example of Macs not "just working," it seems to prove the opposite case -- Sit down in front of windows and figure out the same thing (a lot of Windows apps actually DO startup "maximized"), or a linux machine (which could look like anything depending on the window manager installed and the programs opened). Of course a Mac doesn't "just work" in the sense that no computer "just works"; the human being always needs to do something to the computer, but MacOS X does seem to make it easier to figure out what the human is supposed to do next.
I would disagree, while there is a (shallow) learning curve, when I plug in a printer it "just works". When I select a random network printer at my school it "just works". Yes, this is because these drivers are all installed (and is an option). The only driver I've had to install myself was NTFS3g, which normal users don't need. What part of OSX doesn't just work for you? Yes, it has its kinks and oddities (why is there not a damn simple paint program that comes with it?), but most of the differences between OSX and Windows can be learned in an hour or two. Please, if you are going to say it doesn't "just work" use some examples. My experiences obviously differ from yours. But then, I'm one of the guys who bought it because I liked having a nice UI on top of a *nix terminal.
The dock is different from the taskbar, but it is pretty easy to pick up. My 83 year old grandfather picked it up in about 2 or 3 minutes. Couldn't most users?
They use Macs because "they just work".
I constantly hear this quote from Mac fanboys but it doesn't make any sense. The implication is that other computer systems don't work. I'm on a machine that dual boots Windows and Linux, and guess what? It works!
And you know what else. Nearly every server in the world is on Linux or Windows and they work too. And most businesses are running Windows or Linux and it works there too. And finally Linux and other non-Apple OS's are running nearly all of the embedded systems in the world. And what's most interesting about this is how microscopically small the amount of these people who think Apple "just works" is.
If you take a Mac from the Mac store and sit down and use it (i.e. don't install a bunch of garbage on it before you figure out how to use it), well, most people find it pretty intuitive.
And this is different from Linux how?
If you plop down an Ubuntu system on someone's desktop, in my experience, they find it "pretty intuitive" as well. Actually, many users prefer the Ubuntu desktop because it's easier to find and launch the apps that they need; nobody has has had any complaints about it.
or a linux machine (which could look like anything depending on the window manager installed and the programs opened).
That's a bullshit comparison. You need to compare desktop operating systems, not a kernel and a desktop OS.
Furthermore, OS X can also "look like anything" if people choose to theme it.
My main problem with Linux right now are the damn fonts... They look like complete crap without heavy aliasing. This should *NOT* be the case even with the extra font packs installed.
You probably didn't set up the right anti-aliasing in preferences; that can happen on Windows and OS X as well. The OS doesn't know what you need or want.
When you use X or power management features or bluetooth..etc its not long before something starts going haywire.. at least thats been my experience.
Did you buy supported hardware? If not, that's like complaining that when you install OS X on your PC, things don't work.
It's not a Linux problem when Linux doesn't work on unsupported hardware, and that simply will never get fixed.
Compared to RDP there is no contest in terms of network resources consumed by remote sessions. X11 is a pig.
That is by design: X11 and RDP are designed for totally different bandwidth/performance/functionality tradeoffs.
Furthermore, modern X11 applications are not written or tested for remote usage anymore. The equivalent of RDP in the Linux world is VNC, which works very well.
Give it a few more years and I'm sure Linux will continue to make great strides on the desktop... IMHO they really do just need to kill the damned X11 system alltogether.
You don't know what you're talking about. Microsoft and Apple had to abandon their idiotic attempts at window systems and Windows UI Server and Quartz now have the same architecture (asynchronous client-server systems) as X11. X11 is still the better system.
You should check out enlightenment's edje library. That same animation could be done in 10-15 lines of simple, non-C code (so that designers can do the animations, not programmers)
The nipple's intuitive. Everything else is more or less hard to learn.
E17 (i.e. Enlightenment) has been promising a lot of this kind of thing for a while now. Of course, the Hurd, and DNF also promise a lot as well...
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
For the same reason we should care about what Christians believe - cause they are delusional and accepting irrational belief as "ok" is bad for all of us in the long run.
Their belief in charity and community are just a ticking time bomb. I heard the other day they were giving out free food and clothing to the poor! This must be stopped.
EOF
What's X11-like about the Apple windowing system ?
Apple: down 23% fom their 52 week high Microsoft: down 30% from their 52 week high VA Linux: down 66% from their 52 week high
Why look at VA Linux, when they don't even sell Linux anymore? Take a look at Red Hat, which is down only 14% from their 52 week high.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
What are you going to do if you can't push OSX, and Microsoft is dying? You start pushing Linux. Maybe this won't happen, but it isn't an unreasonable scenerio.
It is a completely unreasonable scenario. And where do get off saying that Microsoft is a dying company? Here's their FY 2008 earnings release. Tell me again how $60B a year is a dying company. Perhaps you were talking out your ass?
I have used and administered Linux systems for a decade now. Whenever I try to setup a "Linux" desktop such as Ubuntu, there is always a long list of problems that would never, ever afflict a Mac or Windows system.
Here are some of the current problems:
- NumLock light is opposite the NumLock mode (this on a dead-common 104-key setup). We see a very high degree of spurious breakage of what should otherwise be very solid functionality.
- Right-click in Firefox 3.x sometimes executes random context item without even displaying the context menu. This bug remained in the 3.0 GA release (and I doubt Mozilla cares all that much, as they are actually not fond of "Linux" as a PC platform).
- Certain non-GPL drivers keep disappearing whenever a system update happens to include the kernel (an essential design flaw of the Linux kernel, though a workaround should be possible).
- Video settings keep getting 'reset' after system updates. The user is then often deprived of a workable UI and they are told to edit xorg.conf from a CLI! Bizzarrely, Xorg and the others will supply example GUI apps (like a clock) but won't write a GUI to manage the display. The 'experts' at the Xorg and Xfree projects also have no concept of a usable 'fallback' mode for a desktop display, say switching to XGA res and framebuffer mode when things go wrong. Supposedly this would be "up to the distro" to take care of, but "the distro" doesn't have the comprehensive knowledge to make an integrated fail-safe display configurator (or not a good one).
- NetworkManager in the Control Panel having a markedly different feature set than the seperate network manager that resides on the "systray"... and that stamp over each others' settings particularly when Wifi is used. This is disgraceful.
- Poor support for a wide range of devices, large and small, internal and USB: TV tuners, modems, Wifi, etc. Even video cards are still a problem.
- Audio blockages in inexpensive hardware. Don't rely on calendar alarms, nor softphones, nor audible status indicators because they may turn out to be inaudible - you never know. And ever it shall be through last year's fashionable audio architecture, and probably next year's too.
- High power consumption on both desktops and notebooks. On desktops, starting many programs will spin-up all of my drives 'just because'. And why a file dialog that pops up with my home directory needs to spin up all of my drives is beyond me. It certainly isn't needed on other desktop OSes. I can't tell you the number of times that changing the display res or doing a system update has remove the power-saving option from xorg.conf. Also, many other examples of low battery life on laptops.
Other observations:
- File browsing is very screwed-up. The browsers keep displaying data through differing schemas, often within the same program, and they have differing ways of describing a file path. Even when they stick to a URL format, the 'handler' part can be made-up and non-sensical, conflicting with other parts of the same utility for accessing the same resource. When file dialogs from other apps are brought into the picture, the confusion becomes severe.
- Drivers: There is no standardization and logo-branding effort to address the devices problem. Are hardware vendors supposed to put a penguin on the box if their product is compatible? They don't really know, and no one at the Linux Foundation or the major distros is going to approach them about this simple but essential practice. There is also no ABI, but I won't "go there".
- Drivers: The group that is responsible for adding and maintaining most device support isn't interested in providing a simple way to find out whether a particular device is supported. Because, you know, that would be interfacing with end-users... Ick.
- Apps: Try doing tech support for a "Linux" application. I have done it for a living! There is literally no way to predict what sort of UI you will have to guide them through or which supporti
That was pretty much X's only really good idea.
Many other technologies you take for granted today were pioneered with X11: mixed desktop and 3D graphics, client/server 3D graphics, separation of window management from applications, theming, 3D look-and-feel, remote GUIs, pixel accurate graphics, backing store policies, server-side extensibility, window server media handling, mixed direct screen buffer and desktop interfaces, and tons more.
And technologically, X11 and the desktops built on it are lightyears ahead of both Windows and OS X, even if you don't realize it.
X11 is still where the innovation happens; Windows and Macintosh are merely commercial imitations.