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Ubuntu To Pay for Upgrades To the Free Software User Experience
jcatcw writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, is using his millions to improve the Linux user experience, hiring people to work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE. He had doubted that desktop Linux could ever equal the smooth, graceful integration of the Mac OS. Now, between the driving pace of open-source development, and Shuttleworth's millions, it might be happening. Why not? After all, Mac OS itself is based on FreeBSD. Desktop Linux's future is starting to look brighter."
Speaking as a FreeBSD user I don't appreciate it.
Mac OS uses a modified Mach kernel and some of FreeBSD's userland stuff, but that's it.
Noone cares if you like it or not, but it IS based on FreeBSD, like you just freakin said, right here. If you find that disrespectful, then you need to check the damn license. Now if you try to say that the Mach kernel was not FreeBSD, you are only partially correct, as it was developed solely as the replacement for the BSD kernel, and much of its codebase was integrated into FreeBSD, not the least of which was 100% of memory management.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
It might not be Ubuntu's fault that Flash crashes but it definitely is Ubuntu's fault that it is being released with very common software that crashes, similarly, it is Ubuntu's fault that it isn't trivial for some people to fix the issue.
[alk]
Your point is moot. Microkernels are dead for sometime already. For simple reason that they fit no niche. And if they fit - it is so narrow niche which falls out of general market.
On the point, Mac OS X uses microkernel. But only for simple reason to sync two kernels: NeXT kernel (heavily hacked IIRC BSD4.3lite) and FreeBSD (further development branch of BSD386/BSD4.2).
Mac OS GUI is essentially port of NeXT Step. All the fancy stuff you see on screen is based on improved specifically for Mac OS X NeXT frameworks. All APIs have "NS" prefix for the reason.
Now FreeBSD appeared for sole reason to ease new platform adoption and provide developers with familiar environment and tools. Apple didn't wanted to go the way of M$ and reinvent everything (and they had no money for that at the time) so they simply took existing OS and integrated that into Mac OS X. Brilliant idea IMNSHO (especially if compared to all possible alternatives).
Mac OS X has two kernels. And they are glued together by simple microkernel, which IMHO (never really bothered to check) would never classify as microkernel on book of real microkernel developers. It is micro only by its size and number of functions it performs. I can say for sure that drivers are not separate processes - as well as OS services - all that makes the Mac OS X not a microkernel OS.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I'm not sure what system you are using but in Ubuntu, the flash plugin is not included out of the box. Firefox will prompt you the first time you try to play a flash movie. Additionally, there is another fix (installing libflashsupport) that does not require to wait for Adobe. There are fixes, there are work-arounds, however, it seems Ubuntu prefers to leave it broken. I'm sure there is a political/legal reason involved somewhere. My original point is that I wish part of that money was spent in addressing whatever that root cause is.
[alk]