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How Apple Killed the Linux Desktop
An anonymous reader writes "Klint Finley discusses Miguel de Icaza's thoughts on how OS X killed Linux on the desktop: 'de Icaza says the desktop wars were already lost to OS X by the time the latest shakeups started happening. And he thinks the real reason Linux lost is that developers started defecting to OS X because the developers behind the toolkits used to build graphical Linux applications didn’t do a good enough job ensuring backward compatibility between different versions of their APIs. "For many years, we broke people’s code," he says. "OS X did a much better job of ensuring backward compatibility."' This, he says, led developers to use OS X as a desktop for server programming. It didn't help that development was 'shifting to the web,' with the need for native applications on the decline."
Because nothing beats Linux for package management. Miss not having a repo of open source at my disposal; the App Store will never touch it.
You mean you miss something like MacPorts?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
At the mercy of Apple? It's amazing how much anti-Apple bullshit gets modded as "insightful".
Let's not forget Homebrew. Homebrew does a nice job of packaging programs that coexist with the versions of prerequisite programs that are included in the OS X system files.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Linux doesn't do well as a Desktop OS.
Dang. I've been doing it wrong for 13 years. Thanks for letting me know.
1. Support 3rd party hardware. Apple and Microsoft are willing to let companies make drivers for their hardware and put their own license on them
2005 called and wants its argument back. It's not absolutely perfect, but Linux hardware support is generally excellent these days. Outside of niche devices virtually everything works great. WiFi was a particularly thorny problem for a few years, being both widely problematic and obviously very important due to the situation with a few widely-used chipsets, but that seems to have ceased being an issue.
2. Consistent UI. People get stuck, they try to find instructions the instructions need to be consistent with their system.
Meh. People who aren't knowledgeable enough to figure things out on their own use Ubuntu, and there is plenty of information out there for Ubuntu.
3. The little features matter too. Time to put your system to sleep and wake up. Does that keyboard light work, How quickly can you connect to a wireless network. Does your screen leave artifacts floating around, consistent Copy and Paste.
Umm, everything you just said works great for me, and has for many years, on many machines. And not just on the high-end ThinkPads I've always used; I've installed Ubuntu for people on low-end Acers and e-Machines, and everything just works, at least in the last 3-4 years.
Either you've had some exceptionally bad luck or your experience is out of date.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
. I eventually did an in-place reinstall of Snow Leopard. XCode never worked right again; I'm getting a new laptop soon and you can bet MacPorts / Fink will be on my short list of software to avoid.
Well, you fucked up, didn't you? Rest assured, it wasn't MacPorts that hurt your install, it was you. MacPorts installs all it's ports in the /opt directory... and touches nothing else. You can't just reinstall the OS over top of XCode and expect things to still work... you blew away XCode frameworks when you did that. XCode comes with an excellent and comprehensive uninstall script, you should have used that first, and then tried reinstalling XCode. Reinstalling the OS just proves to everyone you had no idea what you were doing. If you do reinstall, a clean install is always preferred, and, it goes without saying, a reinstall of XCode is par for the course.