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Gnome Founder Miguel de Icaza Moves To Mac
TrueSatan writes "Miguel de Icaza, via his blog, has explained his gradual move to the Apple Mac platform. 'While I missed the comprehensive Linux toolchain and userland, I did not miss having to chase the proper package for my current version of Linux, or beg someone to package something. Binaries just worked.' Here is one of his main reasons: 'To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros, and the incompatibilities across versions of the same distro were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl.' Reaction to his announcement includes a blog post from Jonathan Riddell of Blue Systems/Kubuntu. Given de Icaza's past association with Microsoft (CodePlex Foundation) and the Free Software Foundation's founder Richard Stallman's description of de Icaza as a 'traitor to the free software community,' this might be seen as more of a blow to Microsoft than to GNU/Linux."
Now he's going to try to clone all of Microsoft's clones of other people's technology for the Mac.
Lets see how far that gets him.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
And never looked back. Linux maintains its place as my workhorse, while I rest in the comfort of whichever other OS I feel like using that day, typically OS X or iOS. SSH and SFTP fill the gaps.
you can run it on your PC; Apple doesn't like it but you can do it
...but sometimes you just have to Get. Shit. Done. Part of getting shit done is using tools that Just Work.
Yes. Freedom. Openness. Yadda. Yadda. All good things. I agree with them. I also need to ship code. That's the difference between my project and HURD. Sometimes, I just don't care if the tools I use were made from crushed unicorn horns and children's spleens.
So he is leaving the mess he caused?
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
I'm starting to think this guy just likes to read about himself in the news. I think his announcement is pretty funny - Linux Mint is a shining example of Linux as a functional desktop OS. It's still not as polished as OS X, but I do find myself using OS X less and less these days.
Maybe he's just butthurt that Gnome probably doesn't have much of a future. I mean, the older versions are great if, uh, your graphics card stops working or something. . .
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
he would infest Linux with Microsoft poison
I'm not keen on .NET either, but that's quite overdoing it.
As for "allowing" anything, Apple lets you sue whatever language you like to produce iOS binaries - MonoTouch is one of them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You trade one slavery for another. The Cult of Macheads will mod me down, but Apple owns you as much as Microsoft does. Icaza trades one set of commercial business ecosystems for another.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Not legally.
Been running Linux for 15 years now, and it's better than it ever has been. I guess this guy just lost whatever zeal he never really had in the first place for free software.....Read his blog post and it seems like he's just bored or lazy, or both. Oh well......
As in, he's screwed it as much as he can. Now, it's time to screw up Apple.
Either that or he's just a complete plank who is self-aggrandising by stating he's going Mac.
I did the same about 10 years ago for the same reasons. Oddly enough it was the people at the local LUG with their iBooks & MacBooks that made me realize something was amiss.
bullshit, it's a very incomplete .NET 4.0 missing huge parts of the framework. and let's not forget Moonlight, now dead.
incomplete system like that is fit only for a trainwreck of a project, like say GNOME3
I'm still not happy about his whole, "Qt isn't OSS so I'm writing GNOME to compete with KDE" move back in the late '90s. Though I appreciate Ximian, I fail to see why he's even relevant these days.
I was a HUGE Linux fanboi in the late '90s through about 2010. I agree with him, however, that Linux just doesn't work as a day-to-day end-user platform anymore. As it is, I'm mostly using my Nexus tablet and Galaxy phone for tasks, and then resort to Wintendo when I need.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
It doesn't matter his affiliation or if he likes or even works for MS or not. Judge the statement on it's own, and it's true.
It's something Linux geeks have trouble admitting, but it is the sole reason Linux usage has not skyrocketed in adoption. If the LSB worked anthing close to how it was envisioned, developers would flock to the platform and then so would users.
At the moment, people use the distro they like and defend, while non linux geeks use distros like Ubuntu or Mint, which are the only platforms commercial developers tend to target.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Apple's loss is Linux's gain.
And the full Java SDK is open source.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I left Linux for the same reasons for the most part.
Of everything he mentions, the only one I've had problems with is the audio. My Wifi is rock solid, and I've had no performance problems on my thinkpad, and at work I'm using a 5 year old, cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow for Windows, but it runs quite well with Kubuntu including 3D desktop effects.
But audio is a bit of a problem, I've started to kill -9 the pulseaudio daemon before starting up my audio player, otherwise the player just hangs while waiting for the audio device. This happens on my desktop and laptop with different audio hardware so it's not just one buggy driver.
Pretty much all of the software I need is available as an Ubuntu package, so fragmentation/incompatibility hasn't really affected me.
It's ironic that he complains about fragmentation, since he's largely responsible. Gnome is pretty shitty, but numerous distributions waste effort either supporting it or for some reason using it primarily instead of KDE which is a lot better. If it weren't Gnome all Linux desktops would have long ago standardized on KDE and we'd be better off for it.
Free Software Foundation's founder Richard Stallman's description of de Icaza as a 'traitor to the free software community,'
Well, if I wasn't before, I'm firmly on de Icaza's side now.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I liked to tinker with configs and settings and libraries, but now I like my home computer to just work. They cost more, but are worth it. I still have a unix command line and most of the open source tools but have access to commercial software as well.
Yummy KoolAid.
founder buys a mac and doesnt look back
Nope. In fact, I think it made it worse.
And they are still advertising Moonlight even though it is a dead project (and they admit it!). Can someone PLEASE turn off this site*! http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/
One of the biggest problem with Linux is people abandoning projects and not removing them from the net/distros. You were wrong, you've admited it, but you leave us the mess.
*In all seriousness, the few Silverlight websites redirect their Linux users to this page where it almost never works for them. This of course makes the Linux experience go from just "Unsupported" to building up the hopes of the users and then Unsupported.
Why surprised? He wants to do to Apple what he has done to the Linux world.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Its really simple. You can f around with linux endlessly or you can get tired of it and move on to something more interesting. Obviously, Miguel is getting older and just doesn't want to f around with linux anymore. The Mac (for now) just gets things done. Thats not to say that nobody should f around with linux, obviously we need those people to do that, and eventually they'll get it more and more solid. Bless their little hearts. But in the mean time, other people want to f around with other things and not have to constantly be f'ing with linux.
Its like cars (or motorcycles)...
When your younger, you don't mind the beater car that you have to repair all the time. You dream of the day when its perfectly restored, but you never get there. One day you just realize, you have other things you want to do, so you buy a new car that just works. If you're lucky you can now afford one because you stopped f'ing with linux and started f'ing with something else that you can make a good living at. And if you're really lucky, you pick up some pile of junk to work on solely as a hobby and without the stress of wondering if the f'ing thing is going to get you to work on time.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I found myself moving from Linux back to Windows 7. Turns out I didn't actually care what fanboys proclaimed Linux could do if the software I wanted to run didn't exist in Linux. Or that my USB3 ports were busted in Linux due to a regression in the kernel that no-one bothered to fix. Or that there aren't any GUI file managers that are as quick at displaying info (and enough details including bitrates and resolutions) that are capable in Explorer.
Shame. But I think I've rid myself of the fanboy stink and use whatever the fuck I want now.
Raenex is a dickhead
And it sleeps in a drawer.
I would put the fault on the fragmentation of packaging distributions like Fink, MacPorts, Homebrew, etc. Also videogames that supposedly work on Mac usually just do not even start because they are not compatible with the hardware.
Please refrain from attacking de Icaza for these simple reasons.
Like Stallman, de Icaza has donated countless hours of organization and programming time to Linux. Neither got rich as a result. Politics aside, Linux is about superior engineering, even if only as a side effect. Because of the efforts of these two individuals, among many others, Linux is now the most popular operating system on the planet. By any stretch of the imagination, they were and are victorious. Android is closing in on a billion users, but regardless of what Google's marketing materials may tell you, Android is a Linux distribution, and GNU and GNOME have been perfecting Linux distributions for over two decades.
I understand that Android does not ship with much GNU or GNOME software, but GNU and GNOME are what built Linux. Without either, the foundations upon which Android runs would never have accreted enough functionality to even think about running a smartphone.
As mostly non-rich people, often not closely allied with specific companies, we don't have publicists or agents. We don't come off as polished. We don't have speech writers. Forgive us for seeming offensive, rude, obnoxious, conceited, full of ourselves, or some other adjective. We're people, and as engineers we're trained to traffic in the honest truth. Once you meet us you'll like us, for the most part. And even if you don't, enjoy using our software. Contribute if you like.
I was with you until you got to the last two words. I think you should replace "registered republican" with "politician." Hypocrisy is not exclusive to the Republican party.
You trade one slavery for another. The Cult of Macheads will mod me down...
Choice of computing platform is not slavery. Liking things that work is not a cult.
...but not good enough as it needs to be. This will always be Linux' mantra.
Miguel de Icaza is a contrarian. That doesn't bode well for Apple.
On reading Miguel's blog post I found myself thinking about a character who showed up on Gilligan's Island who was perpetually lost in his biplane. His nickname was "Wrong Way."
Ever notice how Miguel always seems to get involved in chaotic situations and then flees them by taking the wrong train, ending up in the middle of nowhere? Why does anyone even listen to this guy?
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Can't speak for Icaza but for me personally, the trend towards making the Linux desktop "easier to use" has had me running away from the platform as a Desktop.... the problem is if you are going to make a GUI(and as a result make command line configuration more difficult), that GUI better damn well work. And at least with the desktop managers I have tried, it doesn't. So I find myself constantly trying to figure out what they changed from the previous version(that isn't working in the current version), and of course constantly changing where things are located etc. doesn't help.
If you are going to change the desktop experience in order to make it "easier to use", you damn well better get it right, or else not only do you fail to capture a new audience, you end up alienating the current user base. That seems to be what Gnome has done.
For me personally I develop on a mac, and run my test and prod on Linux(I've tried OS X as a server, and ironically it seems to suffer the same problems as a server as Linux does as a Desktop, they tried to make it "easier to use", but didn't get the abstraction right and the result is a mess).
I was recently put in the unfortunate position of having to develop a PHP app, and I tried doing everything on Fedora 18 with Gnome, and.... that was just plain frustrating. The installer tried to be "easy to use", but often failed, the system got stuck in reboot but I couldn't figure out what service was failing because I couldn't get it to not show that stupid startup animation and instead show me the boot log etc. Eventually I got the machine booted and then just ssh into it from my Mac, much less frustrating.
Bottom line: don't make Linux "easier to use" by breaking a bunch of shit.
Monstar L
Mono was a pointless waste of time and De Icaza is a quisling turn coat. Apple deserves that worthless pile of donkey shit.
Lets see:
Miguel's contributions to Linux:
1) Midnight Commander
2) Contributions to Wine
3) He worked with David S. Miller on the Linux SPARC port and wrote several of the video and network drivers in the port, as well as the libc ports to the platform.
4) They both later worked on extending Linux for MIPS to run on SGI's Indy computers and wrote the original X drivers for the system.
5) With Ingo Molnar he wrote the original software implementation of RAID-1 and RAID-5 drivers of the Linux kernel
6) De Icaza started the GNOME project with Federico Mena in August 1997 to create a completely free desktop environment and component model for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
7) He also created the GNOME spreadsheet program, Gnumeric.
Your contributions to Slashdot:
1) Silly karmawhoring hatefilled anti-Microsoft rants on Slashdot
Who has made better contributions to the progress of Open Source?
Who are you trying to scare off with that?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
and no resurrection and that is joyful news!
I don't have any issues with Miguel, but I met him about 4 years ago and even then he was using a macbook with osx. Or maybe he was just a closet osx user and now coming out? Or he's just starting a fight?
To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros
So he chooses to get his hardware and software from one vendor. Okay thats very neat and simple but he could get it from Canonical as well, or one of the BSD projects.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
As I sit here on my MacBook Air running Ubuntu, working on Ceph (ie getting stuff done!) while browsing slashdot. I've tried OSX many times, and I keep coming back to Linux because it's so much *more* productive, especially when working on code. The only thing I miss is netflix.
So whatever. I still have a soft spot for Apple hardware, but I'll stick with Linux thank-you-very-much.
So close... you've almost achieved the near-mythical +5 Troll!
I use serveral operating systems frequently due to work (and it used to be my hobby). I appreciate OS X's desktop interface a lot, but I don't realy understand Miguel's justification that Mac "just works" in terms of package availability and the quality of the base system.
It's no secret that OS X's base is lifted from FreeBSD. Is Linux too fragmented and chaotic for you? Do you long for a complete and and integrated system base in a single source tree, backed by unified development effort? FreeBSD has that. It also has very high package availability (better than most Linux distros).
On the Linux side, I use Fedora. I never have any trouble finding packages for Fedora. The quality that gets put into the base system of Fedora also leaves little to be desired.
I don't fault Miguel for his choice. OS X is nice--it gets the job done. I just don't think OS X is really giving him something special that he couldn't have gotten with Linux, BSD, or even Windows. If he misses the development toolchain of Linux, he should go back to Linux; that's totally understandable.
I moved to a MacBook for the sole virtue of it being a well-designed notebook, but I have strong feelings regarding Mac OS's functionality and "administrability" when compared to linux distros. It bothers me that there is NO package system to speak of, and you basically have to scour the internet like a fool to find basic tools that are one apt-get away in Ubuntu. I mean, yeah, I know there's stuff like homebrew, fink and macports, but so far all of those gave me nothing but headache, for the sole reason they are third-party hacks not supported (or even acknowledged) by the builders of the system (i.e. Apple).
To top it in terms of silliness, he speaks of "the binaries just works", but he neglects to mention that you still have to look for them in really random places over Google - something that apt-get like systems have been doing securely for the last what, 10 years? I indeed find it very odd that, although there's only one hardware platform for the Mac OS to run, all those third party packaging tools I mentioned actually require you to COMPILE everything again; then you go to the Ubuntu/Debian world, meant to run on several platforms and there's BINARIES for just about anything.
I really want to know what this guy is on. Gnome was a great thing, and he let it rot into that sad piece of bad usability called Unity; then he started dabbling in the very proprietary, advantage-free world of .NET, and he just bows down to Jobs walled garden legacy? I don't get it.
Anyway, freedom not to use is one of the 4 fundamental freedoms, according to RMS. Nothing of value is being (newly) lost, so big effing deal.
I don't understand this thought at all. I run a mixed environment at home, and it all works pretty well. I have a FreeBSD ZFS server in the basement happily running AFP and acting as a Time Machine target. I also have it running CrashPlan in Linux emulation as a target for my friends, family, and Windows PC. The Windows PC speaks happily to FreeBSD via Samba. Firefox works almost identically on all three platforms, syncing passwords and bookmarks. OpenOffice works on all three as well. CrashPlan client runs just fine on two Macs and the PC. Even Apple proprietary crap like iTunes and Airplay runs across platforms. As long as you try to steer clear of single-platform applications, everything works together pretty well. It would not be a big deal if I suddenly had to ditch Mac or Windows (and believe me, Windows 8 has made me consider the latter).
The truth is, there is no "ecosystem" if you are careful in your application and hardware purchases. That MacBook will happily run Linux or Windows if you get disgusted with MacOS. That Windows PC will happily run just about anything if you get disgusted at MS. Keep your data in an accessible format, and you are golden when you switch platforms.
Besides, as a geek your friends and family depend on you to be an expert at anything with electrons. :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
After developing with Mac OSX for a year using the command line interface (i.e., lots of terminals), I found I needed some sort of ports-like package management which has its own headaches. After jacking around with seemingly never-ending updates to Ubuntu and it's resource hungry UI, I found Debian quite refreshing. Not on the bleeding edge, but this is a GOOD THING! Never regretted it.
You confuse choice with slavery. Some choices have masters. Some, like Linux and BSD, do not. They may have their own cults, drama queens, and idiots, but also leaders, contributors, and plentiful competition.
Some choices do not, and I equate *them* with slavery.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
...but what OS is he running on it?
/* No Comment */
Because you equate it doesn't make it fact. Slavery has a very strict definition and you're twisting of it does good for no one.
You must suck with computers. I have an eight year old 3.2ghz p4 that is running Win7 just fine.
I don't know if you read my post, but I'm not running Win7, I'm running Linux. I'm not the one that said it was too slow for Windows. I'm the one that said "it runs quite well with Kubuntu...".
"Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did not stop working, I spend three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers,"
Interesting, that is identical to the experience that I have with Debian. Even people on Arch don't need to "recompile the kernel to adjust this or that." But I hope he enjoys his Mac.
Penny - plain text accounting
so what?
What's the problem with that? Icaza is not a member of linux community since many years ago. He was an important fellow, but not anymore. Also, THIS IS A FREE WORLD, if he decided to change, he is completely free to do that. No problem, really. There always will be people, like me and *many* others, who enjoys the liberty of FOSS community. Everybody is free to use the OS of their choice.
I went the other way about two and a half years ago. I'm sure someone will tell me I was doing it wrong; I wouldn't be surprised if they're right. But I found the FOSS package managers for OS X incredibly painful to work with. I remember it taking at least a day of mucking around with compiling and pre-built binaries just to get the tools I needed for web development. It took me ten minutes to get the same thing working in Ubuntu.
Still, there were plenty of headaches: sleep mode, hybrid graphics and synaptics. Even though I had been avoiding dependence on proprietary software since activation chased me away from Windows, I had to give up really useful Mac tools like Scrivener, Tinderbox and Screen Flow (I still boot the Mac when I need to do a screencast). I used to be a programmer. Now I'm a social scientist. These days I do mostly reading and writing, not programming; the loss of Scrivener was a hard blow. I smoothed the way by writing my own tool.
OS X was significantly better for all but the most ordinary end-user applications. My area of research is the online commons - copyright, FOSS, creative commons - stuff like that. I could make my peace with Apple when they were only a pipsqueak tyrant. When they released the iPad and it was locked down, I simply couldn't stomach it anymore: and I was tying myself to an ecosystem that could be progressively enclosed by Apple. A friend of mine - a social scientist, not a programmer - switched to Mint, proving it was finally doable. Also, XMonad is pretty cool, and my search for a decent editor finally led me to take vim seriously.
Linux isn't perfect, but it's come a long way since I first used it for development in 1993. It really is usable - and sometimes excellent - for everyday work. Using a platform is supporting that platform. I wouldn't tell anyone else what to do, but I'm content to use this one.
Eventually you'll want to do something on the platform though, and will find it difficult-to-impossible. Maybe it'll be that you want a different choice than the crappy low-end video card and the marginally less crappy "high-end" video card. Maybe you're finding your "high-end" video card is cooking itself and decide to attempt to install an OEM heat sink and cooling fan. Good luck with that. Maybe you'll want to do some Java development. Maybe you'll start hating how their directories are laid out.
Little things will start to rub you the wrong way, more and more. One day you'll find yourself formatting over the aluminum monstrosity with a current Ubuntu distribution. But you know, it'll be fun while it lasts. So enjoy!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Icaza can still use gnu tools on the mac; is the point that he's gonna be a Mac pro-booster now or something? While I kind of get his gripe about package dependancy woes its nothing that outshines the frustrations I've felt on both mac & windows with regard to other aspects of theose respective os'. I also think the dependancy issue hassle can be mitigated or even nullified with one really simple change, I don't understand why the aptitude develooers don't do it, but anyway, it seems a little showy to me. Is it simply another headline grab?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Just because you disagree with me, doesn't make it not true.
Each of these platforms has enormous degrees of vortex, along with inducements and outright shock troops to keep you "in the herd".
Platform slavery is well known. I don't, in using it, diminish the horrible context of human slavery. Human slavery is a different subject for a different day. This is about Icaza going from Microsoft to Apple with a blush on his face. This isn't about Dr MLK, or Selma, or Chinese girls in Boston brothels.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The worst thing about Linux and OSS is Miguel de Icaza.
Linux gets shit done for me just fine. The only significant issues I ever face are poor hardware drivers and UI quirks. The former of which can be mitigated by sticking to Linux-friendly hardware. The latter is a no way a productivity stopper. As far as productivity goes, I have found no more productive system than Xubuntu 12.04.
Linux runs everywhere. You more or less have the freedom to choose whatever hardware you like. It's an open platform which allows anyone to go in there and modify it to suit their needs. It's a stable platform written collaboratively by people all over the world. As, as far as a platform to invest on, Linux is a great investment as both a user and a developer because it's not subject to the same market forces as Apple or Microsoft OSes. If Microsoft or Apple were to decide to impose a productivity hindering draconian system, what can you do to stop them? You've invested all of your time and energy mastering their proprietary system. If they make bad decisions, YOU pay for those decisions.
Freedom is why I stick to Linux. Freedom is why companies should build their platform on Linux. Freedom is why Linux is the future of desktop computing. Apple might be sexy now, but it won't last.
he never really got the unix philosophy and wanted to make linux something else.
Given the reasons cited, Windows would have been a wiser choice. Macintosh computers may be flawless when running the latest software on the latest version of OS X, but things quickly go awry when you want to run a newer application on an older version of OS X (where a .1 difference matters) or an older application (less of an issue, unless you use really old stuff). On top of that, running Unix applications on top of OS X is a mess. That's mostly the developer's fault, since they seem to be targeting Linux these days, but it doesn't improve the end user experience.
I made the same decision, for pretty much the same reasons (plus pretty hardware) in 2007. It's nice being able to just do what I want to do, rather than faffing about fixing things or chasing dependencies to get something halfway there.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
How'd you get AFP (Apple, not Andrew) to run on FreeBSD?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Until Oracle decides to say fuck you.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Lol. In Linux or free unix desktop land you're a slave to software dependencies and chasing down half-assed solutions to common desktop application type tasks. On my mac, I spend a total of about 1 hour per 18 months on operating system upgrades. I've been there, done that, and will GLADLY pay the software licensing cost to get what I want done with a minimum of fucking about.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Good riddance! Can we please ban Mono now?
Wait, so, the guy who basically pushed 90% of the bloat, incompatibility, and other such madness I've ever seen in Linux is leaving because of the bloat and incompatibility?
Dude, not cool. You made that bed, now lie in it.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Violation of the DMCA.
Dude's got more legitimate cred than ESR ever had really. People just can't get their heads around the fact that a Linux guy can like elements of other software ecosystems.
seven cats and one dog. Four laptops running Mint 14, 1 netbook running Mint 11, HTPC running Mint 14 KDE and second htpc running Mint 14 KDE. AND guess what, they all just work after install. Weird how you can't get it to just work.
but now I like my home computer to just work. They cost more, but are worth it. I still have a unix command line and most of the open source tools but have access to commercial software as well.
Yummy KoolAid.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
So true. Seeing Gnome and Ubuntu sink is very depressing. If you want to break compatibilities for the sake of change, fork it. Don't mess up the original.
You are right. The dems have done their fair share of damage. It is just right now, I think about the damage with our deficits and the republicans blaming everybody but themselves. That is exactly what de icaza does.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
An Apple tattoo on his ass and a black turtleneck......
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
What did they say about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel?
I would love to see Apple prosecute an individual who has a legal copy of OS-X they installed on a PC under the DMCA.
It would be a great thing to have happen. It will never happen.
Time to open up OSX and allow it to be installed on any computer.
A tired response to a tired post. Apple is a hardware maker not an OS maker. They only make OSs to support their hardware. This explains the price difference between Mac upgrades and Windows upgrades. They make their profits off the hardware. They could potentially offer a version of the OS at a higher price that could be installed on PCs but people like you would complain about the price difference. They can't win this argument so why play the game? You want open there's Linux. You want Mac OS then there's Macs. You want everything your way, life sucks and get used to it! Christ when I was in my teens computers ran off Cassette drives! Be happy. 20 years ago Macs cost the same as a car. Cars got more expensive and Macs got cheaper and you're still complaining! Your average smart phone has a 100X the power of my first computer. My iPad would have probably been a super computer when I was a kid. If you were thrown back in time to the 70s or 80s you'd think you were in hell. Just imagine the 60s, as in pre calculator days when computers ran off punch cards. You're living in a time of miracles and you're whining about running OSX on hardware it was never designed to run on! My expartner bought a Mac clone off some one that claimed it worked faster than a Mac Pro. The damned thing was slower than a Mac Mini and crashed constantly. I made him take it back to the idiot that sold it to him. Is that what you want? A slower than hell OSX that crashes constantly? I'm sure you'd just blame Apple for not supporting PC hardware better!
netatalk is in ports. It's an AFP implementation. It worked well with Classic and old versions of OS X, but I've had better luck with Samba mounts in the last few releases. However, you still need it for TimeMachine.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
How the frack is this a blow to Microsoft? I thought he switched from Linux to MacOS (and by extension Mac hardware).
I guess that's why he was amazed by having a laptop that had a working sleep/wake and WiFi. Many Linux distros are still terrible to this day on many laptops.
And here I thought that I was getting desktop-ready *NIX environment with a UI layer that wasn't a crufty piece of shit pretending to be something it's not. That I can still run native X11 apps on. Next to native MS office, indesign and photoshop. Without vitualization. And VMWare Fusion for situations where that's not enough or for when I want to stage a VM-based server before I deploy it.
I'll pay a couple bucks extra for that at work. And build a Hackintosh at home.
I love BSD, Linux to a degree and even X11. They are great tools. For a desktop workstation, OSX spanks Linux.... it just costs money.
Miguel deciding that there's nothing wrong with Finder that "a few hacks couldn't take care of", here and there.....
I got a Mac Mini about 6 months ago to work on software for OS X which also runs on Linux and Windows. My software uses Qt and I figured that I would try using OS X as my main computer and connect to Linux and Windows using ssh, vnc and/or rdesktop. I gave OS X about 6 weeks and it was OK for many things. I did not find myself relieved that things "just worked" on OS X. Instead I found that quite a few programs I used under Linux were difficult to get to work on OS X. I had troubles with kile and ksudoku. I had problems using X applications over ssh to Linux. Apparently OS X supports the connection for about an hour or so. Overall I found it mildly frustrating compared to Linux, through better than Windows.
A little later I tried Windows as the main machine using vnc to connect to Linux and OS X. This was marginally smoother than using OS X as my main system, but after a few months of trying alternatives I am back to using Linux as my main system using vnc to connect to OS X and Windows.
Now I certainly don't care if Miguel likes OS X better. Whatever works best for him should be his choice. OS X could have been totally Linux friendly if Apple wanted to be more cooperative. If they had, I might have been a convert. As is, it is not nearly as easy to get software to work on OS X as Ubuntu.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
No, you're just devaluing the word slavery by using it in that ridiculous way, because there's already a term for what you're trying to describe: vendor lock-in.
I hear what you're saying about Getting Shit Done. I have that fantasy, too, and occasionally let it play out. Although I've been a mostly-Linux guy since the 90s, I've been jones-ing for some sequencing software that would "Just Work" that I could run on a platform that would "Just Work". Bought Ableton Live and a Mac Mini to run it on. (That's well over $1000, by the way.) If there's anything that should "Just Work", it should be this.
But I almost immediately tripped over the same old minor glitches I've seen on every other platform I've ever used. In this case, the problem is that Ableton perversely installs itself in such as way that only one user can run it (though the license is for the whole box). So, I dutifully tracked down the arcane procedure for making it available system-wide (just as you get with Linux apps by default, I might add), and a couple hours later it's doing what it should have done in the first place. Yes, it works, but it doesn't "Just Work".
As the other commenter answered, it is in ports as netatalk. Combine it with avahi (zeroconf) for advertising the service and it works great as a Time Machine target. I've tested it on a restore, and it does work - though you have to mount the volume manually through the terminal for some reason.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I use it for server work all the time, personal and professional, but I left it 6 years ago when OS X finally matured to the point where I preferred it.
It's a blow to microsoft because for years he has been microsofts top man inside linux. They just lost their most famous saboteur. Not a huge loss, of course, since saboteurs work best when they arent known as such. Miguel's name will live in infamy as the man that killed MC, and I am pretty sure that no half-baked linux project would let him in the front door at this stage, so I doubt it's a real loss, but still somewhat symbolic.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
But vendor lock-in is objectionable because it does, to whatever extent it succeeds, make you a slave. So the OP wasnt nearly as far wrong as his replies would make it seem...
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Linux makes a shitty desktop operating system.
That depends on what you're doing with it. If you're just playing games, you might be better off with an xbox or whatever, but I've been using Linux perfectly happily on the desktop since the mid-'90s.
Just because you believe it really really strongly doesn't make it true, either.
Miguel did not write Midnight Commander. He took over as maintainer of an already written and widely used file manager, loaded it down with crud to the point no one else could understand it and it was barely usable, then quit supporting it. The man deserves no credit for MC whatsoever, unless you mean for killing MC.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
... but it only boots Ubuntu. I have a 2008 MacBook that belonged to my fiancee. It was slow to the point of unusable on OS X Leopard, even after upping the ram to 4GB. Finally I gave her my Windows machine which she loves and took her MacBook. I installed a Raring daily on it and it's working like a champ. The hardware is fine, but the Mac OS is crap. It's slow as hell (I've owned a MacBook and an iBook in the past). I guess maybe if I had a Pro it would be faster, but why would they even release low end hardware that doesn't have the horsepower to run their OS? Doesn't make sense to me. So anyway, here I am using a Mac, but it's straight Linux for me (unless Ubuntu decides that they aren't getting the features they want from Linux and switch to a BSD kernel... yeah, I went there).
Smeghead every day of the week.
Jump to Microsoft. Tell me how well Microsoft plays with Apple.
Again, this hasn't been a problem for me. Apple ships with a built-in Samba so it offers itself up to Windows quite nicely. It can also mount Windows shares. iTunes runs on Windows, so all of your iOS toys still work. Stay away from the iWork and iLife stuff, and you are good in a move to MS.
Jump to Google; they're trying desparately to wean you from either, and into their cloud clutches.
I'm a heavy Google user. Gmail supports IMAP and works well with just about any email program on any platform, Calendar supports ICAL and works well with iPhone and Android (duh!), Google Drive works well with Windows and Mac (and even some basic functionality exists in Linux)... what service is causing you grief?
Most of my geek support today goes towards making stuff talk and solving the mysteries of platform incompatibilities.
Well, amen to that!
Actually, if I had to pick one thing that I think has consumed most of my geek time, it's hard drive failure... so now I just install CrashPlan on people's machines and point it at my basement server. Sooooo worth the couple hundred gig, and no more drives in the freezer. A close second is people who move iTunes to a new PC wrong and "lose their library"... ugh.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You forgot to tell him to get off your lawn.
You must suck with reading comprehension. Honestly, some people...
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
With windows 7 and 8 you can download and install applications later without the need for internet connection or deal with software dependency issues since all the libraries are packaged already in the .msi or .exe, unlike with linux which needs the internet to download updates for the .deb software package to install and work correctly well some of the software not all if you have the latest distro.
I ran team fortress 2 steam no multi cpu rendering(all my six cores run at 86-98% usage) natively in ubuntu 12.10 with the latest amd radeon 6570 drivers and my gpu fan started going berserk vibrating my whole freaking chassis so I had to stop. Gaming under windows on the same machine have no gpu fan issue. Gonna download and try team fortress 2 on windows 8 see if it makes my fan go bonkers. Ubuntu 12.10 does run sluggish at times probably because my cpu runs at 800mhz and rarely jumps to 2700mhz only when running gaming, but the majority of time the performance is on par with windows 7 and 8. If i set my cpu in the bios to run at it's full speed at 2700mhz or with turbo at 3200mhz than ubuntu 12.10 runs smooth consistently. Laptops and netbooks running linux(even xubuntu and lubuntu) or even windows 8 are hotter than windows 7.
All firefox versions including the latest freezes up especially when viewing images in google and brings windows 7 and 8 to a crawl but in linux it's actually stable no issues. Every OS has their pros and cons. I know few ppl including myself who have used OSX and seen crashes and freezes.
Yup. Representatives from my technology company of choice just knocked on my door. They are coming to chain me and send me to the cotton fields.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
I believe the legal situation is, you can buy OSX and run it on a PC if you install it for yourself, but you can't start commercially installing OSX for other people.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Mac is just a stop along the way.
a person could hold the opinion that Microsoft's .NET 4.5 is state of the art, but how could a partial implementation of the 4.0 version (of three years ago), missing crucial libraries, of the framework be a state of anything but half-assedness?
I am just surmising that you meant RMS based on the "other ecosystems" comment? He is a different person than ESR. You know that right? Seriously look it up.
Aside from that little thing... It would be arguable if he has indeed "got more legitimate cred" but arguing with an AC is just not worth it. Raymond's past projects list is nothing to scoff at. To speak contemptibly about the work of Stallman would also be disingenuous merely because he, umm, eats toe jam and is loved madly by the crazies on /g/. Come to think of it for you to have any validity to what you said you would indeed have to be thinking of ESR - and then only arguably. Damn now I am arguing with an AC. Fail.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
There may be some truth to this, but I think the bigger reason is that people like new challenges after a while. Once you know your craft, you know the holes better than anyone. People leave projects all the time and they sometimes just need some fresh air. Some even leave industries.
Look at Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. Look at Steve Jobs. Look at the past open source maintainers for gedit which basically changes every year.
How many software devs do you see stay on a single project for their whole lives? How many would actually WANT to?
He could run Linux and then run OSX as a virtual machine and it would actually run faster than running it on the crippled Mac Hardware.
The title doesn't say he switched to OSX. No one would care. It says he switched to Mac.
And the PC is objectively better than the Mac hardware. You can run OSX on the PC. I know because I've done it. You can run OSX as a virtual machine and it runs faster because it can run on PC hardware. Who the hell would run OSX on Mac hardware? That is suspect for someone with as much knowledge as him.
He makes moves which look and smell like the moves of someone who truly hates Free Software or just someone who doesn't get it.
If your goal is to use OSX because OSX works better then you'd run Virtualbox or even VMware and then run OSX on that.
Why would you run OSX on the Apple hardware unless you actually believe in Apples philosophy and if you believe in that philosophy then you're opposed to Free Software because it's the exact opposite philosophy. Apple releases crippleware hardware, and they lock you in with their software like Itunes.
The guy who launched GNOME as a counter to KDE is complaining about "the fragmentation of Linux as a platform"? Tthe guy who made the decision replace GNUstep (which was the GNU project's official toolkit/framework in 1996) in favor of GTK â" he's fled to the Mac? He's got the chutzpah to say, "Linux just never managed to cross the desktop chasm"â"without admitting that his decisions are a major cause of that failure?
Good damn riddance.
So I cannot make sense of him switching from the superior PC hardware to the inferior overpriced crippleware of Apple.
I've owned an Apple laptop and it just stopped working one day. Unlike a PC I couldn't just open it up and repair it. It's expensive to repair, required special screwdrivers just to open it up, it's harder and more expensive to upgrade and in many cases it's limited in how much it can be upgraded.
It's better to run a PC running Linux on state of the art hardware and then load up a VMWare virtual machine. Someone with the money of that guy should have enough money to build a state of the art Virtual Data Center. There is no reason why someone with his expertise and money would be using standalone platforms anymore because he should be using his own personal cloud at home, his own personal datacenter, and run virtual machines of any OS he wants to all on the PC.
So why would he run Mac hardware? Mac hardware can't do as much.
Interesting not so much about Miguel but for the many "Score 5: Insightful" comments that mirror my own experience. I tried to make Linux my do-it-all system but all the updates and incompatibilities, particularly with the desktop side of things, drove me batshit crazy. When OS X became mature enough to see what it was going to be I switched to Mac for my desktop and Linux for my workhorse/server. Not that either is anywhere near perfect, but it fits my needs and there are times when you need "It. Just. Works." so you can indeed get shit done. Unless Apple takes OS X over an iOS cliff (which is where it appears headed, unfortunately) I think Linux on the desktop isn't going past the hobbiest/technogeek user as far as installed base is concerned (Yeah, I know, your old grandmother rolls her own kernel patches. The rest of us have work to do.)
Linux could have dominated the Desktop in 2006 or perhaps even sooner but he was pushing Mono and talking about how Microsoft was just better. He kept trying to morph Linux into another version of Windows. Then when it had all the problems associated with Windows thats when he goes over to OSX?
At least he's not involved with Android.
Thanks to Miguel De Icaza.
Not legally.
You can run it on a Virtual Machine and be running Linux at the same time.
Isn't that what he always does?
The goods don't always erase the bads.
The best damnation with a faint praise I have seen in a long time. Well played, sir!
Considering Apple is getting out of the computer business, this is of no real relevance.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"I disagree" is not necessarily "shill". I think you'll find a trend amongst older users (in their 30s or older) that are $ rich and time poor. As opposed to teens and early 20s who are time rich and $ poor.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
So, "apt-get install ..." was too hard for him?
OS X does have better cross-version binary compatibility, but its dependency management is nonexistent.
This here's an ad-hominem attack. How about you fight the argument, not the arguer?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I transitioned away from SunOS and used Linux from 1993->2009. Big chunk of life.
In 2009, really out of curiosity, I installed a "Hackintosh" partition on my Thinkpad. Within four months I had a MacBook Pro and was using Mac OS.
The basic reality is that as a Linux user on some regular N percentage of days, I would sit down to do work and end up doing something else: fscking around with Linux. Download, tweak, read, peer at code, compile, plug, unplug, read some more, write some code, tweak again, blah, blah.
It was a regular occurrence. Every now and then I'd simply sit down to work on work and instead, hours later, would find myself having worked on Linux. I generally got the problem solved. Often it resulted from a "yum update" that did unexpected thing X to my userspace. Sometimes it didn't—it just emerged.
Some stuff had never worked well—sleeping, for example, or audio and streaming video—and I never spent much time on them in Linux. I didn't miss them until I'd had them working perfectly well on the Hackintosh partition—a system that was "hacked" together and that wasn't supposed to work well at all.
By the time I'd bought my Macbook Pro I'd already bought and installed Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, DevonThink, and a bunch of other software on the Mac partition, and had installed MacPorts and many GNU utilities, giving myself a command line that felt almost exactly like the Linux one. But fonts worked. Audio worked. Power management worked. Streaming video worked. Commercial applications worked. The apps all had a similar look, feel, and user interface behavior. The visual designs were cleaner and more professional, something I'd never given a second though to in Linux, but which I later realized had been distractions during visual scanning of screen space.
It was when I realized that all of my recent work was done on the Mac partition and I hadn't booted into Linux in a month and really didn't want to unless I had to that I decided to get the Macbook Pro. I thought I'd dual-boot Linux on it, but that soon went away. I still have a Parallels VM with Fedora on it here somewhere, but I don't think I've even run the initial yum updates on it after installing. It's just an unused VM, years later.
Linux had a lot of promise as a desktop OS once. But now, with the desktop on the wane for many common consumer uses and Mac OS and Windows trading blows as equals, I don't think Linux in its desktop form will ever be much more than it is right now. Android is another story—thought my experience with android has been less than perfect.
Too bad, in a way—when KDE 1.0 came out, it seemed to me that Linux was headed for global domination. I used it and loved it and was more productive that I could possibly have been with any of its contemporary Mac or Windows alternatives. But by the late '00s, the roles had reversed.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
You're right. Vendor lock-in dispenses with the unpleasant moral messiness of human trafficking, and goes straight to the more profitable involuntary servitude part.
What? You want to demonstrate your freedom and not renew your annual license for ${expensive-relational-database}? OK, fine. We're exercising the right we gave ourselves on page 427, section 18, paragraph 62, to terminate your license immediately and refund 50% of your final 2 months of prorated license costs. Shut the database down and take your website offline immediately, or we'll sue you for statutory damages that start at $300,000. What? You don't want to terminate your license after all? Well then, you'd better pay for next year's license, then... and by the way, the renewal cost just went up by 50% since you allowed it to lapse (even though we're the ones who terminated it 2 months early), and there's a $18,000 license reinstatement fee unless you agree to maintain your license for the next 10 years (with early termination fee equal to 80% of the license fees for any remaining years).
Miguel is not wrong... the lack of sufficient standards amongst distro's was and still is a major stumbling block in individual user adoption and still gives linux that 'slightly unkept feeling about it'. After a while even really intelligent people can get tired of tinkering with unix/linux and just want something to work out of the box. OSX just works and has most of what linux can offer to the individual user, and often times with a muc,. much better user/programmer experience.
For Big Data, the 'new' big iron (read clouding computing)... linux is great. If you are a company the monetized internet traffic, performs big computations, etc., and can fund people to make linux do your laundry, then linux is 99% upside... pretty much no downside because you'd already have to code most of your own shit no matter what platform you selected.
It really isn't quite the same case with linux as it was unix in the 80's, but there are some similarities... particularly for the companies attempting top [obtaining] profit from linux. Back in the 80's, IBM, HP, Dec, SGI, etc. never agreed to standardize API's and figured they could carve up the market betweenst themselves... along comes DOS, windows, with it's cheaper price and working GUI, with half decent documented API's... and Unix went out to pasture. And then, as now, l/unix developers pretended like the lack of standardization was not a problem... well it was then, it is now. Difference is, linux is free so people are relatively happy to live with it. Far too simple a history, I know... and Linux does not have to be relevant to a majority user based (it is general open source and not for profit).
Note: I would term myself a linux and programming dabbler at best. I dabbled with Gentoo, linux from scratch as my more 'hard core' distro quite some time ago and then kinda dropped out of the user base... i dabble with a bit of C and python from time to time now. In the past 10+ years, User experience on linux has seen little improvement, in my opinion... linux is still just as cool and fun to tinker with as it ever was, though. So don't take this as bashing. Use of 'bash' intended... the world needs a lot more bash, or was it hash?
So, all things being equal, he chose wisely by selecting the one that's easier to use then.
I agree. No need to hate on De Icaza. It's his choice but I don't really get why now and not years back when Linux was more of a struggle.
Technically, Mono is great. Unfortunately, Miguel completely failed to establish it as a Linux standard by antagonizing much of the Linux community and failing to assuage licensing and patent concerns. Frankly, as an early Mono adopter and supporter, I feel let down by him. Let him be happy with his Mac; I won't miss him.
I've been using Linux exclusively for ten years, and yesterday wiped it off my laptop in favor of Windows 7. I had previously been a long-time Ubuntu user who had switched back to Debian because Ubuntu became keylogging spyware. But Debian is kind of crappy compared to what it once was (before Ubuntu stole their scene) - Gnome 3.4 on sid?? And then a system update broke my whole system irreparably and no-one could tell me how to fix it. So enough of this ham-radio computer hobbyist Linux enthusiast business. Feels good. It's nice to be back with Windows, everything working like it's supposed to, Dolby audio, Netflix, etc. etc.
I used to configure my desktop PCs to dual boot Windows and Linux. I started doing so in the mid 90s. Some tasks were just better performed in a unix environment. I didn't care about the politics of linux, I just wanted a unix environment. In more recent years I've found that Mac OS X fills this role quite well, for both traditional unix tools and whatever FOSS software I want to run. Some folks seem to erroneously equate FOSS with linux but configure; make; make install seems to work just as well under os x for what I've tried. Mac OS X just makes for a better desktop environment. I still use linux, but its running on the headless servers in the closet. I have linux VMs to start up in VMWare should I actually need Linux but I don't think I've started one up in a year. At the time I had to write something that would be deployed on a RHEL box and I started the project at home under CentOS.
Been running Linux for 15 years now, and it's better than it ever has been ...
Yeah, its better. I haven't had to manually enter my monitor's operating frequencies to setup graphics under linux in recent years. ;-)
he can't.
did miquel get fired from his linux gigs _finally_ ???
osx makes me belch, but I guess a gnome guy would like it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
There are quite a few men that discover when they are getting older that they are gay. That they either were gay the whole time and just didn't realize or admit it, or that they became gay along the way. Some leave their families to live with a partner of the same sex, some just buy a Mac. Nothing wrong with that if it makes them happy, I guess.
MOD PARENT UP!!!
You must be an IBM customer.
Or was that Oracle? It's so easy to confuse the faceless masters...
Every time I try to use it, I find the function keys are fucked up in my terminal emulator.
Otherwise I'd use it constantly. I adore the Norton Commander-style interface. I've never found a better file management interface.
My ThinkPad cost about as much as a MacBook and I certainly think of it as a PC. I could have bought another PC at a third of the price, but I like the features of the ThinkPad. MacBooks have similar aspects that actually make worth three times the cheapest PC. There's nothing wrong with that.
Pretty much all of the software I need is available as an Ubuntu package, so fragmentation/incompatibility hasn't really affected me.
Sums it up right there: for most people that is not the case.
Games, Adobe, MYOB, drivers for thingys, MS office/exchange stack for work, airplay/itunes (kill it with fire but hey lots of people use that stuff), etc.
" In Linux or free unix desktop land you're a slave to software dependencies and chasing down half-assed solutions to common desktop application type tasks."
Name a few. Seriously. I've used linux for ten years and never spent time "chasing down half-assed solutions to common desktop application type tasks."
Drivers for obscure novelty items don't count.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
Seriously, are you still spouting that bullshit? For the configuration Apple chooses to sell, they are very competitive on pricing. Ultrabooks are typically more expensive than MacBook Airs, and the very cheap ones have really shitty cases.
Or are you one of those assholes who like to compare a macbook air to a cheapie $250 netbook?
Mucking Foron.
DMCA only applies in the US to the best of my knowledge.
Seriously? Anti-enterprise is a bad thing now?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
No. http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macosx107.pdf: "The grants set forth in this License do not permit you to, and you agree not to, install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-branded computer, or to enable others to do so."
In 10.4, on the other hand, it's not explicitly stated, only implied: "This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time."
But vendor lock-in is objectionable because it does, to whatever extent it succeeds, make you a slave.
That's not slavery. It's more like a protection racket.
You could refuse to buy an upgrade, but as time goes on compatibility with your customers and contractors will become more and more troublesome. You could completely drop our software, but the transition could be expensive and you'll be even less compatible with your customers and contractors. Or you can just pay up.
Mac hardware sucks compared to the PC. A PC running OSX on a virtual machine is better than a Mac and cheaper.
Once you don't compare "cheapest PC" vs. "cheapest Mac", but "the Mac I want" vs. "a PC with the same specs, bought from a reputable company", the Mac hardware will beat most PCs of the same price.
A PC running MacOS X on a virtual machine is running unlicensed software. First, it is running a modified VM that you probably had no right to modify, second it runs an unlicensed copy of MacOS X that has just enough copy prevention built in to make it a DMCA violation.
Oracle can't retroactively take away the source code, so no. The parts that are free software will forever be so, and the other distributions can pick up development. Red Hat would probably love to spit in Oracles soup if possible.
-- Linux user #369862
You trade one slavery for another. The Cult of Macheads will mod me down, but Apple owns you as much as Microsoft does. Icaza trades one set of commercial business ecosystems for another.
Didn't he change from linux to osx?
The Gnome project was a disaster from beginning to end. It accomplished exactly one useful thing: Trolltech was forced to GPL QT. At that point, Gnome should have been promptly shut down, having accomplished its purpose, and Linux on the desktop would be much further advanced than it is. But instead we have this crippled zombie thing that shambles on and on. Somebody put a stake in its heart or something please.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I just read at least a dozen "but OSX just WORKS!!" threads, "I don't have to do anything to make it WORK!#@!".
Well, guess what. What you spend your money on is *REAL* *VOTING*; more than any election.
When you *VOTE* for shitty, evil Apple Business Practices (that would be ALL OF THEM), you're supporting and proliferating Evil (tm). They're worse than Microsoft, just without as many of your Billions. Keep feeding the beast and see what happens.
the Mac hardware will beat most PCs of the same price.
That's a bold claim, and one that doesn't hold up. The "Mac Tax" is quite a fiction by people who don't consider size, weight and build quality to part of the specs. But Macs aren't especially competitive.
Last time I was in the market, the two closest machines of interest were the Zenbook UX21 and the Macbook Air. Both were the same price. The Zenbook had near identical specs, except for an SSD twice the size and much better speakers.
I'd say that Macs are generally fairly competitive on price compared to similar PCs, but not usually beat.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Ultrabooks are typically more expensive than MacBook Airs,
That's also a wild claim. Ones with the same specs (like the Zenbook versus Air) are similar in price. The Zenbook usually but not always wins slightly.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Once you don't compare "cheapest PC" vs. "cheapest Mac", but "the Mac I want" vs. "a PC with the same specs, bought from a reputable company", the Mac hardware will beat most PCs of the same price.
That's true, but it's also not a very good comparison. The real test is to start with the specs you want, and then compare a PC from a reputable supplier and a Mac that most closely approximate them. The Mac you want will almost certainly have some features you don't need, as will the PC that most closely approximates it. Both are likely to lack some features you want.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I have a "funny" feeling Miguel probably turned his back on the community because of the zealotry and hate spewed from the community at large. Some of the comments AND moderation are embarrassing!
The GNOME Desktop at version 2 was great, I was a fan for many years and I'm grateful it exists. I didn't like KDE during that time (found it too clunky - just my humble opinion - I like it now!) .
Personally I think the "Desktop" as it stands today is bloated and way too complicated now and I say this in particular for KDE and GNOME. I'm currently using XFCE.
The Mono project was a response to Microsoft's "invention" of the .net platform where "all Windows software will be based on .Net". Potentially there would have been no way to write cross-platform software for Windows. Thankfully not much of a threat now. I used Mono years ago and enjoyed coding for the platform.
Miguel has started Xamian and the company offers cross-platform development tools which is great but I can't afford the $300 yearly subscription and Linux support for the "platform" is noticeably absent. A damn shame really. I would liked to have evaluated it.
Also, one of the main "features" of Linux is the existence of many distributions of Linux. I started with Slackware then Redhat, Mandriva, Debian, gentoo, Ubuntu and now Porteus. They've all served me well over the years because each one filled a particular need at the time.
I'm no zealot and I use what works for me. Generally I use Windows for gaming & Linux for everything else. I'm considering buying a Mac because I want to develop stuff for iPhone (I actually own an SIII) and don't like the idea of Microsoft locking down the bootloader on a "PC". I know Apple do this too but at least their OS foundation is based on unix.
Miguel is entitled to his beliefs and opinions. He may have made mistakes but nobody is perfect.
he speaks of "the binaries just works", but he neglects to mention that you still have to look for them in really random places over Google
He will have a first hand experience to this when he will look for a simple text editor with syntax highlight :
I tried to find one, have installed two or three, but there're far from what we have in any Linux distro out of the box (usability and stability).
Oh! Wait, he will maybe pay for one of the store ? Good for him, but I won't pay just for being able to edit code...
Also: Did he noticed that pipe, backquote, square brakets, ... are not displayed on the keyboard? I suggest he googles the key combinations to get them, because they aren't mentionned in the system documentation... Or, if he has time, he can use the visual keyboard to find those combinations, pressing modifier keys until the required character appears somewhere... What a shame.
In a few years he will find out that he needs to pay to upgrade his OS because the new apps won't start on his otherwise functionnal system. New binaries just won't work.
Working on the Mac OS system is quite painfull for a developer, and frustrating.
The end key is driving one crazy: instead of going at the end of the line it goes at the end of the paragraph. Seriously who needs this?
Oh! And if the window management is so painfull to you, you can *pay* a small app that eases the process of arranging windows (this is not a joke, an Apple fanboy told me that). However you still have only a small corner to resize them, on their right only... What a shame.
I wish good luck to him, we will see in a few months how his coding productivity looks like.
How FUD like that gets modded "insightful" is beyond me (if this wasn't Slashdot). The largest things missing from Mono are WWF and WPF. Everything else is pretty much there, even relatively new features like C# 5.0 async support. WPF would be nice to have but it really ain't cross-platform thus it's loss is not that big of a deal since you can always use other Toolkits. With Xamarin being in charge the focus of Mono has shifted to cross-platform mobile development and you know what? It works great for that purpose. Doesn't look like a train-wreck to me.
Quote:
[...] "I did not miss having to chase the proper package for my current version of Linux, or beg someone to package something. Binaries just worked." [...]
I can agree to this to a certain extend. I am actively using Linux as my primary desktop since Linux 0.99pl14 came out. Having used/configured/compiled fvwm/olwm/olvwm/CDE/twm/piewm/wm2/AfterStep/Enlightenment 16-17/KDE1-4/GNOME1-3, thus I consider myself able to handle things quite well.
Whenever I (more recently, i.e. GTK2/GTK3) tried to install a new GNOME program I ended up updating my whole stack of applications breaking others on the way, having to fix them later on.
*This* never happened to me when upgrading or installing KDE programs. They are simply designed with a rather stable API and thus are much more forgiving of one not having the bleeding edge library "X" on ones system. Sure even KDE programs sometimes require one to update libs along the way, but the APIs for "older" programs seldom breaks.
So I can only agree with Miguel if he states that he needed to chase the proper package, which is, if at all, never available for your current distro (Murpy's law). But if GNOME (the project members) kept things more clean and stable instead of making major API changes while making minor library number upgrades the problem would never have occurred in the first place.
Eh, I really liked GNOME towards the end of its version 2 cycle. The Mac OS ness didn't bother me at all, I thought it looked great and was really easy and nice to use. I've recently started using a Mac for work, and I'm pretty disappointed at how unimpressive it is in comparison. The way OS X handles multiple desktops seems like a total regression.
If you want a really nice polished unix system that works and has all the shit you need for development and it's all on some of the best designed hardware you can buy then of course the Mac is your only real choice.
Windows isn't even an option and I suspect he's recieved enough hate for mono that the shine of Linux might be wearing off. Mono was stupid and he was being a tool for accepting a Microsoft technology but some people do taking their hate a bit too far.http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/03/05/2256243/gnome-founder-miguel-de-icaza-moves-to-mac#
Vendors *do* regard their locked-in customers as property. Very valuable property in fact.
You can observe the value reflected in the share price whenever enterprise software companies or products get bought and sold for their "installed base".
To think of it... DNA Lounge has too many unused time every week.
I should propose jwz to sell tickets to him saying his "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" line from the stage three times over the night, and nothing else happening in the club. The floor and upper level will be packed with people who use Linux for all their work. I will bring my camera.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
s/time/nights/
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
And, intriguingly, the install disk comes with a free set of "Apple labels" that can be applied to any computer.
After having recently purchased a Mac Mini i have had a number of problems with things not working as i would expect.
Simple things like .
Using a non Apple keyboard - unlike the keyboard selection widget in Ubuntu which "Just Works(tm)" (press a couple keys and voila). Even a Mac guru friend could not get OSX to use the correct keyboard layout. Even with various 3rd party tools and hacks still certain keys on the keyboard are in the wrong places. such as backslash and tilda.
The responses i get are "your not doing it right" - considering the Mac Mini was originally punted in such a way that you can use your own keyboard and mouse - it should "Just Work(tm)" - it doesnt.
File system support - certain filesystems on external USB drives cannot be written to by default - I've had to use third party - buggy drivers to enable this again - this is an area where I would expect OSX to "Just Work(tm)" it doesnt very well in this case.
iTunes - first time i plugged my iPod into the new mac into a virgin iTunes - it wiped all my tunes when it was supposed to be sync'ing up. No explanation why.
In the mac Terminal app the page up / page down / home keys were next to pointless - i had to hack a fix in place for this.
Using the mac ports system sort of feels dirty but i really miss "apt-get install packagename" - many software packages are not compatible with Mountain Lion which has led to frustration when trying to get things to work.
Lastly hardware support is really crap - eg: i have a USB midi interface that "Just Works(tm)" on ubuntu. I understand you need to install drivers on OSX (this was a surprise to me given that i was led to believe OSX "Just Works(TM)" of course the driver is not compatible with Mountain Lion.
So Macs are shiny and all - but if you want to go outside of the box "Just Works" does not apply - not for me anyhows!
N.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Actually, while there may be some things making it technically illegal, I think Apple have accepted Hackintosh.
With the release of Mountail Lion, it's no longer called Mac OS X, but OS X. This shows me that they are separating the Mac brand from the OS, which now (unofficially) runs on a lot of other hardware than Apple's Macintosh machines.
The only time they seem to take action is when people start trying to sell hardware commercially as OS X compatible. Or indeed sell anything which purports to get you a Mac on the cheap. They have taken *no* direct measures in their software to hinder installation on other hardware after switching to Intel. There's their TPM, and the SMC had to be faked / emulated, but those barriers were long since broken. Occasionally a release comes which breaks things momentarily, but these always seem to be honest changes, rather than (very) half-hearted attempts to thwart hobbyists.
It's a good attitude to the issue, imho.
Technically, Mono is great. Unfortunately, Miguel completely failed to establish it as a Linux standard by antagonizing much of the Linux community and failing to assuage licensing and patent concerns. Frankly, as an early Mono adopter and supporter, I feel let down by him. Let him be happy with his Mac; I won't miss him.
Mono was also a *massive* strategic blunder: it would have been far more sensible if Miguel had built an open source clone of the JVM instead for his Linux GUI efforts:
My observation at the time was that Miguel seemed to be over-excited by the (nice but superficial) language features he saw in C#, and completely forgot that the real value is in the *platform*.
Given de Icaza's past association with Microsoft (CodePlex Foundation) and the Free Software Foundation's founder Richard Stallman's description of de Icaza as a 'traitor to the free software community,' this might be seen as more of a blow to Microsoft than to GNU/Linux."
Does having a previous association with Microsoft automatically disqualify you from having a valid opinion? Shouldn't we be looking at what he is saying, as opposed to who is saying it?
Period. More than Windows in fact. Horrible UI. Can't get my head on what makes it so appealing to people? The 'Apple' logo on the side of their machine? Linux all the way! (Lubuntu)
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
I don't think it's very fair to say the Gnome project was a disaster. Sure, in the context of present-day desktop environments, GNOME 1.x looks pretty damn horrible now. But back then, comparing it to KDE (which, to be fair, was in some respects the more reliably functional interface) it was not bad. At that time, I really hated KDE, since it was so kfucking kluttered and kfugly.
I stuck with GNOME from 1997 until the end of the 2.x versions, since it did what I needed it to do reasonably well. Meanwhile, the early KDE 4.x releases were unusable. Sadly, GNOME 3.x has followed suit (and appears set to stay that way), while KDE has re-evolved itself in recent versions as a really nice, feature-rich environment.
Sorry, I have no sympathy for someone who was responsible for GNOME 3. As for whingeing about incompatibility of distros, just stick with one for bleeding sake! In my case, it's CentOS 6 (though Fedora 18 with MATE looks OK, it's just that Anaconda is so wretched on it) - 10 years of updates (more than Mac OS X), GNOME 2 (the best thing to come out of GNOME), System V initscripts (not the pain that is systemd) and the glory of GRUB 1 (10 times easier to manage than GRUB 2).
It's a rock solid setup that I think is the best "professional" Linux desktop out there today, which is why I use it both at home and work. Yes, I dual boot with Windows, but only to play games of course. Steam on Linux might knock that on the head once they get 1,000+ games rather than 100 or so they have now.
The way OS X handles multiple desktops seems like a total regression.
I normally refuse to say "This", since I hate the meme, but, well, this.
The way Apple carried on about their so-called "spaces" amused me tremendously, since the facility has been around in X11 environments since, err, not quite the dawn of time (I'm much older than that) but definitely in old versions of CDE, back in the early '90s.
but now he's moving to Mac OS X?
Why didn't he just work in Objective-C from the get go?
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.gnustep.discuss/msg/a11ebc20417db2c2
Reminds me of the MacSnobs who used to complain of my pointing out the advantages of using NeXTstep instead of Mac OS 9 and earlier. It kills me that Mac OS X was so watered down to accommodate such ignorance. I'd give my interest in hell for:
- vertical menu .pdfs will fail to print, or fail when being refined / pre-flighted)
- pop-up main menu set to the right mouse button
- top-level print, hide, quit and services
- not having to load Carbon
- to have Display PostScript (I never had an eps file which would display and not print --- it's wearying the number of times
- to have PANTONE colours at the system level (I'm really tired of having to deal w/ RGB from MS Office products)
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
What I took very personal was how de Icaza wrecked the superior SuSe distribution which was the flagship of KDE. It was difficult to inflict more damage on KDE than the Novell acquisition and what Icaza has done with his toolkit fetish. Now KDE 4.10 is an absolutely impressive desktop but where would we be today if Suse had not been compromised by this Mexicoder. Caldera, Suse, Nokia. We see the picture! Suse has to be put into German hands again and become the driving force behind KDE. Stop the influence of all these incompetent US corporations and Mexican flame baits. Build organisational fire walls against poisonous coding. Libreoffice / The Document Foundation has shown the path to independence.
It might be half-arsed as a framework, but still be an state of the art VM. You could argue the same about v8, great VM, but without something like node.js there is no framework at all.
Mac hardware sucks compared to the PC. A PC running OSX on a virtual machine is better than a Mac and cheaper. Why would he do this? I always suspected he was selling out, and he's fueling these rumors with his behavior. Remember him pushing Mono/.Net? Remember him defending Microsoft?
In a LinuxFORMAT editorial over a decade a go, I labled him as a sellout. He has never proved me wrong.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
GRANDPARENT ALREADY AT LIMIT.
So I guess I'll just have to weigh in with a chorus of "Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead."
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Oh, yeah, easy is always the right way. Why work hard? Got better things to do than deal with drama or perhaps, something to learn.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It seems to be working... I've had this setup going for over a year. If you have a specific concern I'll be happy to run a test against it. I've restored a backup to a MacBook Pro using Time Machine (though I had to manually mount the volume using the command line). I regularly drag files over to ZFS using Finder and vice versa... it's my primary way of sharing between the machines. I did get an error once when trying to change a creator attribute, but I think that was a permissions problem.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
27" iMac 4-core with 8 GB RAM - cost ~$1800CAN ... you have a big ass, noisy box sitting on or near your desk with wires snaking to and from the monitor. Conversely, the iMac fits cleanly, quietly, and completely on your desk. ... period.
A competitive screen (same resolution) from Samsung costs $1100CAN. Add in a good wireless keyboard and mouse, the RAM, HD, etc. and the difference between the homebuilt PC and iMac is maybe $200CAN BUT
If you want to game, maybe there is an argument for the PC. If you need to work or relax and enjoy some media, Apple
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
i usually build my PCs from well chosen quality parts made by reputable companies - and i end up with a machine significantly less expensive when compared to a mac with the same specs in addition i can add components with exactly the features i want (if i can afford them)
My PC? Probably not. It doesn't like to run MacOS in a VM.
MacOS is very picky about what hardware it will run on. It is far far FAR more restrictive in this regard than Linux.
You can't just grab a bit of random kit and expect it to run.
It's nothing like Linux or Windows in that regard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you are an artistic professional, you might need a $600 image editor or a $1000 video editor. However, most people don't even fully exploit what comes bundled with MacOS.
Those of us that are somewhere in the middle are much better served by Linux or Windows.
There is a sort of "justify yourself" mentality with MacOS. That is in stark contrast to the "why not" mentality you will find with Linux or Windows.
Anything that Macs can't readily do is modded down by the group think.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Again, this hasn't been a problem for me. Apple ships with a built-in Samba so it offers itself up to Windows quite nicely.
This is just such a joke. I had to resort to managing MacOS with command line tools because it's filesharing is so unreliable. It doesn't matter if you are talking about samba or Apple's own native stuff. It's all crap.
The existence of something pre-bundled can't be used to imply any thing about it's effectiveness or reliability.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Next to native MS office, indesign and photoshop
Those are pretty much worthless to the vast majority of people and by far not worth the limited hardware choices and increase costs you will have to deal as part of the Apple collective.
If photoshop is really the best you can come up with then you really are a clueless do-nothing twit that could probably get by just as well with an iPad.
MacOS doesn't spank anything. It's a weird mixture of the bad parts of both Linux and Windows. It's not as well suported while being more closed.
The fact that the closed bits were bolted onto FreeBSD really don't change this.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Next to native MS office, indesign and photoshop
Those are pretty much worthless to the vast majority of people
MS Office worthless? LOL Hardly... especially if you have a job and it's mandated. Indesign is also far from worthless.
and by far not worth the limited hardware choices and increase costs you will have to deal as part of the Apple collective.
I haven't found a piece of Mac hardware yet that sucks for getting real work done. There's just no $400 Walmart option.
If photoshop is really the best you can come up with then you really are a clueless do-nothing twit that could probably get by just as well with an iPad.
Actually, no, I'm an IT Director for a smallish Oil company.
MacOS doesn't spank anything. It's a weird mixture of the bad parts of both Linux and Windows. It's not as well suported while being more closed.
The fact that the closed bits were bolted onto FreeBSD really don't change this.
Ummm... you obviously know nothing of OSX's roots and never used a NeXTstation. Get off my lawn. OSX is a Mach/BSD hybrid with history dating back to the 80's that was originally called NeXTstep. It predates both Linux and FreeBSD. The FreeBSD userland is there as it was more modern than the old 4.3BSD userland. The kernel is certainly not FreeBSD.
OSX is very well supported and is far more open than Windows. The source for the base OS is even available though fairly restricted. It may not be enough to please the freetards but it's certainly enough to make *ME* happy.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. I like linux the way it is. It beats windows by far stablility wise and I get to chose whatever window manager, filemanager,... works for ME. At least I don't have 1 browser that is being shuved down the throat or need to installl *binaries*.
BTW: From where did the love for binaries appear to a guy who is developer, linux&mac user for a long time? I just love the fact that I have a choice in everything in linux. That what really makes it *FREE* for me. Free as in FREEDOM. Not as in FREE-software.
My understanding is that Mr. de Icaza is, always has been, and generally has conceded himself to be, a pragmatist. He values software freedom for the practical benefits that it brings. I can respect that to a point. However, like Mr. Stallman, I am an idealist. I believe that freedom is valuable primarily for its own sake, that suppressing it is a bad thing even if it is alleged to bring "practical" benefits, and that encouraging it is a good thing even if it comes at the price of some (usually temporary) inconvenience. Pragmatism, unfortunately, often leads to compromise, and to the abandonment of ideals that prove difficult or inconvenient. Idealism on the other hand motivates people like RMS to continue to try to address the problems with, e.g., free software on the desktop, not by abandoning freedom, but by trying to fix them.
Nonaggression works!
If you buy the software online, you violate the CFAA in the same way Aaron Swartz did - you performed a financial transaction (in his case, he didn't even perform a financial transaction, but he did download public domain papers that came with a financial per-page charge to non-students) online and violated the terms of service agreement and are committing a felony by attempting to install it on a non-Apple branded computer.
Yes, that law was written for ATMs, but it is so poorly written and over-broad that it could be applied to just about anything, including visiting pretty much any web site without prior authorized permission.
Exactly.
I ran Linux on my PC, exclusively, in the late 90s. I installed Slackware from a stack of floppies, battled X config files to get a gui working and then, around 2000, spent an entire weekend trying to get my first ADSL connection working.
These days I spend 90% of my personal computer time editing photographs and doing web design. I need Photoshop, I need colour calibration tools that work and I need a decent text editor. Both OSX and Windows provide all I need, and I have no need to spend my free time on Linux. It's just not the fun it used to be - for me. I understand the impulse to tinker, but it's not for me any more.
It's not about being anti Linux, or a shill. It's just a different point of view.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
"but regardless of what Google's marketing materials may tell you, Android is a Linux distribution, and GNU and GNOME have been perfecting Linux distributions for over two decades."
No and no. Or do you consider OS X a BSD distribution? Let me just mention a few of the ways in which Android is much more incompatible to a typical Linux distribution than even the most brain-damaged system/UI "innovation" coming from Ubuntu and Fedora.
* Every program package or "app" in Android comes with its own user ID. While many daemons and services in a typical Linux distro do run under their own unique user ID, Android carries this to an extreme, extending the design even to end-user applications.
* Android is mostly a single-user OS as far as the human end-user is concerned. Stock Android doesn't even come with the "su" program that allows for multiple log-ins. Or a a /home/ directory for that matter.
* Android doesn't use X or any of the major graphical toolkits used by Linux distros as diverse as Fedora, Ubuntu, Slackware or even Puppy Linux.
* Android is infested with proprietary programs to an extent that makes Ubuntu look like St. iGNUcius.
And no, GNU have not "been perfecting Linux distributions for over two decades" although you can read recommendations on their site about which "GNU"-slash-Linux distro they prefer you to install.
Quite. It's just like this extreme libertarian I knew who called me a slavemaster because I didn't accept his premise that all coercion is bad.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Yup, though actually I don't really care if it is "open" so much as accessible. For instance, XLS and DOC are not open, but most things can read them. OpenOffice can even open my old WPD encrypted files from the early 90s.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I had to resort to managing MacOS with command line tools
Oh, no, not that!
LOL, sorry...
I can't really address your point because I don't know what your issue was. I believe that you ran into something that I haven't. My only struggle was to get my Mac to reliably print to my Windows-attached printer. Never did solve that... the problem "went away" when I plugged the printer into an Airport Express.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Damn straight I'm posting AC in this mosh pit.
As someone who has authored and maintains a pretty damn big OSS project that directly addresses the needs of a tiny, largely computer-illiterate (and often extremely poor and unliked-by-society) clientele, I can relate.
I get zero help. That's because the project is completely free, and serves such a tiny, who-gives-a-damn-about-these-losers crowd. I'm completely alone on the project. It can get frustrating as hell; especially when the abuse starts pouring in from the very folks the project is supposed to help.
Sometimes, there are Higher Callings, and there are some of us that respond with Service.
And then, as a few minutes of scanning this comment thread will show, there are those who contribute nothing but bile.
I disagree with a lot of OS folks. However, no one can dispute their zeal and passion; which often manifests as real elbow grease and self-sacrifice.
Again, thanks. It won't even buy you a cup of coffee at the donut shop, but I might, if we ever meet.
No, you're making a false distinction between one definition of slavery and the existence of another word with a similar definition.
check out this one:
Slave:
3. a person under the domination of another person or some habit or influence: a slave to television
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
And that differs from my claim
For the configuration Apple chooses to sell, they are very competitive on pricing.
how? What does "very competitive" mean in your world?
Come on man, quit holding back. Tell us how you really feel.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
KDE was still cripped with QT GPL/dual license since Gnome and GTK were always LGPL.
Trolltech is a company like any other. They shouldn't be forced to do anything just because their toolkit was popular with some devs. KDE fragmented the desktop with their shortcut in QT.
It wasn't until QT was picked up by Nokia and LGPL'ed in mid-2010 that KDE's license was appropriate for mainstream Linux.
Well I personally find GPL to be slavery of a different kind - IMO, it's an infectious license designed to force developers to release their source code under the GPL. I'm a BSD (and commercial) software developer and we have to jump through hoops when compiling on some systems (like Linux) to avoid GPL software not compiled with the GPL exception (for instance gcc has the exception). Once you drink the Stallman kool-aid, you are in the cult and it is hard (if not impossible) to get out.
I can understand the desire for FOSS, but as for Stallman's vision, I have to disagree - we don't sell the hardware with all the software on it anymore, so software developers have to make their money somehow. My company group does it the right way, IMO - file formats and APIs are free, but our software is not. Unlike our competition, we don't compete by vendor lock-in and anyone can implement our APIs and use our file formats - in fact, some FOSS developers have done just that for parts of our software. Unfortunately, the bad is we have to patent a lot of software technology, so some things probably can't be implemented (this is the fault of the US patent system - we are basically forced to do it to avoid lawsuits).
Perfectly valid argument when we're talking about Oracle or DB/2, but we're talking about a consumer level operating system here. OSX is and has always been perpetually licensed. New major versions cost a little ($10-$20 recently), but you can keep using the old version as long as you like. So nice straw man you have there...
Microsoft on the other hand seems like they'd like to move towards annual licensing about as soon as they can. I'm sure they would have loved to get yearly $$ from everyone who decided XP was good enough and decided to stay with it...
Apple uses CUPS for printing, and the only time I ever had a problem finding a printer was when I hooked up to a WinPrinter (and that was simply a matter of finding a beta Linux driver that wasn't in CUPS yet). As for updating the UNIX subsystem, yeah that can be an issue, as Apple only does it with OS releases or emergency patches. If you absolutely need the latest, you can always compile and patch it yourself, which I've done in the past with ssh, kerberos, and apache (getting Apache set up for Apple's configuration took more time than compiling/updating it). I absolutely hate that they only update OpenGL with major updates, but that is a personal peeve (I work with the latest graphics - what can I say?).
What's worse is that this "crippled zombie thing" actually seems to have a lot more users than KDE, even though people incessantly bitch about how bad Gnome3 is and KDE would be much, much easier for former Windows users to use (and is endlessly configurable for those who want something a little different).
Sorry, but I don't understand how you compare these cases. Can you explain what the similarity is, please?
What's worse is that this "crippled zombie thing" actually seems to have a lot more users than KDE...
And Windows has even more. That doesn't mean it's right.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
how? What does "very competitive" mean in your world?
Competitive as in compete with.
They're generally comparable in price. Sometimes slightly more, sometimes slightly less. Or, more typically exactly the same price but with variations in specifications.
Of course, they come with OSX. Whether that's a plus, minus or neutral is rather subjective.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
OSX is fun for a while, but corporate applications become incompatible with later versions and even things such as network printer installations don't work from version to version (let alone hardware changes and endless adapters that come out when Apple feels like it).
I have *FAR FEWER* printing issues with OSX in a corporate setting than Windows. Stop buying shitty printers. CUPS is rock-solid.
You can't get a proper menu system going,
WTF are you talking about? What kind of menu system?
nor can you get decent Linux apps to work properly on it (they are always a few versions behind and sometimes you have to pay for an outdated version).
If OSX isn't their primary target there's some differences that need to be coded around. And I've never paid for open source *NIX software. If you want a snazzy OSX front-end for something, yeah some folks want to be paid for their work.
OSX is NOT LINUX.... you can't expect everything to "just work" from Linux land. Just like you can't expect the same on a FreeBSD machine. More of it does than you think however. Install Fink or Macports.
And "a few versions behind" is total BS though they some folks drag their feet on OSX versions. And I'll deal with that since on the other hand, I have plenty of great commercial software you'll never EVER have for Linux.
Trying to get anything remotely advanced to work on it (like wireshark in promiscous mode or powertop to see wattage per application) never quite works.
Again, wrong. Never ONCE have I had an issue with Wireshark. Run it as root. If you're unsure how to do that, step away from the Mac and go play with your Windows box.
The logs are never complete in a corporate setting, so you always have intermittent "issues" connecting to wireless, joining a cross-platform domain, etc. It's an Operating System and it don't always "just work" as is often claimed.
So logging causes wireless issues? If you have inadequate logs it's because you don't know how to turn additional logging on. Familiarize yourself with the system and learn something....
Haven't had issues joining a Windows domain in years either. "Just works" only applies in Apple-land. The only thing that "just works" with Windows Server, is a Windows client. Real networks need real IT guys who can cope with this and know a bit more than the Net+ book and MS certs would get them.
Your wireless issues are likely misconfiguration or your AP firmware needs updates.
That, for a start. I'd also like full support for my keyboard (as in midi), a decent sequencer, a scripting language that works across multiple applications, IPSEC over L2TP VPN support that isn't a total pain in the ass, WIFI that reliably works, 802.1x support that isn't a complete headfuck, etc.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I could care less about mono and Gnome. I've been using KDE for at least the last decade. I've avoided mono as the tool-set always seemed to be pretty useless for anything other than attempts to port VS Windows stuff. I use VS at work along with SQLServer and LabVIEW. While we have plenty of Linux at work on servers, most applications and development remains on the Windows platform. Mono just seems like a big waste. Too much incompatibility and a whole lot more work than I have time for. I avoid installing mono on my home desktop and avoid using the stuff on my systems. I've done C++/Qt and some Java on the Linux platform and have yet to see any need to use mono for anything.
So Miguel is now going to work on semi-compatible libraries and tools to confuse Mac users? Good luck with that!
bob@Osprey:~>
I'd like an office suite for starters. I'd like to be able to script things in the file manager, so i can say, drag and drop a bunch of files to have them automatically convert format/resize/etc. I'd like to be able to use my MIDI keyboard with a decent sequencer. I'd like IPSEC over L2TP to work. I'd like 802.1x to work. I'd like http proxy auto-detect via DHCP to work. I'd like backups to just work (no i don't want to write a script).
Linux misses the mark in so many areas because it is made for nerds by nerds. Which is fine. But the average person (or hell, even me when I'm not at work) just doesn't want to deal with that sort of shit. I have money. I use it to make the problems above go away.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Name something macs can't readily do?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Miguel,
Given that you have decided to do the right thing and join the ranks of the Mac faithful, I, as GNUstep's Chief Maintainer, I would like to extend a formal invitation to re-join the GNUstep project. ;)
Sincerely Yours, ;) Enjoy your Mac.
Gregory Casamento
P.S. Kidding.
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Although the license says that, it doesn't mean it needs to be followed......even legally.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Many the high level problems (devs are always right and should ignore users, wm fragmentation, mono and the never ending chase game, etc) we have were caused by him, it almost looked like he was playing the MS game against linux... now he will attack the MacOS... just as MS wants...
He never finish anything, always leaving its project before they could work, contributing to yet another NIH solution for a existent tool/usage
Higuita
Elvis is dead.
Microsoft is not the reason why Linux has problems.
Mr. Rogers was not a Navy Seal.
bullshit. what makes you think a bunch of power and money grubbing scum in the pockets of billionaires have to have their words on paper followed all the time every time. fuck them. their words are not morality, their words are not ethics. their words do not have your interests in mind, only theirs.
The Gnome project was a disaster from beginning to end. It accomplished exactly one useful thing: Trolltech was forced to GPL QT. At that point, Gnome should have been promptly shut down, having accomplished its purpose, and Linux on the desktop would be much further advanced than it is. But instead we have this crippled zombie thing that shambles on and on. Somebody put a stake in its heart or something please.
The other thing - GNOME never lived up to its name, which is why the GNU people should have worked on GNUSTEP instead. What did GNOME stand for? GNU Network Object Model Environment. Nothing in that description suggests anything that wasn't there in NEXTSTEP, or by implication, GNUSTEP. So having had the license issue bother them, they should have simply done worked on a GNUSTEP desktop, with a liberated display server analogous to Display Postscript or NeWS that could also have been GPLed (since they weren't going the Quartz way of Apple) and then pushed that project on those merits, instead of just the license that Qt was under. That way, regardless of what Trolltech did, this GNUSTEP interface would have taken off.
Instead, dropping the GNOME objective, never really making Bonobo a viable standard and never providing a quality suite of applications as KDE does - all proved to be the undoing of GNOME. Honestly, GNOME 2 was a poor DE particularly compared to KDE3, and GNOME 3 just became more unusable, while reducing already minimal functionality. I don't know how legit de Icaza's complaints are for devs - after all, KDE does fine while supporting not just the various Linux distros, but the BSD distros as well.
The license for OSX requires an apple branded computer, there is no legal copy of OS-X installed on a 'PC' without an Apple logo.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Sorry for the A/C...give him a few days with Xcode, and he will be begging for Linux again.
Or just go to the command line and do development from there. Pretty much the only time I fired up Xcode was at Apple when I needed to tweak an xcproj file and the tweak involved adding or removing files from a project (because I'm too lazy to go generate UUIDs from the command line, for the add case, and manually edit all the dependencies and crap); the rest of the time it was Good Old MicroEMACS and the in-house script wrapped around xcodebuild, and other command line tools such as gdb (as per the other reply to your comment).
Set the tm flag in your volume definitions and use a different zeroconf daemon, avahi doesnt' do ti for some reason.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The JVM/Java ecosystem is exactly what Linux needed to have a chance on the desktop. It's a huge ecosystem of ready made libraries and tools, most of which are open source. Why reinvent the wheel?
Because while Java itself isn't 'flawed', most of what you're think would make it great is actually really shitty libraries that are 'the problem' that Java experiences in the first place.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Ok let me rephrase, I'd love to see Apple prosecute someone who purchased a copy of OSX,be taken to court over a DMCA violation.
For a very long time I have had the feeling following his Microsoft tech love that at some point Miguel de Icaza will giggle insanely, then pull of his face Mission Impossible style and say "You fools it was I Bill Gate all along!".
Fragmentation? It's more like a bloodbath. I've been waiting since 1998 when Netscape released it's source for Linux to get it's desktop act together. It hasn't. It isn't competitive, as evidenced by it's minuscule market penetration on the desktop. Eric Raymond was wrong. It takes a cathedral to make good *finished* software that is actually usable by a large percentage of the computer world. Apple and MS devote millions of dollars to usability. Linux? People argue about what should happen, then all do different things on the desktop. There's no standardization of usage across various programs, and as Miguel said, attempting to get things working by finding the right ... anything... is still problematic.
If you want to be a l33t self-satisfied Linux user, great. If you want users to be able to use your software, you have to do what the large software corporations do, QA the shit out of it, seek user input and spend big bucks to get developers to go to the nth degree of polish, whether they want to or not.
This is the biggest difference between corporate software and Open Source (et al.) for the user; corporations force developers to not be lazy when the grunt work starts.
And secure!....
I am not speaking of all laws, just recent ones.
the laws against *stealing* were made long ago by people actually interested in how others should be treated.. we're not talking about stealing.
What use is case law against an un-findable PC running Mac OSX? useless.
Yeah, I have the tm flag set, but I haven't tried the alternate zeroconf solutions yet. Frankly, once I knew the magic joo-joo to mount the thing manually, I lost interest in monkeying around :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's because of stupidity like this that the DMCA should be violated at every opportunity as civil disobedience.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I think the average intelligence of both Linux and Apple communities just went up a little.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I don't know what you're smoking, but I want some. A quick check between the Apple store and Lenovo's site will show you that the lowest model Mac Pro is $500 more than a Thinkstation E31 with all the same hardware, except 12GB of RAM in the Thinkstation as opposed to the 6GB the Mac comes with. I've done this over and over, every time a Mac fan tries to make the point that you are buying high end hardware not commodity hardware. I always find Lenovo has a better price, and you don't get much higher end, or reputable, than Lenovo.
You can't enforce a contract that makes someone do something illegal. No matter how much you'd like to.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Apple is a hardware maker not an OS maker. They only make OSs to support their hardware.
For an non-OS maker, they made a damn good OS. OS X is what Linux should have been IMO. *nix kernel, runs all the standard *nix/GNU software, great _standard_ gui, API, applications, etc. They got the OS X desktop right from the start. Linux community and companies on the other hand, apparently still can't decide what their GUI should be like.
But to be fair, Apple's hardware pricing does suck. And while I appreciate that Macs cost less than they used to 20 years ago, it almost feels like they haven't changed pricing since about 10 years ago. 10 years ago an PowerBook would cost about $1700 for a stripped model to $3000 for a loaded model. Same thing today.
I really marvel at my newish Sumsung Series 7 laptop bought from Best Buy. Intel I7 processor, beautiful screen, long battery life, plenty of memory, and slick industrial design. All mine for $1000. I would have to spend well over $2000 to get the same package from Apple. I was really wonder how apple is able to do business in this environment, but once Windows 8 came out, I made up my mind to get a Mac next time around.
I agree 100%. At the same time, I just can't see how the open source community and companies would allow a non-free library a monopoly on the Linux desktop. Well, maybe RedHat or some other big Linux backed should be made a deal with TrollTech, instead of spending money on Gnome.
Another bad decision about Gnome was the choice of programming language for implementation as well as the main API. The GNU people hate C++.
The highest end mac does not compare to the highest end PC.
Actually being able to use synaptics touchpad on laptop.
Works great on my laptop (plain vanilla installation of kubuntu).
At the moment, I have CentOS 6.3 installed on my sony laptop
No, you don't, unless you are a professional Microsoft astroturfer. CentOS is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux replacement for people who want to run server software specifically configured for Red Hat, without having to pay Red Hat licensing fees. It's a workaround. It's not supposed to be used by people who have any other choice. It's not even used by most people who have to use commercial software that is specifically configured for Red Hat, because at this point Fedora (also Red Hat product), Debian (the best Linux distribution overall) and Ubuntu (the best user-friendly adaptation of Debian for desktops and laptops, as long as you use Kubuntu or Xubuntu flavors) run that software better than Red Hat does.
So no, you don't have CentOS on your laptop. And if you do, you still have time to replace it with Ubuntu and deny that you ever have it there.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
All supported on Linux. Don't even try hastily googling for "linux bug midi" to dig up some "evidence" posted by 12 years old on Ubuntu forums.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Technically, yes. But by the same standard, Ubuntu LTS is likely just as good.
To keep my point simple, I didn't mention the many problems in OS X that I encountered while setting it up. For example, it made me type in the password to my Apple ID over and over again. It seemed truly insistent on making me fill in info for a credit card. It pummeled me over and over with license dialogs I had to "agree" to. User switching doesn't work out of the box--you have to set it up. And perhaps most inexplicably, it absolutely would not let me proceed without declaring my gender. WTF Apple?
There only one OS I know that's actually a candidate for the "Just Works" title: Chrome. I've been using a Chromebook pretty constantly since they came out, and it's amazingly trouble-free. It doesn't do as much, obviously, but I'm unable to think of a single hang-up I've had with it.
His actions since adopting and trumpeting Mono, but not limited to Mono have always made me think he was some kind of sleeper troll. His stances often seemed to take antagonistically disruptive positions. That even this time his "reasons" clearly don't seem to match up with reality, reinforce what I have seen in the past. I suppose what he said could be true if he is running one of the more esoteric distributions, but really...as much as I am not a fan of Ubuntu[I am a Debian user], there is little you can't get either natively packaged or via a ppa.
He is literally the John C.Dvorak of the Linux programing world.
I have used Windows, OSX, Linux (a lot of variations), BSD, and Solaris.. But, the OS that has stuck out the most to me the most was first Ubuntu.. and now Crunchbang (#!). I've been looking for a lightweight experience for awhile and I am someone that didn't dig GNOME3, KDE, or LXDE. I did like Windowmaker, but unfortunately that's a project that's kinda rolling in a grave somewhere. As far as this guy saying that he's having too many problems with dependencies, he's obviously "on something" because if you're using a package manager correctly, you shouldn't have the problems he's stating. Maybe 10 years ago it would have been a problem, but nowadays, Linux is a cakewalk! Even if you can't get the package from that repo, there are always other repos or you can even COMPILE FROM SOURCE like the rest of us Linux guys do!!! It's a novel concept really!
Obligatory Monty Python sketch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13JK5kChbRw
***Game Over***Insert Coin***
Now he's going to try to clone all of Microsoft's clones of other people's technology for the Mac.
Lets see how far that gets him.
===
I have this problem with Miguels conjecture, that it is a Linux problem,I see it as nothing but a Gnome project problem. I believe that the Gnome project was without a true project manager, a project manager who would sit down with the shopping list, review what was the priority, and do what a project manager should do. That includes getting funding and developers a timetable and testing plan and tackling what is priority number one to end-users and distribution developers. After that Gnome project would tackle priority two. Instead the project tried to tackle too many features without a good developers road map.
Why is it that there is no fragmentation with KDE, or cinnamon? Both just work and both are have their same functionality, irrespective of platform.
If Miguel was or is such a hotshot architect, developer, why is Gnome so fragmented? It is Gnome, not Mate, Cinnamon, or KDE or Enlighten.
Why did Canonical go their own way with Unity? Some questions that have been asked need to be answered.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Lock yourself into a single one. If they have what you want, good for you; if not, live with it. It's essentially what you do when you decide to go Apple or Microsoft.
Your average smart phone these days has more raw grunt, RAM and storage than a high end Cray 2 installation. The Cray 2 was the fastest super computer from 1985 until 1989: 1 GB of RAM 1.9GFLOPS. I think many of the monolithic(non-massively parallel) super computers of the early 90's would only be just eking nose and nose with a high-performance smartphone/tablet. Some of the early massively parallel machines would lose to a smartphone when the GPU(s) are added to the comparison. Oh and the power consumption is just hilarious.
Cray 2 ~250KW..(typical. including cooling infrastructure) iPhone CPU 2W (Max. cpu only. passive cooling)
Heck, a 1MHz 6502 drew more than 2W until the 65c02 came out.
I used to be a GNUStep proponent as well. But in the end it was the lack of apps that killed it. Well not killed it but put it in life support. If you want GIMP you have GTK+ as a dependency, same thing goes for Inkscape. Applications rule put simply. Otherwise you could just use a regular window manager.
The use of Objective-C brought it no favors either. People were not used to the language and contributors did not show up often. GNOME has a C bent and KDE has a C++ bent from the get go.
Qt has more problems than just C++. The problem is its own bastardized templates and the moc compiler. To be honest I prefer the gtkmm API.
Qt has more problems than just C++. The problem is its own bastardized templates and the moc compiler. To be honest I prefer the gtkmm API.
Speaking from experience, you can work around the MoC. Yes, the MoC sucks and Trolltech engineers are idiots to deny that, but with a bit of cleverness you can make the MoC vanish and all be dynamic as it should have been in the first place. This wart does not begin to outweigh the fundamental advantages of the QT object model.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Depends on the jurisdiction. In Germany, for example, a EULA is only valid if it was presented to the user before she bought a license.
The problem w/ the Mac is that one is limited to the form factors which Apple is willing to manufacture --- I'd love to replace my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121, but the closest thing to it now is a Microsoft Surface Pro --- Apple's iPad would require me to make do w/ software sourced from the Appstore and I can't find equivalents there for some of the special-purpose software I need.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
What do all the people who develop for OS-X & iOS use? Obj-C is pretty much the default for XCode, just like it was for NEXTSTEP. So where does Apple get all the Obj-C developers that are apparently in short supply?
at work I'm using a 5 year old, cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow for Windows
I think he might have been referring to that part of your post, but perhaps you didn't remember you wrote it.
it's a very incomplete .NET 4.0 missing huge parts of the framework
Rubbish.
Miguel has contributed more to Linux while sleeping than you have to anything while working at your hardest. Honestly, if you feel like making a contribution to the world, why don't you dig a hole by a tree, put your self in it and shoot your self in the head. As fertilizer you'd contribute to the world in more ways than you ever have before, and you'd stop being a useless sack of methane-producing meat.
at work I'm using a 5 year old, cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow for Windows
I think he might have been referring to that part of your post, but perhaps you didn't remember you wrote it.
Most people don't speak about their own actions in third-person voice, so if someone says "I ate a pop-tart that was deemed too old to be edible", it's a pretty good bet that the person that ate it is not the person who deemed it unsuitable. Likewise, if someone is using a "cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow", it's a pretty good bet that the person using is is not the one who deemed it too slow, else I would have said "I'm using a cast-off desktop that *I* deemed too slow for windows".
Is he having one on with us? If not, this is like pissing in the town well before loading the last box on the moving truck.
Bye de Icaza. You won't be missed.
Oh don't get me started on GTK with their horrible documentation. It's nothing more than an info dump, with a great deal of the modules with incorrect syntax. Anyone who says otherwise is in denial. It's quite frustrating from the standpoint of someone trying to learn the API, as even the devs have said it's not friendly for new users. I had thought about trying to write them some user documentation as I was deciphering their unholy mess and then realized its Gnome and they can suck it.
Ubuntu is being moved to Window Maker as it's X11 window manager. It provides "integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment".
Honestly, GNOME 2 was a poor DE particularly compared to KDE3, and GNOME 3 just became more unusable, while reducing already minimal functionality.
As for which desktop environment is better, that is purely a personal matter of preference. Right now I use both KDE and Unity in Ubuntu 12.04 as well as Xubuntu 12.04. Soon I plan to install Linux Mint and use Cinnamon and KDE along with MATE. I also plan to install Arch Linux. I'll try all these out then decide which ones I will use regularly.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I used to be a GNUStep proponent as well. But in the end it was the lack of apps that killed it. Well not killed it but put it in life support. If you want GIMP you have GTK+ as a dependency, same thing goes for Inkscape. Applications rule put simply. Otherwise you could just use a regular window manager.
There are CinePaint and Krita to replace GIMP with. To tell the truth I've been waiting 15 year for GIMP to edit in at least 16 bits per color channels and it still does not.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What specifically do you need to do that Linux does not do? MS Office isn't an answer, it is a specific application suite. The functions it does can be done by OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
While I don't "work" in IT, I am disabled and have disability income, I volunteer for Freegeek Twin Cities. There we take in donated PCs, test them, and build new PCs from good parts that meet our minimum standards. We then install Xubuntu 12.04 and sell them at low cost to those who can not otherwise afford PCs. As of yet I have not come across a software need that Linux can not do. The closest I know of is editing photos and graphic design. If Blender, CinePaint, GIMP, or Inkscape can not do what needs to be done then it is possible to install Photoshop CS5 using WINE.
Ooh, I just thought of something, run XCode to develop for iOS.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Lol. In Linux or free unix desktop land you're a slave to software dependencies and chasing down half-assed solutions to common desktop application type tasks. On my mac, I spend a total of about 1 hour per 18 months on operating system upgrades. I've been there, done that, and will GLADLY pay the software licensing cost to get what I want done with a minimum of fucking about.
On my Mac I run Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 12.04 and I love the freedom to run whatever software I can. Now if Adobe were to port Photoshop CS to Linux, and drop the price, I and many other Linux users would use it too. Because I can't afford CS for OS X I'll try both CinePaint and Krita for deep color editing of my photos. I am willing to give up a little tyme maintaining my system for freedom to do what I want. Giving up freedom is what makes you a slave, not the other way around.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I just had a look at his wikipedia page. Midnight commander : hated it (when nc was fine) WINE : never worked properly for me. Mono : ditto Gnumeric : even worse. Don't get me started on GNOME or KDE, I hate both. I loved the Xwindows combination with any simple task manager (like mwm) but to me things are getting worse and worse in Linux and I have moved to MacOS in 2004, except for severs or computing work, done on Linux, but on the command line by ssh. So please, God, smite De Caza the same way you got Hans Reiser or McAffee out of the game. Those pricks just ruin it for everyone else with a huge ego and unusable software, schisms, and so on.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal