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Compare and Contrast: Linux and Apple
egwene wrote to us with the latest Salon Linux piece regarding Apple and Linux and the passing of the advocacy torch. The article gets into some of the...intense feelings our compatriots have for their operating system.
also, as wonderful as linux is, it does not allow me to do my daily work.
;-)
if i cannot run: framemaker, photoshop, filemaker, acrobat distiller,
soundedit16pro, cubase, visionDSP, and illustrator on linux -- then
linux is less than useless for me for getting my work done instead of
tinkering!
right now the only daily app that i need for work that linux actually
provides is NETSCAPE, and say what you like - the GIMP is not photoshop.
you can not do complex high-quality four colour (CMYK) work for prepress
on linux! that is simply a fact of the current state of linux.
so -- during the day, i must use macOS (or windoze) if i want to use my work to actually do something productive. at night, linux (ppc) is fun to tinker with, but still lacking in any consistent elegant ease-of-use or productivity applications. i give it another two years before linux becomes anywhere close to the mac for useful productivity applications. but by that time OS-X should be able run linux binaries anyways...
There's just not much real configurability with either OS. And at times, it can be downright insulting. "File extensions? You don't need to bother with those, because you'll only be dealing with other Macs and they'll know what file you're talking about." "Long file names? Sure, Windows has them -- Windows is really 32-bit!" It's ultimately a decision between Sherlock and the paper clip. Either OS lets anybody's mother -- no offense, Mom -- start using the computer as soon as it powers on. And that may be fine for some people. But not for me. I don't need to be insulted by my OS, and I like a learning experience.
I want an OS that is stable, powerful and configurable (free is good too). I want an OS that lets me tune it and tweak it to just where I want it for just the reasons I want. I want an OS that makes zero attempts at thinking for me. An OS that gives me plenty of tools -- that gives me a fishing pole instead of a fish, so to speak. And an OS that does all that and still lets you peek under the hood at your heart's content is icing on the cake.
For me, that's Linux. And it's why I've been moving to Linux as my desktop OS for the past couple years ("Linux: It's not just for servers anymore."). Linux is not insulting. Linux doesn't coddle me, or pretend to know what I want. It doesn't try to be everything to everyone, or try to be insultingly cute in the name of "useability" (has anyone got MS Bob to run on NT Server yet?). Sure, FreeBSD fits the bill too; hell, so does OpenDOS for that matter. And if you want to go that direction, more power to you.
No matter which way you go, you'll start "thinking different" (adverb intentionally ommitted), because you'll actually have to start thinking once you start using. In contrast to the Mac, in which case no thinking -- different or otherwise -- is required at all.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Naw, it's not flamebait as far as I'm concerned - I mainly agree with you. Just keep in mind that there is a big difference between "buzz" between those who have the Geek Nature, and the rest of the world (affectionately known as the "room-temperature" crowd).
The average non-geek heard about Macs in the '80s as The Cool Thing. That doesn't mean they bought them, mind you, it just means that they were prominent in the culture. Linux occupies that niche in the general culture today. That doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether Linux will thrive or not, but it does help visibility among the Suits (which, after many years in the biz, I, too, now am). I've been using Linux for one thing or another for about five years, but now that it's on the cultural radar screen, justifying it's use on my network is much easier.
As far as the core geek community goes, you're completely right. Macs were never truly "cool" - all the "in-the-know" crowd waited eagerly for Amiga or hacked up their Apple II (or anything other than a DOS system). These people have been all over Linux for years, though. That said, a truly heavyweight core of geeks do use Macs, but not as enthusiasts - they just use them as real simple tools to get their net activity and home-based work done. Why? Because it's real easy to turn on a Mac and just Get Stuff Done, without brains required. And for all the people who hack at work and like to hack at home, there's probably an equivalent number of people who want to leave their brains at the office.
To the truly aware, Linux isn't "hot" or buzz-worthy - Linux just Is.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Well, there are several dozen freeware and shareware tools to do this as well. I personally use IPNetMonitor and WhatRoute. With MacOS X, there will be a BSD layer underneath that you can force your users to use if you didn't give them the tools they needed to start with. I've been using Macs for 11 years, and I have two friends who do Mac consulting for a living. They don't seem to have these problems. Seems to me the failing is not with Apple, but with your techs or your company.
The mostly monochrome desktop is far from "elegant" and the interface is too damn illogical
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but most people would disagree with you. Believe it or not, Enlightenment with an undulating background and neon translucent windows is not what most people would consider an intuitive interface. The Mac GUI follows a simple set of rules that is consisitent between applications and the Finder. Windows hasn't even gotten this one down yet, let alone Linux.
how much you configure FVWM to do what you want (you mean you can actually define your OWN button menus? wow!).
That's just it -- the average user doesn't want to reconfigure their menus. They don't want the menus to vary from computer to computer doing the same tasks either. They want all the things that they need access to already be there for them in a logical fashion.
Sounds to me like the article was written by a mac advocate trying to get linux users to use macs.
As a Mac advocate (and a Linux advocate too), I have to disagree. If anything, this article was balanced, leaning towards Linux. Then again, I'm an advocate, not a zealot.
If Apple shipped a complete development environment with their OS and stopped sueing people I might consider it.
Well for one thing, the average user doesn't care about devlopment tools. It's just a bunch of useless, scary stuff that they will not be able to use. It does not belong in the distribution of a consumer OS.
Also, with Apple's server OS, MacOS X Server, Apple does ship a complete set of GNU compilers, linkers, etc. They also include the soure code for the Darwin kernel if you want to look at it.
Finally, as to Apple suing people, what does that have to do with you? They are just protecting their hard work and technology. Whether you agree with their legal proceedings should not be relevant to your thoughts on the relative merits of the OS. This is just some Apple-bashing you threw in at the end, but it exposes your true character and opinion better than the rest of your message.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Linux/Open Source advocacy and Apple advocacy are really two different animals. Right now, Linux has the "buzz" that Apple had in the years immediately following Macintosh, but the industry has matured to the point where Apple is part of the Establishment, albeit an interesting part.
The Linux community of today has more in common with the hardcore computing enthusiasts of days past (the folks who soldered their own mainboards) than they do with the Apple crowd - though, of course, there are obvious overlaps (the anybody-but-Microsoft people, for instance, often have a foot in both camps). What's interesting is what I've noticed among several of the uber-hacker old-timers that I've had the opportunity to meet and converse with over the years: people, there's a lot of Net.gods who fit this:
At work, they hack Unix, or Linux, or BSD, and produce Open Source code. At home, a lot of them have Macs.
But there's no urgent need for people to be Mac advocates anymore - Apple is safe and sound and inhabiting a moderate-sized, highly profitable niche in the market. Linux, though, needs their support.
Not one of my finest posts (for which I apologise), but I just figured I'd toss it out there.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I have always been confused by the zealots of our geeky little world...
How can you get that worked up just because someone says that they like to use a Mac? Or Windows? One the one hand you disdain someone that can use an "inferior" program(or OS, whatever, really), and on the other hand expect those products to improve to to suit your own needs and wants.
My dad uses AOL. I consider it a personal failure on my part. As much as AOL sucks, according to all of us, it does what he wants it to. It doesn't have the power of sendmail. It isn't open source. But it works.
Any moron can learn HTML. So why are there products like MS Frontpage? That mangle the code into something almost unrecognizable? Because it is easy. Our whole society is based on easy. TV, movies, fast food, and even software. Apple succeeds in the face of obsolecsence because it is easy to use. Windows exists because it's users don't have to know anything to type up a letter and print it out.
Linux is great, Linux is good, but it is a niche product (for now) that needs the dreaded "user friendliness" before it will ever become ubiquitous.
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
Unix was very important for computing, and so was Apple's GUI. But in the same way that the Windows GUI is not innovative but rather based on Apple's, isn't Linux based on Unix? Windows market share dwarfs that of the MacOS and it's quite possible that Linux will dwarf the market share of Unix, but Linux will never be innovative in the revolutionary sense that Unix was.
Part of that article struck me -- the apparent disdain of the Linux community for Apple's choice of BSD to base Mac OS X on. But having been a past and present Linux user professionally, and an exclusive FreeBSD user personally, I think I can see where Apple is looking.
Any professional OS that touts ease of configurability must have a consistent interface to everything underneath. The more I delve into Linux, the more I get confused by the different ways everything has to be done. I think this is a symptom of the "hack it till it just works" mentality.
I don't exclusively use FreeBSD because of its stability and security (although that was certainly the case when I switched a few years ago; Linux boxes were giving me and others unexplainable random problems left and right that an installation of FreeBSD remedied handily.) I continue to use FreeBSD today because things are done right and consistently. That might mean waiting a little longer for equivalent functionality, but I can trust said functionality.
The Linux systems I use seem to be able to do more, but I can't always find the correct way to do it. Perhaps that's more due to a lack of documentation, but when I do find the right way, it seems to be a hack that really doesn't fit into any consistent way of doing things. For example, getting my ATAPI CD-RW drive to work meant inserting a LILO flag. It seems to me that functionality should have been found elsewhere, perhaps in a kernel config file or by unloading one module and loading another. FreeBSD doesn't yet have IDE-SCSI support, but I bet when they do, it will be able to be enabled without rebooting and should also be easy to set up.
All in all, I can see the building of an organized, easily-setup, easily-administrated OS a lot more clearly on top of a BSD kernel. The tests of time have showed BSD to do well in those areas. I think Linux will get there, maybe on the next iteration of the kernel. 2.2 unloaded a lot of nasty old baggage that was around in 2.0, I have faith that 2.4 will be even better.
Of course, the rest of the story probably involves things like the GPL. Apple and other large companies who derive a huge bottom line from software licenses, I think, will continue to shy away from truly free licenses for some time. I think that is truly a shame for the forces of free software.
P.S. I have tried to be constructive here instead of being flamebait. I would appreciate replies that are in the same manner.
"How can you get that worked up just because someone says that they like to use a Mac? Or Windows?"
Personally, I could care less what anyone uses on their desktop. It's when people involve themselves in a holy war and introduce their slanted views as reasons why, say, Windows is "technically superior" to GNU/Linux that makes me whip out the beating stick (I'd say clue-by-four, but you know, most of those nuts couldn't get a clue if it were a sledgehammer caving in their skull). ;)
"Any moron can learn HTML."
Yes and no.. Sure, anyone can learn HTML.. sort of. I've yet to see /any/ Web site that structures HTML as well as I do (and no, I'm not being egotistical.. it's ridiculously easy to make perfectly compliant, legible HTML source.. the point is, few bother to either a) learn how or b) use what they learned effectively). Most "Web designers" think if you throw up a few Active Server Pages, Java applets, and JavaScript crap, you're "studly". I think it's pathetic. Keep it nice, keep it clean. I have, however, seen a few HTML compliant sites that were better than your average corporate or "home page" site (yeah, I lump those together because they usually suck just as bad as the other).
"Apple succeeds in the face of obsolecsence because it is easy to use. Windows exists because it's users don't have to know anything to type up a letter and print it out."
As someone pointed out in a previous discussion, these GUIs aren't precisely "intuitive". Sure, they may be a little easier for Joe Public to grasp than other interfaces, but you might be surprised at how many people can't even figure out how to use Windows. At all. Thus do I disagree. You have to know something about it to use it. It's just that many people have been conditioned by it and so /see/ it as being "intuitive".. I wasn't born knowing how to use Windows, I learned it. Of course, some people grasp these things easier than others.. But learn it they still have to do. ;)
~ Kish
Because porting to additional platforms is much easier after porting to the second, the essential choice for vendors will be between supporting just MicroSoft or supporting multiple platforms. Thus, any reduction in MicroSoft's market share will make it more likely that vendors will support Linux. Linux wins when more people buy iMacs. All users wins when there is greater choice in the OS market.
Not only that, but a greater number of economically viable platforms will drive more companies to open source. Why? Because most companies can't afford to produce and support binary distributions for a wide range of platforms. While they could contract out such support, moving to Open Source will allow user of even obscure platforms to become customers.
Andrew Semprebon EQ Systems Inc.
Isn't Windows as close to Apple as Apple is close to Xerox's (internal) system.
So technically, isn't everyone using the Xerox OS?
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
The Mac OS has always been for me a tool of maximum efficiency - it's about as clean and fast a GUI as one could hope for, mostly thanks to its carefully thought out placement of icons, menus, buttons and so forth. Linux - tho' I've not been working on it for too long - is efficient as any unixesque system through the CLI (and I'm sure enjoying Enlightenment!)
I've been working on macs almost my whole life, and love them. But because the sort of work I do has been changing, I've found a text-based interface more efficient. My mac advocacy hasn't slackened though!
I thought the Salon article made a good point, though - that (and I am paraphrasing cruelly to make my point) people become advocates of the system they find the most efficient. Personally I wish that Alias | Wavefront would write a window manager - Maya is simply the best ``OS'' I've ever used. Irix is fun, too.
*N
I don't think the writer understands at all why we use Linux/UNIX..
... The geeks look at a computer as a sacred mystical ..."
"The design and elegance of the Mac operating system can affordany moron to get work done in an efficient way and, if necessary, figure
out what's wrong with it. This is contrary to all that the average Linux geek wants
tool, and use allegorical and mythical terms to describe it
1) If a mac isn't doing what you expect then it gives you NO debugging information to "figure out what's wrong with it" - trust me.. I work on a help desk. How do you ping something from a mac? erm. there's a COMMERCIAL PACKAGE that can do it.. sheesh. So if it says "can't connect to mail host smtp.foo.com" I have no idea if it's a DNS problem or a TCP problem or an IP problem, and I'm trying to work this out through some 'kwit down the phone who bought a mac fooled into thinking it would be easy to use. The mostly monochrome desktop is far from "elegant" and the interface is too damn illogical.
2) The mythical terms stuff is garbage. As a die-hard GNU advocate I'd still be the first person happy to rename 'grep' as 'regexp-filter' or even 'search'.
I was originally drawn to unix 5 years ago just by seeing a solaris box and how much you configure FVWM to do what you want (you mean you can actually define your OWN button menus? wow!). I have stayed with linux after seeing the power of opensource and its mass ability to protect good technology from being beaten by FUD.
Sounds to me like the article was written by a mac advocate trying to get linux users to use macs.
If Apple shipped a complete development environment with their OS and stopped sueing people I might consider it.
Many of you already know this -- but I made a pretty stupid error in the Apple/Linux story. I said that Mac OS X is code-named Darwin. As I have been informed by numerous parties this morning, Darwin only refers to certain underlying layers of code in Mac OS X, mainly Mach and BSD. Corrections have been made to the story that bring it, I hope, into line.
Cheers!
Editor, Salon Business & Technology
Salon.com
I think one of the major problems with tossing around the phrase "easy-to-use" is that no-one ever really defines who is supposed to find it easier.
Is it the complete neophyte who knows nothing about computers at all? If so, no mainstream OS qualifies. Is it the casual user? Is it the "power" user? Or is it the totally geeked-out hacker type?
Ultimately, if the "ease-of-use" factor strays too far below the user's skill/knowledge level, s/he's going to find the OS getting in their way with too many wizards and "are you sure?" dialogs. If "ease-of-use" was keyed to a more advanced user, the user's going to be intimidated by the system, and may never use it to the fullest.
And let's not forget that the user generally learns about the system as they go. So, what the user once considered a difficult task s/he may come to view as simple, if only through rote repetition. Does the system get out of their way once they've learned these tasks? Or does it force them to continue to use the "easy-to-use" wizards and whatnot?
The real problem here is that there is no such thing as one-size-fits all. Personally, I think that is misguided and silly to try to do it. Look @ Windows. It tries to be all things to all people, and as a result, isn't. Is that what we want Linux to aspire to? I don't think so...
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
Professionally, I am primarily a UNIX and VxWorks developer (I have a Linux box on my desk which I use for prototyping) and sysadmin who has used far too many flavors of unix to remain normal. I've also done quite a bit of Macintosh programming.
At home, I have both an iMac and a linux laptop to play with. Guess which one is used more? The iMac. And no I am not dumbing down off-hours... I do most of my home coding projects on the Mac these days. The Mac is just more fun to use, and when it's MY OWN time, the fun is really all that matters.
Is Linux "fun to use"? Yes. As a challenging and powerful environment to keep one's unix chops up to snuff. It's also the most pleasant of all the unices I've seen or used over the years.
Is the Macintosh "fun to use"? Also yes. As a tool that hardly ever gets between me and whatever it is I am trying to do.
I guess what I am trying to say is that linux is fun in the sense that, say, Rubik's Cube or a challenging puzzle is fun. My Mac is fun in the sense that my guitars are fun. There is plenty of room in my life for both.
I have as much "unix cred" as almost anyone, and I still have nothing but respect for the general design of the MacOS. It bothers me when (as happens all too often) I hear perfectly competent and intelligent linux advocates flaming MacOS by reflex.
I'm not really sure why it has to be one or the other. Why not both?
:Michael