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.

Comments

Re:sacred mystical computers? utter BS

[Arkham]

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.


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.

Confused

[Hermetic]

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.

Why BSD in Mac OS X, you ask?

[Zigg]

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.

Ease of use or efficiency?

[snicker]

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

Bonehead error concerning Darwin and Mac OS X

[Andrew Leonard]

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!

It's about the fun.

[meepzorb]

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