Admittedly I'm a reluctant user of OSX, having to use it at work from time to time and haven't spend more than a couple of weeks working with it. From the outset, a useability deficit was immediately apparent; OSX still hasn't provided a means of finding software and delivering it to the user.
How depressing it was to find that Apple users are still stuck with the oldest problem in software installation, and that is finding the software first. Windows users considering switching will find this to be as depressing as it was on win32, and similarly we hear Mac users that have moved to Linux cheer endlessly about the ease of software installation using a system such as apt.
So boring it is to spend countless hours trawling around websites looking for software, and there's so little on the machine out-of-the-box. OSX really doesn't push much further than the windows paradigm in this regard. There's this fink but last time I tried it was all a bit hacky and suffered issues worse than those in any Linux distribution I've used.
In short, nothing I've tried comes close to software installation in Linux; Linux brings the software to me.
Where the *.dmg is concerned, while convenient (once you have actually found the bloody thing), it is certainly not unique to the Apple platform. Linux already has two perfectly good solutions to this would-be problem.
Then again last time I looked searching for a package and clicking the conspicously named "Install" button in Kpackage or Synaptic seems to suit vast numbers of lazy, or just plain busy Linux users out there.
The beauty of Autopackage is, as a developer, I can make one package for all distributions of Linux. With Klik, I only 'install' the software for that session (in fact it is run from cache).
i was given an Apple machine (in my case at the workplace), tried OSX, decided i didn't like it for various reasons, and so installed Linux on it. chicken meet egg.
Mac hardware's nothing special - it's primarily the software that makes Macs so great in comparison to a typical Windows/Linux/BSD PC. Why the heck would anyone buy a Mac and then install a Linux on it? Just doesn't make sense.
is this slashdot? ahah, it's Toys 'R' Us.
this may disquiet you, as would the howl of a Banshee in the Night, but some people actually find Linux easier to use, more interesting and perhaps, just perhaps, to their taste. some people
you may find it similarly unsettling that this also includes non-geeks, the curious, and those that simply prefer the look and feel of KDE or Gnome over OSX.
human beings, those semi sentient bags of mineral born from a long and absurd confluence of error, contingency and agency, might just (every once in a while) escape the steering gaze of mass-market engineers.
"Hey, what about the fact that both OS clients are available to only a tiny portion of the market?"
What a silly thing to say. What is the 'market' you speak of, Windows? Windows isn't a market, it's an Operating System, well kind of, it operates some of the time. I could equally complain about this atrophic review on the basis that Outlook isn't available for my operating system, but the 'article' isn't about that.
This is a visual comparison of three popular clients, not a provision of options for the Windows user.
Of course we'll never see the work of that clever kid that makes a film about making a film for a competition called 'Thought Theives' whereby the competition holder runs off with the creator's IP and adds it to their marketing portfolio, all rights reserved.
This is idiocy. KDE is a great many things, but usable is not one of them.
One of the first mistakes in a discussion on useability is generalising useability.
I for instance find OSX confusing and distracting, prefer WMI as a DE http://wmi.modprobe.de/ but enjoy teaching on KDE Linux machines. Given that OSX, for instance, is projected as the canon of Useability, then I obviously prefer counter-productive and complex environments.
Having taught students on Linux, Windows and OSX systems in intensive situations I have seen too much to homogenise what is 'useable', and what is not. Rather I watch what my students enjoy using, what they don't, and the Total Cost of Use in a productivity driven academic context.
In this regard, teaching primary OSX and Windows users alike, KDE3.4 has been a total hit; itself been the seed of many migrations off both Windows and OSX (without a prod from my biased stick).
The same could not be said a few years ago of course, however the KDE project now seems to offer a formiddable and impressive productivity suite.
Sounds like you should look at Desktop distribution of Linux like http://ubuntulinux.org/ or http://mepis.org/. The latter installs in under 20 minutes from a 'try-before-you-buy' LiveCD. Click on the desktop icon elusively named "Install Me", and watch it all Just WorkTM. Every video codec under the sun, CD/DVD Burning, printing/scanning/camera, most wifi cards, ipod synchronisation and other fashionable dependencies therein.
Finding software for Linux couldn't be easier, no running around hunting an app down on websites and looking for 53r14alz. Open up your favourite package management GUI, click on "update", then "search", select what you like and finalise with "Install".
Really, there are no excuses; hence those that actually try a contemporary Desktop class distribution these days generally never look back.
One cannot talk about 'PC' brands anymore, as Apple is essentially comprised of these components. Asustek's designs are themselves comparable to the PB; however being carbon fibre they do outdo the PB where robustness is concerned:
DRM attempts to prevent you from copying data, by "managing" your digital copying rights away from you.
The only way this will happen with the 2.6.12 kernel is if you decide that you want to remove rights from yourself (to copy to a given device). Read the kernel-dev mailing lists - it seems you have a tainted view of TC, one more in line with the 'Palladium' project - which was to be a M$'s implementation of TC to the ends of ensure pirate copies of their OS could not be installed to the given device. TC in itself is not innately evil, though of course it can be used for evil.
Again that bewildering question in a so called 'geek' blog.
Why Linux over OSX 'Tiger' on IBM's PPC architecture? Well aside from some performance benefits (albeit in isolated areas), it feels good, it's free, it's fun, it's more flexible and (for many) it's familiar.
On a more personal level, I just don't like the Aqua interface; it's too visually dominant, overly 'branded', click intensive and thus ultimately counter productive. While I'm aware I can run alternative window managers in OSX, I would rather add than remove components from an OS, and this is what Linux allows (even encourages) me to do.
This means that, in general, you will have a tough time getting decent video performance out of your Mac running Linux..
I've found the opposite. I have a dual G4 tower at my disposal running Linux, and recently gave a 3D class on 10 eMacs running Linux. I chose Linux over OSX because the 3D performance was some 10-15% in frame rate alone across similar applications (Blender, Quake3). Furthermore this was using the DRI http://dri.sf.net/ instead of the proprietary drivers (which are not available for Linux PPC). Of course without the proprietary drivers you will miss out on GPU specific features like support for pixel and vertex shaders. Given that Linus develops for Linux on a PPC, I look forward to a bright future for Linux on the platform.
Airport however doesn't work - for the rest however it was a 15 minute, seamless install, and especially in the eMacs performance was overall much better.
Is it possible you are mistaking Trusted Computing for Digital Rights Management?
Firstly, TC in the Linux kernel is optional, an option for you, the administrator to define who uses what and to what extent on your machine.
I realise the term may have been dressed up like the villianous accomplice of DRM, but frankly they are mutually exclusive from the perspective of a Linux user. At worst, if SuSE was to ship their distribution with TC and you didn't like this, then either switch distro or grab the kernel source.
Getting multimedia to work with Windows XP is still somewhat of a pain. Yes Windows Media Player does a fairly good job, but there are still tons of files/formats that just don't play right off the bat..
You're right, I don't know whether CodeWeavers do support the PPC architecture, I was answering hastily to the more general question of Photoshop on the Linux platform. Currently I have a Linux/G4 at my disposal which is garnering my interest in the hardware. I also know many people running Linux on their PB's; the PPC as an install target has alot of momentum which will only improve performance and base compatibility. The only time I'm in contact with OSX itself however is when I have to teach on the platform, something I don't find very easy.
it's ok, you just haven't taken the time, or have the interest to actually do some research.
saying "No linux variant works "out of the box" if your hardware is slightly different than what you'd find on a 5 year old pc." is however simply untrue
a distribution like Mepis for instance already ships proprietary drivers for nvidia or ati, and simply does work out of the box on a great many portables with wifi cards. i have the responsibility of installing it on 30 workstation machines for a course in game development, thus i did do my research; just like anyone, i don't want to be spending time downloading, or compiling such drivers.
Photoshop fine, with a wrapper http://codeweavers.com/, though I far prefer Gimp for all my design and image processing. iMovie? i don't know what that is, though iTunes runs fine apparently.. most Linux users use gtkpod http://gtkpod.sourceforge.net/ as an iTunes replacement however.
Agreed, I had very pleasant experiences with Linux on the PPC architecture.
Ubuntu went onto 10 emacs in under 30 minutes, the install was a no-brainer. Everything worked out of the box save the Airport (of course).
I went on with wiping OSX and loading Ubuntu on a G4 tower recently. Interestingly I noticed big speed-ups in 3D applications (with Quake3 as my benchmark), compared to performance on the native OSX platform. Blender and Alias Wavefront's Maya also performed much better in Linux; thoroughly reccommended if you want to squeeze some juice out of your hardware, especially in 3D applications.
If only IBM would add PPC laptops to their Thinkpad range..
The fact that you have to re-compile the kernel every time you install any hardware is completely insane.
You poor chap, you really did meet the wrong person in IRC didn't you. I have only *needed* to recompile the kernel to use new hardware precisely because I prefer to work from a skeleton kernel. Five years ago, it was a little rough, but now I barely need to think about driver support. Windows however is an ongoing nightmare, actually having to download drivers from websites - hard to do when you're network card isn't 'detected' out of the box (to use your own example).
You however would have been better off with a Desktop distribution of Linux, like Mepis or Ubuntu, which in my experience (and I'm talking about many highly vareigated install targets) work out-of-the-box. Join #mepis sometime, these kids don't talk about compiling kernels, they talk about how cool each others KDE themes are.
Linux itself supports many many times more hardware than Windows, count them!. In fact, support for legacy devices and peripherals is one of it's pre-ordaining advantages.
To some extent he has a point, though it was never the intent of Linux (if one can name it as an entity) to 'Kill' Windows. Linux's performance offerings are known and overtly apparent to the computer consuming world, but the "Windows came with the PC" | "I don't like changes" renders adopting Linux as difficult as a name change for many; even when a distribution like Mepis proves that installing Linux is several degrees easier than Windows itself.
Regardless, performance enhancements pull few punters other than power-users and those responsible for large mission critical deployments. The curious are simply an exception (myself included). This of course is statistically proven to be changing, but will happen most largely at the enterprise level, where people just simply find themselves working with Linux one day, and perhaps even decide they like it enough for home use.
Perhaps another thing worth mentioning, on the level of branding is the Repitition-Produces-Comfort factor - people see WinXP at the boot promp and thus can project their workflow as a continuation of work done on another machine. I see that alot here at the university, which has both Fedora and XP on all machines. With Linux comes a strange kind of noise, for many; a class of noise called 'Choice'. Linux, as a self-defying entity (in the public imagination) cannot be summarised in the mind.
Linux has a poor image precisely because it doesn't have one.
It also needs to be said that Linux is fairly young, and so attempts at branding are even younger. Perhaps the weight of Novell can change that with a little constructive meme production. I disagree however OSX will have any real foothold, sitting at about 2.9% in desktop share it's as 'niche', or even more niche than that of Linux. OSX has a thick glass
ceiling that Linux doesn't have, a brutal dependency: OSX requires not only a certain build, but a certain vendor of hardware. There is a reason we aren't seeing an uptake of OSX in offices and enterprise operations. This is one area Linux is making great headway.
What will pull people over to Linux are Linux exclusive third party applications that lead people by the nose of their own creative and productive ambitions. And yes, I wouldn't discredit the possibility that proprietary apps could seed the swell of change in this regard. Imagine what a Final Cut Pro or powerful multi-track hard disk recorder (perhaps ) could do for the adoption of Linux in Universities for instance. It certainly worked for Linux in Hollywood. Naturally this requires alot of development capital ultimately justified against an isolated, and quantifiable target market. Linux users as it stands are certainly far from that. Chickens and eggs perhaps.
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly I'm a reluctant user of OSX, having to use it at work from time to time and haven't spend more than a couple of weeks working with it. From the outset, a useability deficit was immediately apparent; OSX still hasn't provided a means of finding software and delivering it to the user.
How depressing it was to find that Apple users are still stuck with the oldest problem in software installation, and that is finding the software first. Windows users considering switching will find this to be as depressing as it was on win32, and similarly we hear Mac users that have moved to Linux cheer endlessly about the ease of software installation using a system such as apt.
So boring it is to spend countless hours trawling around websites looking for software, and there's so little on the machine out-of-the-box. OSX really doesn't push much further than the windows paradigm in this regard. There's this fink but last time I tried it was all a bit hacky and suffered issues worse than those in any Linux distribution I've used.
In short, nothing I've tried comes close to software installation in Linux; Linux brings the software to me.
Where the *.dmg is concerned, while convenient (once you have actually found the bloody thing), it is certainly not unique to the Apple platform. Linux already has two perfectly good solutions to this would-be problem.
One is http://autopackage.org/, and a completely different approach (and quite impressive) is Klik http://klik.atekon.de/.
Then again last time I looked searching for a package and clicking the conspicously named "Install" button in Kpackage or Synaptic seems to suit vast numbers of lazy, or just plain busy Linux users out there.
The beauty of Autopackage is, as a developer, I can make one package for all distributions of Linux. With Klik, I only 'install' the software for that session (in fact it is run from cache).
maybe some are like me.
i was given an Apple machine (in my case at the workplace), tried OSX, decided i didn't like it for various reasons, and so installed Linux on it. chicken meet egg.
this may disquiet you, as would the howl of a Banshee in the Night, but some people actually find Linux easier to use, more interesting and perhaps, just perhaps, to their taste. some people
you may find it similarly unsettling that this also includes non-geeks, the curious, and those that simply prefer the look and feel of KDE or Gnome over OSX.
human beings, those semi sentient bags of mineral born from a long and absurd confluence of error, contingency and agency, might just (every once in a while) escape the steering gaze of mass-market engineers.
Now there's a bad start.
"Hey, what about the fact that both OS clients are available to only a tiny portion of the market?"
What a silly thing to say. What is the 'market' you speak of, Windows? Windows isn't a market, it's an Operating System, well kind of, it operates some of the time. I could equally complain about this atrophic review on the basis that Outlook isn't available for my operating system, but the 'article' isn't about that.
This is a visual comparison of three popular clients, not a provision of options for the Windows user.
If you like what you see try Linux.
Of course we'll never see the work of that clever kid that makes a film about making a film for a competition called 'Thought Theives' whereby the competition holder runs off with the creator's IP and adds it to their marketing portfolio, all rights reserved.
This is idiocy. KDE is a great many things, but usable is not one of them.
One of the first mistakes in a discussion on useability is generalising useability.
I for instance find OSX confusing and distracting, prefer WMI as a DE http://wmi.modprobe.de/ but enjoy teaching on KDE Linux machines. Given that OSX, for instance, is projected as the canon of Useability, then I obviously prefer counter-productive and complex environments.
Having taught students on Linux, Windows and OSX systems in intensive situations I have seen too much to homogenise what is 'useable', and what is not. Rather I watch what my students enjoy using, what they don't, and the Total Cost of Use in a productivity driven academic context.
In this regard, teaching primary OSX and Windows users alike, KDE3.4 has been a total hit; itself been the seed of many migrations off both Windows and OSX (without a prod from my biased stick).
The same could not be said a few years ago of course, however the KDE project now seems to offer a formiddable and impressive productivity suite.
Sounds like you should look at Desktop distribution of Linux like http://ubuntulinux.org/ or http://mepis.org/. The latter installs in under 20 minutes from a 'try-before-you-buy' LiveCD. Click on the desktop icon elusively named "Install Me", and watch it all Just WorkTM. Every video codec under the sun, CD/DVD Burning, printing/scanning/camera, most wifi cards, ipod synchronisation and other fashionable dependencies therein.
Finding software for Linux couldn't be easier, no running around hunting an app down on websites and looking for 53r14alz. Open up your favourite package management GUI, click on "update", then "search", select what you like and finalise with "Install".
Really, there are no excuses; hence those that actually try a contemporary Desktop class distribution these days generally never look back.
what?
Asustek make the Apple iBook range, Quanta computing the G5 Powerbooks...
l
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050114A7040.html
One cannot talk about 'PC' brands anymore, as Apple is essentially comprised of these components. Asustek's designs are themselves comparable to the PB; however being carbon fibre they do outdo the PB where robustness is concerned:
http://store.agearnotebooks.com/asusv6vphotos.htm
DRM attempts to prevent you from copying data, by "managing" your digital copying rights away from you.
The only way this will happen with the 2.6.12 kernel is if you decide that you want to remove rights from yourself (to copy to a given device). Read the kernel-dev mailing lists - it seems you have a tainted view of TC, one more in line with the 'Palladium' project - which was to be a M$'s implementation of TC to the ends of ensure pirate copies of their OS could not be installed to the given device. TC in itself is not innately evil, though of course it can be used for evil.
Again that bewildering question in a so called 'geek' blog.
Why Linux over OSX 'Tiger' on IBM's PPC architecture? Well aside from some performance benefits (albeit in isolated areas), it feels good, it's free, it's fun, it's more flexible and (for many) it's familiar.
On a more personal level, I just don't like the Aqua interface; it's too visually dominant, overly 'branded', click intensive and thus ultimately counter productive. While I'm aware I can run alternative window managers in OSX, I would rather add than remove components from an OS, and this is what Linux allows (even encourages) me to do.
errm
print "because the 3D performance was some 10-15%", " better", " in frame rate alone"
This means that, in general, you will have a tough time getting decent video performance out of your Mac running Linux..
I've found the opposite. I have a dual G4 tower at my disposal running Linux, and recently gave a 3D class on 10 eMacs running Linux. I chose Linux over OSX because the 3D performance was some 10-15% in frame rate alone across similar applications (Blender, Quake3). Furthermore this was using the DRI http://dri.sf.net/ instead of the proprietary drivers (which are not available for Linux PPC). Of course without the proprietary drivers you will miss out on GPU specific features like support for pixel and vertex shaders. Given that Linus develops for Linux on a PPC, I look forward to a bright future for Linux on the platform.
Airport however doesn't work - for the rest however it was a 15 minute, seamless install, and especially in the eMacs performance was overall much better.
http://ubuntulinux.org/
Is it possible you are mistaking Trusted Computing for Digital Rights Management?
Firstly, TC in the Linux kernel is optional, an option for you, the administrator to define who uses what and to what extent on your machine.
I realise the term may have been dressed up like the villianous accomplice of DRM, but frankly they are mutually exclusive from the perspective of a Linux user. At worst, if SuSE was to ship their distribution with TC and you didn't like this, then either switch distro or grab the kernel source.
Getting multimedia to work with Windows XP is still somewhat of a pain. Yes Windows Media Player does a fairly good job, but there are still tons of files/formats that just don't play right off the bat..
Annotated Links: http://www.google.dk/search?hl=da&q=windows+%2B%2
legacy hardware aside you might get some mileage out of this:
http://ardour.org/ it's about to go 1.0 any day and has served me well. Linux for now, soon OSten.
"Kernel in the City"
Does Linus dual boot his PB? Will Perens choose to stop frequenting the Pickled Penguin after his fall out with Larry?
Real developers, real lives; this compelling new series promises to 'take the clothes off' Kernel Development.
" Lawyers are a little like Knives . You can spread your bread with one or You can stab someone ."
Didn't the director of the Spanish SGAE (Music Copyright Cartel) also say that?
In fact I think it was:
Mp3's are like a knife (...)
You're right, I don't know whether CodeWeavers do support the PPC architecture, I was answering hastily to the more general question of Photoshop on the Linux platform. Currently I have a Linux/G4 at my disposal which is garnering my interest in the hardware. I also know many people running Linux on their PB's; the PPC as an install target has alot of momentum which will only improve performance and base compatibility. The only time I'm in contact with OSX itself however is when I have to teach on the platform, something I don't find very easy.
it's ok, you just haven't taken the time, or have the interest to actually do some research. saying "No linux variant works "out of the box" if your hardware is slightly different than what you'd find on a 5 year old pc." is however simply untrue
a distribution like Mepis for instance already ships proprietary drivers for nvidia or ati, and simply does work out of the box on a great many portables with wifi cards. i have the responsibility of installing it on 30 workstation machines for a course in game development, thus i did do my research; just like anyone, i don't want to be spending time downloading, or compiling such drivers.
Photoshop fine, with a wrapper http://codeweavers.com/, though I far prefer Gimp for all my design and image processing. iMovie? i don't know what that is, though iTunes runs fine apparently.. most Linux users use gtkpod http://gtkpod.sourceforge.net/ as an iTunes replacement however.
Agreed, I had very pleasant experiences with Linux on the PPC architecture. Ubuntu went onto 10 emacs in under 30 minutes, the install was a no-brainer. Everything worked out of the box save the Airport (of course).
I went on with wiping OSX and loading Ubuntu on a G4 tower recently. Interestingly I noticed big speed-ups in 3D applications (with Quake3 as my benchmark), compared to performance on the native OSX platform. Blender and Alias Wavefront's Maya also performed much better in Linux; thoroughly reccommended if you want to squeeze some juice out of your hardware, especially in 3D applications.
If only IBM would add PPC laptops to their Thinkpad range..
The fact that you have to re-compile the kernel every time you install any hardware is completely insane.
You poor chap, you really did meet the wrong person in IRC didn't you. I have only *needed* to recompile the kernel to use new hardware precisely because I prefer to work from a skeleton kernel. Five years ago, it was a little rough, but now I barely need to think about driver support. Windows however is an ongoing nightmare, actually having to download drivers from websites - hard to do when you're network card isn't 'detected' out of the box (to use your own example).
You however would have been better off with a Desktop distribution of Linux, like Mepis or Ubuntu, which in my experience (and I'm talking about many highly vareigated install targets) work out-of-the-box. Join #mepis sometime, these kids don't talk about compiling kernels, they talk about how cool each others KDE themes are.
Linux itself supports many many times more hardware than Windows, count them!. In fact, support for legacy devices and peripherals is one of it's pre-ordaining advantages.
To some extent he has a point, though it was never the intent of Linux (if one can name it as an entity) to 'Kill' Windows. Linux's performance offerings are known and overtly apparent to the computer consuming world, but the "Windows came with the PC" | "I don't like changes" renders adopting Linux as difficult as a name change for many; even when a distribution like Mepis proves that installing Linux is several degrees easier than Windows itself.
Regardless, performance enhancements pull few punters other than power-users and those responsible for large mission critical deployments. The curious are simply an exception (myself included). This of course is statistically proven to be changing, but will happen most largely at the enterprise level, where people just simply find themselves working with Linux one day, and perhaps even decide they like it enough for home use.
Perhaps another thing worth mentioning, on the level of branding is the Repitition-Produces-Comfort factor - people see WinXP at the boot promp and thus can project their workflow as a continuation of work done on another machine. I see that alot here at the university, which has both Fedora and XP on all machines. With Linux comes a strange kind of noise, for many; a class of noise called 'Choice'. Linux, as a self-defying entity (in the public imagination) cannot be summarised in the mind.
Linux has a poor image precisely because it doesn't have one.
It also needs to be said that Linux is fairly young, and so attempts at branding are even younger. Perhaps the weight of Novell can change that with a little constructive meme production. I disagree however OSX will have any real foothold, sitting at about 2.9% in desktop share it's as 'niche', or even more niche than that of Linux. OSX has a thick glass ceiling that Linux doesn't have, a brutal dependency: OSX requires not only a certain build, but a certain vendor of hardware. There is a reason we aren't seeing an uptake of OSX in offices and enterprise operations. This is one area Linux is making great headway.
What will pull people over to Linux are Linux exclusive third party applications that lead people by the nose of their own creative and productive ambitions. And yes, I wouldn't discredit the possibility that proprietary apps could seed the swell of change in this regard. Imagine what a Final Cut Pro or powerful multi-track hard disk recorder (perhaps ) could do for the adoption of Linux in Universities for instance. It certainly worked for Linux in Hollywood. Naturally this requires alot of development capital ultimately justified against an isolated, and quantifiable target market. Linux users as it stands are certainly far from that. Chickens and eggs perhaps.