Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 15th Jul 2009 21:38 UTC
It's time for another "OSNews asks" item. This time, I want to focus on something that I've been wanting to talk about with you all before, but never found the time for. The question is simple: which feature(s) from other operating systems would you like to see in your own main operating system?
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Member since:2007-02-11
If you can live with putting your computer to sleep, I think that's already around. I use this with my Mac Mini -- the power button simply puts it to sleep and it's more convenient for me, instant-on, no boot times and the computer is like I've left it. It also allows me to bitch about the output of the uptime command.
What I do miss from OS X is a unified package manager. The problems are not just in updating applications; Gentoo's portage and FreeBSD's ports collection are a great way for me to keep all the libraries I'm working with up to date. Right now I have to rely on a bunch of scripts I've hacked by myself to download the latest versions and compile them, which feels rather shaky and requires some intervention from me.
Member since:2005-07-11
What I do miss from OS X is a unified package manager. The problems are not just in updating applications; Gentoo's portage and FreeBSD's ports collection are a great way for me to keep all the libraries I'm working with up to date. Right now I have to rely on a bunch of scripts I've hacked by myself to download the latest versions and compile them, which feels rather shaky and requires some intervention from me.
Are you manually compiling Unix apps? Or open-source OS X apps?
There's a couple of different ports tree available for MacOS X (fink, macports, I think darwinports, pkgsrc). Why aren't you using those?
Member since:2006-12-20
• Windows’ Task Manager. When the system locks up, there’s just nothing as low-level as Ctrl+Alt+Del in Mac OS X. There’s Cmd+Opt+Escape, but to be honest it has never once worked when OS X has locked up badly on me.
I love on KDE that xkill is by default bound to ctrl-alt-esc. When a program is misbehaving, press that magic combo and the cursor turns into a skull and crossbones. Click the window which is being bad and BAM! it dies instantly, with none of the waiting around like on Windows!
Okay so it doesn't work on console apps, but for that you can just do run command and killall -9 foo.
Member since:2005-07-06
More than that I'd love to have a "restart X" or in OS X's case a "restart Quartz" keyboard shortcut (as you have with X11 or Xorg) to simply kill the GUI and restart it.
Whenever OS X locks up on me (rarely enough, though) it's always the GUI only the underlying system keeps on running nicely.
Sometimes I can login via ssh and kill the GUI from there so it'll log me out and go back to the login window, but I don't have ssh remote login enabled all the time on my box.
Member since:2006-02-05
The waiting time in windows is because it tries to shut it down gracefully first, so if the process has any cleanup it is able to do it. If you don't like/want the timeout, killing it from the process tab instead of the applications tab will not wait.
Also, the equivilent to killall on the commandline is taskkill /F /T /IM <executable name>. taskkill is sort of like kill and killall in one app, which is why you have to specify all those flags to tell it what exactly you want to do.
Member since:2005-07-11
I use OS X as my primary OS.
Things I would like to see:
• OpenSolaris’ Time Slider (ZFS snapshots). Time Machine is just too slow over the air, and the one folder-one view blinkers on Time Machine make it less effective. Also the detatched UI is just outright odd. Having to click a dock item, or menubar item to access Time Machine for iPhoto / Mail.app / &c. is so odd I more often than not forget that the functionality is even there.
Things I would like to see:
• OpenSolaris’ Time Slider (ZFS snapshots). Time Machine is just too slow over the air, and the one folder-one view blinkers on Time Machine make it less effective. Also the detatched UI is just outright odd. Having to click a dock item, or menubar item to access Time Machine for iPhoto / Mail.app / &c. is so odd I more often than not forget that the functionality is even there.
Having something like this available for all the OSes that support ZFS would be nice. Especially if it was incorporated into more than just Nautilus.
ZFS and Time Machine seem like they were made for each other. It's strange that they haven't been melded together yet.
Member since:2009-06-11
Member since:2007-02-11
I could trade any other app for OS X's Automator.
I use Windows and something as easy to use as Automator for Windows but based on PowerShell is sorely needed! By all aspects (completeness, ease of scripting, time saving age of Web 2.0, GUI power), this is way overdue, since Apple already has it for quite some time now.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."More News »
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Member since:
2005-11-10
I use OS X as my primary OS.
Things I would like to see:
• OpenSolaris’ Time Slider (ZFS snapshots). Time Machine is just too slow over the air, and the one folder-one view blinkers on Time Machine make it less effective. Also the detatched UI is just outright odd. Having to click a dock item, or menubar item to access Time Machine for iPhoto / Mail.app / &c. is so odd I more often than not forget that the functionality is even there.
• RISC OS’ save panel. Instead of a file picker, it presents you a proxy icon of your file, and you drag it to where in the file system you want your file to be. Totally magical and elegant.
• Windows’ Task Manager. When the system locks up, there’s just nothing as low-level as Ctrl+Alt+Del in Mac OS X. There’s Cmd+Opt+Escape, but to be honest it has never once worked when OS X has locked up badly on me.
• Amiga’s shutdown. Power button, done.
• BeOS’ do-it-with-meta approach to filing. iTunes DB die die die! All of that should be done entirely at the filesystem level.