Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 23rd Oct 2009 21:13 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
John Siracusa, the Mac OS X guru who writes those insanely detailed and well-written Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica, once told a story about the evolution of the HFS+ file system in Mac OS X - he said it was a struggle between the Mac guys who wanted the features found in BeOS' BFS, and the NEXT guys who didn't really like these features. In the end, the Mac guys won, and over the course of six years, Mac OS X reached feature parity - and a little more - with the BeOS (at the FS level).
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RE[5]: Wise timing, Apple. I see what you did there
by darknexus on Sun 25th Oct 2009 04:57
in reply to "RE[4]: Wise timing, Apple. I see what you did there"
Member since:2008-07-15
Linux has hardware support in the bag, eh? Funny you should say that, especially since there are loads of devices that work in Windows or even OS X but have poor drivers or no drivers in Linux. If your hardware follows a standard or has a good open source driver then Linux has your hardware in the bag, otherwise you're more than likely sol, because as a driver development platform Linux is simply awful (kernel versions and such nonsense).
RE[5]: Wise timing, Apple. I see what you did there
by jgagnon on Mon 26th Oct 2009 15:17
in reply to "RE[4]: Wise timing, Apple. I see what you did there"
Member since:2008-06-24
The big players in commercial desktop applications don't seem to pay any attention to Linux.
If Linux really wants (and I hope they do) the "big players" to create applications for their OS then they better get to work on standardizing an API to work with in as many areas as they can. It is pretty damn hard to "write an application for Linux" and have it work most distributions without recompilation or installing every dependent library along with it. It is much easier for an application developer to target a given "product" like Ubuntu 9.04 than to target Linux as a platform.
The people that drive Linux standards need to consider the overhead of this "many platforms within a platform" problem and find a solution before they can ever expect the masses to come develop commercially viable software for Linux (outside vertical markets, that is). It is the fluid nature of Linux that is both appealing to casual developers and the bane of mass commerce.
And for the record, I am very much a fan of Linux and use it daily. But being a technical person who does development daily, I will say that as a business desktop programming platform Linux leaves a lot to be desired. My opinion, of course, but I've seen nothing in recent history to change it.
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Member since:
2007-12-13
... or Microsoft and their OS. Linux has hardware support in the bag. As far as being a popular platform for desktop productivity apps, then the point is a fair one. The big players in commercial desktop applications don't seem to pay any attention to Linux.