Point-counterpoint at DaringFireball’s interesting editorials.
Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Well I use it. I’m not a 40 something year old Unix hacker. Neither are any of my friends.
When a hacker becomes a Mac user he’s putting on tie dyed clothing and growing a goatee. There’s no question about it. When that same hacker delete’s Mac OS X and installs Linux he’s growing that goatee out to a beard but he’s still wearing tie dyed clothing.
My iBook got too slow, the screen sucked, the keyboard was plasticy, I could not easily use it for kernel development (all my target boxes are x86), and there is no G5 laptop available, so I bought a Thinkpad T42p. I know lots of people who moved from Apple -> Thinkpad. My productivity has more than doubled, the laptop is now my primary workstation, the iBook was mostly used for reading mail and osnews. The TP was a lot more pricy though.
I’ll say one thing: whoever designed XCode doesn’t work for Apple. It’s the absolute worst IDE I’ve ever used, hands down.
isn’t the T42 near the top of IBM’s notebook line, and the iBook near the bottom of Apple’s?
i just don’t think a good comparison could be made between the two..
now, a Powerbook and a T42..
and in any event, since your target is x86, i don’t see why you would expect G4 or G3 based solution to perform as well as a x86 based one.. in your case, it just made more sense to stay on x86 ( if you intended to use the iBook for work oriented stuff as well )
but hey… i may be wrong. i don’t do kernel development, so i don’t know how practical that is…
sidenote : the T42 is a gorgeous machine.. i hope lenovo doesn’t screw up Thinkpad 🙁
“infofascism”
Some people desperately need vacations… o_O
“I know lots of people who moved from Apple -> Thinkpad.”
I’m sure Jacob knows dozens, hundreds even of people who’ve done this.
I’m a 20 something unix hacker that owns a powerbook, and I love it. I had a PC, but the linux support for power management was terrible at the time. (Is it any better now?) The Mac goes to sleep when you close it, and wakes up instantly when you open it, and it lasts for four hours. Did I mention it runs silently too? I couldn’t say any of those things for my last PC laptop running Linux.
Don’t you think it is a little foolish to purchase a “budget” (I use the term loosely) PPC laptop to do kernel development for x86? Actually it approaches idiocy, nothing personal.
So you replace the iBook with a machine that approaches double the price and it works better, big shock there. I like ThinkPads. I love my X31 and I would say that the T42s are better than the powerbooks as far as hardware is concerned.
If you are not getting a Mac for OS X, much of the time you will be better served with x86. Since you were doing “kernel development” I assume you installed and were running one of the PPC Linux variants so that benefit is out the window. So what does your highly dubious statement tell us again?
Macs are nice, since the proprietary hardware does what it’s supposed to be: it just works (and lets you work). Is your hardware Free Hardware(tm)??
Re: Development:
XCode is the so far best IDE I’ve used. Sure, Emacs might be more powerful; same for shell + vi. But all that NetBeans/Eclipse stuff is surely from hell!
BTW XCode comes from the NeXTStep ProjectBuilder.
Hey, solaris is “open” and since “We at Sun and our esteemed competitors up in Redmond are engaged in a grand experiment” ” increase a company’s transparency?” why doesn’t he simple port Solaris to PPC ?
what a dweeb.
Yea, that’s right. OS X’s gui configs are obnoxious. I’ll give a couple examples, because my dealings with OS X are admittedly limited this is about all I have:
1.) Wireless keys config. There are more options when you select the config through the wireless icon on the top bar than other ways of getting there…why isn’t it the same stinking config utility?
2.) Starting sshd. I made the mistake once of trying to start ssh via the command line once by simply typing sshd. Well, after starting and restarting and killing and starting and etc etc on the gui config it finally (and as far as I can tell randomly) generated the necessary keys and started properly. Probably started it about 15 times in various patterns, it was um interesting..
Also, OS X lacks a really nice pager, the ones I’ve seen are hackes that don’t let me easily drag windows across desktops. Small, but still.
As others mentioned the lack of desktop choice is annoying.
Now for the political reasons:
1.) I don’t like Apple as a company. They sue their fans, they fail to port itunes for the hackers who wrote a large portion of their featureset (samba, khtml, X11R6, etc)…
2.) They aren’t going to be great forever, I’d rather support something that is for me every bit as usable as their OS that is Free and won’t suddenly switch to a different core
.
Now the financial reasons:
1.) I like games, but I’m poor. A gaming Mac will cost me 3 times a machine that will equally play games on the PC. I’m serious, a $1,000 PC is as good a gaming machine as a $3000 dual G5; of course the G5 is a much better machine but it’s not gonna get me better framerates! And I can compile on a PII…and I do
.
What I do like about apple: iBooks. When I have money for a notebook, I will likely buy an iBook because I see them as the greatest bang/buck in the notebook market. Maybe Dell will suddenly put out a nice P-M machine before I have money though, one that I can run linux on well.
I think the idea that hackers are all running off to Apple is a bit off. I think many are flirting with it, buying Apple’s gorgeous notebooks; but that’s simply because Apple is very competitive in some arenas and it does have some very attractive features. But in the end, yea I don’t think Linux and freeBSD has been left to cheapskates and zealouts. I’m happy to see Apple competing, I’m not anti-apple; I just prefer to avoid their stuff. I actually have recommended Apples to quite a few people, but I could never see myself happy with a lab full of Macs…
Apple has also gotten very competitive in the cluster market, including the small (under 20 nodes) cluster market!
I wouldn’t mind seeing OS X replace Windows for one reason: Porting to and from OS X to and from other *nix is waaaaay easier than between Windows and *nix!
I wouldn’t mind seeing OS X replace Windows for one reason: Porting to and from OS X to and from other *nix is waaaaay easier than between Windows and *nix!
Do you think that both of them beeing UNIX has anything to do with this? I can tell you that porting from Win2000 to WinXP is as easy if not more
Well, they aren’t really Unix(tm) (does SCO own the Unix trademark?), but they are rediculously similar so yes that’s why. However, there are differences, otherwise you wouldn’t port you’d just recompile
.
And Windows isn’t really a fair comparison, as they are from the same vendor anyway… They try to make porting 9x to NT easy too don’t they?
Oh btw, I’m not over 40 just in case anyone thought I was heh. I am 40/2.
I can’t do anything to help from a financial or political standpoint, but I might be able to help a bit on the admin.
1.) Wireless keys config. You can enter the WEP key for an access point from the network config, but not when set to automatic. Create a new network location and specify the access point name and key. (You could update the default automatic config but it is better to leave that one as is for when you are on the road.)
2.) Starting sshd. System Preferences => Sharing => Services Tab. Check the box that says “Remote Login” sshd is started and all necessary keys are generated. If you have the firewall active it also opens the appropriate port as of 10.3.8.
IRT Pager, I agree wole heartedly. There is a commercial pager in open Beta right now, but I was not overly thrilled by it. It does allow drag and drop between desktops though. http://www.yousoftware.com/desktops/ I prefer Virute (which is free) but you can not drag and drop between desktops. You need to do a <shift>CMD>o then choose the desptop to send the app to.
A very interesting article. One of the things i loved about the G5 that i had was the fact that it did so many things that I’ve never been able to do on any other os. The look on my friends face’s when you could pop open linux desktop via Fink, then use the hot keys to make it zip out of the way. It turned quite a few heads, and converted a few Windows user’s right there. They’d realy freak out when you’d open up vm and run me or xp or linux , all at the same time. Many was the time when I’d be burning a cd, compiling new programs from source via fink, and farting around with Xp , all at once! That was on a 1.6 G5 with 2gigs of ram, at just under 2,500$ Canadian. It slowed down a little, but was still faster than most of the p.c’s i had used up till then. Never felt the urge to tinker with mac desktop endlessly like i do with Linux. Because i could mess with Fink kde, gnome or other’s on the desktop, minus the reboot i have to do with my pc now. There probably is all the same tricks available on a pc, i just haven’t got there yet. I love mac’s, have had 2 of them so far, and saving for a dual 2.5 as we speak. So , to me, it is the Kool Kid toy. And since I don’t drive, I think I’m allowed to own Something Kool.
I’d have a Mac laptop if it had a better screen. Why?
Because 1024×768 is for suckers
Well, not quite, but I really don’t likt it. The 15 inch PowerBook is 1280×800, but that’s not much better. The 17 inch PowerBook has a nice resolution, but it’s wayyyyy to huge and heavy to use when I travel so much.
Instead, I bought a IBM ThinkPad T42 with a 1400×1050 screen, and I think IBM makes the best laptops, even better than the venerable Mac laptops.
I had a Dell Inspiron 4100, which was the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever owned, but I become addicted to it’s 1400×1050 screen. Coding, writing, web browsing, email, everything I do, it’s really difficult to go back to 1024×768 when you’ve tasted the higher resolutions. It’s kind of like crack.
I’m well aware how to do both now… And the sshd config doesn’t consistently work; it requires sshd to not be running. But it doesn’t give any form of error to suggest this; I know this from trial and error.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21594
quit yer yappin!
(actually, I’m not sure if this version allows you to drag a window from one desktop to another – a feature that is coming acccording to author.)
Fair enough. Just trying to be helpful.
Though I suspect the problems with ssh stem from trying to activate it manually. All’s well that ends well I suppose.
Apple has an ingenious craft of making their customers feel special through their products. Many cultures in the west thrive on the celebrity disease. A deluded and sick need to feel special and garner undeserved attention. Apple feeds on this disease.
Little wonder Apple fanatics have the “I-am-better/smarter/cooler-than-you-because-I-use-Apple-products” mentality. The author of the blog calls open source (Linux) users “cheapskates” because they don’t use Apple. He is totally elated by the fact that Paul Graham cites that the best hackers are “switching.” He then proceeds to chastise an Apple customer who is dissatisfied with Apple’s business practices and ethics. You know, to the Mac lunatic, Apple is never wrong.
The author has a complexity disorder. A need to feel special. A need to be amongst the cool. A need to be different for no apparent reason. A need to be associated with smart people. If you buy apple products to look or feel cool, or because your favorite celebrity uses them, seek professional help. You have a disease, a complexity disease.
There is nothing wrong in appreciating a product or a corporation. But you are a mad man when you sling condescending remarks at people who don’t share your appreciation or somewhat demented deification of said product or company. Apple makes great products, but they have a sick cult. You can mod me down now.
Nope, can’t drag and drop yet. He is doing a complete rewrite though and should be releasing it eventually. (He put up a post in his livejournal on the subject not too long ago.)
Your comments don’t make sense…
“As you’ll recall, Microsoft was successfully sued over their unfair practices getting hardware manufacturers to bundle Windows with PC hardware… It’s under the no bundling clause of anti-trust law.”
Every PC I see for sale at WalMart has Windows on it.
“You can’t buy a Mac w/o OS X – what if you have no intention of running OS X on that hardware?”
Why would you buy a Porche with no engine? And you CAN buy a Mac with another OS installed.
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/apple/
“Oh yeah, and remember when Apple changed the firmware so that you could no longer load OS 9?”
What would the security features of MacOSX be for if you can boot into MacOS9 and be able to delete everything? There is no security in MacOS9 and if Apple is moving to MacOSX why SHOULD they maintain MacOS9? Its OK that MS no longer supports 3.11 but its NOT OK that Apple dropped support for MacOS9?
i guess you totally didn’t get mac os x then. i’d never ever switch back to windows.
“My iBook got too slow, the screen sucked, the keyboard was plasticy, I could not easily use it for kernel development (all my target boxes are x86), and there is no G5 laptop available,”
So you bought Apple’s lowest end laptop to do X86 kernel development. OK
“so I bought a Thinkpad T42p. I know lots of people who moved from Apple -> Thinkpad.”
Yeah right me too.
“My productivity has more than doubled, the laptop is now my primary workstation,”
I would hope so since I don’t see how you can do X86 kernel development on a PowerPC laptop and also the lowest end laptop that Apple has. 12″ iBook with 256MB of RAM?
“the iBook was mostly used for reading mail and osnews. The TP was a lot more pricy though.”
OK
I’ll say one thing: whoever designed XCode doesn’t work for Apple. It’s the absolute worst IDE I’ve ever used, hands down.
Well, I wouldn’t use it for Java development. (BTW, Apple recommends eclipse for that). But have you used it to write any C or Objective-C apps? It’s an excellent IDE for those languages.
Better Ogg Vorbis / .ogm support would be nice, too.
Reason for not purchasing an iPod: ogg
Your conclusion doesn’t make logical sense at all. Comparing Apple and Microsoft in these respects is just obsurd. Apple, like many well-known computer companies out there (IBM, SGI, Sun, etc.), provides both the hardware and the software for their platform — a complete solution. Microsoft doesn’t produce the computers that their crapware runs on at all. If apple wants to make computers the way they think they want to make them, how does this violate anti-trust? Apple isn’t trying underhanded and unfair tactics to get OSX installed on Power Macs, because they’re the ones that produce them in the first place. So what’s the issue here? Or are you just pissed that you can’t run OSX on x86? I don’t really have any problems with x86 hardware nor do I have problems with other platforms, especially if someone feels that they have what suits their needs. I use a mac because it does exactly what I want it to do. And in no way do I feel like I’m being subjected to how apple feels I should be using my computer. I just really like the solutions they provide, and if I didn’t I’d go elsewhere. Why does everyone want to try and turn our right to chose into some crazy form of limming-ism? Ever since I started using computers, I’ve become ever more convinced that the exact same thing can be said for windows fans. So who’s right in the matter? Well, I say it’s the person who makes and follows through with a consumer-educated decision on which computer fits their needs the best.
I’ve been fantasizing about buying a mack mini and install linux on it, just to piss off my mac-loving coworkers.
I guess it could be a nice surfing machine or a mythtv frontend or something… I’m definitely going to NOT buy an ipod, for the reason yawn mantioned: Me wants ogg!
I didn’t expect the iBook and Thinkpad to be comparable, however I _do_ expect the keyboard I am typing at for 10 hours a day to be better than the one in Apple laptops.
When I bought the iBook (in 2001) it was a cool little machine and actually felt fairly fast, especially when running Linux. But, as the Sun guy says, even if I wanted to stay with Apple, they don’t make a laptop with the same power and mechanical quality as the TP.
No, I do not know “dozens of people” who switched, but almost all of the ‘early iBook adopters’ I know who bought iBooks back in 2001 to run Linux on them, have recently upgraded to TPs. Being x86-compatible turned out to be more of a deal than I had expected, even in Linux/UNIX where ‘everything is just a re-compile away’. I would never have bought a Dell or Compaq though, their quality is generally lower than that of the Apple machines in my experience.
I use my laptop mainly for work (mostly stuff you can do in xterm), so while nice all the OSX-eyecandy means less to me than CPU speed, a good screen, and a good keyboard. All the stuff the (expensive yes, but worth the money) Thinkpad delivers.
OK, so everything starts falling into its places.
Apple == Fascist Company
Linux == Communists
Microsoft == Capitalistg Company
Now if anyone call tell what Sun Microsystems is, we’ll have a complete picture of the world.
Thanks.
Ya You are right.
I think Sun is the smiling face of communism after embracing OSS.
Hmmm, I guess under those conditions, the GNU and Stallman would be outright Stalinists. I guess we can be glad they’re not setting up “collective farms” and sending axe-wielding assassins after people in South America.
“Since I bought the Dothan I installed Fedora Core 3, got the wireless, sound and X working, CPU frequency scaling and touchpad work fine and are configured properly. And the 2.6 kernel has support for ACPI. I just need to make some adjustments there.”
This hints at what I was speaking about earlier. I don’t want to ‘echo mhz > /dev/acpi’ to adjust my power settings. (That was surely how I had to do it with my Dell, and that’s what my friend does with his admittedly very pretty Fujitsu lappy). That just doesn’t cut for my on-the-go productivity.
If I unplug this Powerbook, it automatically throttles. If I plug it in, it’s max’d out again. I have screen brightness from F1/F2, and I can put it to sleep/wake it up instantly. It lasts four hours away from the wall, and the fan control keeps it silent. I couldn’t do or say any of that with my Dell running Fedora (Windows, yes but it just doesn’t cut it for my dev work).
I know 2.6 has the ACPI stuff, but it seems hardly fleshed out at this point. If I’m a year behind (I may well be) by all means let me know, because I really like Linux too, just not on my laptop. This is OS X territory.
i/PowerBooks do sleep mode really, really well. With Windows or Linux (when you can get it configured right) goes from sleep mode to usable in 10 seconds or more.
<p>
When you open up a Mac, it comes on instantaneously.
When I had an iBook, Linux would take 4 seconds to come back up from sleep. Mac OS X would take 2 seconds.
My iBook wakes as good as instantly, its up and ready to use as soon as the screen is fully opened. I only turn mine off for OS updates these days ((reboots)
as far as I’m concerned, OSX is the only OS i’d consider running on a laptop at the moment. One of my friends runs Linux (Ubuntu w/2.6 + 2.10 I think) on his older Pentium-4-M laptop and it runs really well, power managemenet, sleep and everything work I believe. But it doesnt have the same level of polish Mac OS X has.
MacOS X is just NeXSTEP + Aqua.
All of MacOS X does NeXSTEP can do it :
Interface builder of course but also keynote ( http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Concurrence.gif )
Most of Apple hackers come from NeXT.
They only re-package it.
Even the Workspace Manager is still better than the Finder…
Modern ? MacOX ? It is just a joke?
Cheap NeXSTEP on cheap box, that what is MacOS X
Yeah, of course does MacOS X behave like the successor of NeXTSTEP, just because it is.But the good thing about it is that it doesn’t look like crap, what NeXTStep & OpenSTEP do for sure (as most other windows manager for unices and linux do).
Better Ogg Vorbis / .ogm support would be nice, too.
Reason for not purchasing an iPod: ogg
Rigggght!
While iPods support a standard and open format (mp3), you have a problem because they don’t support an obscure format that all three people use (and most of them using linux). Perhaps you drunk the kool aid and converted your music library to OGG already, commiting yourself to whatever format someone invented and marked as open source.
You can go buy a Creative player then, or an iRiver. Sure, ten people at most use these players, but they have the …all-important ogg compatibility.
Want cheese with your whine?
So now you are comparing a 4 year old budget laptop to IBM’s current top of the line and that makes it better? Switchers who switched 4 years ago for the hardware have nothing to do with current switchers who switch for the OS. Your arguments are those of a strawman.
As far as the keyboard goes, I don’t own an iBook of any generation but you could have gotten a USB keyboard. ThinkPad keyboards are better. Point in fact they are widely considered the best laptop keyboards. iBook keyboards on the other hand are generally average to above average. This should not have been a surprise.
Both Apple and IBM make really good laptops. IMO ThinkPads tend to have a slightly better construction, but they’re usually pricier.
However, being only one company, Apple cannot offer such a wide variety of hardware as the x86 world. For example, if you need raw power, nothing Apple offers comes close to a Dothan 2ghz+ with a 6800Go or X800 Mobility. If you want a very light and portable laptop and don’t need an optical drive, the lightest Apple laptop is still a lot heavier than an IBM X40 or a Dell X1. If you want a super bright (X-brite, Flexview) or very high resolution screen you’re out of luck with Apple. If your needs are met by an ultra-cheap $700 laptop, Apple has nothing in store for you. If you prefer a touchpoint to a trackpad, Apple doesn’t give you that option.
Mainstream Apple laptops are generally very competitive with brand name x86 laptops. But if you have some specialised needs, there are many things you simply can’t buy from Apple.
As far as i know, the ssh daemon on mac os x is invoked by xinetd, so it should not be run as a extra daemon. xinit will start sshd when a connection to the machine is built up.
I can’t check it right now though.
I use Mac OS X because it’s a real party OS! It’s a happening thing.
Other OSs are better [don’t really know which ones, but you’re sure to tell me], other machines are cheaper [you guys build a PC in a shoebox held together by spitwads and tape for less than the price of a barrel of oil]. Macs on the other hand are <u>HUMONGOUSLY</u> expensive without adding any value.
It’s all true, I humbly bow my head. But let me tell you something: your kit is just nowhere near as sexy as a Mac is. My OS doesn’t look like the Tellytubbies landed in Fisher Price land and it doesn’t run on a box that looks like a drunk floozy that got lost on the way to the strip club.
And that’s just the encore. I’m not using it for the fancy-schmancy Genie effect, I’m using it because it just plain rocks. If there was only eye-candy and no substance do you think they would have used it to build a super computer with it? I think not!
I just had to share that with you.
Mainstream Apple laptops are generally very competitive with brand name x86 laptops. But if you have some specialised needs, there are many things you simply can’t buy from Apple.
This is correct.
And another thing: if you want a laptop that can run OS X, none of the x86 laptops (specialized or not) will do 😉
How can you take these comments seriously?
“Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD”
No it does not run FreeBSD and it is not based on FreeBSD. If in the first part of the article they get something like this wrong…I go to the next article.
>>While iPods support a standard and open format (mp3), you >>have a problem because they don’t support an obscure format >>that all three people use (and most of them using linux).
1. its not all that obscure
2. mp3 isn’t particularly open
3. ogg is a better codec anyway even if the above two statements are false, ogg’s smaller and sound better at the same time.
>>You can go buy a Creative player then, or an iRiver. Sure, >>ten people at most use these players, but they have the >>…all-important ogg compatibility.
whats it matter if only ten people use them? if you’re buying an mp3 player just to be part of a community you really need to get you’re priorities in order.
I just need to get my work done, not make a fashion statement or be cool. And my work is writing .Net/database apps for the business world. In the business world I’ve never even seen a Mac.
Who are you Mac people? Do any of you have to do weird stuff like actually get an IT job?
Who are you Mac people? Do any of you have to do weird stuff like actually get an IT job?
Actually I have to say that I see a few mac people at my work right now.
One is a manager and one is a web development programmer.
Both Windows zealots and *Nix fiends and linux nerds and Apple fanatics tend to all have one terrible thing in common. They project their user needs on other people. If you develop .Net apps then Windows is probably your best bet as you have figured out.
But I know more than a few database admins that prefer to run on linux for example because the servers that run their databases run on a *Nix and the familiarity alone is worth the price of admission which is daunting at the least (installing a new OS is always daunting).
I personally as a Unix Sysadmin found the experience of working on an XP desktop to be maddening.
What people need to do just get their work done varies a great deal depending on what their work and their needs as users really end up being.
But thanks for projecting …..
Many of them use a PC at home, strange thought I know. They are about 6% of the laptop market and about 3% of the desktop market; maybe they are allowed to use Mac’s because they aren’t drones
. I’m just kidding..
“sidenote : the T42 is a gorgeous machine.. i hope lenovo doesn’t screw up Thinkpad :-(”
Lenovo bought the desktop side of IBM, not the Laptop side. 🙂
“No it does not run FreeBSD and it is not based on FreeBSD If in the first part of the article they get something like this wrong…I go to the next article.”
Are you saying the Mac OS is not based on FreeBSD?
(Panther specs from the Apple website)
The most widely-distributed UNIX-based operating system, Mac OS X offers a unique combination of technical elements to the discerning geek, such as the fine-grained multithreading of the Mach 3.0 kernel, tight hardware integration and SMP-safe drivers, as well as zero configuration networking. Panther integrates features from state-of-the-art FreeBSD 5 into Darwin — the Open Source, UNIX-based foundation of Mac OS X — to provide enhanced performance, compatibility and usability.
Tiger is based on FreeBSD 5.5.
Wow. You might want to go back and read the rest of the article.
hahah owned!
They are about 6% of the laptop market and about 3%
Remember that only Microsoft has way bigger share on the PC market then Apple.
If you look at the facts Dell only has about 4 – 5% of the total PC market themselves. So if you compare Apple to the PC market then Apple is not doing bad.
If you look at the software side Apple is doing pretty darn good there also. (If you take MS out of the loop) Microsoft makes the next 10 companies put together look bad.
But you take MS out and all of a sudden Apple is a major player.
GNU/Linux actually has a larger share of the desktop these days than OSX
Who are you Mac people? Do any of you have to do weird stuff like actually get an IT job?
There’s more to an IT job than doing .NET development. I do .NET development from 8 – 4 every day as a team lead at an entertainment company. At work I have a Dell laptop to do this on. At night I bring the laptop home in case I feel like doing any .Net development, but my home machine is a 17″ Powerbook, which I use for my side work of web design/development. Heck the machine paid for itself with my first job, $5k to design and code a flash site for a local attorney. So I use a Mac for an IT job; get paid pretty well for it too. Could have done that site on a Windows/Linux machine, but overall I find I enjoy the Mac better. Every person will have their own opinion; but Mac OS X has moved the Mac out of the artsy-fartsy world that Mac used to live in.
Very hard to verify, if you look at sales OSX has a bigger market share then all versions of Linux for sale right now.
If you include downloads that is hard to say because there is a greater chance of someone using something they paid for then something they got for free. So who knows how many downloaders actually use the Linux they download.
This is going to be a point of contention until more people start to buy Linux.
umm…. Dell has about 30% of the PC market… Apple is about 5th in the world for desktop computers… if you only count home computers I am sure they bump up a bit.
No it does not run FreeBSD and it is not based on FreeBSD. If in the first part of the article they get something like this wrong…I go to the next article.
It IS based on FreeBSD, idiot. It used to be based largely on OpenBSD (inc. userland et al), but Apple migrated most of it to FreeBSD underpinings in later releases of OS X (even hired principal FreeBSD developer, mr. Hubbard).
Of course it’s called “Darwin” and FreeBSD there is mixed with Mach 3 microkernel and has Cocoa APIs on top, plus Aqua. This doesn’t change the fact that it is based on FreeBSD.
Furthermore, what the article means is not that it runs FreeBSD per se, but that it runs what largely amounts to FreeBSD for all practical purposes to the interested hackers. It doesn’t take a PhD to understand what the sentence means, does it now mr. pedantic?
Are you the same kind of anal bore that points out with fervor (for anyone who cares) that Linux is not in fact “unix”? Correct? Yes. Relevant and withing a mile of understanding the context? Nope.
Do you even know who Paul Graham and/or Gruber is?
whats it matter if only ten people use them? if you’re buying an mp3 player just to be part of a community you really need to get you’re priorities in order.
People listen to music in the first place in order to be part of a community.
People do EVERYTHING they do in order to be part of a community.
So what was your point exactly?
“Who are you Mac people? Do any of you have to do weird stuff like actually get an IT job?”
Yes, we’re the guys usually maintaining the Solaris systems because the Microsoft stuff cannot be deployed in critical situations where it *has to work*.
I used to work at a bank in midtown NYC last year and all the apps that needed to transform various numbers into Excel spreadsheets were done on Windows (except for a few which actually used arcane langs like Tcl to generate csv’s for said spreadsheet folk).
Aside from frequent reboots, the Windows machines had an ‘acceptable’ uptime; they eeked out more value than they cost to run and, of course, in a bank if it costs $3m to run but brings a value of $3.5m, then it’s ok.
However NONE of the mission critical stuff ran on any Wintel servers. You may see a lot of .NET development out there, but it’s mostly for the fluff layer. When the rubbber really hits the road and billions (or even millions) are at stake, you’d be hard pressed to find a IT pro depend on Wintel.
You can’t beat Unix and at home, my Mac Powerbook handles everything I throw at it. I’ve passed the point of buying cheap garbage off the shelf and throwning it in a box and calling it a server. Most of those parts are cheap for a reason. While it was fun, there’s something to be said now for machines that are designed and run well. My Sun and Mac machines all fit into that category and when I *need* them, they rarely disappoint.
“Apple == Fascist Company.
Microsoft == Capitalist Company.”
Funny. How many governments around the world are closing the door on ‘capitalist’ Microsoft?
While I agree with some of the Apple criticism, the notion of the OS bundling thing is a non-issue. Why? Because Apple, unlike Microsoft, doesn’t just make an OS – they make hardware *to run* the OS (or vice-versa).
The notion of an OS as a separate entity is fine, but it doesn’t have to be the only one. Apple has a significant investment in the FOSS community, much more than Microsoft does or probably will for the foreseeable future (of course, much less than GNU/Linux or *BSD). And because they have a lame advertising campaign (I found much displeasure with Ghandi especially) and because you’re not ‘allowed’ to run your OS on a x86 box, they’re somehow a fascist organization and Microsoft is therefore ‘ok’? shrug.
Frankly, the whole Apple ‘closed box’ thing is tiring. And at the same time you mention NOTHING about Microsoft’s ‘Secure Computing Initiative’ where they, in a sense, own your BIOS?! Hmm. To me, that has far more devious implications than Apple’s approach. At least with a Mac (specifically a Powerbook) I know where I stand, have all the FOSS Unix tools I need and have superior quality and design. How many FOSS tools are included in Windows? Remind me please..
No one is forcing you to buy Apple anything. When you buy a Mac, you buy the whole shebang. Sorta like buying a car and expecting wheels and an engine. Who want’s to buy a car and have the dealer say “oh, well, even though your Toyota is set to roll, we haven’t yet included the charge for the engine from Ford”?
I buy Apple cuz they simply make the best.
“Also, OS X lacks a really nice pager, the ones I’ve seen are hackes that don’t let me easily drag windows across desktops. Small, but still.”
Exactly! There’s a *really* good pager called Virtual Desktop from a company called CodeTek. It’ll cost ya, but it does a lot of good things, among them, dragging windows from one desktop to the next.
I sorta got really used to working with Windowmaker for years and loved the way desktops worked on it. Virtual Desktop is not yet supported in Tiger, so I’ve found that Desktop Manager (http://wsmanager.sf.net) works well on Tiger (you’ll have to get a few builds back tho). It has less features than Virtual Desktop, but switches much faster. Sometimes, less is more. And you can move the current window to another desktop via a hotkey.
You are right. I was reading what I was looking at wrong.
Look at http://www.sharkyforums.com
You’ll find far more rabid Windows and Microsoft fans that ever more strongly feel the need to define themselves by their computer than any Mac user.
Here we go again. What utter nonsense! I suppose all Windows users are morons and all linux users are c001 h4x0r5??
I use Windows and RedHat to develop on, A ubuntu and BeOS machine at home and 3 Macs. The only reason why I feel superior, at least to you, is because I don’t go around labeling an entire population as a cult.
In regards to the article… sounds like a couple of kids bickering about who has a better bike.
John Gruber has a nice writing style. Although, I don’t agree with some of his views (e.g Dashboard is not a Konfabulator rip off…….Not!), this one I had very little complaints about. I agree with him that “the reasons for ‘unswitching’ are not real reasons but excuses”. There is usually some solution for an unexpected behavior on the Mac and the Mac web is quite helpful in solving many of those problems.
Re: converts. There have been quite a few converts from the PC side or at least give the Mac a fair shake. Anand of Anandtech is one prime example. He is very fair and does an even handed comparison of his PC to his Mac. Most Mac users on his forum seem to favorably view his criticisms since he is not a raving lunatic on either the PC or Mac side. Its easy to see spot some PC fanatics there in the Comments section. We also see many criticisms of Apple and its products even on many Mac sites. But what we don’t appreciate is someone making judgments on the Mac without really having used it (5′ minutes at a store does not cut it). When we defend the Mac from these PC fanatics, we come across as fanatics ourselves.
I think that all Mac aficionados should stop defending Apple/Mac too enthusiastically. The product speaks for itself. Also its core is somewhat shifting these days. We now have former PC users, Linux users and iPod users who have come to appreciate the Apple way of computing. It is becoming more broad based. Thus ‘my computer is better than your computer’ argument is starting to get boring. I use the ThinkPad for Fritz8 (and never log on the internet with it to keep it free of viruses, trojans and spy ware) and use the Mac for everything else.
Sorry for the ramble!
Cheers
People that say they know which is best are just fooling themselves if they haven’t used each and every one they try to compare to.
It’s just a joke for anyone to say, “my os is better because” when they’ve never used anything else. Or they haven’t used a current version side by side for close to equal time. I’m not talking about both for an hour. You can’t figure out much of anything in only an hour. Fifty hours is closer to it as a –start–. After 50 hours you can consider yourself just passed by a newby unless all you did was e-mails and surf the web.
Which OS do I use? Does it really matter? (Actually I used eight different ones until recently when I settled on two.) What matters are that they are the perfect ones for me. Well, close enough to perfect. Does that mean they are perfect for you? Maybe or maybe not. All I know is that most of the time what I think won’t change your mind and vis versa. The big difference is that I –really–know– eight OSs like the back of my hand. One I did I picked the ones that are best for me.
This guy makes some great points and is a interesting read. I prefer to use my mac for Unix SA type work. SUre i could isntall linux on my x86 laptop but its a lot let usable then my powerbook.
> And another thing: if you want a laptop that can run OS X, none of the x86 laptops (specialized or not) will do 😉
Yes: there you go — right to the heart of it. You buy a Mac because you like the Mac user experience: OS X, the various iLife apps, and so on. Or because you march to a different drummer and wanna run PPC Linux on sexy-looking and durable hardware.
The Thinkpad *does* rock, and I’d buy one if Windows or Linux was my day-to-day OS. But I like most things about OS X, so Mac it is.
I’m typing this on a venerable 1st-generation iBook. 300MHz of PPC fury. I’ve beaten the hell out of it for at least three years, and *everything* still works. And while it doesn’t run OS X 10.3.8 nearly as elegantly as my dualie G5, it’s useable.
The iBooks are low-end consumer Macs. No fair comparing them to the way cool ThinkPad. And there;s really no point comparing Mac laptops with x86 machines: they’re built to do different things.
“Differences between Mac OS X and BSD”
“Although the BSD portion of Mac OS X is primarily derived from FreeBSD, some changes have been made”
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelPr…
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/
“The most widely-distributed UNIX-based operating system, Mac OS X offers a unique combination of technical elements to the discerning geek, such as the fine-grained multithreading of the Mach 3.0 kernel, tight hardware integration and SMP-safe drivers, as well as zero configuration networking. Panther integrates features from state-of-the-art FreeBSD 5 into Darwin — the Open Source, UNIX-based foundation of Mac OS X — to provide enhanced performance, compatibility and usability.”
What was that your were saying about *bsd. Search the Apple developers site with the keywords FreeBSD.
Luke, I am your father!!!
Here we go again. What utter nonsense! I suppose all Windows users are morons and all linux users are c001 h4x0r5??
I use Windows and RedHat to develop on, A ubuntu and BeOS machine at home and 3 Macs. The only reason why I feel superior, at least to you, is because I don’t go around labeling an entire population as a cult.
In regards to the article… sounds like a couple of kids bickering about who has a better bike.
————————————————————–
You feel superior because you have 5 computers in your house. 🙂
It’s not allways about benchmarks, they are not everything… Usability, fun, power offered by OSX is far beyond what you can get from WinXP and…. Linux (as of now).
Seriously, I’m now using my new Mac Mini (G4 1.42Ghz) much more often than my WinXP PC (AMD Athlon64 3500+). It’s not allways about hardware, it’s about how it runs. Since i’m not a gamer, I don’t have any need for a 600$ video card.
iLife and OS X Panther (soon Tiger) are far more advanced software that what you can get with a Standard WinXP or Linux install. Add 99$ and you get iWork (Pages and Keynote2). So good….
> Remember that only Microsoft has way bigger share on the PC
> market then Apple.
Microsoft has a marketshare of about 0% on the PC market, they only sell some mice and keyboards.
I cannot recall any great code coming out from Apple/Mac “hackers”.
Paul Graham certainly doesn’t write any real code after he sold his Lisp-storefront-from-hell-that-was-better-than-anything-else-at-the-ti me to Yahoo.
DarlingFireball certainly doesn’t come across as a coder. More of a vicious semi-smart wannabe lawyer. If he didn’t claim to be an Apple fan, I’d guess “100% Microsoft ____ole”. You know, one big OLE object.
It just makes me laugh to think someone with a brain — a real hacker — would pick a machine that costs twice as much as a PC, delivers half the performance, runs 1/100 the software, and has 1/100000 the coolness of FLOSS/Linux.
It makes me laugh so hard because it is such a lie. In a richie’s wannabe elite hacker world, everyone has a Mac. All the c00l hazk3zrs have Mac. Uh huh… go back to pontificating and dreaming… richie Mac Applescript kiddie. Mac is on a death spiral for power users. The new growth in Mac is dumber-than-nails iPod/iTunez hazkzers. You know, people who think they are cooler than Jobs because they can use Apple’s patented “click-wheel”.
So if you really are a kick-ass Mac richie hacker, show me the code! Show me all the Mac hacking that is going on. I want to be impressed. Maybe you can show me some code that enables Mac to wake from sleep reliably? Now that would be cool.
I will point you ti fink and the Linux Kernel and NetBSD and Darwin and darwin ports.
you want professional software? just look around… subethaedit…. unison…. there is tons out there…. lots of CGI is done on a mac because the developer likes to use OS X.
but anyways… as some one who recently completed his Computer Science curriculum I will tell you that OS X is as capable as any system (more so than Windows in fact) to be a developer system… sure you can do everything on windows, b¨t you pay for it or it is a pain in the butt to get working.
Take a dekko at the following websites for some cool programs.
The first site contains programs written by two grad students at a cancer institute in Denmark. They are the best programs I have used on Os X and they are free.
http://www.mekentosj.com/
This next site about DevonThink makes organizing pdfs a breeze (have a lot of pdfs of references I use for my research.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/index.php
For loads of software for Os X:http://www.versiontracker.com/index.shtml
Obviously coded by someone!
Is there anything you have coded for Os X that I would be interested in?
Cheers
//My OS doesn’t look like the Tellytubbies landed in Fisher Price land and it doesn’t run on a box that looks like a drunk floozy that got lost on the way to the strip club. //
My XP Pro desktop doesn’t look like the Tellitubbies either … ever hear of Object Desktop? Guess not.
You compare the look of a PC with a drunken woman? FWIW … I’ve seen PLENTY of drunk women who still look quite good.
Well considering that Linux has three time the development time line as MacOSX and probably has several thousands of people working on its developement compared to MacOSX just look at the how advanced MacOSX has evolved from 10.0 to 10.3 compared to Linux in the same time frame.