“In 2005, Apple announced the Mac Mini. It was the answer to what I was looking for in a computer, so I bought one. This is a report about the early months with my new Mac, and how it compares to a Linux computer (I have never owned a Windows computer). In short, I am now both a Mac and a Linux user – Apple gets GUI simplicity, usability, and coherency right, and Linux everything else.”
I have to agree with you last sentence. That is what I have found with the MAC and Linux. I used to be a Windows98/NT/2000 use way back when. I have not used XP or 2003.
what is MAC?
It’s Mac, MAC is networking stuff.
Media Audio? Controller? I think?
> It’s Mac, MAC is networking stuff.
Now go search the threads if someone dared to write a capital I on some other apple trademarks.
Too bad this guy found the Apple Mac Mini and Mac OS so below his expectations. Since he comes across as a crashing IT snob (“I am writing this with a Linux vim editor, in a MacOS terminal window, and I’ll use Linux script to secure-copy the file …”), I’m slightly surprised he didn’t decide to write his own operating sytem instead of whingeing. Tut tut! It seems insane to fork out for a Mac only to run vim on it in a console window.
I have read at least one other article from someone who put Debian on a Mac Mini on a dual-boot basis. At the time, the only thing not working in Debian was the sound, but that might have been fixed by now. If you want to go Linux on a Mac Mini, this might be a very good way to do it.
Overall, a Debianized Mac Mini is very tempting in some ways – a couple of small, silent but still capable boxes doing stuff like serving email, home media streaming and browsing or Open Office. I guess the price of the Mac Mini is a bit offputting by the time you’ve added in extra ram and the like, though, or at least it is where I live.
Edited 2005-11-27 22:31
totally wrong statements in the article.
Indeed:
1. The guy reckons you cannot work with in the background at all. First of all, is it really a good idea to try and work like that?
He says that if you try and drag something from a window that is not at the front, then that window immediately jumps to the front. I’ve just tried this with the Finder, and the window does not jump to the front! And, more importantly, any background window can moved by holding down <command> and dragging the title-bar. If it is a Cocoa app, then you can hold down <command> and use the interface like normal, except that the window remains in the background.
2. He says that to perform the same action as a right-click, you have to hold down the Apple key (next to the space bar) and then click. Err, wrong. You hold down the control key, but never mind. I don’t think this guy quite gets that half the point of the Mac interface is that programs shouldn’t require you to use any button other than the main one. Extra mouse buttons are there purely as a luxury for some shortcuts.
3. OK, so he’s complaining about the shortcuts for taking screenshots. What exactly would he prefer – dedicated buttons on the keyboard? In any case, you can simply open up Preview, go to the file menu, and easily choose one of the “grab” options there.
4. Gotta love the complaint about not all the software being free
5. Why exactly is he complaining about the lack of built-in MPEG2 support. As he says, someone has to pay to license MPEG2 somewhere, so why exactly should it be Apple’s job? In fact, where is this MPEG2 content coming from? I have never come across any MPEG2 content on the internet other than illegal downloads from BitTorrent.
The only MPEG2 support I need is for DVDs, which OS X performs admirably at. Windows doesn’t even support this as it is.
6. Oh, and look, a complaint about the Apple DVD player being closed source. Because I’m sure that the license Apple has for playing DVDs allows them to completely open source their code for it. It’s just that they’re such bastards that they don’t want to.
7. There’s some complaints about the core of OS X. Some of which I might just about agree with, some of which I think may be wrong, but that I don’t know enough about to really say. However, I think that that is really Apple’s decision at the end of the day. Once they have a serious competitor on that sort of front, then I’m sure more work would go into it.
8. Oh, and oh my God, a complaint that Apple haven’t used X11. He is complaining that Apple aren’t thinking about their computers the right way. Surely it is their right to do things how they want to? Personally, I rather like the approach of having my own personal computer. That’s why I have a laptop. Trying to spread the whole thing out over a network just sounds like a technical nightmare for the average user.
I can see what he’s saying from an enterprise point of view, but that’s not really the market Apple are in, so why complain about it?
9. Slightly intrigued by his pronouncement at the end:
“For networking and operating systems, it’s Linux first, Apple second, Windows first.”
Sorry is that a draw, or a typo?
8. Oh, and oh my God, a complaint that Apple haven’t used X11. … Personally, I rather like the approach of having my own personal computer. That’s why I have a laptop. Trying to spread the whole thing out over a network just sounds like a technical nightmare for the average user.
Hey Mike,
I’m not sure if you just weren’t being clear enough or if you don’t have much experience using X11, I just thought I’d clear something up about X.
Although X is networkable, ie. you can connect to apps on different computers remotely, for all intents and purposes it works no differently for a desktop user than a Mac does. There is no special connecting to your own display, it just works like normal.
Personally (although I am sure apple had their reasons not to do this) I think it would’ve been great if Apple had used X as their graphics engine so that you could use all of the great X11 apps that exist out their (without running them on top of the standard graphics server).
Thomas McMahon
thmcmahon_at_gmail.com
…and X is not modern technology (just pounding on that annoying statement that the author is “used to more modern user interfaces”). Criminy! I used X on my VMS Workstation back in the mid-80’s…
Yeah, sorry, I guess I did come across like that was the only thing you could with X11.
However, it is a rather old technology, and going on some of the articles I’ve read about providing hardware acceleration, it seems like it is actually fairly tricky to get the whole thing working.
I’m sure Apple’s engineers had their own reasons, and indeed, thus far, the whole Quartz system seems pretty decent. Indeed, the way it allows for Expose is incredible (I admit to having no idea how hard it would be to do something similar in X11). Besides, I’m sure Apple are quite capable of extending Quartz to work over a network if they particularly want to at some point.
There are several totally wrong statements in the article.
Pray what are they ?
I barely skimmed through it, but aside from the examples already given in other replies I found it interesting that the author called C# C-hash. I thought by now everyone knew C# was pronounced and spelled as “C sharp”. Where did the hash come from?
I barely skimmed through it, but aside from the examples already given in other replies I found it interesting that the author called C# C-hash. I thought by now everyone knew C# was pronounced and spelled as “C sharp”. Where did the hash come from?
Because the average dweeb out there is a clueless moron; its pretty figgin obvious that its a sharp as used in music; it can be seen as either a c sharp of a d flat, which ever ever takes your fancy; which ever way it is – the idea is its meant to be one up from C, but not quite a full step to a new language – if it were, it would be called d, which is already a language.
here’s one statement that’s wrong:
[code] is that today’s PCs are built for stone-deaf speed nuts who think it’s normal that a CPU must generate more heat per surface area than a stove, and require something that sounds like a jet engine to cool it lest it disappears in a rapidly expanding plasma cloud. I was looking for an unobtrusive and quiet machine that I can put on my desk without going deaf or getting sunburned. And I don’t care about gigahertz ratings when I do desktop work. I get all the horsepower I need for 3D rendering at work. [/code]
The above was true in the past but not with the micro sizes of today’s cpu’s. My Dell Dimension 5100 with a P4-HT/EM64T 2.8GHz (say that fast 3x) is the quietest and coolest rig I’ve ever owned. It has one massive front fan, huge cooling system on the cpu and usual power supply fan in the rear and they spin very quietly at a low speed vs. fast at high. What probably helps is that so much is built into the motherboard though thereby making the whole system much easier to circulate air.
[code]barely usable hardware graphics (only 32 MB!), [/code]
32meg is actually very usable if you have adequate system RAM to allocate AGP texturing for and shut down some of the super duper effects in games.
[code]too few USB and Firewire connectors,[/code]
that’s what hubs are for.
I have to agree with his disdain for Apple’s licencing scheme on Quicktime – it’s a huge rip off with planned absolence.
[code]So why am I disappointed? Because Apple botched the job. They totally crippled MacOS X with proprietary additions. In particular, they tore out some of the lower layers and replaced them with a Mach-like microkernel. Microkernels were all the rage fifteen years ago, but the idea totally crashed and burned because performance and resource usage was pitiful. All implementations failed, and today it’s deeply buried and forgotten. [/code]
old news.
Much like the author I’m also mainly a Linux user. The things that bug me the most on OSX are the terminals. When you double click text it doesn’t highlight everything between the spaces like you’d expect it to. I do imagine there’s a way to change this though. Maybee someone would know off the top of their head?
Oh, and another thing that annoys me is that I can’t set the focus to follow the mouse like I can on Linux and the like. It makes it rather difficult at times to deal with two windows at once.
And I fully agree with the author that expose is no replacement for a nice taskbar and some virtual desktops. But I suppose it may just come down to what I’m used to. I am learning to live with the OSX way of doing things I guess, or at least when I use it I don’t want to throw the thing out the window anymore.
“Maybee someone would know off the top of their head?”
Use xterm, it’s much better anyway. You simply need to install Apple’s X11 server (not Fink’s, Apple’s integrates).
I do use xterms. They behave the exact same way.
Hmm…
After using a Mac almost exclusively for the past 8 months from a lifelong taskbar user, I think the dock / expose / window hiding kicks the living shit out of the taskbar.
IMO all taskbars suck, it takes too much reading.
With the dock, I see big beautiful icon quickly, click quickly. I don’t know about Linux, but Windows taskbar grouping sucks, you have no ability to group windows to the same area of the taskbar but NOT collapse them, and I don’t even know if you can group at all in Linux (I suspect you can somehow)
but hiding a whole app > minimizing any day of the week.
IMO, Linux and Windows take too much fidgeting when it comes to managing the windows, and I expect this to get worse as resolutions increase… both of them are really meant for full screen usage, when we have 2000x whatever resolutions etc, are you going to want a fullscreen web browser? Windows/Linux as of right now don’t offer anything as nice as expose to take the work out of organizing non-fullscreen windows… which I feel is the right way to go as resolutions increase.
I thought I would hate the dock, and initially I was a little iffy of it, but after using it so long it kicks the crap out of taskbar by a large margin IMO.
> Oh, and another thing that annoys me is that I can’t set the focus to
> follow the mouse like I can on Linux and the like. It makes it rather
> difficult at times to deal with two windows at once.
MacOS has a global menu bar that changes depending on which window has focus; if focus-followed-mouse then the menu bar would be useless.
Strange – my terminal does exactly what you’d expect, which is highlight everything between the spaces. You might want to check your double-click speed?
He’s a KDE user. I’m not saying that being a KDE user is a problem, but KDE is, in many ways, anti-Mac. In fact, they even have an “anti-Mac” section to their HIG.
For me, when he talks about the single/double click thing, I find it to be a baseless complaint since Windows does the exact same as well as my Gnome desktop.
The author does not want a Macintosh. KDE specifically says things like make things complicated so that you can offer users more options – the complexity level isn’t a big issue since as time goes on more people are comfortable with computers. That’s fine, but that’s not what the Macintosh is trying to achieve – and one of the founders of KDE recently posted something saying that KDE should get rid of that attitude and be more Mac-like. Anyway, I’m about as comfortable with computers as one can get, but I don’t like complexity. This author seems to prefer it. That’s fine, but that’s not a problem with the Mac OS. That’s a difference in preference.
I also dislike the fact that the author thinks abstraction is a bad idea (which is what a rant against microkernels is), but that’s another story.
“For me, when he talks about the single/double click thing, I find it to be a baseless complaint since Windows does the exact same as well as my Gnome desktop. ”
I believe KDE is pretty solid on this, single click everything.. I actually prefer it, I used windowmaker for a long time and my fingers got tired from the double clicking.
I disliked the fact that the author didn’t proofread this
.
For me, when he talks about the single/double click thing, I find it to be a baseless complaint since Windows does the exact same as well as my Gnome desktop.
The GNOME desktop is conistent when Nautilus is set to single-click and everything is single click. But is inconsistent when Nautilus is set to double-click then you have double-click for desktop items but single-click for the panel.
On the desktop/in nautilus, you want to be able to select icons. It is easy to select an icon with one click OR “activate” it with a double click. On the panel, you only ever want to activate the icon.
I am used to the system and I like it.
BTW, I use GNOME and have an iBook with OS X.
It’s not just selecting actually, but mainly “grabbing and moving”. One should think of desktop items as objects, which you can touch and manipulate. You don’t want all objects to jump in your face as soon as you touch them. Other items, like panel launchers, are merely buttons, so it makes sense that touching them activates something. That’s why I like to think of left-click as “touch”.
Personally I think that in the future the panel should behave just like the desktop, but that’s a different story.
Another point which is often overlooked is that doubleclick is in no way required to do anything. It is just a shortcut to the default action of the object’s context menu (which we have the second mouse button for).
I for one am quite taken with the name of a document in the top center of a window. When it’s not saved it’s greyed out. But when it’s saved, it comes into focus. You can then drag that as a line of text and switch between applications to drop it into an email [or another document], and it will be copied there.
Pretty fancy in my book.
The ‘networked’ argument is a sophism. Most personal computer users don’t have a network. You’re lucky if they network their own computers if they have more than one.
Why do I care where my data is? Because it’s important to know where stuff is, don’t you think? If your data is on your lofty network and you stored it on volume [BitterCold] which all of a sudden drops off the map, it may be significant to know that [BitterCold] is actually a server in Alaska.
The X11 argument is stupid. You can get it with the developer tools. He must not have paid much attention.
Complaining about the performance of the Mac Mini. Why do these people always want a horse cart to perform like a Ferrari? So used to ripping the insides of a fridge and mounting it into a sceptic tank and cooling it with liquid natural gas, all for the price of a Playboy subscription, that the forget decent engineering doesn’t come free.
Speaking of which: free software… what kind? What do you do with it? What is the Linux equivalent of iLife?
I can’t comment on protocols and standards and there are certainly some things that royally tick me off too, notably the QT to QT Professional thing, I’m not happy about that. And about some other things. But overall, I live on that system and it performs very well. The dock is really good and I couldn’t live without Expose anymore. Virtual desktops? What do I give a damn about virtual desktops? If you have more than one user, fast user switching will give each user the apps and privileges they require and they can make it look like anything they want it to look like.
I also dislike the fact that the author thinks abstraction is a bad idea (which is what a rant against microkernels is), but that’s another story.
That’s not a fact. I’d say he thinks that bad performance is a bad idea. Who cares about kernel internals as long as you don’t have to watch the beach ball too much. I’m a mac user myself, and I agree with him.
The author mentions this:
“….the underlying operating system. It’s based on FreeBSD, a powerful and well-respected Unix variant, what can be wrong with that? It’s not a leading-edge OS, sure, but it is tightly controlled by a professional team. I understand why Apple chose it; I am sure they felt it’s more manageable than Linux….”
IIRC, Apple asked Linus, and he said no. They could have used it, but I believe they wanted him to work for them or something (why would you ask the creator of Linux to work for you on BSD anyway right?).
He says FBSD, but I know OS X used Darwin. Does anyone know, is Darwin a child of Free?
Got a source for that? Apple did a lot of work on MkLinux WITHOUT Linus. They could have very easily continued with that, but it didn’t suit what they were doing. Instead they chose FreeBSD.
And Darwin is essentially derived from Mach and the BSDs, with most of the credit going to Free (though there is considerable debate about this by people with too much time on their hands).
eh?
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html
“Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted..”
I went browsing through this article with an open mind, but every time I scanned over a section briefly I couldn’t find anything but this guy expecting Mac OS X to essentially be Linux, then I found this
“The fact that Objective C is GPLed and there are alternate C++ bindings don’t change the fact that Apple is making it as difficult as possible to write MacOS software. Fire the gray beards!”
Apparently this guy has NEVER used Objective-C ever. Im currently taking a second C++ course and writting Mac software in Objective-C and IMHO Objective-C is much nicer to work with! Not that I have anything against C++ in fact I like the language, but in terms of being productive I like Objective-C especially with Cocoa a lot better.
Seriously I’d expect some sort of valid comparison between an Objective-C project with Xcode/Cocoa or GNUstep before this guy made any sort of statement.
Why can’t this guy just change the title to “How I’d like Apple to make Mac OS X be like Linux” ?
“Why can’t this guy just change the title to “How I’d like Apple to make Mac OS X be like Linux” ?”
or rather why can’t I make this OS more like the one I’m used too. ANd for someones who’s nevered owned a Windows system he seems quite up on their faults dosn’t he?
“Poor file type identification”
“MacOS is filled to the gills with arcane keyboard shortcuts”
“FreeBSD is a little quaint. It doesn’t even have a /proc filesystem”
“network services are sparse (no rsh)”
“Objective-C is a quasi-proprietary language”
“The Mach-like microkernel is a proprietary addition”
“Apple has this open-source fig leaf going but they are careful to never release anything that might be actually useful”
and the winner is…
“They should have used X11”
I agree with you on the rest of the quotes, but with file type identification, he’s right. Unless he’s outright lying, I have not used OS X.
What I mean, guessing the content of a file by it’s name is lame. See his example between *.mpg and *.mpeg. I think that using the output of the “file” utility is better, a perfect thing would be having an extended attribute holding the MIME type.
Using X11 would not be a good idea for Apple, but when they were building something new, they should have made it network transparent.
AFAIK, OS X uses extended attributes for MIME types, and only resorts to file name extensions for figuring out what to cache there if the file command fails. I don’t own a Mac and might be wrong, it could be that it has its priorities wrong and tries the extension before using the file tool, though. What I do know however, is that OS X knows what icon to display and how to open a file even if the file name has no extension.
the best part is that the author doesnt know you can use X11 as a display layer and OSX even comes with it these days.
“Give me a break! Double-clicking is seriously on the way out, but even if Apple feels they must stick to it, be consistent!”
lol
“As a Linux user, I am used to getting software for free.”
lol
“I also have serious problems with Apple’s proprietary graphics engine. They should have used X11.”
lol
lol
I like reading articles like this. It’s no matter whether the author is wrong or right, it’s just that it’s more in-depth than most of the articles here. He doesn’t brush over things, he goes into detail, and his writing style is pretty good. You keep on reading.
Again, I don’t know if Apple really butchered the kernel, or that they should have used X11. The author thinks so, and he does explain it, I just didn’t get it
Still, that’s more effort than taking a few quotes and saying they’re wrong, no reason given…
I felt much the same about the article. It was quite interesting and he goes into a lot of detail to built his arguments against the MacOS design choices. Even if I did disagree with many of his points, it was far from mindless.
Yep guys you’ve red the truth.
I’ve been using MacOSX on one of the places I administrate. It’s a disaster. The boss of the place is really angry that he had bought fancy-looking cripplyworking system. Even the gui is inlogical imho.
What I mean here is that clicking the red x on the window title does not close the page, it only closes the window (and that’s just one example)… WHAT THE HECK! On the other hand the price you pay for that kinda stuff that does not work as I want is too big. Please dont support these quacks, if you’re not bound to mac(in case you’re music editor or something like that)get a REAL COMPUTER install easy debian-based linux like Xandros and do with you’r computer whatever you want to do. P.S. I want to thank the writer about the article.
He makes some good points, but some are uncorrect really :
For example, kernel parallelism on MacOS X is a disaster. The Mac mini is already a little underpowered. The effect is that when you do a harmless but long-running system operation such as accessing a disk, like copying a file or downloading one over the net, the entire system freezes and all you get is a spinning beach ball cursor.
Typical Linux user, overestimating the role of the kernel 🙂 I think the minis slow HD (and low memory) is a much likelier culprit. When performing lots of tasks at once you take up a lot of memory and more importantly swap space. Lot’s of swapping leads to the “beach ball”
And as a mini owner he’s exagerating the problem here IMHO, I never seen this problem performing these tasks. If you DO want to see it open 8-10 apps, start a disk-io heavy task and start switching between apps.
Also I don’t get his problem with netinfo . Apple is modernising the underlying OS keeping the old ways intact for those that want them and including more powerful tools. Just like IBM did with AIX and Sun is now finally doing with Solaris10. Linux really is the one stuck in the past here, not OsX as he seems to suggest several times.
Overall I find OsX, including the underlying Unix system, much easier to work with than Linux (for the desktop) and I’m a unix admin by trade.
Good points in the article were : unresponsiveness when accessing no longer available network disks (NFS or SAMBA, lack of codecs because Apple pushes Quicktime and lack of good freeware. But overall pretty poor article.
You say that there is not good freeware for OS X, what are you looking for exactly? Virtually all Linux/Unix software compiles on OS X and there are free/open source software specifically for Mac too.
And as a related note, the quality of shareware on OS X is IMHO phenomenal, I’m happy to pay for some of it.
A lot of the “open source” type apps (except the big ones) seem to be stuck in permanent-alpha stage or are just designed badly although there are some pearls in there too.
Also I don’t want to install the development tools (to be able to use fink) to use some cheesy little program. And I don’t wan’t to go back to dependancy hell either.
To nuance there is a lot of good stuff around for mac like iTerm, Desktop Manager, Adium, etc… It’s no match for the sheer amount of freeware around for Windows though.
And as a related note, the quality of shareware on OS X is IMHO phenomenal, I’m happy to pay for some of it.
I agree with this, however I’m on a budget here, and i dislike paying for software I can get for free on most every other platform even if it is higher quality. I guess I’m cheap 🙂
Edited 2005-11-28 02:37
The author complains, “Poor file type identification. Unix including FreeBSD has powerful tools to identify the type of a file. The Mac trusts the filename extension instead.”
So do the KDE and GNOME desktops.
where did U read this? rename a PDF-file and then see how KDE seas the world
> where did U read this?
Try this:
echo “Some random nonsense” > ~/Desktop/test.png
Now go to the desktop and click on the file test.png and see what happens.
> rename a PDF-file and then see how KDE
> seas the world
If you rename it without a file extension, then all is well: KDE will examine the file content. However, rename it with a bogus file extension, then KDE gets confused.
Not much better than OS X really.
So do the KDE and GNOME desktops.
Not so, I just renamed a .pdf file to .txt it still opens in Gnome Envince, the same thing happens if I remove the extension altogether.
My Final Cut Pro files don’t have a file type extension, nor do media files associated with the application, and yet OSX knows perfectly well what application they’re associated with. This would have to be due to the embedded file type and creator metadata, which is in the same format and the same location as it has been since before OSX existed.
Thom, I’m curious why you chose to pick this article amongst the plethora of news articles about OS X that don’t make false trollish comments in an eloquent fashion thus gaving them a sense of validity.
After reading the comments, It’s obviouys that several of the fence-sitters who aren’t familiar with OS X were influenced by the piece.
In defense of Thom the article does make a few valid points and probably accurately depicts what (some) hardcore Linux users feel when switching. Plus the guy’s not a professional tech writer so it’s understandable there is some bias or some mistakes.
It would be better if submitters explicitly pointed out what the source of the article is.
This guy’s totally spot-on. If Apple would just do a better job of mimicking KDE they could get a chunk of that vast KDE desktop market share.
KDE is too busy mimicking OS X.
Having tried pretty much the same experience myself (they really are very nice looking pieces of kit) I find myself pretty much agreeing with all of the authors comments about the UI. However, I’m an atypical user; most users don’t care about multiple desktops, resizing windows, app bar at the top of the screen etc. All they want is something that’s reliable and looks nice while they edit their work in their single windows, the Mac delivers this in spades. Me I’m back using my Linux box and I’m giving the Mac to my girlfriend.
but KDE is, in many ways, anti-Mac. In fact, they even have an “anti-Mac” section to their HIG.
And in many ways KDE is just like Mac, you can for instance have the menubar on top of the screen like mac has.
And your “fact” is in fact not correct. There are no such thing in the HIG. The document you are referring to are located in a collection of documents described like this: “This document is intended to provide a place where KDE application designers/developers can review user interface design principles. It is intended to complement, not compete with, the interface standards. Design principles are not the same as standards” The difference is rather obvious.
the single/double click thing
The most important thing is keeping it consistent, which KDE does whichever solution you use. And one of the features offered in XP are the possibility to set it to single click. The mix of singe/double on the Mac is simply a design compromise forced by the use of a singel button mouse.
KDE specifically says things like make things complicated so that you can offer users more options
And that’s just pure nonsens.
I can not agree with a statement that all PC hardware is ugly and noisy.
In my opinion the pre-Gigahertz war PC processors (like PIII 733 MHz) were very good: reasonably fast for desktop use and they had very low power consumotion. Those designs didn’t even require dedicated CPU fan!
Well, all this changed once AMD created 1 GHz Athlon and Intel had to respond with P4.
One can also find very nice looking PC cases.
So given all this, instead of buying MAC, I would rather find older PIII PC built using uATX board (most likely for free from somebody’s garage), add memory to 512MB, add HD, replace whining fans, put all this into new case and then install Linux.
Cheaper and better.
this is just some rambling by some kid who knows a few words but not the meaning of those words. The whole section about micro kernels is pathetic he completely misses the best point of a micro kernel (stability). This is probably because he didnt know about it.
lets not even get to the MS bashing
“The upshot is that Apple is now stuck with a defacto proprietary language, much like Microsoft is trying to foist C-hash (C#) on us”
C-hash huh? no comment.
I agree, another rant by a Linux nerd who expects the world to be revolving around him. Next!
This article is basically a well-veiled attempt at an anti-OS X troll. I could waste my time and rebut 80% of his points, but I won’t bother because there’s no gain.
Sure, OS X’s underlying architecture causes it to lose many benchmarks that test low-level OS subsystems — but then you have to ask yourself, how many OS X users out in the world really care that OS X’s context-switching overhead is much higher than Windows/Linux? All they care is that their applications run and run decently, which OS X does.
I’ll even say that OS X has some UI consistency issues — but has this guy even used KDE/GNOME if he’s complaining about OS X’s UI inconsistencies? Come *on*, pal.
OS X is not Linux. Windows is not Linux. FreeBSD is not Linux. Quit pretending it is, people. It’s a completely different OS, and it’s oriented towards a completely different user base.
PS: It only takes some pre-planning and quick tweaks to build an almost-silent PC. I did so back when building my Athlon 64 box, and it only cost me $30 more in overhead for some better components.
Apple sets the bar very high in their advertizing. Consequently, a “switcher” is going to have very high expectations from their new Macintosh, and will be dissatisfied when it doesn’t measure up, even if it’s above Linux/Windows. I know this because this is what happened to me. I am also a Linux->Mac switcher.
Apple advertizes their system as being all high and mighty, but in general I found the Mac Mini to be slow, buggy, and the user interface to be quite inconsistent. The fact that you can’t export the display to a remote machine, whether you like it or not, is a disadvantage for Linux switchers. Ditto for slow UI, ditto for UI inflexibility (who do I have to kill for sloppy focus?) ditto for poor network performance (and it is BAD.)
I will agree with you on one thing, which is that his complaining about the Mach underpinnings and FreeBSD, at least so far as that it’s unfamiliar to him, is unreasonable. He needs to suck it up and learn it, or switch back.
I liked my Mac Mini in many ways, but the reason I walked away and sold mine was because IT WAS NOT AS GOOD AS ADVERTIZED. When I bought it, I took a hit in performance and was provided less interface flexibility than in Linux. But the final nail in the coffin was that the vaunted Apple UI was really not significantly better than Windows for example, and was in fact even less consistent and oftentimes extremely poor performing. Apple needs to wake up and reinstate their Human Interface Guidelines group that they canned a few years ago, and rewrite finder to not be such a buggy, slowass piece of shit.
Frankly, if finder hadn’t sucked so bad, I would probably still own my Mac Mini. I was sold on a life-altering UI experience, and it was very much “not so.”
I liked my Mac Mini in many ways, but the reason I walked away and sold mine was because IT WAS NOT AS GOOD AS ADVERTIZED
You go around judging products by adverisements and are disappointed when they don’t match your expectations ? We live in a world that sells _washing powder_ as a life altering experience for christ’s sake.
Next time shop around, go to internet forums and ask for opininions, ask friends and collegues and go to the Apple store and play around with an actual machine. You’ll have much more realistic idea of what to expect.
I was in the Apple store most of the weekend before I bought my mini, in the end people started coming to me because they thought I worked there .
It’s not the Apple marketers that set the bar so high, after all every company hypes their product. Instead it is the Mac fan base that oversell it. I also tried switching to the Mac (6 month trial then back to Windows). During that time I discovered that Apple had their own implementation of the BSOD called the WWOD (White Window of Death). And why do all the apps start with an i? When scrolling through a list of apps it is a pain when half the apps start with an i. I switched back not because the Mac was a crappy computer/OS but because it was no better than what I was used to. The Apple fan base just needs to wake up and realize that this is not 1985. None of this is intended as anti-Apple, they bring much creativity and energy to the desktop and I wish them well.
You wanted performance and bought a mini? and then complained that it was slow? thats like dating a model and complaining that she’s too skinny tho and dumping her for a fat chick.
Sure, OS X’s underlying architecture causes it to lose many benchmarks that test low-level OS subsystems — but then you have to ask yourself, how many OS X users out in the world really care that OS X’s context-switching overhead is much higher than Windows/Linux?
There is definitely a limit to what is acceptable, however. My 2.3 Ghz PowerMac is notably slower than my 2.2 GHz Linux machine. Compiles take 50% longer, and that’s not a small difference. On a desktop machine, the differences between (say) OpenBSD and Linux are academic. The latter does much better in the benchmarks, but its hard to notice at the user level. The difference between Darwin and Linux are noticeable at the user level.
You use compile times as a benchmark? I’d say a more realistic benchmark is how quickly/efficiently you can get your work done on either.
Don’t be a Gentoo user. Gentoo is bad for your health. 😉
“So given all this, instead of buying MAC, I would rather find older PIII PC built using uATX board (most likely for free from somebody’s garage), add memory to 512MB, add HD, replace whining fans, put all this into new case and then install Linux.
Cheaper and better.”
Yeah! In Star Trek Universe this is true…
“replace whining fans”
I wish I could replace all the Linux whining fans as well. For the record I am an Ubuntu user and it sickens me to the stomach to read this trip and the constant rants that all software should be free with the intellectual property donated to any lamer that wants it in the form of the source. Oh that will encourage the advancement of computing talent NOT! The Linux word Free = Freedom, there is no crime in charging for your hours of hard work!!!
To be completely fair KDE does take a cue from the suffix, try renaming a .pdf file as a .png file for instance, the difference is that if there is no suffix kde runs file to identify the type.
To be completely fair KDE does take a cue from the suffix, try renaming a .pdf file as a .png file for instance, the difference is that if there is no suffix kde runs file to identify the type.
Works in GNOME. I renamed a .pdf to .png and Nautilus still opened it in the default PDF viewer.
Edited 2005-11-28 03:19
Funniest thing I’ve read in a long time.
OSNEWS has editors so articles this bad don’t get posted?
about the “stone-deaf” “CPU hotter than a stove” parts…makes no sense. Isnt the G5 pretty darn hot too? I think he was referring to the Intel processors…anyway overall a nice article but his opinions he should keep himself about anything else other than his experience with the OSes.
The comment on C-hash…well # is known as hash so go easy on the author. Nice article with some things I dont agree with. I think the dock option with virtual desktops would work out best for my uses. Best of both worlds. Mac OS X is slow as heck there is no doubt about it…and you wont believe how much context switching is important when you get into heavy video editing. The 17 inch powerbook g4 with 1.5 gigs of ram is very slow when vdo editing. However I cannot comment if it is the OS itself or the G4 processor since I have yet to do editing on a G5 workstation. Overall I give the author a 6 out of 10. Some comments were absolutely lame.
The technical name for the symbol is the octathorpe.
Incorrect, the symbol ‘#’ is only called an octothorpe in the context of being on a telephone keypad.
…which window has focus?
http://bani.anime.net.nyud.net:8090/tell_me_dear_apple_which_window…
apple needs to go back and re-read their own UI guidelines from the original macos. aqua is a pile of poo — lots of eye candy but terrible usability.
Too much meaningless statements in this article typical of the linux geeks that does not understand OS X, and wants in different ridiculous ways to protect Linux.
The author has a complete misuderstanding of Objective C and Coccoa, because for him everything which is not open source, sucks. I dont think that he does understand what COCOA does, and why its so wonderful for developpers. The thing that he should wonder is rather why Linux does not have this. And he seems to say that you can only code in OS X with Objective C, hey!!!!! wake up you can use C, C++ and a ton of other langages as you would on Linux. Does OS news read this before, because and article having so much wrong statements like that should not be published. Is there anyone checking the quality of what people write?
When i read this ” The fact that Objective C is GPLed and there are alternate C++ bindings don’t change the fact that Apple is making it as difficult as possible to write MacOS software Apple is making it as difficult as possible to write MacOS software.”,
i feel that the author of this crap does not understand a single thing on OS X, but his article is only a Linux troll bunch of bullshit.
And its full of this kind of statements.
This the linux troll who thinks that the Linux is the best kernel out there. Every kernel has good point and bad points. Darwin is as better as Linux, trying to say that Linux is only the reference is crap. The author does not understand the way Darwin is designed, the BSD nature of OSx, etc….. I can say a buch of things that i dont like on Linux. He is talking about paralellism, well i think he does not get the point.
I am sorry but i feel that OSX is much better for handling many tasks a the same time. What he says is irrelevent because i never got the behavior that he describes on OSX. Even if the Finder does not respnd any more or crash, osx allows a force-quit, even if the finder is blocked, it does not mean that all the os is blocked. It is possible to go to any other app or do something else while the finder is processing.
Yes the finder itself is not as multithreaded as it should be, is KDE? I dont think so…. Again its not because the finder itself block times to times (again its trying to do many things at the same time on a small hardware, doing the same with Linux has the same effect. On my machine the color ball is almost non-existant). Moreover if KDE crashes (and it does often) there is no intuitive way to restart ot as the OS X provides.
Another example that i have many times using linux is when running large simulation code. On linux you need to incrase the value of nice for the simulation process (nice + value ./ appname.exe). otherwise the system gets very slow to use. Using the terminal becomes a pain. On Osx i dont have the same problem, running the same simulation does not disturb the rest of the system, because the system knows that it should give to the simulation small priority, something that i have to trigger by myself on Linux.
Again i mean the author comments generalize to the all os, which is not true, the finder is not all the os, OS X has an exellent parallelism.
He is talking about the choice of the graphical engine used by apple. He does not get the point, should we say hiim that Os X is years ahead in graphics than Linux. He is talking about a mening less network issue, but the point is that Linux graphics sucks and is far behind OSX. Yes there are bood projects to bring to Linux good graphics and graphical engines, but Apple has been doing for many years what they want to offer tomorrow, and they have been write to develop their own engine. Apple knows how to deal with graphics technologies, and really os x is ahead in this domain. X11 is evoluting, but its not as modular as Quartz, apple wanted to have something modular, and they got it. Moreover the author seems to forget that Quartz is built on standards, pdf, opengl…
The author should consider that Apple is a compagny that needs to be competitive quickly so they need to develop technologies that put them ahead on the competition. This can only be done with self developed technologies.
“I don’t see Apple’s OS ever catching up to Linux.”
Is it a joke, are you serious? OS X is far ahead of linux. I mean look at the dam teconologies that OS X has. Linux is far behind os x , come one just be honnest and stop to troll. Linux is great, sure i am agree, but OS X please, thats another level and world of os technologies. I mean Quartz, the integration of OpenGL as hardware abstraction, Coreaudio, CoreVideo, CoreImage, ColorSync, Automator, Spotlight, Inkwell, Speech, accessibility technologies, VoiceOver, Expose, Bonjour, Networking technologies, support of Wifi and wireless network, secutiry features (FileVault, etc…), parental control and multi-users faclities, .Mac, Safari, iChatAV, iSync, Adress Book, websharing, pdf, FontBook, Printing, Quicktime and h264, Applesricpt, Cocoa, CoreData, , Lanchd, Xgrid, Xcode, GCC4.0, AppleScript Studio. etc…. so much technologies that you do not find built in on Linux or if so, less the quality and sophistication of what OSX proposes. Try to use wifi on linux today, it sucks….
Just tell me, catching up linux, in what? Linux is kust not at the level of OS X, accept it, dont be the linux troll that thinks that Linux is ahead of any other os, thats just your imagination or your lack of knowledge about what is going on somewhere else outside of the Linux world.
“I don’t see Apple making big inroads into the server market,”
Oh no they do, open you eyes, Apple has been growing significantly in this market, OS X server put linux in shame when it comes to server administration, and people are getting in the Apple approach gradually.
Yes Linux and OSX can cohexist, they already do, Linux is strong on server market, and can be competitive on desktop market. OS X is stronger as any other os as a workstation and desktop os, because it has the technologies for, on the server market OS X has a huge potential.
Edited 2005-11-28 07:23
Your post was pure, mindless Mac-fanatic trolling. You come app with a long list of Apple buzzwords, yet you have no idea what they mean (some of them mean nothing at all, by the way).
Linux is behind of OSX because OSX has Quartz? And what makes Quartz superior to Composite? What’s “OpenGL as hardware abstraction” supposed to mean? What’s so great about CoreAudio compared to, say JACK? I develop audio apps for Linux and OSX, so I know the answer – nothing! CoreVideo, CoreImage? Buzzwords. Why is Expose better than Kompose? Bonjour is not OSX exclusive. What are those great and superior OSX networking technologies? Why is FileVault better than Cryptoloop? You do know that Safari was based on KDE technologies? OpenSync supports far more devices than iSync. An address book, font manager or PDF support is also all but OSX exclusive (I know a guy in prepress, he prefers KDE’s font manager to FontBook). Quicktime is a joke compared to Xine or MPlayer, h264 was supported on Linux before OSX had support for h264. And guess what? I use gcc 4 on Linux for a long time now.
And Apple grew significantly in the server market? Yeah, they sold one server in ´04 and two in ´05, 100% growth! OSX is simply not suited for servers, and Apple is not important at all in that market. And I doubt that’ll change. Educated guess: IBM still sells way more AIX servers than Apple sells XServe toys. And AIX goes the way of all UNICES these days.
OSX is not the be-all, end-all OS you believe it to be. Maybe it’s nice to look at, maybe it’s in a few ways superior to other OSs, but it’s pretty much a toy. A nice desktop OS, if you only want to do basic stuff. But definitely no workstation OS. And don’t sing the Pixar song , that was a marketing stunt. And the Adobe stuff? Works better on Windows, anyway. It’s quite common for Audio pros, but that’s not because of OSX’s greatness – RTLinux would be better suited for that kind of work, but the applications are missing. Even FCP is a joke compared to, say, Piranha Edit or Smoke (both Linux based)…
LOL – you have the nerve to call him a fanatic – you looked in the mirror lately?
Your post was pure mindless trolling
” And the Adobe stuff? Works better on Windows, anyway”
Hmm, and how does “Adobe stuff” work on linux? You, know since it was an OSX/Linux comparison.
Since when did Adobe stuff work better on a PC?
surly the comment of a person who has never used Adobe on both platforms
“Microkernels were all the rage fifteen years ago, but the idea totally crashed and burned because performance and resource usage was pitiful. All implementations failed, and today it’s deeply buried and forgotten.”
Totaly wrong! nowdays microkernels are much faster.
The Mac is very smooth compared to the now dated Windows XP, and also smoother than the latest GNU/Linux desktops.
However when I am dragging files from CD (which are not writeable) problems can really occur.
For instance, I had a two files in the same folder with names that differed only by capitalization. When I dragged a bunch of folders including this one to my hard drive, it would start the long process of copying, but then it would notice a name collision and stop.
It would not ask to resume by skipping this file which would have made it easy, but completely give up half way through copying a bunch of folders.
Then, to make it even worse, next time I drag and drop the remaining folders, it would try to ‘move’ from the CD and complain it cannot write to the CD, but in an otherwise vague manner.
This is terrible. It requires ejection of the CD and reinsertion to get it to ‘copy’ things from the CD again instead of trying to ‘move’ things.
Next time to copy, its easier by opening a terminal and using cp -R or whaterver.
bought myself an imac. i symply love it. i’ve tryed several linux distros in the past ,,,, none comes close to OSX’s simplicity and intuitivity.
Quicktime is really crippled and almost unusable in the free (beer) version. But you can easily download VLC or MPlayer for OS X and play mpeg-2 and DVDs without all of the problems he mentioned.
The Finder really still sucks. Not as much as it did in 10.1 and 10.2, but the network access and the accomppagning freezing is annoying.
The window click through behaviour and the inconsistent double/single click stuff has been discussed in deep by daringfireball.net
His review is honest and most of the points he makes are valid. Some of his complaints are obviously caused by his lack of knowledge: X11 vs. Quartz/Aqua, Micro-Kernel bashing…
I wouldn’t exactly say that Quicktime Player is crippled! It does pretty much what it’s supposed to. However, the lack of proper full-screen in the free version is incredibly annoying. If it’s the Pro advert you’re bothered by, I’m sure I saw a good hint on macosxhints on how to remove it.
I forgot to mention earlier about the guy’s complaints on single and double clicking. I agree that it’s not maybe the best choice, but there is some logic behind it:
The icons in the Finder sidebar and the dock are merely links to the program/file and so only require a single-click. However, items elsewhere in the Finder are the actual files and so require a double-click to open. Admittedly though, an alias encountered in the browser part of the Finder does confuse this rule slightly!
The thing that I like from OS X is the power management: the one-second suspend closing the screen from my powerbook, this rocks!! Linux’s software suspend is not working in the same way. Also I think that Mac Mini with Linux is a very great combination, but OSX / dual boot too. But the problem with Apple hardware and Linux is, again, the power management…
The Mac OS X interface is not modern?
“The underpinnings of the GUI have a disappointing number of serious defects, but they are apparent only to Linux users who are already used to more advanced technology”
Wha?
I would agree that Apple has had a problem being consistent with the Mac OS X interface (and I DO believe consistency is very important, being male) but maybe the “reporter” is simply more used to using KDE than any other UI, because I’d rank GNOME higher on the usability scale than KDE, let along Mac OS X. But I guess that is it, isn’t it… UI’s are subjective – and they have all implemented basic principles of UI design.
I am tired of those coward trollers scared to post with their manes
Yes typical comments of a loser that you are and that cant accept the facts, you just want to ignore that OSX is far superior to Linux in many things.
“And what makes Quartz superior to Composite”
Its just working right now and has been working for more that 5 years. Composite is till not stable, slow, not usuable, and try to do things that OSX has been doing for 5 years. Thats a great thing for lInux,sure, but it comes so late comparing to osx.
“What’s “OpenGL as hardware abstraction” supposed to mean?”
Read the osx developer doc. Open Gl is used in Tiger as an habstraction layer between the hardware (the graphical card) and the aboves layers. Before Tiger everything in OS X graphical engine, say Quatz, Quicktime, had to comminicate directly to the hardware. In Tiger Quartz, Quicktime, CoreImage/video, lies on top of OpenGl, for a much more modular architecture as everything can access to the OpenGl hardware accelaration more easily and for much better performance.
“What’s so great about CoreAudio compared to, say JACK? I develop audio apps for Linux and OSX, so I know the answer – nothing!”
JACK is not built in Linux, CoreAUdio is built in osx. CoreAudio is more robust, faster, really faster, much less latencies than JACK, coreaudio is much more modular and scale with hardware, coreaudio supports much more audio formats, coreaudio has a hardware-level abstraction layer, coreaudio support a real and powerful plugin architecture and provides a powerful and modular AudioUnits, Open AL is built in, MIDi is integrated directly in the operating system, Coreaudio supports 64 bits audio file format, coreaudio support device agregation, coreaudio is stable and reliable, Jack is not, etc…etc…. so dont say me that you know a single thing about Coreaudio.
“CoreVideo, CoreImage? Buzzwords”
Troll, why dont you say ahh yes for people that do intensive graphical tasks, Coreimage/video is great, Linux should consider to have this kind of staff, but no because you dont know what to say and maybe you are too stupid to come up with such comments, you say buzzwords. Well maybe yo are just jalous that you baby sucking linux does not have this.
“Why is Expose better than Kompose?”
Do you just realize that Kompose is a ripp off of Expose, that even not match half of Expose. Can you make drag and drop through windows using Compose, i dont think so, can you drag and drop files or folder from the desktop to any other window with Compose, i dont think so. Moreover Kompose is instable, slow and unusuable, it just sucks. So please before to open your stinky mouth, go and use Expose before coming to troll here.
” Bonjour is not OSX exclusive. What are those great and superior OSX networking technologies?”
OS X has been using bonkour long before the idea of porting it to linux appeared. Its much more stable and well implemented on Osx, and even on linux its still more an experimentation than a usable technologiy. Networking? It just work on OSX, no tricky preferences ala windows, no strange configuration file to change in case of some problems, did you already try to use a wireless network on Linux, it simply sucks, difficult to set up, and even it does not work most of the time.
“Why is FileVault better than Cryptoloop?”
Are you kidding me? Did you ever used Cryptoloop? Thats a nightmare for a simple user. Kernel configuration, getting the user space tool, setting up the loop device, mounting the encrypted file system, everything in the terminal. Who is gonna to use that for protecting his data easily and effectively. People needs a easy way to deal with complex technologies. I dont imagine myself asking my grand mother, hey!!! use this if you want to protect your data, and have fun with command lines. Come one, come back to Earth, why is FileVault better than Cryptoloop, well FireVault is a single click in a preference and you are protected, nothing else to do.
“You do know that Safari was based on KDE technologies”
Oh yes i know, but Safari is much more now, i mean its fast, easy to use, effective, well designed, lightweight, and it works with much more sites and support much more web standards than anything in KDE.
“OpenSync supports far more devices than iSync.”
I tried to connect my palm with Linux, it doesn not work, i tried my cell phone, it does not work, i tried my ipod it doesn not work. No way that opensync supports more devicves than iSync, you dont know what you talk about.
” An address book, font manager or PDF support is also all but OSX exclusive ”
Adress book in osx is shared data base accessible from any other application. Mail can access to Adress book content without lanching Adress book, there is an API for that, there is not such thing workin on lIunux now.
Font manager on Linux sucks, its unstable, slow, not searchable, and ugly.
Pdf? Can you export to pdf any file from any application on Linux. I dont think so, on OSX any application can save to a pdf file.
“Quicktime is a joke compared to Xine or MPlayer, h264 was supported on Linux before OSX had support for h264.”
Can you edit movies with the simplicity of cut, copy and paste,
create slide shows, convert media formats, author 3GPP and 3GPP2 file formats, create designer media skins, prepare movies for streaming, automate your workflow, etc…. with Xine or Mplayer, i dont think so. Yes you need to pay an extra 30 dollars for that, but regarding what is possigle to do with quicktime, thats nothing.
As a player Quicktime is faster, read a large set of movie or image formats. H264 on linux sucks, its slow and buggy. Quicktime provides a real experience to view h264 content with hardware accelerated rendering, it works. Moreover Xine and Mplayer do not support h264 according to their supported codecs list in their web page. So what bullshit are you talking about?
“And guess what? I use gcc 4 on Linux for a long time now.
”
I did not say that Linux does not come with Gcc 4.0. The point is that the Apple version has unique features as universal binary compilation support (thanks osx!!).
“And Apple grew significantly in the server market? Yeah, they sold one server in ´04 and two in ´05, 100% growth! OSX is simply not suited for servers, and Apple is not important at all in that market. And I doubt that’ll change. Educated guess: IBM still sells way more AIX servers than Apple sells XServe toys. And AIX goes the way of all UNICES these days. ”
You are just jalous, and a linux troll that can not accept that another os can be successfull in the server market. You just idiot. A recent study of Gartner has shown that apple entered in the top 10 for the server vendors. In the second quarter of 2005, apple sales has grown by 10 % and by 69.8% compared to the second quarter of 2004. Thats the numbers, apple is growing in this market and its gonna to be faster with the transition to x86, if the linux fan boys like it or not. Os X is already better than Linux on many things, it has better suport for mixed plateform environment, its better designed for robust administration, it has many built services with full adninistratin technologies, it is a much better plateform for providing a complete set of server services with the maximum of efficiency. Try to set up a Linux server, thats a a mess, today administrators wants technology that make their life easy, they want a powerful user interface to deal with complex settings, to set up modst of the services easily and quicky and OSX provides this all built on top of open source standards. Linux is stucked with the old way, amd linux geeks are still believing that thats still what people want.
“OSX is not the be-all, end-all OS you believe it to be. Maybe it’s nice to look at, maybe it’s in a few ways superior to other OSs, but it’s pretty much a toy. A nice desktop OS, if you only want to do basic stuff. But definitely no workstation OS. And don’t sing the Pixar song , that was a marketing stunt. And the Adobe stuff? Works better on Windows, anyway. It’s quite common for Audio pros, but that’s not because of OSX’s greatness – RTLinux would be better suited for that kind of work, but the applications are missing. Even FCP is a joke compared to, say, Piranha Edit or Smoke (both Linux based)…”
Yeah of couse you continue your bullshit. Linux sucks for worsktation, it does not have legs for that. People want an os to work with, not to work for the os. You ara just a trool that try to convince himself about irrealistic things. OS X is better than anything else, yes for Adobe, just go out a little bit, most of the press and 2D graphics business use OS X or plan to do so while migrating from OS 9. Music industry use OSX more than any anything else. Linux as a solution for music production. is a joke, there is no single application that works in this os, it does not have the legs for.
OS X is taking the 3D world as crazy. Most of the Maya users use OSX. Marketing? you try to convince yourself about that, if Alias would say that their users use Linux you would be agree, so stop be idiot, just accept a fact.
If FCP is a joke why most of the studios are using it or migrating to it. FCP as a film editor is the best on the market, largely adopted by the industry. Its faster, more scalable, more intuitive than anything else. Piranha and Smoke are old dogs, that people do not want to use anymore. FCP provides what s the best in real time editing of HD content, try to edit multicam HD contents on anything else, thats sucks, FCP scales with the hardware, allows to edit in real time multi sources in the same time, offers powerful Livetype, etc… Combined with Motion, Shake, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro 4, Logic Pro, OSX runs great applications that take full advantage of OSX and really deliver. With Aperture, OS X show again how much great application can be developped on it, and how it works for offering great asolutions for many pro users.
OS X is the os that scale from for the needs of my grand mother to the needs of the scientist or the needs for lage clusters. This is what linux is not able to do.
So now come back to your Liunx world your are miserable.
The reality distortion field really works wonders…
Universal binaries is a OSX-exclusive feature? Cool. Problem is, no other platform needs it, anyway. I, for one, give a rats ass. I prefer a small, fast loading binary compiled for my architecture only.
I wont even comment the server issue any further, come back when OSX made serious inroads. Apple’s one of the top-ten server makers? There aren’t that many, anyway. If they become one of the top three makers, we’ll talk.
OSX made the 3D world go crazy? What a joke! Maya for OSX sucks compared to Maya for Linux or Windows. Most Alias customers use Maya on OSX? Maybe, because there’s no other at least semi-decent 3D suite for OSX. Come back when there’s XSI for OSX (wont happen – according to Softimage, OSX simply performs too bad).
FCP is nowhere near Smoke. Yeah, Smoke is old. But it’s full-featured, fast, stable and proven. FCP supports multiple HD streams? Neat. Now, open FCP and try to work with, say, 6x 2k 10bit uncompressed streams, with LUT. Doesn’t work? Strange, it does on that old, slow Smoke… Of course, some studios use FCP, it’s cheap and easy to use. But not better. Just good enough for some tasks. You mention lots of cool Apple apps. You mention Shake. Shake performs better on Linux (but it’s more expensive – blame Apple), read, for example, Highend2d. I know the Shake devs from back then when the company was called NothingReal. Shake was improving very fast back then, lots of new feature with every release, lots of interface and usability improvements. Now, since it’s a Apple product, next to nothing improved. The interface is the same, except for the scrollbar colors and Apple about screen. The new features of major releases are one or two licensed plugins and a few fixes that would have been part of a free update back then. There also was this great alternative back then, Rayz by SiliconGrail. Extremely fast, lot’s of cool features, great workflow. Available for Linux, IRIX and Windows. When Apple bought NothingReal, they also bought SiliconGrail, only to kill the competition. They laid of the devs, killed the support, killed the whole product. They didn’t even port a single one of the advanced features, let alone the great GUI, to Shake.
I am a fan of linux too and I do not agree on the fact that OS-X is intuitive. Already the single vs double click issue that you noted is enough for me to bin the whole thing. Furthermore, I pretend control of my box, and I get annoyed when I do not find a way to do something (and furhtermore I much prefer the classical Unix config files under /etc). So, I do not agree on your standings of user “experience”. For me, Linux/KDE comes first (and by far) even there (have you tried the new Suse 10? Pure joy).
One other mention. I do not give any relevance of what is the language of choice the developers use. This is, as long as they provide me with a choice of what I can use to write my apps and to interface with the underlying system. In this respect, MS, with its .net platform, must be given credit for.
Furthermore, I pretend control of my box, and I get annoyed when I do not find a way to do something (and furhtermore I much prefer the classical Unix config files under /etc)
why not just view them from the command line or use Tinkertool?
too many people basing opinions on just what they like best, so you like single vs double click, doesn’t make it better, its just what you prefer
1. The hardware is underpowered, form over function again (this is laser-etched Apple after all!)
2. The GUI is not as good as everyone makes out.
3. The bundled software is pretty nice, except Quicktime which does nothing useful unless you pay another 60usd.
4. They used crappy old NeXT and other proprietary stuff instead of using FreeBSD and X11 to their full potential.
5. Performance stinks, mainly because of 1 and 4.
Actually I was very close to buying a Mac not so long ago to experiment with my cross-platform apps, but had some opportunities to use one at work, and boy did it suck:
1. The single button mouse and single menu thing just didn’t work for me.
2. There was way too much eye candy slowing down simple tasks.
3. The console was horribly underused, Darwin is what’s under the hood, but the hood is nailed shut!
It seems to me that MacOSX is somewhere between Windows and Linux, but Linux is still much better overall.
you forgot in your opinion, which is all it is, in summery the ease of use and just able to get on with with makes it so much better then Linux, but yet again that is, like yours, just my opinion and carrys as much worth as yours
best of all I can understand him for wanting applications gratis. He is simply used to getting everything+kitchen sink WITH the operating system.
Think about it for a while, and just count how much money I would have to fork over if I bought every app which does not come with the system.
I use software for:
– music engraving
– audio editing
– full office application (writer, spreadsheet, presentation, grafic package)
– image manipulation
– integrated development environment
– several programming languages
– watching movies
– drawing technical stuff with a 2D-CAD program.
I once added all this together, and took the cheapest proprietary solution which halfway fits to the open-source counterpart.
Guess what? The additional software would cost as much as the hardware or more (1200$ and more). And upgrades to new versions are NOT included.
With open-source jou definitely can get used to getting everything gratis.
Compare that with what he said in the article: You have the movie viewer and need to fork over 20$ for getting a so-called PRO-package, and STILL NO mpg2 capabilities!!! That costs you 20$ extra.
I would feel like going into a shoe store where the clerk sells me some shoes without shoelaces. OK, I say I buy shouelaces. He gives me one extra package with the shoelaces, I go home and unwrap it – just to find that this was only ONE shoelace, and that I would have to go buy another shoelace to make my shoes fully functional.
OS X is the os that scale from for the needs of my grand mother to the needs of the scientist or the needs for lage clusters. This is what linux is not able to do.
Nine of the top ten supercomputers run on linux.I think that says enough.And if your granny can’t run linux,well shame on you.