I entered the world of Apple hardware about 3 months ago now, with a second-hand iBook2. It was a 500mHz, 256mb, ATI Rage 128 model, with a standard CD-Rom drive. I spent the first few days trying to tweak Mac OS X to my liking, then a few further weeks installing and learning to use the applications I thought I’d need. Chimera, BBEdit, the developer tools, even the Fink X server so I could use Gaim.
But OS X just wasn’t stacking up for me. For my uses, Mac OS X isn’t all it claimed to be.I’d read the hype about OS X, indeed it would have been pretty hard to miss. I was led to believe that great swathes of Windows users (and a few Linux users) were biting the bullet and changing to OS X because of it’s performance, usability and stability. Maybe this situation is a little exaggerated given the nature of the pro-Apple press, which will pounce upon any morsel and claim that the Mac revolution had finally arrived (albeit maybe 15 years too late). But eventually, using OS X was, for me, a bit of an anti-climax.
The graphics card that was incorporated in my iBook wasn’t up to running the new QuartzExtreme features, so I had to make do with standard 2D rendering. I experienced small amounts of graphical lag right from the start with OS X.
Scrolling a Finder window with more than 10 or so icons in it would produce skipping and visible refreshing, something I thought died with Windows 3.1. I certainly wouldn’t have expected such poor performance from from a 256mb system, when my Amiga 500 managed such tasks and performed better, at least in terms of responsiveness, than this in 1991. Maybe this could be rectified. Maybe the configuration panel hides an option to increase rendering performance; but I shouldn’t have to find it, such simple system performance issues should not exist. OS X on Apple hardware should just work well out of the box.
In addition, the 1024×768 maximum resolution of my iBook simply didn’t seem enough for OS X. Maybe technology has evolved so much recently without my noticing that 1024×768 is now the working minimum, but consider the cavernous expanses of desktop you get in Windows 9x at that resolution. My mother uses Windows 95 at 640×480 resolution, and is quite happy with it. I can’t see how Apple can justify the cramped feeling of OS X on such a high-resolution display.
I laboured with it for the first months of my iBook use, telling myself; “This is just the way Macs are, you’ll get used to it” and “You’ve just got to think differently”, but waiting for my computer to catch up to me just isn’t the way to be productive. In an age where Moore’s Law proves itself every 6 months or so, I should never have to wait for tasks to finish when using simple desktop productivity applications. Simple little things can kill your computing morale; I don’t want to watch an icon bouncing up and down while an application starts; I want those extra cycles put to use to make said application start faster in the first place. Even simple applications like the terminal were taking around ten seconds to load; unacceptable when all I wanted to do is issue one command (and yes, opening the terminal, waiting, then issuing that command is still faster than using the Finder).
Don’t get me wrong, I do like some aspects of OS X. This article isn’t a flame. I think the enforcing of the Apple HIG on application vendors generates truly stellar usability levels, and represents the way forward to functional, ‘just works’ computing. I think out of the box, OS X is the prettiest OS out there, and while they may impact on performance, you can’t deny that large, clear icons and well-worded dialogues and menus help out novice users more than any ‘tool-tips’ or help files. However I feel that Apple have concentrated on getting OS X running nicely on their top-end hardware and ignoring those of us who can’t afford or just don’t want to upgrade to something a faster. I’m sure the same accusation was raised by 386 owners when Microsoft released Windows 95, but my iBook is just 18 months old, and certainly not ready for the scrap-heap yet.
I think the OS X concept is great, and given a few more version revisions and a truckload of optimisations and I’m sure they’ll be on to a real winner (and if the occasional x86 port rumours are true, I know for sure who will win the ‘desktop battle’ for Joe Sixpack, and it certainly won’t be Microsoft).
For now, and more importantly, for me as a power-user, OS X just isn’t good enough for doing the things I need to do.
The Alternatives
I think maybe I should clarify here that I’m not an Apple user for the software. I don’t use Photoshop or Dreamweaver, and I don’t heavily use a digital camera or video camera. I’m not one of the media types that traditionally made up the Macintosh market. I’m a web developer of the ‘new school’; CSS, the W3C validators and a good terminal Vim session are my friends. I like to do everything by hand, and I’m most comfortable using Linux as it’s what I run for my clients on their web servers. I’ve been using Linux on the desktop on and off since Redhat 5.2, and I’ve now been Microsoft free since 2001. My other laptop is currently a Dell Inspiron 2560 which has run Redhat 7.3, 8.0 and now 9 ever since I bought it. To be honest, I only really wanted to play with Apples for the hardware. Apple hardware is, in my opinion, the best manufactured and designed hardware bar-none. Macs are sexy, cool and hell, they last for years.
So, what were my options? It seems the PPC users options are certainly limited. I could downgrade to OS9, but that would mean learning a whole new system (again), and the OS9 architecture seems the be flawed and, well, decaying. Of course, I’d heard about PPC Linux, but never anything more that the occasional Slashdot announcement for a distro release, and that never seemed to happen particularly regularly anyway. I’ve used Redhat for most of my working life, I was comfortable with it, and so that was the basic blueprint I used when looking for a Linux PPC solution. I knew Debian PPC was available, but I’ve used Debian on x86 in the past and I don’t like the idea of having to download and configure everything I wanted from scratch, least of all actually set it up into a usable state. I had a look at SuSE, but their PPC offerings haven’t been updated since 7.3, and I wanted to be a little more current than that (From my use of Redhat on x86, I knew I had to have Gnome 2.0)!
. How happy I was when I found Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.
Yellow Dog is, essentially, a port of Redhat 9 to PPC. It uses the excellent Redhat installer ‘anaconda’, keeps the same Bluecurve-esque theme (‘Wonderland’), and streamlined GNOME 2.2 desktop. I gazed at the screenshots, read the marketroid spiel, and within 5 minutes I had gFTP downloading the 3.0 ISO images from my local mirror. Once received (about 4 hours later over my DSL) I burned the images and inserted the first disc into my iBook.
The Installation
I waited for the screen to light up, heard the familiar, reassuring Apple ‘BONG’, then watched in dismay as OS X booted normally. I had forgotten to hold down the ‘C’ key as the machine booted up. (did I mention I’d only been using my iBook three months? 😉
A quick reboot, and now I watched as the installer started. I don’t really have any comments about the installer (which is, of course, good thing), apart from that it worked really well. If you’ve used any of the recent Redhat releases you’ll be right at home. Partitioning was a snap (I just selected the automatic option, I decided not to keep any OS X partitions), and I selected the custom package option. I elected to install GNOME over the default KDE (nothing personal, I’m just familiar with GNOME having never really used KDE), which wasn’t the default setting, and I added a few extra packages I know I’d need. The overall install size with these options was around 2GB.
One thing I did notice is that I was being asked a few possibly redundant questions. The installer asks you for your mouse type, video card and monitor type. Because of Apple’s standardised hardware, surely a lot of this should be avoided by simply selecting the type of machine at boot; if I could have just told the installer I have an iBook, surely it should then know what hardware I have. Maybe this wouldn’t work so well for those people with a custom PPC system, but for the majority who have Apple hardware which remains pretty much unchanged from manufacture, this feature would make things nice and easy.
Using Yellow Dog
The first boot was pretty painless. The CUPS daemon took a long time to start on the first boot, I guess as it figured out I don’t actually have a printer. This hasn’t been an issue on subsequent reboots, I think it fixed itself. The firstboot application ran fine, and I set some system options and tested my sound card.
I logged on and a very familiar GNOME desktop appeared, almost identical to Redhat’s apart from the default panel position. Yellow Dog puts the panel at the top of the screen, presumably to make previous Mac OS users feel at home. This was soon remedied 😉
The first things I tested was the suspend mechanism, which was one of the things that impressed me most about OS X. I closed the lid, and to my surprise the little breathing LED that I was familiar with worked first time. I opened the lid, and after half a second, my desktop appeared again, perfectly. I was impressed. Very impressed. I started the GNOME battery monitor applet, and it displayed the status pretty accurately (I’d ran the whole installation process on batteries, so I was down to about 30%).
Now, the real test, the extended keyboard functionality. I tried the brightness and volume controls, which also worked flawlessly, as did the F12/eject button. The F10 and F11 keys take on the role of the middle and right mouse buttons respectively, a fairly cumbersome solution, and I can see it causing problems for the mouse-dependant. I don’t really see a much more elegant work-around for this problem, and well done Yellow Dog for including this feature as a fall back for those without external mice. Another nice feature that users of the iBook’s track-pad may appreciate is the pad-tap functionality. Using the option-F1 and option-F2 keys you can set the tap functionality, from a mouse click to drag mode etc. While Linux was never designed to work with single mouse button systems, Yellow Dog have done well to make X usable.
By this point I was pretty much speechless. I’ve had various problems with laptops and Linux in the past, and I didn’t expect everything to work so well out of the box. If anything I was a little upset I wouldn’t be able to get my hands dirty under the hood to make it all work again 🙂
As far as the applications go, I suggest you go and read any review of Redhat 9. OpenOffice.org is there, in all its glory (I’m using it to type this), and Yellow Dog seem to have decreased the start time a respectable amount. OO.org Writer takes around 6 seconds to load on this machine, OO.org Calc just a little longer. Mozilla 1.2.1 is included with anti-aliased fonts by default, and Evolution is getting more and more mature each time I use it. Apart form these, all the usual suspects are here, emacs, The Gimp, gphoto2 and suchlike, along with a few themes and backgrounds.
The GTK2 font smoothing looks excellent on the iBook’s LCD panel, set to the ‘sub-pixel’ rendering method. Overall system performance seems pretty snappy, and certainly more responsive than using OS X.
Keeping my system up to date has been a snap, because unlike Redhat, Yellow Dog uses apt-get for RPM out of the box (and why Redhat haven’t followed suit yet is a mystery), and updating is as simple as ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade’.
There are still some holes in the bundled applications. MP3 support isn’t here, as in Redhat, and there is the conspicuous lack of a video player. MPlayer with a nice GTK front-end (the current MPlayer GUI suffers from an annoying bug where the GUI appears underneath the GNOME panel, making some buttons inaccessible) would be a good start, or maybe something from the excellent VideoLan project. I downloaded RealPlayer, which worked fine out of the box (I experienced no /dev/dsp permission problems that seem to persist with standard Redhat installations). While all of the above can be fairly easily obtained and installed, it’s a protracted process, and including these applications by default would be a great plus; maybe a Debian-esque ‘non-free’ repository which could be scanned during installation for extra packages which don’t necessarily meet the licensing restrictions of the standard CDs. I think Gentoo Linux got this system exactly right; those applications which requ!
ire click-through agreements or binary-oply releases could be downloaded then installed using an RPM spec file. One of my pet-peeves is installing applications that don’t get listed in my RPM database.
Hardware support looks good. My external USB HP CD-writer was auto-detected, and worked fine with the new Nautilus CD burning capability. I also have a USB MS Sidewinder joy-pad, which worked fine once I ran /sbin/modprobe joydev as root. I don’t have any FireWire devices to test the support, but there is mention of FireWire in /proc/bus/pci, so I can only assume the Yellow Dog kernel comes with compiled-in support. Some sort of XFree voodoo meant that when I plugged in my USB mouse, it was working instantly (with wheel support) without me having to touch my XF86Config.
The Conclusion.
I love my Linux iBook. It really is the perfect computing platform. The marriage of such excellent hardware and a Linux distro customised to take advantage of it all make the iBook a joy to use with YellowDog. Using it for day-to-day tasks brings back a joy that I thought died with the Amiga. Everything just works. If you’re someone who needs to use their computer to work, and can’t tolerate software failure or hardware incompatibilities, this Yellow Dog Linux on Apple hardware fits the bill very well indeed.
So do I regret ditching OS X? Not really. I have some issues; it’s much harder to find PPC RPMs on the net that x86 rpms (It should be noted that the excellent Freshrpms repository provides PPC packages). I’m a little more limited in my use of other operating systems within Linux; I can’t get VMware, for example, but that’s really a problem with the choice of hardware platform that operating system.
About the Author
Jon Atkinson is currently taking a year out from a Computer Science degree at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and in his spare time likes tinkering with old hardware, boozing a little too much and spending excessive amounts of money on his better half. His (largely) juvenile website can be found here.
So which is the real performance drowner? The ATI Rage 123 or his 500mhz cpu? I would think OSX would run better on a mac system like this.
..but the GUI’s too inadequate (KDE or GNOME), usability too low, the apps crash too often, and sadly, XP runs faster on this hardware than Linux does. Bah.
If he is a power user then he shouldn’t be using an ibook in the first place, for power usage anyways… he shouldn’t expect so much from a laptop that is intended to be a slightly lower brand. The lag should be expected, i think 🙂
Great review, Jon! I’ve got Yellow Dog 3 on a 600 MHz G3 iMac. It has 1 GB RAM which helps. I have never seen the quality and performance of a Linux distro leap so high from one version to the next. Everything is a million times better than 2.3. Amazing. The iMac too only has a ATI Rage 16 MB card. The performance though. compared to 2.3, is phenomenal.
uhhh…yeah…..
He demands such performance yet he apparently never gave any of the tweaking apps aimed specifically at power users and those that have older systems? I mean the application bouncing he complains about it right in the standard system preferences.
I was very excited to try YDL when it became publically available for download several weeks ago. For some reason it didn’t the monitor and the video card which I found strange because YDL 2.3 was able to for its’ graphical install. For the record i’m using a 500mhz imac w/ Rage 128.
I too had the delayed CUPS startup during first boot. No biggie. However, on both YDL 2.3 and 3.0 for some reason it offsets the monitor to the left about half an inch and there’s also a high-piched squealing which seems to happen anytime I move my mouse. It also happened on 2.3
The thing that was the worst for YDL 3.0 was whenever I would logged out the screen would go black. I was not able to kill X and had to reboot.
I want to give the folks at YDL the benefit of the doubt because they are a PPC-only distro but frankly I’ve had nothing but problems and I’m much happier with Mandrake 9.1
There’s my 2¢.
I’ve got an iBook of the same vintage as the author, as well as a TiBook 667 (no DVI). I installed Mandrake 9.1 PPC instead of YDL3 on them though. I boot into MDK, then use Mac-On-Linux to boot OS X simultaneously on VT9. I hit ctrl-alt-F7 and ctrl-alt-F9 to toggle back and forth between Linux and OS X. Works quite nicely, and OS X even runs pretty respectably under MOL, even on the iBook (NOTE: You want to have lots of RAM for this…). I’ve installed YDL 3 on a desktop machine, and their MOL support isn’t near as good as Mandrake’s, but I’ve made it work under both. Lets you have your cake and eat it too… I still prefer OS X on a Mac that is a bit more powerful (my dual G4/800) and Red Hat on x86 hardware (my dual Athlon MP 2000), but not a bad compromise.
>on both YDL 2.3 and 3.0 for some reason it offsets the monitor to the left about half an inch
This is _normal_. It happens with almost all alternative OSes, depending on the driver. You see, each different driver has different settings on initialization and parametres, this is why you will find one inch of offset left or right everytime you use another OS or even just another driver, on Mac or PC.
> and there’s also a high-piched squealing which seems to happen anytime I move my mouse.
I don’t know about that. File a bug report with YDL.
Opinion 1: OS X 10.2.6 is a beast of an OS and will bring any current G3 to it’s knees.
Opinion 2: Apple hardware is expensive yet also extreamly well built and designed.
Opinion 3: OS X is an extreamly capable UNIX OS that hold’s it’s own to any OS in existence.
Don’t think for a minute that Aqua somehow negates OS X’s UNIX underpinnings. Aqua is easily the most elegant, user-friendly and function GUI in the unix/Linux universe. However, if GUIs are not your forte then there is always the command line for your power-user needs.
To quote Mr. Atkinson”For now, and more importantly, for me as a power-user, OS X just isn’t good enough for doing the things I need to do.”
What “THINGS” exactly would he not be able to accomplish on OS X that Yellow Dog Linux(YDL) was able to do?
I agree that YDL is an excellent alternative for those without fast Apple hardware but to confuse hardware issues with OS X functionality is silly and ignorant.
…want to get an Ibook too.
I would be the same way with OS X, though. I mean, it is nice and everything, and it is Unix enough. But, I think it is just as difficult for anyone who has used Linux for a long time to switch, as it is for windows users. I wouldn’t last 10 minutes with OS X. I don’t like big, fat bloated GUIs, which is why I don’t use Gnome or KDE. Give me fvwm, xterm, xfe, adie, firebird, thunderbird, prozgui, abiword & xmms and I am happy.
You have several options if you want to run X Windows on mac OS X. You run it rootless via Xdarwin or Apple’s X11/ You can also run it full screen with Xdarwin and use a key combo to switch back and forth between Aqua and your window manager. This is what I prefer.
You can slo boot in console mode and run an X Windows enviroment, without aqua, etc, if you want that Unix-y experience.
You seem to be accusing him of not doing enough to make OS X perform. This is essentially a review of Yellow Dog Linux. I don’t think the author uses his computer to prove to himself that OS X is powerful and that enough tweaking will make it run fast. Yellow Dog ran well for him without such tweaking. Taking it as a mortal insult whenever OS X proves to not meet someone’s requirements is ridiculous. This applies to many Linux trolls, as well.
I had the same iBook, and Mac OS X was almost unusable.
My 4 year old Celeron 400 with 32 MB of RAM was much faster running Win98SE.
I ended up selling my iBook. Oh, and I didn’t find that OS X lived up to the hype, either.
I’d rather be running Linux. Works for me?
Very nice post Greg, thank you.
“I bought the slowest Mac CPU with the slowest video card and for some reason, the computer seems slow and unresponsive to me.”
>..but the GUI’s too inadequate (KDE or GNOME), usability too >low, the apps crash too often, and sadly, XP runs faster on >this hardware than Linux does. Bah.
XP runs on PPC hardware now? Wow, amazing.
By the way, publicizing this article was a big mistake since we all now that Mac people are even worse zealots than Linux users.
Yes, but when he ran a different OS on the same hardware, it became responsive, and not so slow.
Plus, when I bought my iBook, it was the best one available.
And it came with Mac OS X pre-installed. So you expect it to be usable.
Well, isn’t Mac OS X supposed to run “well” without tweaking? Isn’t that what apple has aimed for? “It just works”?
I’m thinking if I tried Mac OS X and found the same performance issues, I would have also guessed that there wasn’t much to do about it since Apple seems to try and have it all working automagically perfect from the very start or at least, that’s what has been implied.
I’ve noticed this occur with many alternative OSs as well–BeOS shifts the screen right, my framebuffer console shifts it far left, X shifts it around the middle. Vesa drivers, for some reason, never have this problem. Is it inherent in the Vesa specification?
XP runs on PPC hardware now? Wow, amazing.
By the way, publicizing this article was a big mistake since we all now that Mac people are even worse zealots than Linux users.
I think he was talking about general linux. And as far as the mac zealots..
They seem to be worse than the linux zealots.. Since the linux zealots usually only attack Billy and hardly ever attack Steve since most of them would rather run OSX. The Apple users attack everyone that doesn’t run MacOSX..
Damn 97% of the world!
Can you watch DVDs (if you had a DVD drive) with this sort of hardware on YDL? Does the VGA Out dongle work yet? How about the RCA Video/Audio out that plugs into the headphone jack?
In sort, how does it handle multimedia output besides the lcd?
I really liked debian on my ibook, but at the time multimedia sucked on it. 500mhz doesn’t seem to be enough. Given on 10GB, I had to choose only Mac os X (since 10.2.6 with dev tools _seems_ to take up 5+ GB maybe I did something wrong, but installing 10.0, then 10.1 upgrade, then 10.2 upgrade then software updates, then dev tools left me with not much space)
I would hope eventually to move back to linux as that is what I code on most of the time, but this I need it for multimedia as well, and unfortunately (or fortunately if you have them) the later ibooks use a different video card, so I doubt much effort is being put on this driver.
Yes it’s a YellowDog review, but the first page is basically a performance complaint with Mac OS X. And a lot of his points are perfectly valid, no one’s arguing that it’s a speed demon. I was just pointing out that one of his complaints, “Simple little things can kill your computing morale; I don’t want to watch an icon bouncing up and down while an application starts; I want those extra cycles put to use to make said application start faster in the first place.? Is right there in the preferences.
I’ve got no problem with him liking YellowDog more. I haven’t had the chance to try it lately but it and RedHat 9 actually look very pretty to me and the distro comming with rpm and apt in harmony sounds great to me.
500MHz G3 w 256MB RAM. On OS X I have applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter, Reason, Final Cut Pro. Were I to install YDL I could replace these with… the Gimp… and Kontour, losing some 90% of the functionality on the latter. Of course, there are no usable OSS counterparts to things like Painter, Reason, and Final Cut Pro.
Did I mention I can also watch Flash animations in any one of IE, Safari, OmniWeb, Mozilla, or Camino? In Linux I could try watching them with… the open source Flash plugin that lacks things like clipping masks.
Scrolling a Finder window with more than 10 or so icons in it would produce skipping and visible refreshing, something I thought died with Windows 3.1.
This is what I saw as his primary reason for switching to OS X. Well, first, this would hardly motivate me to drop all the applications I use and switch to Linux. But… OS X composites frames and draws them to a backbuffer then pageflips at the end of a vertical refresh. It’s impossible for there to be “visible refreshing” in OS X… the compositing engine simply “drops frames”. You will never experience tearing artifacts… so I don’t see how he can claim that there’s “visible refreshing”.
I still fail to understand the arguments about OS X’s performance compared against GUIs circa 1991. Certainly these GUIs didn’t have performance problems… but on the flipside they were visually apalling.
In the end, it seems if you don’t “do anything” with your computer on the creative side, Linux may be a suitable choice for you, however you might want to consider why you purchased a Mac in the first place.
I have a 600Mhz iBook, very similar, and a new power mac. OS X is just fine on it. However, what I did do immediately was max out the ram to 640mbs. I think to be truthful, that this is key. My Power Mac also has maxed out ram, and I’ve never ever had speed problems with it. Of course, this is fairly useless advice because maxing out the ram is not a cheap thing to do, but before you say the processor sucks, I’d look to the ram. OS X just eats it up, kind of like it eats up your money. Its worth it to me, because I really love OS X, but I can definately understand why some people will look at apple prices and turn their noses up.
A lot of the gripes expressed by the author are legit. Unless you are running at least a G4, MacOSX is just bearable to use. It will run fine on G3s as long as their is not much heavy processing involved.
Yellow Dog is fine but not as fast as MacOS 9 on the same hardware.
If you plan on running MacOSX, G4 is the way to go.
Many of you are missing the boat in this thread. The subject is not OS X. The subject is YDL and its incredible leap from 2.3 to 3. If you could see them side by side, you would know what I’m talking about.
>The subject is YDL and its incredible leap from 2.3 to 3.
I agree. The 3.0 version uses the latest Red Hat stuff, plus some brand new pref panels AFAIK.
Jay, check your email please.
dude… make sure you are running the CK patched 2.4.20 kernel . then just set up the MM apps needed like K3B and xine (it is very stable and usable now)
also make sure you get the O(1) interactive proc scheduler and the rmap patches as well.
then renice X to 0 and you can run arts at the minimum framebuffer with no dropouts!!! DVD playback is perfect as well. I have no qualms with my system…I like it better than XPs MM.
I think that is his point. All the applications you mention are part of the traditional MacOS arsenal. The author clearly mentioned that he wasn’t one of those media people, so he had a much greater flexibility to chose his OS based on preferences rather than application availibility.
His video chip is the bottleneck in addition to the low bus speed of his iBook (which I believe is only 66MHz as opposed to the newer iBook’s 100MHz bus). But a huge bottleneck is the Rage 128. The Rage 128 is incapable of handling non power of 2 textures. Quartz Extreme needs this. Despite the marketing, Quartz Extreme really does make a difference. I’ve got an iBook 700 dual USB with 640MB and an ATI Mobility 7500. It runs OS X beautifully, and I’m a developer. I typically have apache and mysql running in the background, with a dozen large apps open like Project Builder. The G3 is seldom a bottleneck. I have seen Macs that don’t support Quartz Extreme, and that is where the sluggish feel comes from. QE really does make a difference. For most users, running OS X without QE-capable hardware would be unbearable, so I can see where he’s coming from.
Simple little things can kill your computing morale; I don’t want to watch an icon bouncing up and down while an application starts; I want those extra cycles put to use to make said application start faster in the first place.
Ahh, how many minutes I have wasted^H^H^H^H^H^H spent admiring those bouncy icons as I wait for apps to start. But besides that, and in general laginess, I don’t seem to mind OS X.
Visible refresh tearing and laggy scrolling?
These are the problems I always had with KDE before I switched to Mac OS X.
But then again, not everyone can be BeOS
-hugh
So is there a YDL bootable demo CD like knoppix?
I’m so sick of these “how i installed linux” stories.
They are almost as bad as “Is Linux ready for the desktop?”
-Hugh
Hello Jon,
If trying YDL 3.0 was motivated by the sluggish behavior of MacOS X on your iBook and if you have a broadband connection, download (it’s free) the 3 iso images of Mandrake 9.1 for PowerPC (Bamboo)and try it.
Now that you’ve put Linux on your iBook, you might want to replace the iBook itself with a PC laptop. Again, your quest of trying to avoid sluggishness will be awarded.
I did the same thing you did but earlier than you. I was already using “soon to be sued by SCO” Unices on PCs for quite some time though.
MacOS 9 will run on my “obsolete” 1999 G3 laptop until the hardware dies. Meanwhile, I switched to Windows XP for the workstation (Pentium 4), Linux and BSD for the servers, mostly running on “not obsolete at all” 1999 dirty PC hardware.
Now, should I say that I’m not flaming either
“To be honest, I only really wanted to play with Apples for the hardware”
So he probably just used it as it came from the previous owner.
I personally always do a clean install on any second hand machine I get.
Why did he keep talking about how great he liked gnome and only had screenshots of KDE?
I have exactly the same iBook as the reviewer and OS X 10.2.6 runs beautifuly on it. Everything just works beautifully except for printing over a windows network.
>Why did he keep talking about how great he liked gnome and only had screenshots of KDE?
He didn’t. I added the screenshots, they are TerraSoft’s shots, not ours or Jon’s. In fact, you could have seen that if you were more careful reading their URL.
Uhm, there’s only one KDE screenshot and two GNOME screenshots. Or is there something I’m missing?
I am a coder, and I love Mac OS X. I am running the exact same configurations, and for the life of me, I can’t see why you were having such a hard time. I don’t have the visual refresh problems that your talking about, if you mean the whole window bluring out everything else as your scroll or resize. It has never happened to me, and yes I am a Unix User. I have X11, Fink, and all of the window managers loaded up, but primarily let the X11 Aqua interface be used. Personally, I think you wrote this article just for the attention. YDL 3.0 has a glitch in the installer when running on your configuration that I have yet to get around, and am tired of messing with personally. Once you put in disk 3, the entire anaconda installer freaks out and tells you to debug it, so I just restart. I was able to install YDL 3.0 with very very very minimal installation, of like gnome only GUI, and Abiword I believe, and that was the only way I was able to avoid the damn glitch. YDL sucks, I can do everything just as fast through Fink, and X11. Your ignorance amuses me.
To each his own. I don’t dispute his preference for YDL over OSX, but to me there’s simply no contest.
It boils down to one word for me: aesthetics.
And that’s why I love OS X.
Linux may have great underpinnings and marvelous “tweakability,” but otherwise it’s an ugly mess compared to OSX.
My ‘biggest’ problems with Linux has always been fonts. For example in Gimp only half of the fonts has been usable ( I could select all but only half of it worked with the effects). So maybe I’m the only one with this problem, but since then its always the first thing I try on a Linux Distro. So I’m wondering if this is a porblem in YDL. Would be nice if somebody could try it.
Thöms
Your comment was respectable until you said “You wrote this article just for the attention.” Not only does this not make any sense (c’mon, off the top of your head, what’s the author’s name?), you don’t appear to realize that it is possible that somehow, somewhere, a Yellow Dog Linux installation worked better than an OS X one. The author never said “OS X sux0rz!!!! lunix 0wnZ!!1!.” Yet you seem determined to look stupid — “your ignorance”, “YDL sucks”, the aforementioned “just for the attention.” If you want to look like a serious “coder,” don’t act like a closeminded fool.
I get the 10-second load times for small apps problem, too. I’m on x86 hardware in Linux/KDE or GNOME. Anything from a K6-2 to a P4 takes forever to load KDE or GNOME specific apps. Anyone know why that is? Other apps load fine.
For example in Gimp only half of the fonts has been usable ( I could select all but only half of it worked with the effects).
I just tried on my box, with gimp 1.3. It shows all fonts available to fontconfig, but not all work. The Gimp font engine needs scalable fonts (truetype or Type 1), the fonts that don’t work are the X bitmap fonts. (Gimp 1.3 has a small preview in the font selection, that one looks strange for bitmap fonts, so it’s easy to see what fonts work, though i think they should just be removed from the font selection)
GNOME and KDE specific apps tend to make use of more shared libraries than other apps which increases load time.
I also thought the start of this article was some attention seeking strategy, (and that perhaps it was posted because of this – more impressions). The comments about OS X are completely unnecessary. If this was a decent review of YDL then it would not of started in such a “troll” like fashion. It _should_ of concerned it self purely with YDL, and maybe mentioned why it was chosen towards the middle (after covering installation). Example reasons could be; the need for a particular application, or work/study requirements or simply because the author likes checking out new operating systems.
This kind of article reflects poorly on the author and OSNews.
The Gimp font engine needs scalable fonts (truetype or Type 1)
Thx for testing.
That was my first thought, but roughly half of the scalable fonts didn’t work. Red Hat 9 has been the first distro I tested where I didn’t had this kind of problem.
If you’ll notice from earlier on the MacOSX Zealotry in these comments was predicted, and you guys all came through! You guys are ruthless.
Nathan,
I found most of my Linux setups to be quite sluggish until I ran across a little utility called “hdparm”
It seems that most distroes don’t turn on things like DMA, and 32 bit access for your hard drive when going through the installation so you have to do this manually. As an example, the transfer rate of my drive went from 10Mbps to 48Mbps with some simple tweaking
Hope this helps.
Simple little things can kill your computing morale; I don’t want to watch an icon bouncing up and down while an application starts; I want those extra cycles put to use to make said application start faster in the first place.
I can’t believe how many times I hear idiots complaining about “bouncing icons” as if it’s some horrible flaw in the overall design of OS X.
Don’t like the bouncing icons? System Preferences > Dock > Uncheck “Animate opening applications”
Now, was that so hard? The bouncing icon will now be replaced by a pulsating arrow to indicate the application is loading.
KDE has similarly useless eyecandy. It’s just off per default. Window Maker has it, other window managers and desktop environments have it. I don’t see the problem with OS X having it, eveing having it on per default, especially when it’s so easy to turn off.
Of course, knowing the utilitarian zealots who most frequently argue agains OS X, their window manager of choice is most likely twm, a symptom of their pointless quest to eek every last possible CPU cycle out of their system so their IRC clients run with optimum efficiency.
Nom seems to think that the OSX to YDL was a kind of troll, or written in a way to get our attention.
Thats what you call journalism. Thats why they call a Lead Line a well, Lead Line.
Although I dont think it really was intentional, I think the author just followed a logical progression in his thinking, ie. I used OSX, wanted to like it, didnt work so well on my machine, tried YDL, report on the experience.
But never the less, this makes for good telling. If he had started some other way, and but OSX in the middle, someone would have complained that he was trying to “hide” his message of OSX bashing in the article.
Hmmm, jerky scrolling? Let me have a look. MacOS X.1 on iBook 500Mhz with 320M RAM. Nope! No jerky scrolling in a finder window with more than 10 icons. Oh, and with “reduce processor performance” ticked to lengthen battery time!
It has an “uptime” of 149 days too
nice… this shows how well Linux can run if all of the hardware is supported, seems like Terrasoft has put a lot of work in this distro. I tried Debian and Mandrake on my iBook, but they just don’t seem that “integrated” with the hardware, I guess I’ll have to try YDL3.0.
Yeah, I want to go out and buy an extra 300MB of RAM just to make my system “run flawlessly”. Every post on here says “I’ve got 600MB of ram, and my Mac runs fine”. JESUS… My notebook has 256MB of ram, and it NEVER runs slow, hell I could take out 128MB and it would still run fine. Maybe if OSX spent less time rendering PDFs, and more time doing what its supposed to be doing, then it would run better. A Mac that can’t handle Quartz Extreme? Why in the world does Apple even make such a thing? They shouldn’t be selling it with OSX if it can’t hanlde it.
You appear to be misinformed. The flash plugin on Linux is most often the same as the one on Windows – Macromedia have made a (proprietary) Flash plugin for a long time now. I don’t know why you think otherwise.
Hello everyone,
I have a toshiba 200MHZ laptop that I am willing to ship to anyone wanting to review XP. Of cource when you have completed the reviewl, if you could install FreeBSD and tell us how responsive the OS is compared to XP. The author’s only valid point is to show how valuable OSS is to people who can’t afford new hardware.
Here’s my article: For Mac users that want to try out Linux, Mandrake 9.1 is significantly better (in my opinion). They have much better Mac On Linux support (run Linux and Mac OS X simultaneously) and their default setup under Gnome is more Mac-ish (though you can configure it however you like).
Personally, I won’t use any computer with less than 512MB of RAM. Buy more RAM; it’s cheap, and it helps a ton, despite some people’s claims of “fast performance” with only 128MB… Fast is really relative and open to interpretation. All computers perform better with more RAM; it’s just a fact.
That all said, if you only want to run Linux, please just go buy PC hardware and run Red Hat (though I REALLY like what SuSE has done w/8.2). I’ve compared YDL3 and RHL9 side-by-side, and YDL3 is a decent attempt at recreating RHL8/9 on PowerPC hardware, but falls way short. If you want Linux and Mac on the same machine, then either YDL or Mandrake are viable options (I like MDK9.1 better).
For the record, I use primarily Mac OS X on the desktop (and laptop), Linux for my servers, but my RHL 9 & SuSE 8.2 machines are starting to get more play on the desktop…
Although I run OS X exclusively, I have installed YDL 2.3 on my Lombard hoping that it will require less resources. Turns out that if you use a decent DE, Linux is a resource hog just like OS X. And call me weird, but OS X is slow but usable on this 333 MHz G3 with 384 MB of RAM
Anyway, I do have Linux installed and play a bit from time to time. I waited for YDL 3.0, and tried Mandrake 9.1 PPC because it was released earlier, and boy was I pleasantly surprised! Install was flawless, everything just worked, the assortment of installed packages is great (MOL is there and worked right away), not a single problem.
Then I gave a shot at YDL 3.0 expecting something even better, but it turns out that people at Mandrake have made a better job at PPC Linux than the YDL has.
I guess my point is to try Mandrake, don’t just assume that YDL 3.0 is better like I did.
So what if 256MB or 128MB of RAM is all you “need”. Who cares about needs… I WANT 512MB or MORE of RAM in each of my machines, x86 or PPC. RAM is sooo cheap these days, I don’t understand why anyone with a $1 doesn’t have at least nearly a gig in their machines.
I had the same experience on a G4 TiBook. MacOS X just doesn’t perform very well.
It’s sad, but true. The ‘most advanced UNIX GUI in the world’ crawls on any machine less than 800Mhz without Quartz Extreme.
My 550Mhz G4 TiBook was nice hardware-wise, but I ended up using MPlayer to play DivXs because Quicktime didn’t support them, and running Mozilla remotely from an 800Mhz x86 box because it was faster than native mozilla on 10.1.5.
With Photoshop now running properly under Crossover Office, I can’t imagine myself buying another Mac instead of an x86 machine running Linux.
I would like to see some NEW screenshots perhaps of how the reviewer has HIS computer setup. NOT the lame undersized ones from yellowdoglinux.com
Those Bluecurve icons are fast becoming a cliche. It would be nice if Redhat would mix them up a bit, because they look pretty odd in their uniformity next to other random icons.
“OS X on Apple hardware should just work well out of the box.”
Everything works fine here.
“I can’t see how Apple can justify the cramped feeling of OS X on such a high-resolution display.”
What cramped desktop? I run finder with 128×128 icons and there is plenty of space for iTunes and Mail apps.
“Even simple applications like the terminal were taking around ten seconds to load; unacceptable…”
Uh? On Windows XP(P4 1.7), it takes about 20 secs just to open I.E.
and last: “This article isn’t a flame.”
I’m not so sure about that. If it was really about Apple’s hardware then you would have not written the first page filled with nonsense.
But then, why have simple and functional when you can have something over complicated right?
I used Linux as my primary desktop for 7 years. Beginning with Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, switched to Debian, used Sorcerer which got split up, then over to Gentoo, .. All very nicely set up, with all hardware configured.
Today I am working on an ibook (800Mhz, 384mb ram) with MacOSX. (on which it is pretty fast) You can say I ditched Linux for Mac OS X. Say what you want, but it offers a far superior desktop experience to do development, design and day to day business like mail and webbrowsing.
Linux is nice as a server product, but pretty much sucks on the desktop.
“Everything works fine here. ”
That comment is not worth posting.
“Uh? On Windows XP(P4 1.7), it takes about 20 secs just to open I.E.”
Not only is that a lie, it has nothing to do w/ the article. Unless you expect him to run XP on that APPLE laptop…
“I’m not so sure about that. If it was really about Apple’s hardware then you would have not written the first page filled with nonsense.”
You are grasping at straws now.
Not really–just more FUD from the linux crowd.
I have an iBook (dual USB) 700mHz, with a scant 256Mb of RAM, and OS X is very snappy. Of course the heavier applications take a while to start up (~10s for ProjectBuilder) but to my mind that’s more related to the speed of the hard disk.
I’ve been a linux user since 1999 and a PC user since 1991; I currently run 2 linux servers and an OpenBSD box. My next desktop system will also be a Mac. My next server…will be a PC. I’m willing to pay extra for the increased desktop quality of a Mac; nothing against Linux, but both KDE and Gnome have a long way to go.
KOMPRESSOR
@Anonymous
That comment is not worth posting.
OS X on Apple hardware works well out of the box. The author of this story obviously lied(false statement.)
Not only is that a lie, it has nothing to do w/ the article. Unless you expect him to run XP on that APPLE laptop…
Mac OS X’s Console app took 5 secs to start with iTunes playing in background. Note that I am using an iBook 500MHz white dual-usb (1st gen.) with all current Jaguar updates applied.
You are grasping at straws now.
I am setting the record straight thank you.
“Mac OS X’s Console app took 5 secs to start with iTunes playing in background. Note that I am using an iBook 500MHz white dual-usb (1st gen.) with all current Jaguar updates applied.”
You are not addressing your blatent lie.
That comment is not worth posting.
OS X on Apple hardware works well out of the box. The author of this story obviously lied(false statement.)
Wow! So you are disagreeing w/ or something now? What you said was:
“Everything works fine here. ”
Which is a comment not worth posting on the Internet. Feel free to mutter it all you want in the bathroom.
With a headline called “Why I Ditched MacOSX for Linux – A Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 Review” it’s unreasonable not to ask Mac afficionados not to get upset. The headline is a little provocative.
Worse: I’m a huge Amiga nostalgic, and I’m prone to complaining about problems with the iBook. But this review gets downright silly:
Scrolling a Finder window with more than 10 or so icons in it would produce skipping and visible refreshing, something I thought died with Windows 3.1. I certainly wouldn’t have expected such poor performance from from a 256mb system, when my Amiga 500 managed such tasks and performed better, at least in terms of responsiveness, than this in 1991.
Now, I owned an Amiga 500 in 1991, even souped it up in 1993 with more memory and a 40MHz processor. The reviewer is right: I remember it as blazingly fast — with 4-color screens. If you pumped up the number of colors, and installed the necesary hacks to get icons whose colors stayed “the same” regardless of screen palette (e.g. NewIcons), opening a drawer brought the Amiga to its knees. Comparing the Amiga and the iBook is utterly inappropriate.
Worse, right now I have precisely the same iBook the reviewer has (same speed, same memory), and to call the iBook unresponsive makes me wonder if he isn’t running OSX 10.0. I may not be enough of a “power user”, but c’mon, it’s an iBook, not a PowerBook. It is odd that the reviewer didn’t think to mention which version of OSX he used, when he scrupulously detailed other OS’s. He does imply Quartz Extreme so maybe he did get past 10.0, but it would be nice to have a precise idea.
I can’t see how Apple can justify the cramped feeling of OS X on such a high-resolution display.
Doesn’t seem cramped to me, although I confess I like my font sizes large enough that I can read without straining. Suum cuique.
That said, I found the Linux part of this review interesting. I have a question though about this bit of praise for YDL:
I tried the brightness and volume controls, which also worked flawlessly, as did the F12/eject button.
I would have thought that was a hardware issue, not an OS issue. Does anyone know? & if it’s an OS issue, not a HW issue… WHY??? Making it an OS issue seems like stupid design to me.
First off, I love OSX on my 600MHz iBook with maxed ram. However, the beauty of linux on an apple portable is that you can have awesome hardware and the option to run OSX via MOL is always present – which is very helpful if you are a linux guy and a media guy or share your computer with say your significant other. I am just glad there good alternatives to OSX that run on apple hardware.
In the end, all *nix OSes need to just get along. A larger user base will equal more apps which will equal a larger user base, etc. Apple is doing a good job using open standards in certain areas and including X11 has really opened OSX to the rest of the *nix world. OSX and linux should coexist happily and compliment each other.
In the end, all *nix OSes need to just get along. A larger user base will equal more apps which will equal a larger user base, etc.
I think this is flawed logic. MacOS X apps do not run on anything other than MacOS X. They are by no stretch of the imagination even portable. Software written for Linux/UNIX will run on MacOS yes, but then it’ll run on basically anything else too with a bit of work, including Windows. The same is not true in reverse. Therefore, Linux has nothing to gain from more people using MacOS.
Apple is doing a good job using open standards in certain areas
Yes, but not the areas that actually count (application APIs)
including X11 has really opened OSX to the rest of the *nix world.
Yet there is no free implementation of Quartz or Aqua, or even a translation layer to X.
OSX and linux should coexist happily and compliment each other.
Unfortunately that is not possible. They compete at every level now, as this article has shown.
I understand the author’s opinion of OSX considering the hardware he was using…but, he should not expect his iBook to perform well with OSX. You need a fast G4 with lots of RAM to be productive. The bigger point that I would like to express is that I am tired of all the Apple bashing that has been going on of late. Why? While I am sure that there are comparisons of OSX vs Windows vs Linux out there on current hardware, the most recent articles I have read (including this article) try to make far-reaching proclaimations about the inability of OSX to perform everyday tasks efficiently…USING OLD HARDWARE NOT DESIGNED FOR OSX. In other words, you need to put OSX on a current Apple system if you are going to compare it to a current P4 with XP. One reviewer out there might say, “I compared a P3 with XP to a G3 running at similar speeds.” I’m sorry pal, but I think most people would agree that your setup is faulty. You cannot compare a G3 w/OSX and a P3 w/XP even at the same processor speed. Why? XP on Intel hardware is more mature than OSX on a G3. The timeframes are different for these products and comparing them would not provide a fair analysis. Windows has been running longer on the Intel/AMD platform than OSX (specifically OSX) has been running on a G3 or G4 platform. I think you need to start with a G4 with OSX before you can start comparing it to current PC systems. What is the point of comapring hardware from two years ago anyway? By the way, have experience across all of these platforms and I am not a fanboy for any of them.
Oops, of course I misinterpreted that comment. Yes, it’s a pity the free flash player is not more advanced (rather that than a PPC version of the closed player, but hey).
It just needs somebody sufficiently motivated to sit down and hack on it for a while. Shows up the problems of proprietary software though.
@Anonymous
You are not addressing your blatent lie.
I did IEs start up time again and it took 17 secs. When I disable McAfee it starts up a lot faster. I guess I got a slow P4.
[i]That comment is not worth posting.
OS X on Apple hardware works well out of the box. The author of this story obviously lied(false statement.)
Wow! So you are disagreeing w/ or something now? What you said was:
“Everything works fine here. ”
Which is a comment not worth posting on the Internet. Feel free to mutter it all you want in the bathroom.[i]
My comment was on-topic. Yours wasn’t. Silly troll.
People need to realized that OSes are hardly ever fast on the hardware that they are introduced on. DOS was not fast on the 8086/8080. Windows NT (the OS that XP is based on) was not fast on the x386/x486 CPUs that were common when it was introduced. The classic Mac OS was not fast on the original Motorola 68000 CPUs. And Mac OS X is not fast on the G3/G4.
This is why is kills me when people talk about the classic Mac OS or Windows XP being fast. The ought to be, as they have years of CPU upgrades behind them. Besides, if speed was everything then we would all be using DOS.
Would’ve been nice to mention Mandrake 9.1 in the alternatives section. To be honest, though, even as a Mandrake fan, I’d probably pick YDL if I bought Mac hardware – the Mandrake port is fairly “part time”
I purchased a 12.1″ 800mhz 128MB ram ibook around January on the basis of: a) durability (this is key for a university student) b) price c) elegance of hardware d) ability to run a few operating systems I like.
First of all I want to say I think it’s obnoxious that Apple still ships machines with 128MB ram. This simply isn’t enough for OS X. I would be willing to bet a LOT of the complaints about OS X speed and reponsiveness would dwindle if they simply made the lower ram limit 256.
Today I only have one os installed on the machine — Debian GNU/Linux. I really wanted to enjoy OS X. I gave it my best, but for my usage I found the gui of os x to be horribly incompetant. What it comes down to is ability to customize. So many complain about how GNU/Linux has no unified desktop gui I find it to be it’s strength. The ability to make X11 behave in several different ways is to me a strength. I personally prefer to be at the keyboard as much as possible in a gui as it is simply faster. So in GNU/Linux I have set up several keybindings to move about my virtual desktops, keys to start all my apps (emacs chain style at that — hold alt, type the first 3 letters of the app, and it’s running), keys to cycle through the windows and workspaces (hold alt, use vi style keys to move around), etc. I found such customizations in OS X are ei
ther impossible or not as extendable as in X11.
OS X definitely cuts it as a desktop os for the average user, but for power user hardc
ore unix geek developers it simply doesnt offer a gui that will conform to the user’s
style.
It is possible to dual boot, correct? So you can have both, right?
Say you have OS X pre-installed and wanted to load YDL or Mandrake or someting, how would one do it? It is easy on x86 hardware as I can partition during the Windows install and the load Linux later.
But os my Powerbook, how does this work, when I do an OS restore it takes up the whole drive automatically and I do not see an option to change that, Thoughts?
-Jason
Anytime an author writes ‘this is not a troll’, it is a troll.
I’m not even a mac owner, and I know that attempting to run OS X on a 600mhz ibook with 256mb of ram is going to be tedious.
Geez, gimme a break!
Here is my article proving that Windows XP sucks..
“I just tried running Windows XP on my P200 with 128mb of ram. It is so slow. Windows XP sucks. Then, I installed BeOS and it was really fast. BeOS is the best thing since sliced bread. The end.”
While we are on the topic, is it possible to book YDL from a firewire drive?
I have MacOSX and and XDarwin. Click on an icon and in 10 seconds I have KDE running too – best of both worlds.
Incidentally, KDE taxes my 16Mb video card just as much as Aqua.
Oh, and one more thing. XP isn’t fast, or responsive. Or even that stable. I’ve got it running on a lightly overclocked Celeron 500MHz (@562MHz) system with a heap of RAM and a 32Mb video card. Screen redraws are slow, glitchy, mouse responsiveness varies and apps crash all the time. Not only does Luna take a fair bit of tweaking to calm down, but all the folder actions and stupid wizards and stuff slow down your progress far more than they aid.
Compared to my G4-350 upgraded 9600 (which technically shouldn’t be running MacOSX) with a scarce 216Mb, my Mac is fair-to-occasionally sluggish, but rock solid, dependable and still efficient to use.
Odd, huh?
And Mac OS X is not fast on the G3/G4.
This is why is kills me when people talk about the classic Mac OS or Windows XP being fast. The ought to be, as they have years of CPU upgrades behind them. Besides, if speed was everything then we would all be using DOS.
Windows XP was released about a year after the first (non-beta) release of Mac OS X. The only significant difference from the hardware side is that x86 speeds have increased more in the time since XP was released than Apple’s speeds have increased since OS X was released. Windows XP does fairly well on CPUs that were released long before the OS, if you give them enough RAM (I’ve had good XP performance on a 500 MHz P3 that was plugging along on 98SE before hitting the old hardware pile and then being resurrected as a testbed for software (I fully believe in testing my software on systems that are well below the capabilities of the system the software will be running on)).
Of course, if speed was everything I’d probably be running some archaic real-time Unix system (I’ve worked with a few of these over the years, very fast for single-task computing, but definitely not meant for normal users). Really, though, I only have a 2GHz PC at home for games (and it would still be a 1GHz PC if that one hadn’t been fried in moving cross-country), and a 1.8 GHz PC at work to keep compile-times within reason.
Last summer, after having my iBook (same as this Jon’s) for about a year, there was a lot of stuff coming out that I wanted to play with on Linux, but couldn’t get compiled on OS X. Namely, OpenMCL (Mac Common Lisp), GNU Mono, GNU Smalltalk, and new versions of KDE and GNOME. Also, since I pretty much just use Squeak as my desktop, using OS X only as a platform for running a web browser and Squeak.
So, I thought I’d try installing Linux on my iBook. Before I bought my first Mac almost 4 years ago, I had been a full-time Linux/x86 user. I went with Debian 3, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Performance seemed to be quite a bit below OS X’s. Things like OpenOffice took more time to start than Office. OpenOffice, Mozilla and Opera crashed all the time. The worst thing was that on the same machine, Linux tends to run Squeak worse than Mac OS 9 or X or Windows, depending on whether it is PPC or x86. I’m not sure why, but I wasn’t going to take a 30% (!!) dent in Squeak performance and perhaps a 50% dent in subjective productivity for nothing. Although, I must admit to feeling a bit warm and fuzzy when the only thing vrms (a virtual RMS, heh!) complained about nothing other than Opera. One thing in its favor- Linux used a fraction of the RAM OS X did, and my 320 MB of RAM seemed excessive.
Perhaps it’s time to try out this new YDL- it sure looks nice. I may end up switching back to OS X, but it’s always fun to see what the “state of the art” with Linux is, even if it’s a measure behind OS X.
I’ve found on this model iBook OS X performs quite well. I’ve never had issues with 10 icons slowing the Finder down, or any other GUI lag.
For me as a power user, Linux just wasn’t up to the task. For me, being a power user means being able to do the things I need to do, and to not get in the way when I have other computing tasks I don’t really want to do that I need to get done. Like dealing with spreadsheets and writing documents. Hell, now a days, I write all of my papers in LaTeX, and even that is less of a hassle than on OS X than it was on Linux. There was a time when I spent a lot more time playing with Linux than actually doing anything productive, but now a days, when it comes down to it, I want my computer to just work when I need it do. There are times when I still enjoy tinkering, and OS X is condusive to that.
Maybe this has all been said, but I’ve not read the replies. I’m too afraid it is a bunch of Linux cheerleaders and Mac zealouts chewing on eachothers legs. Doesn’t sound like my idea of a good time, but maybe I’m nuts.
That is the comparison that should be made, not an old machine with an old OS like Bob the Monkey makes.
And what do you think you are doing, trying to be a poweruser on an old consumer machine?
he had such a problem with OS X performance on a 500 MHz iBook. While performance isn’t scorching on my 266 MHz Rev. C iMac (288 MB), it’s very usable. I run OpenOffice in Apple’s X11, and it works fine. I would love a 900 MHz iBook, or even better, a 17″ Powerbook. But I can’t afford either right now.
I don’t want to have to know ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade” to update my software, I prefer to use Software Update. I do some things in Terminal and X, but because I want to, not for basic functionality.
I don’t dislike Linux, but I much prefer OS X. Unix is there when I want it, and disappears if I don’t. MP3 is present in OS X, I don’t have to wait until YDL includes it, or look for a work-around.
OS X just _works_ for me. I feel like _I_ have to work for Linux.
Lemme start by saying that I’ve never used an OS as nice as Mac OS X. I get my Mac fix and my Unix fix in one shop. Awesome stuff.
Don’t flame me. 😉
Good article, I think. I think the zealous Mac users have mistaken this as an OS bash, but it isn’t; rather, it’s a Linux distro review with a preface of /why/ YDL was being used in the first place.
Okay, NOW you can flame me.
18 months ago Dell had 1GHz laptops available. A search for Dell laptop 2001 on google brings up an article from LinuxJournal reviewing Debian Linux on this configuration in December 2001:
PIII 1.0GHz Processor
256MB RAM
IBM 32.0GB 5400RPM UDMA66 HD (IBM DJSA-232)
ATI Rage Mobility M4 Video w/ 32MB RAM
Built-in mini-PCI 3Com 56k modem + 10/100 combo
15″ UXGA Active Matrix (TFT) display (1600×1200)
Built-in ESS Maestro 3i sound card
LG 8X DVD-ROM Drive
BIOS Revision A09
Granted, it’s a high-end laptop from Dell at the time, but December 2001 was almost 18 months ago. Still, it was during a specific lag-time in x86 laptops, where the laptop processors were significantly behind the desktop processors (before the P4 was available on laptops), as they were offering 2GHz P4s on the desktop at the same time, with WindowsXP installed.
I’ve had this exact problem, it was due to having a hostname set that didn’t have an entry in the /etc/hosts file (or, of course, not having an entry in the dns server for the hostname, but I don’t run my own dns server at home). If you use a static ip, just add an entry in hosts
192.168.1.1 workstation workstation.domain.com
or if you use dhcp, you can add an entry for 127.0.0.1. I’ve seen some people say this has caused problems with some apps, but I’ve never had a problem with it. After making this change, my apps, including terminal went from opening in 10 seconds to less than 1 second.
Gnome will warn you when you log in if it can’t resolve your hostname, but KDE doesn’t, but it will still suffer from the problem.
I’ve only read the first part of this article, mainly because I am interested in OSX performance on non-G4 Macs.
Apple does indeed seem to have concentrated on “glitter” rather than performance. You should be able to turn off window shadows and other unnecessary graphical features in order to get the best possible performance. Instead, G3 owners are left feeling like they need to buy new hardware which is unfortunate. I laugh when I think about my obsolete 1998 Wallstreet G3 at 233 MHz, and then realize that 5 YEARS LATER the same processor is still being used in iBooks with only marginal speed increases! I sincerely hope that Apple junks Motorola and finds a chip vendor (maybe IBM) that is willing to update their chips to compete with Intel.
That said, my Sawtooth G4 runs OSX marginally – an increase in RAM was a big help – and things really run well now with a new 1.2GHz upgrade. I just hope Apple gets their act together and gets some new chips in place (PPC970).
That’s what made you “switch”?
I look forward to your treatment of the more serious issues mentioned in the 2003-05-20 01:48:05 post re: linux desktop stability.
OS X beats linux any day — and I use both EVERY day.
>Anytime an author writes ‘this is not a troll’, it is a troll.
>I’m not even a mac owner, and I know that attempting to run OS X
>on a 600mhz ibook with 256mb of ram is going to be tedious.
>Geez, gimme a break!
>Here is my article proving that Windows XP sucks..
>”I just tried running Windows XP on my P200 with 128mb of ram. It
> is so slow. Windows XP sucks. Then, I installed BeOS and it was really
> fast. BeOS is the best thing since sliced bread. The end.”
There is one problem with your argument. A P200 would be very very old (1997?) while a 600 MHz iBook is reasonably recent (2002?).
I doubt XP would be slow on even the wimpiest Wintel machine bought in 2002.
That said, I’d still pick OS X over XP any day. But that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to performance improvements in Panther.
-Jay
You appear to be misinformed. The flash plugin on Linux is most often the same as the one on Windows – Macromedia have made a (proprietary) Flash plugin for a long time now. I don’t know why you think otherwise.
Well, it appears you’ve figured out at this point that there is no release of Macromedia’s flash player for Linux/PPC.
Oops, of course I misinterpreted that comment. Yes, it’s a pity the free flash player is not more advanced (rather that than a PPC version of the closed player, but hey).
It just needs somebody sufficiently motivated to sit down and hack on it for a while. Shows up the problems of proprietary software though.
Watching anything in the open source player is a painful prospect. Not only is the rendering performance terrible, but it’s clear a fraction of the functionality has been implemented.
This is just one of the many disadvantages of Linux/PPC. It’s a platform with almost no commercial support.
OSX is a demanding Operating System. I would not want to test it on a 2 year old mediocre laptop computer. Just as when Windows 98 came out – trying to run it on 2 year old hardware that was marginally capable of running 95 ( and when 95 came out trying the same trick on a machine running 3.1) lead to disastrous performance.
While my 386 handled Win 3.1 well, it wasn’t up to Win 95 or even to dare think of Win 98. My 486 machines are fine on Win 95 but I wouldn’t put XP on them. As a matter of fact they’ll run Linux but not a full Distro. (small hard disk).
I’m running OSX 10.2.6 on a 1 Gig G4 with 512 Meg of RAM. That is what it is really designed for. While the 486 is good for DOS and Win 95 – it ain’t ready to run Windows 2003 server. Likewise the IBook 2 is fine for a simpler OS like Linux, but not for OSX. And now that I have BSD Unix running great – why would I want to put Linux on this one. But it sounds like Linux is great for the slower Macs.
See those little buttons on the front of your monitor…. TRY THEM!!!! they fix your screen when it shifts!!!!
Or you could sit there and cry all day, its up to you.
All these wannabe computer reviewers. Let’s see, I installed Windows on an old 8086 and it really sucked, so I swithed to MS-DOS. Jokers.
I’m running OS X on a G4 500 AGP with ATI and it performs incredibly well. No Quartz Extreme here, but 384MB of RAM. It is snappy and efficient. I run everything on it and always have from 4 to 8 Apps running simultaneously. Others I know are running OS X on slower G3’s than you and no complaints.
Oh yeah, what version of OS X are you running? You failed to give us the salient details. In Jaguar, especially from 2.3 forward the ATI drivers and OpenGL was significantly improved. I guess we don’t have enough information about your second had iBook from your second hand review.
I’m sure this has already been said above. But what a dumb ### this Jon guy is.
Let’s do a comparison. Duh, I just bought a used Penium computer with 64mb of RAM and found that Windows XP really sucks. I also bought a used Yugo. I don’t think I’ll get my money’s worth out of this even though it only cost me $50. Does anyone know how to get gum out hair?
All the above are reasonable comparisons to what this guy said. Don’t buy old used equipment and wonder why an OS sucks. Dumb ###.
An iBook (or any other Mac) with 512MB or more will run Mac OS X 10.2.x respectably. It’s unfortunate that Apple sells the machines with low RAM but there are plenty of comments on this, waiting to be read.
I’m glad that the author has found some satisfaction with the computer; however, the article is a bit like my search to change the display resolution in Linux from 640×480 to 1024×768. I can’t find the place to change it and I haven’t searched too hard, so Linux is garbage. It’s an illogical leap. Linux is fine, the integration is rubbish.
It looks as though I’ll be trying Mandrake for my PPC604e machine soon and, from the comments here, I’ll be better off choosing it than the competition.
I almost did the same on my iBook when I received it. Its a 600mhz 12.1″ and had only 128mb ram. OS X ran so slow it was almost painful. I then maxed out the ram and to my surprise it became very fast. Camino (don’t run IE anymore) launches in 2 bounces on the dock rather than 8 or 9 with 128mb.
Although this almost did it for me to keep OS X I had this burning feeling that I’m missing many functional applications such as a good newsreader. I’m used to using Forte Inc’s Agent on XP, and Pan in Linux, but I couldn’t find anything that was close to their power for OS X. I stumbled upon XDarwin and, more importantly, fink. In minutes (minus the download times
), I had X running rootless with openbox-rootless seemlessly attaching to my desktop. Pan ran *beautifully*. This did it for me. I’m all set. Now not only can I run *nix X applications, but the addition of Adobe’s set of applications (Photoshop!), and Microsoft’s Word just tops off the cake for me.