Linux users weigh in: MacOS X Good or Evil?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve recently undergone a minor conversion of sorts.

I used to regard Macintoshes, those closed, proprietary little toasters with obsolete single-tasking non-memory-protecting OSes, as something slightly less evil than the guy on goatse.cx. I hated the fact that Jobs and crew were making 80s-era OSes for completely closed hardware that didn’t allow any modification. I hated the fact that they didn’t even have a command line, but made you used the damnable mouse for everything.

I hated the fact that neither of the Big Two were offering anything I would consider usable.

Much of that changed with MacOS X. BSD kernel? Check. UNIX-like command line? Check. More open hardware? I don’t know, but I’ve heard it isn’t completely closed anymore. That was phase one: Basic Acceptance.

Now, I’ve been travelling a bit, and using computers in Strange Lands. Some of those computers have been Macs. Admittedly, no Xs, but MacOS 9 is … nice. It’s certainly pretty, I’ll give it that, and I like how it uses the NeXT STEP-style scroll bars (both buttons at the bottom). I like how it uses the toolbar up top as a kind of context-sensitive menu, changing depending on what program is in focus at the time. It’s convenient, and certainly a big win for uniformity of interface.

MacOS 9 doesn’t have a command line, though, and that is a dealbuster for me. I’ll probably never buy a pre-X Mac.

But X does. X is a repackaged BSD, and BSD I can work with. I myself run Linux, but penguins and daemons of a feather flock together. So, has Apple held true to the BSD way? Has it kept the good things alive and added Mac style and interface savvy, or has it mangled the kernel and sprayed an interface on top?

I’ve already determined I’ll never buy a preassembled PC again (self-assembly from parts is the only way for me). Is buying a Mac worth it?

2

Yes, OS X is wonderful. But its not just BSD with a pretty face. It’s BSD running on top of the Mach kernel, with NextStep API’s (Cocoa), Mac classic APIs (Carbon) and the Quartz interface running on top of that. Check out http://www.apple.com/macosx/
for the technical information about OS X.

I hate computers that have bad interfaces, and every Windows and Linux desktop environment I’ve ever used has a horrible interface. I’m on my Dell right now, though I hardly ever use this machine, firing up instead my G4 iMac or G3 iBook, and it has both the latest SUSE Linux and Windows XP SP1 on it. Neither is very functional, UI wise, IMO, though Windows is far more so than the Gnome desktop on Linux (I absolutely loathe KDE).

I hate hardware/technical things, so I rarely upgrade my machines, and would never build one from scratch, so I can’t really address your situation there. The PowerMac G4s are quite customizable, and very easy to crack open to finagle the guts of. But I bought an iMac because it doesn’t need that sort of fiddling. With a PowerMac the PCI slots give you direct access to the system bus, you can move/add/remove/put butter on the internal hard drives, etc etc etc.

I love Mac OS X. It’s the most stable, most attractive, and most all around usable operating system I’ve ever encountered, especially in its current Jaguar form.

Kirk

3

My idea of a good interface is a good command line, so I suppose I’m fundamentally different from you on that count. Not that a well-made GUI is lost on me, but with the way I use computers I have more use for a shell than a mouse. MacOS X, I’ve read, has tcsh as its default shell (so has that in common with the other BSDs). I only have experience with bash, but tcsh isn’t bad.

I agree that Linux has nothing spectacular in terms of GUIs, but we easily eat MS-Windows’ lunch in that regard anyway. I think both KDE and GNOME are roughly on a par in terms of look-and-feel, with GNOME being more customisable and KDE being more tightly integrated. Of course, I also think twm is better than Windows 3 was, and that WindowMaker is the golden standard WinXP still hasn’t reached.

From my use of MacOS 9.3, I know how pretty Macs are, and from looking at MacOS X screenshots, I know that Apple hasn’t slacked. The transparent terminals you can use are just amazing. Of course, the interfaces are usable as well, and the applications integrate with the background UI to a level unknown in other OSes. I like the dock. Very NeXT-ish. :slight_smile:

So on the interface, I’m sold.

It’s good to hear that you can crack the case and swap out components. Does anyone but Apple sell hardware, or is it still proprietary (and damned expensive)? I’m not a hardware freak: None of my chips are overclocked, and adding RAM is the most adventurous I’ve gotten recently. But it’s good to know I can.

Hardware moddable? Check.

As for stability: My source is the Ars Technica review of MacOS 10.0, and it says that 10.0 is only marginally more stable than 9, especially since the Classic Environment likes to freeze on you and doesn’t want to quit when it does. Here is the page I refer to: Mac OS X 10.0 - Page 7 - (03/2001)

Have these issues been rectified? Is Jaguar’s Classic still flaky, meaning that most Mac applications have to be run with care? If the GUI dies and I’m left with a CLI, I’m not getting anything I didn’t have in Linux and I’m using a mostly-dead box as well.

Are more recent releases of MacOS X (Jaguar, for example) stable enough to be left on all night, or will I have to worry about large parts of the interface crashing?

MacOS X is like that nice Ferarri: Powerful, beautiful, well-built, and expensive, but if it crashes you’re looking at expensive parts and the need for professional repairs.

4

If you don’t use Classic applications, you don’t have any reason to use Classic, and it’s pretty stable otherwise. And you can ignore Aqua if you wish and snag a copy of XDarwin and compile Unix XFree86 apps and run them in WindowMaker, which I agree is quite nice. (I don’t live in it, though, it’s just one of many OS X environments I like to play in).

5

Derleth, Jaguar is supposed to be very stable. The Ars Technica article notwithstanding, I don’t think OS X was ever particularly unstable. (Left on all night? Please.) In fact, as long as you stay away from Internet Explorer OS 9.0 is damned stable.

I don’t really understand the “expensive parts and expensive repairs” comment. Yeah, if the motherboard goes, it’s going to cost, but all the other components are standard – disks, CD drives, and memory can all be obtained cheaply.

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AHunter3: How many native X apps are there? Not that I’m a big ‘app’ user, but if I have to go into Classic for things like email and web browsing, the instabilites of Classic begin to present problems.

Finagle: I routinely leave my Linux box on for weeks on end, simply because there’s no reason to shut it down and it’s convenient to simply turn on the monitor, undo the screen saver, and have a fully operational system immediately at my command.

Apple hardware is tradtionally expensive, since Apple is a hardware company that can sell to a closed market (Mac users). At least, it has been traditionally. Traditionally, the only way to get your hands on a MacOS was to buy a Macintosh, too, but that has changed as well (BTW, nice box for the Jaguar :)).

So has Apple really abandoned the hardware monopoly? Could I go down to CompUSA and buy things to put in my PowerMac G4?

7

Well, I guess it depends on what kinds of things you mean. If you mean can you go down to CompUSA and grab a new motherboard to put in it? Then no.

If you mean can you go buy some extra memory, another internal hard drive, maybe an internal ZIP drive, or other various devices, then sure. Although I wouldn’t bother with CompUSA when there are probably plenty of places you could get things cheaper. :slight_smile:

The primary proprietary hardware issue would be the motherboard and processor. There might be something else, but I can’t think of anything else right now that you couldn’t replace with a generic. Of course, you’d have to make sure that the extras you bought had OS X drivers available for them.

8

Derleth: New OS X user here, and by no means am I am techie type person. But I just got a (slightly used) G4, and I will try to answer some of your questions.

I am currently using OS 10.2 (Jaguar). It is very stable. I often leave it on overnight. I don’t leave it on for days, merely because I am worried of a sudden lightening strike hitting the house when I am at work.

As far as apps: No problems. Jaguar’s built-in email program is just fine. But, I have Entourage too. Yes, there’s a OS X native version of Office. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and umpteen other apps that are important to me are already usable in OS X. OS X needs a little more time to be “mature”, but so far, I am happy. I stuck with mostly OS 9.2.1 (Is there an OS 9.3? I didn’t think so) but when Jaguar came around, I found myself spending more and more time in it.

As far as hardware goes, most of it is standard. Bear in mind, I am no techie. I just recently installed my FIRST thing into a computer. RAM. Boy was I terrified, (I am such a coward) but it was really easy on a G4. The case opens and snaps shut like a suitcase. Anyway, as far as parts go, HD, RAM and drives seem to be pretty standard. Though I guess there are a few parts that are not Mac-compatable, so it’s best to make sure that it will work with Mac before buying. But most parts will. As far as video cards go, you have to buy a Mac-compatable one, and only a few are available. (But good ones—ATI and Nvidia.) Same goes with sound cards. I think many othe PCI cards are pretty standard (Firewire, USB, etc.) but I cannot say for sure on all cards. I don’t know much else other than that.

9

I should also say about upgrades: I am actually unsure about all the video cards available for upgrade. I know that Apple ships with ATI and Nvidia cards, but I’ve not looked for these cards as available as upgrades. There are several models of Radeon cards that are usually mentioned in Mac catalogs. One is a modestly priced 32 meg PCI card (for older Macs) and one (or two) are AGP based higher-end cards. They come at a price, though.

There are also processor upgrades, but at a price. My 533 G4 can be upgraded to 1 GHz, but for about $600 - $700 or so. I have been assured that the price will go down on this. I’m in no mood to upgrade anyway. Also, there are G3/G4 upgrades pre-G3/G4 Macs, which will boost their speed quite a bit. This keeps older Macs up and running for years. There is even a workaround to make these supposedly “not OS X compatable” Macs run OS X anyway. Pretty cool. In my opinion, Macs seem to have a longer shelf life than PCs.

Yeah, yeah, more than you really asked…

10

Mac OS X is frankly, a godsend.

I used to be really into Linux and all of that, configuring X servers, Compiling kernels… etc…

I switched over to the Mac in february of this year, and piddled around in OS 9 for a few months, before switching over to X (My iMac was a display model from last year that I got a good deal on, but did not have X installed new.)

The interface on X is actually IMO improved greatly over the interface in 9, and not just in the aspect of prettiness. It is a lot prettier, but the interface is also a lot cleaner and more consistant also.

I am now running OS 10.2 Jaguar, and was running 10.1 before, and both are really good, stable, relatively full featured OS’es. 10.2 gets the nod, IMO as the best consumer OS out there.

Days since my upgrade to 10.2, co-incidentally my uptime :wink:

12:04AM up 17 days, 9:41, 2 users, load averages: 0.53, 0.45, 0.32

Application support is also pretty good. I use X exclusively, no classic, and have little/no problems finding apps I need.

Photoshop is there, Office is there (although I do not run it, no need), games are there, along w/ many standard UNIX apps, which will run.

11

**

Clearly. :slight_smile:

Bash is also included. You can set it to be the default shell in the Terminal application’s Preferences.

Of course. :slight_smile: It is NextStep. :slight_smile:

Only Apple sells Mac OS systems. But as I said before, on those systems, the Power Mac is after-purchase configurable to a large extent.

This article is way out of date. There have been ten minor and two major upgrades to OS X since the 10.0 release. And if you’re jumping into Mac OS X now, you shouldn’t have any Classic software which is good, because Classic is somethign of a kludge.

I tend to keep my iMac on for weeks at a time (longest uptime was something like two months, from the day I got it to mid-April of this year, when there was a major electrical storm).

Kirk

12

I just wanted to chime in to say that I’ve left my iMac on for several months at a time, only occasionally rebooting to “refresh” it. There have been no ill effects whatsoever.

Also, the list of OS X applications grows by the day. This Apple site page has details and links to apps and updates for OS X compatibility. For your average computer user, who surfs the Web, maintains e-mail accounts, and plays games, there is plenty of software to choose from. As with all software, you need to check if the individual program or update plays nicely with OS X, but it’s no longer the case that there’s little software that’s designed for OS X, period.

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Note that ArsTechnica has reviewed 10.2
Brian

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N9IWP: I have found the 10.2 review and have read parts of it. That, plus the opinions and facts expressed here, make Jaguar seem a rather attractive system to me.

It really is great how well Apple has merged their biggest wins (great GUI, exellent all-around consistency) with the wins of the BSD Unix system (stability, great CLI, great under-the-hood performance and efficient hardware utilization).

All in all, it looks like a very nice hobby computer and a refreshing break from the PC world.

Thanks for all your help, y’all. :slight_smile:

15

Derleth:

Email: Eudora, MS Entourage (an Outlook derivative), Apple’s built-in Mail, Unix pine and mutt, AOL, Nisus Email, and the raw command line mail command all work without Classic. I’ve probably left out a dozen I don’t know about.

Browsers: iCab, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera, Chimera Navigator, OmniWeb, and Mozilla all run natively in Aqua; lynx works from the command line; Mozilla for X-Window and a handful of other X-Window browsers work in the X-Window environment. Again, I’m sure I’m leaving out a dozen or more.

Word Processors: Microsoft Word ::barf smiley:: is available and native, of course ; AppleWorks is native; the very klunky beta of OpenOffice is available but requires the X-Window system to run; AbiWord is nicer but also requires X-Window; there’s also a Java-based application suite called ThinkFree that is available. Nisus Writer isn’t available yet, though, and neither is WordPerfect which may never be.

Spreadsheets: Excel, AppleWorks, OpenOffice (see above), ThinkFree. Possibly others. Don’t know about KISS. No signs of Quattro or Lotus 123 being ported.

Databases: MySQL, FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Server. AppleWorks probably contains a stripped-down db of some sort. Any open-source Unix stuff is likely to be ported if it isn’t already. Or you can compile it yourself from source code if you want.

Graphics: Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, InDesign, Bryce, GraphicConverter, Canvas, Acrobat (minus Distiller which is still Classic only). No Quark yet but they say it’s coming. Maya, Gimp, and other Unix-world stuff, some of which is X-Window dependent, others Aquafied. I don’t know about Painter, Poser, TypeStyler, and some others I don’t use very often.

Video: I’m pretty ignorant of the details but I get the sense that damn near anything that’s digital video will run under MacOS X or else there’s a better one that will.

Sound: Deck, some other stuff, your basic low-end shareware. Cabrio, iTunes, and a dozen others will play your MP3s, and N2MP3 and another dozen others will encode them from AIFFs or CDs as necessary.

Webby stuff: Dreamweaver, GoLive

Newsgroups: Hogwasher,

Text Processors: BBEdit and BBEdit Lite; all the famous Unix command-line text editors of course.

Remote & Networking: Timbuktu is native; Microsoft released a MacOS X client for Terminal Server; and VNC is available in native too I think. VPN clients are available for Cisco 3000 and 5000 series that I know of, others may be as well. And in the XWindow environment you can run (or be run by) another Unix box using ssh-x and exporting the display from the one being run to the one doing the running. (I’ve run a Linux computer’s entire KDE interface in an X Window).

Other: Default Folder, Remember?, Toast, OmniPage Pro, Retrospect, VirtualPC, QuicKeys (in a limited form), and Morph exist in native forms. Many other mini-apps and extensions have MacOS X parallels that do identical or similar things, e.g., instead of Snitch you can use XRay.

Things that won’t work in X yet: Quark; Adobe Acrobat Distiller; SoundApp; WordPerfect; Nisus Writer; SuperPaint; Ashton-Tate FullWrite; MacDraw; HyperCard; OK, also no serial printing now and maybe ever; many scanners don’t have OS X drivers; some older peripherals requiring drivers may also fail to work (I haven’t tried hooking up my old SyQuest drive yet).

16

procreate’s Painter 7 is OS X native. One of the first to come out.

Wow. Impressive list, AHunter. I didn’t know about half this stuff!

I was also impressed with Jaguar when I hooked up my sister’s digital camera. We’d mislaid (temporarily) the CD with the drivers on it, but I thought, “what the hell” and just plugged it in to see what would happen. Jaguar immediately recognized it, and opened up iPhoto for me!

17

AHunter: Good to know that X isn’t hurting for good programs. All in all, it sounds like a mix of the MS world I despise and the Linux world I love: Entourage and pine on the same system? Bizarre! Well, as long as emacs will compile (and as gcc 3.1 is included, I know it will), I’m set as far as email and news are concerned, not to mention text editing.

In fact, with gcc bundled, I have no real reason to worry about native X apps: I can download and build anything I need, bootstrapping myself from a compiler, a browser, and an ftp client to a full system. That’s why I love the common practice of *nix-centric groups distributing source tarballs to the exclusion of binaries: Getting a bizarre system up and running and downright livable is doable as long as you have a C compiler.

Opera is good. Opera is very good. :smiley:

As far as word processors go, as long as I have LaTeX and emacs, I’m set. And guess how LaTeX is distributed… :slight_smile:

Given all of the foregoing, the only real stumbling block is what has always hobbled Apple: Price. The G4, high-end dual processor beast it is, starts at $1700. The cheapest G4 system, the eMac, starts at $1500. The cheapest of the lot, a G3 iMac, is itself $800.

For comparison, Gateway offers the Gateway Profile 4X, with a P4 processor and a 40 gig hard drive, for $1500. A high-end top-of-the-line PC costs about as much as a relatively low-end but modern Mac. And since Gateway allows me to customise an order (not something I noticed on the Apple site, but correct me if I’m wrong), I could probably knock some dough off of that by opting for an Athlon or settling for a smaller hard drive.

And Gateway charges too much. I could find computers roughly the equivalent of what Gateway is offering for a fraction of the price (probably under $1000) if I went to a warehouse-style PC distributor that simply sold hardware, as opposed to selling tech support and OSes as well.

Bottom line: While I’m attracted to Macs at multiple levels, PCs will always be less expensive and probably easier to find parts for (especially seeing as how I can cannabalize old PCs for extra drives, RAM, etc.). The next computer I buy whole, instead of in parts, will be a Mac, but that isn’t saying much for my desire to shell out $2000 for one machine.

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[rms]
It’s GNU/Linux!

Although it is based on a BSD kernel, MacOS X itself contains proprietary code and is not Free Software; therefore it is evil!
[/rms]

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Terminus: I certainly empathise with RMS. He’s had his project upstaged by a freaking Finn, ferchrissakes, and a Finn who bootstrapped his kernel project into a full-fledged OS through taking advantage of RMS’s project, something people tend to forget.

Believe me, when the Hurd project releases a stable version, I’m on it like bugs on Exchange. But so far it hasn’t happened (RMS being too ambitious, p’raps?), so I use Linux.

The GNU that’s Here beats the GNU that Isn’t.

(I have a feeling GNU would still be languishing without a working kernel if it wasn’t for Linus.)

As for nonfree code in X: I know, I’m not a Pure OS OS User. (That looks weird. Open-Source Operating System. That’s better.) But I like supporting projects (and corporations) that know the value of good code, and BSD is some good shit.

Seriously, X has given the *nix world an answer to its critics’ most vocal whines: Lack of a good GUI and lack of a good newbie OS. X has both. Apple has always given its Macs the latest and greatest GUIs ever since Lisa (remember that flop?), and the little toasters have always meant fewer headaches, not least because Apple has always kept a tight reign over what hardware the little boxen could use. That has changed, I realize, but it was a major factor through the 80s-90s.

MacOS X: Unix for the Rest of Us.

Sounds like a good way to get the Beast of Mordor…er…Redmond running scared.