Pico! emacs is klugey, and vi is ancient (though I do like vim).
Seriously, if Linux ever wants to be really mainstream, what they have to do is develop user-friendly utilities, more than they need a user friendly UI. Wordperfect and some other Corel stuff is out there, but they need to get a lot of the little things that PCs and Macs have had for a while, and they need to be easy to use.
Example: I did a little test on a Linux box and a Windows box to see how long it took to download, install, and successfully play an MP3. Time for the Windows box: about 90 seconds. Time for the Linux box: about 10 minutes.
Granted I’m not as familiar with Linux, but I’m not computer illiterate. When Linux can beat windows in something like that, then I’ll pay more attention to it.
Well, could they even be called “alernatives” in that case? That wasn’t really the point of Linux and BeOS. Look at it like this: you have your standard Ford minivan, which sells in huge numbers to all sorts of people. Then somebody else comes along and designs a Jaguar XK8, which only sells in miniscule numbers to a specialized market niche. So you ask, “Why didn’t they make the Jaguar exactly like the Ford Minivan? Then it could use all the same replacement parts, and it’s a lot easier to find Ford parts than Jaguar XK8 parts.” They could, but then it would just be another minivan - harldy much of an alternative for folks who don’t like minivans. The design goal of the XK8 wasn’t to be another minivan.
Anyway, Linux is based on Unix technology, which long predates Windows, and BeOS intends to be an alternative OS that addresses some of the architectural issues in Windows - you can’t do that if you are Windows, because you inherit the architectural problems with the APIs (and in your proposed case, ABIs as well). For most consumers, Win9* is the way to go due the overwhelming amount of software, but under the hood, WIN32 is not nearly as well designed as many of the other API’s around. Win9* manages to hang together pretty well at a user level due to an unholy amount of money and resources spent hacking on a rather poor and inelegant design. Other alternative OSs spent an infinitesimal fraction of those resources on a better design, and come up with what’s in many ways a nicer OS, but they don’t (currently) have the massive market support that Windows does.
I’m not sure what you mean by “install” an MP3 (it’s a data file), but there’s nothing intrinsic to Linux that would make this take 10 minutes. I am familiar with both Unix variants (I don’t use Linux, myself) and Windows, and I can accomplish most tasks faster under Unix, even if they’re simple ones like “download and play this MP3”. But the more complex the task, the more the ratio tilts in favor of Unix. (I’m probably a 3+ sigma case though; I write OS’s for a living, so I do different sorts of tasks than most consumers).
A similar thing is true for GUI’s vs. (good) command line interfaces, like bash or ksh. It’s hard to argue that the GUI is vastly easier for the beginner. But for complex tasks and expert users, the GUI doesn’t begin to approach what you can do with the command line. IMHO, they’re just different tools with different advantages. Using one where the other would be appropriate will just yield frustration.
Yeah, there are some features that are really nice to have in an OS (read kernel) before you smack a GUI on it. Multiprocessing (or hopefully multithreading) and synchronization, interprocess communication, an event or message system, and protected memory are things I can think of off the top of my head.
Technically you don’t need any of those things (MacOS 1.0 only had the event handling), but I can’t imagine anyone nowadays writing a GUI on an OS that doesn’t have that stuff.
I believe there are some projects out there to get Windows software running on Linux. And there is a program I know of to run Mac software on BeOS. The way these typically work is that you open up a window that has a virtual Windows (or macos) desktop on them, and all your Windows programs run inside that window. From what I understand, the Windows one is a problem, because the way Win95 works, it expects to be the only thing using your machines hardware.
Also, the programs you run this way will be slower, because they have to deal with 2 operating systems.
Oh, and your programs in the pseudo-Win95 probably wouldn’t be able to communicate with your native Linux programs, so it would still feel like using two seperate machines.
There is also the WINE project for Linux. Its not an emulator though - they are attempting to reproduce the entire Win32 API. This way, native Linux and Win32 programs will be able to share common functions and data (real simple example: a single clipboard). You’d even be able to access COM and OLE objects in other applications. Its not that far along, last I heard, but hundreds of Win32 programs will run and a few will run without critical problems.
This is not the only one in the works, I think Corel is working on one (or bought someone who is working on one).
That’s a good point about the emulators that Hunsecker and everybody else mentioned. Completely escaped my mind.
For the benefit of the person who asked the question: there are (at least) two ways to provide this emulation, only one of which accomplishes what I you are after as I understand it.
You can provide the WIN32 API under a different OS, as basically a link-time or run-time library. However, this usually requires that you go and recompile all the applications under this environment. It’s a source-level compatibility, not a binary-level compatibility (although I guess you could provide both; for all I know, some of them do). In other words, it has to be done by the people that write the programs, but it makes it easier for them to have their programs run under the other OS. You still can’t just go buy Windows software and run it under this environment. The CPU’s might be different, the object formats are different, and so on. But there are many advantages to this approach as well.
Then, separately, there’s the concept of binary emulation - you directly run Windows executables with the aid of some fancy software, under another OS. This is greatly facilitated if your CPU is an x86 one. This does allow you to run “well behaved” out of the box software, but sometimes at a large performance hit if your host CPU is a different type. Many times games and such don’t work very well. IIRC, this is the case for WINE - you’re much more likely to be able to run a business app than a game, say.
There are some technologies that do other things, like invocation-time translation of binaries. I’m not sure what the state of the art in those are.
Thats mostly correct, but its not necessarily true that you need to recompile applications if you are providing the Win32 API under a different OS. This is what WINE is, and the binary files run using it.
You’re right, but I think I did mention that. That’s what I was talking about in the second section - binary emulation, requiring no recompilation. But not all technologies that let you run Win32 software under other OS’s work that way. I was just trying to explain to the guy who asked the original question that there are different flavors, some of which do require recompilation.
You seemed to have missed my main point, which was that comparing NT to non-Linux flavours of Unix is completely irrelevant when looking at how NT and Linux stack up. I’ve been in a discussion (OK, flamewar) about NT vs Linux before where people offered the accomplishments of FreeBSD and Solaris boxes as evidence that Linux could do things NT couldn’t. Even assuming that their examples were valid, they say nothing about how NT and Linux stack up.
If you’re going to compare NT or Linux vs the other flavors of Unix, you’ve really got to look at price/performance since PC hardware is so much cheaper than RISC hardware. (I love people who don’t realize this and think that you can just whip 4 Sun boxes out of your ass in a week or so).
The vast majority of servers that I’ve run in my entire carreer have been primarily File/print and database servers, and it’s hardly ‘not much’. File/print and DB servers are the backbone of the network of pretty much any business except for an ISP. File/print plus databases and a few apps covers everything I need my OSes to do, so I’d hardly consider it ‘not much’.
Also, my build servers running compiles under MSVC and VisualAgeC continue to do 4 builds a day without me having to reboot them, which is not exactly a stressless operation.
I’ll defer to the ISPs that seem to manage just fine running NT as Internet servers.
Are the memory leaks in the applications or in the OS? Application memory leaks mean the application is bad, not the OS. I have no idea what you mean by native NT and Unix web solutions, since the Unix boxes running web servers that I’ve seen tend to run Apache or some other 3rd party web server.
Are you complaining that NT apps aren’t stable or that NT isn’t stable? If an application screws up and can’t handle the fault, then Dr. Watson gets invoked to generate the rough equivalent of a core dump file. If your apps are crashing several times a day but NTW is staying up, that means that the OS is stable but your apps aren’t.
I mean, if I started running some app on a Linux box and it core dumped every 15 minutes, would you then say that Linux was unstable? No OS can magically fix the bugs in an application, but what a stable OS does is cleanly kill the application when it does something illegal without crashing the OS itself.
This sounds suspiciously like “Twin”, which was the Win32 API running on Helios. (Helios is a British SunOS clone.) I had to use Twin in one embedded project we were doing at Wyse Technology back in 1997. I hope I never have to go through the experience again. It was pretty awful. The basics worked, but hardly anything else did. You couldn’t even use real Windows fonts, you had to use X Window System fonts. Bleah.
Our NT problems may have as much to do with hardware as anything, I’ll admit that. I work for a company who is very “thrifty” when it comes to equipment purchases. We have one real server - RAID disk arrays and all and it hasn’t crashed at all. It’s primarily a SQLServer and file server. When I say crash, I mean Dr. Watson - not blue screen.
But my point is that we ran Linux Redhat on the same boxes for our internet servers that were wiped out and reloaded with NT. When they had Linux, we had no problems whatsoever. With NT we have numerous problems.
For a similar reason, we use Novell for our primary file servers and print servers, because when compared, NetWare ended up being more stable and reliable than NT on our existing hardware.
What my point is, NT has not, in my opinion been ready for primetime in all areas that it’s touted to be. With what I’ve seen of W2K, I have much more confidence in it than I do NT4
(I know an MP3 is a data file; I meant download and install an MP3 player)
That’t exactly the problem. Unix is fantastic if you’re writing programs, or running networks or processor-intensive calculations – but that’s NOT what most people do. Most people don’t want to be bothered with learning somewhat esoteric commands and parameters; they want to be spoon fed: “click here to download and install. Then click here to see the pretty colors.”
When Linux becomes that simple, then it will become mainstream. There is nothing wrong with this view; the people railing about how much better Linux is that windows need to realize this and simplify the UI. The average person is at least apathetic to technology, and when it comes to cutting edge, complex stuff like Linux, they’re downright technophobic (trust me, I see it every day in my job).
Most people, when referring to theft of the MacOS GUI, are implicating Windows. You don’t so often hear people (even Mac users ) complaining that the AmigaOS is/was a ripoff of the Mac interface, or that X-windows was lifted from the Mac, etc etc. (Occasionally you’ll hear it said of BeOS, though).
With that in mind –
I’ve seen a few screen shots of the Xerox Alto interface that was the inspiration for the MacOS. It resembes the MacOS in look (and, based on description of how it behaved, in feel) less than the AmigaOS resembles the MacOS. There are some broad general similarities, and it was definitely intentional copying of the concept, but it was based on something that was briefly seen and studied, after the fact.
Windows, on the other hand, has always lifted significantly more from the Mac. The white Windows arrow points to the upper left at exactly the same angle and is exactly the same size and shape; double-clicking an icon does exactly the same thing in either OS; click and drag behaves the same way. Icon size is either identical or comes very close. And that is all before Windows95, which introduced the Desktop (as a place files could be located + a folder that actually contains them on the hard drive), the recycle bin (trash can), the Start Menu (Apple menu), and which abandoned its own (Windows 3.x) original look and feel for a design that was both more Mac-like and also more X-Windows-like. (the X to close the windows, for example).
None of which is horrible except when we had to hear PC users ooh and aah over the wonders that Microsoft had wrought in creating all this splendor, after years during which they disparaged the MacOS look and feel for being unlike DOS! (The other day a Windows techie saw me running dual monitors and had the nerve to say, ‘Oh, cool, you have dual monitors, just like Windows 98’. We hate that kind of stuff!).
