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Jamie Zawinski Switches to Mac OS X
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Jun 12, 2005 09:00 AM
from the don't-worry-jamie-we-won't-post-it dept.
from the don't-worry-jamie-we-won't-post-it dept.
iskander writes "After a disappointing experience with sound, Jamie Zawinski has finally given up on desktop Linux and switched to Mac OS X. The future of apps like xscreensaver and Gronk is now ``highly ambiguous''. He has already ditched a free/open platform before, but he seems a lot angrier this time. Indeed, twisted by the Dark Side of the Source, young Zawinski has become."
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Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Funny)
maybe i should submit a story about what OS my neighbour runs, or perhaps his brother and wife
Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:4, Funny)
An XEmacs contributor switches to a more useful system. I love the irony.
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Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Informative)
jwz [jwz.org] wrote xscreensaver, Lucid Emacs, Netscape Mail and News 2.0 to 3.0 and the original UNIX versions of Netscape Navigator.
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Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there's still issues with Linux audio. But whining and running off to another OS isn't going to fix them.
He complained endlessly about Mozilla too. It seems he does nothing but whine.
-Z
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Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Insightful)
Well the problem is fixed for him isn't?
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He's a Prima Donna (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess what all you Prima Donnas, (and yes there are a *lot* of Prima Donnas out there). You will never ever get everything you want, something will always be wrong because the problem is not with the world at large, it's with your personality.
HTH
Parent
Re:He's a Prima Donna (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree; IMO he's got a legitimate point. From the JWZ blog regarding problems with XMMS hogging all audio output such that no other apps can play audio:
This frustration highlights a failing of the Linux-based desktop platform. Put generally, Linux systems often require the user fuss with (and be aware of!) highly technical system tweaks to satisfy some really basic end-user scenarios. The blog's thread has lots of people going on about ways to fix this particular problem, but frankly I'm on JWZ's side: it's a damn waste of time! At least it is for those whom, the computer is a tool for getting work done, instead of an end in and of itself.
Put another way, I'm all for some degree of tweaking in my day-to-day usage. I find and install new tools, write helpful scripts/plugins/etc., and do other "meta-work" to make myself more productive. This process is kinda fun, too. But having to screw around for hours figuring out what to do just to get more than one app to play audio is insane.
And the real killer is that the solution is probably not to just roll up the ol' sleeves and write some software to "scratch the itch". This isn't a software problem, it's a real world problem of fragmented design and developer effort and a lack of a seamless out-of-box experience for Linux-based systems.
Getting fed up with that is hardly "throwing [your] toys out of the pram" -- it's called cutting your losses.
Parent
Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Informative)
"Back before you had heard of Netscape, I was responsible for the Unix versions of Netscape Navigator through release 1.1."
"Before Netscape, I was primarily to blame for Lucid Emacs"
"...I was one of the folks who created and ran the Mozilla Organization during the first year of its life"
"But now I've taken my leave of that whole sick, navel-gazing mess we called the software industry. Now I'm in a more honest line of work: now I sell beer."
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Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Who the hell is Jamie Zawinski (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you the core (sole?) developer of a base app included in every desktop distro?
Parent
From TFA (Score:5, Funny)
D'oh!
Re:From TFA (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:From TFA (Score:4, Funny)
And people wonder why there are so many reposts....
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Re:From TFA (Score:5, Informative)
from the don't-worry-jamie-we-won't-post-it dept.
Parent
Re:From TFA (Score:4, Funny)
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new flash... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to be a jerk, I loved all his negitive comments about Netscape/ Mozilla, and whatever else he works on, but it got old like 6 years ago.
Re:new flash... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Congratulations, Jamie. (Score:4, Funny)
The reason he switched.. (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
I also gave up and went for a Mac for exactly the same reason. It's unacceptable that in 2005 a Linux distribution (FC3, in my case) doesn't recognize a three-button+wheel USB mouse out-of-box or that setting up a TV card requires you to edit some config-files by hand.
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't quite understand why you're using Windows as a reference, when I was clearly talking about Mac. I plugged the mouse in and it just worked.
Oh, I know, it needs you to know what you're doing, and that usually needs some brainwork.
Ah yes, the tired old "If Linux is not good enough for you, it's because you're not good enough for Linux" argument. Ten years ago I used to spout that elitist bullshit, too.
I've lost the count of how many Linux computers I've built. I've set up and maintained Sun and DEC Alpha boxes (running both DEC Unix and Linux) and, quite frankly, I feel like I've done my share of tweaking. Now, all I want is a desktop computer that works for me -- not vice versa -- and Linux just doesn't cut it.
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Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Can a driver determine the tuner type by querying the card?
If so, then requiring the user to select the tuner type in a config file is completely stupid; the user shouldn't have to tell the computer something about a peripheral if the computer can determine that information itself without the user having to get involved.
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Re:Sounds familiar (Score:5, Interesting)
Unforutnately, for the rest of us, I have better things to do with my time that mess around with asoundrc files. All I want is for every freakin program to properly output over my SPDIF channel. Is that really too much to ask for? Apparently it is, and I've almost switched back to windows on numerous occasions because of this.
In fact, the ONLY thing keeping me on Linux right now is MythTV. If it wasn't for MythTV, all my servers would probably be OSX by now and my Media box would be Windows.
Bryan
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telling (Score:5, Insightful)
If Linux on the desktop is to survive, I really think there needs to be a major coordinated effort to get lots of things in line. Maybe some type of consortium that would facilitate dialog between different groups and/or state a common direction. It is really hard to build a solid desktop OS when you've got thousands of developers operating independently or in small groups. You might get a few good solid apps, but the OS itself is going to be a patchworked hodge-podge.
Re:telling (Score:4, Insightful)
This is my favorite thing to hear about Linux. Linux will survive on the desktop, on servers, on refrigerators for as long as one person wants to run it there. I have a Linux machine that I use for most things, Windows on my laptop, and an iMac in the bedroom for playing music, movies, and using the web. Everyone wants to get worked up about Linux's survival. It's not survival that matters, it will survive a good long time, it's the advancement of it.
Sheesh.
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Obnoxious screensaver (Score:5, Funny)
1. Short timeout for writing passwords, what may make it difficult for some people to unlock the screen at all.
2. Stupid, delaying messages after entering the wrong password, as if the security delay by the authorization system was not enough.
3. Ugly, ugly, *ugly* logo.
4. Small, non-antialiased fonts in the password dialog, as if the screen space was so scarce when all other windows are hidden anyway.
Dark Side (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a printer system that was developed for line printers and never matured.
We have a sound system that works most (but not all) of the time if you are lucky.
We have power management issues on laptops which Microsoft fixed in 1995.
And finally
I have a laptop running Red Hat 9 because Fedora 1, Fedora 2, Fedora 3 and SuSE 9.x all have so many major problems with their basic installation that the machine is unusable. My next laptop will be an Apple machine.
Instead of adding more features I for one would be grateful if the Linux software developers fixed existing software. Bug hunting is not sexy but it might avoid more incidents like this.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
Funny thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sound (Score:5, Insightful)
- arts must die, and it will w/ KDE4
- esd must die
- every program should start using gstreamer
- ALSA must learn to do proper software mixing out of the box.
Imagine my "pleasure" when I inadvertly caused a "beep" to emerge from my terminal window, and as a result had to wait a while (20 seconds? can't remember) before I could start playing a video with sound. Or how I had to do "killall -9 artsd" to start playing video in totem after listening to music on Amarok (which is superior to rhythmbox in most ways).
The Solution -- just mix on multiple opens (Score:5, Interesting)
All sound drivers without exception should work like they do currently on FIRST OPEN, but on second and subsequent opens they should automatically hook in a mixer and mix all inputs together.
The code to do it already exists, but it's just not being structured sensibly as above. It's no surprise that newbies find the one-at-a-time behaviour unhelpful, because it is. This is a multi-user O/S fer crissakes, single-open in sound drivers is just dumb!
Parent
That's it, I'm switching too! (Score:5, Funny)
The hell with all of you. I just installed DOS on my box and all is well.
Slashdot, please don't post this. You guys are jerks and I'm going to tell my mommy about you.
Time for linux to change its focus. (Score:5, Insightful)
Howto: Make linux work properly on the Desktop (Score:5, Informative)
Get an SB Live! Value or an SB Audigy! Value.
Get an Nvidia Geforce(1/2/3/4) MX or not video card.
Use an ACX110/111 802.11g wireless card.
Done.
Hardware audio mixing, all the drivers will auto-install. An almost Mac OS X-like experience, and certainly much easier than Windows.
Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
You bet your sweet bippy that was a troll. Do your worst, I've got karma to spare.
*NOW* is the time for Linux to get its collective head out of the sand and really reach out to the common users. You know how on a weekly basis we laugh at Microsoft for announcing yet another feature that will NOT be in Longhorn? Let me just put this one in bold:
Longhorn is going to suck. It's going to be the worst Windows since ME.
Microsoft has no plan for it. They know they have really taken Windows about as far as it can go, and any real changes are going to require years of work. But because of market pressures, they can't really take the time that would need - and yet, due to mismanagement, they're going to spend years wastefully. This is the PERFECT opportunity for Linux to finally rise to the forefront -- but only if the geeks get off their high horses and admit that a good OS has to be usable by common man. AND, right along side that, if they can come to understand criticism is NOT necessarily an attack. Reading responses on this thread, all I can think of is O'Reilly screaming 'Shup up! SHUT UP!' at anyone speaking facts he doesn't want to face.
I gave up on Linux for the same reasons as Zawinski. I want an OS that *works*. I don't want to tweak my sound drivers. I don't want to have my nVidia drivers FRICKING VANISH after a week of working right (after a week of work to get them running). I don't want to have to remember that completely ridiculous program names like "the GIMP" are actually usuable graphics applications and not, as the name would suggest to a normal human being, porn videos.
(yes, I know what the name stands for. That does not change the fact that Granny Average User would never in a million years click on something called a "gimp" looking for a way to take the redeye out of her pictures.)
The Linux community needs to get out of the 90s. There are modern solutions to every major problem with the OS, and within a year, two at max, they could make it REALLY user-friendly. The problem is that user-friendliness isn't sexy to Linux geeks. No one wants to spend time writing a new sound library that actually works when they can just look down their noses at anyone who doesn't know how to properly configure ALSA. And the only thing less sexy than THAT is not writing any actual code at all, but just going through the OS and making sure the user dialogues make some sort of sense to those who don't have PhDs and, as someone else mentioned, will actually fit on a screen resolution of less than 1024x768.
But you know what? Someone has to do it. Because if no one does, Linux will NEVER get past being a hobbyist OS, and whatever horrible things the next Windows introduces to the computing world, we'll be stuck with dealing with them. ('Cause god knows, I just *love* having mailboxes on Linux and Mac machines shut down because Windows-borne virii have filled them with spam. That helps my sense of superiority to no end.)
So this is truly put up and shut up time. There has never been a better opportunity for Linux to really make some inroads in the home market - but only if the contributors are willing to make some compromises and give the other 90% of users some reason to switch. So all I ask is, if you contribute to OSS, and you EVER spend any time online complaining about how Linux could be great if only it could get into the mainstream - use that time to tweak Linux's usability instead. Fixing bad error messages doesn't even require much programming skill at all. Make Linux usable for common people, and it can succeed. Period.
Tired of Futzing (Score:5, Insightful)
When one first acquires a new tool, whether it is hardware, software or a woodworking plane, the very act of learning how use the tool itself works is highly engaging. Just futzing about figuring out how the new tool works is an end in itself.
However, after one has spent 20+ years learning the ends and out of each season's new tools the joy fades. One becomes progressively less interested in the tools itself and more interested in product you want to use the tool to make. The time spent futzing with the tool is not engaging but frustrating and wasteful. You want to get the primary work done not spend all your time adjusting your tools.
How many times over the years has Zawinski wrestled with a problem similar to his Linux sound issue? The thrill of solving such a problem is long gone, baby.
The Linux community is dominated by people who enjoy the process of learning and using the tool itself. They are the kind of people who take the toaster apart to see how it works. The vast majority of desktop users, however, just want to make toast.
People like Zawinski, who have taken apart their fair share of toasters, also now just want to make toast. At present, Linux doesn't let him do that.
From the blog of George W Bush (Score:5, Funny)
Dear CNN: please don't report this. Screw you guys.
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Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Also, he doesn't really care what the Linux crowd thinks, which is why he posted the remark about Slashdot.
Parent
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Both of us have a significant amount of experience with SGI workstations. SGI, like Apple today, was a Unix that "just works". It had pretty fonts and a very nice designer look and feel. It was also elegant and a snap to administrate.
I, like JWZ, also used Linux workstations. But they were clunky compared to SGI and I always came back to the better design and more attractive display SGI had.
I also had a MacOS computer, which I used for video editing and running commercial software such as Photoshop. I liked it a lot, but was wedded to emacs for text editing and SGI or Linux for web serving. So as a result I needed to have two computers on my desk, a Mac for graphics and a SGI for Unix stuff.
Then MacOS X came out. It was a lot like SGI - it was like a designer Unix, with even more slickness. As a result, I gradually switched away from SGI, especially when it became clear that SGI was not updating their GUI to be competitive with what Apple has. I shed a tear for SGI, because their stuff was the best at the time. I wish they'd been able to make a more elegant transition to the world of cheaper computers.
For me, MacOS X truly combines the best of the open source and proprietary worlds. I can use a slick and stable GUI, running all the slickest proprietary applications such as Final Cut Pro and Photoshop. On the same machine I can also run all the open source web software I could ever want. And I can even copy that software and have it run fine on a Linux server without missing a beat.
So I know exactly where JWZ's coming from, and it's interesting that we followed such a similar path. I joined Apple before he did probably mainly due to my need for proprietary software like Final Cut and Photoshop.
I can say from my own experience that I've never been happier with my computing environment than I am now. We'll see how the more cynical JWZ does. No doubt he'll find much to hate and much to love.
D
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Re:Motivation? (Score:4, Interesting)
jwz is responsible for many significant *NIX applications [jwz.org].
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Re:Sounds like a hardware problem to me... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know where you got that notion, but it is wrong. Right now, for example, my OS X system is playing music in iTunes, environmental sounds from World of Warcraft, and my terminal can beep, as can my email program when I receive a mail.
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Re:Sounds like a hardware problem to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
You couldn't be more wrong about OS X.
As a Mac user, the idea of a computer being unable to play an essentially unlimited number of simultaneous sounds is just foreign to me. I don't even think about it. I expect that I can leave iTunes playing music while playing a game that makes all sorts of noises and still hear alerts from iChat when I get an IM. There's nothing to configure, it just plain works.
The only time I've been amazed by sound on OS X was when I first played with Soundtrack. This program lets you create professional-quality music by mixing up to 99 tracks of layered audio. Not only does it mix them in realtime, but it can apply advanced audio effects in realtime as well.
Not once in the process do you have to care about audio hardware setup. Whatever you have plugged in -- analog speakers, USB speakers, S/PDIF -- the appropriate audio comes out of it.
Meanwhile, you need to spend an afternoon to get open-source UNIX to reliably make a sine-wave beep.
Perhaps you might want to review Apple's overview of OS X 10.4's Core Audio functionality [apple.com]?
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Re:Fix Setup! (Score:4, Insightful)
These things are very obvious problems, at least to the users. But the developers have convinced themselves that these aren't problems so they just move on to adding new features and forget about these small issues. But its the details that are important to the users. I don't care if gnome supports SVG graphics or whatever, but I do want to be able to get my photos off my digital camera easily. I want to scan in something and print a copy. Why is that so hard?
This is the major flaw with open source software. Most of the developers are volunteering their time so they care about what interests them. Thats fine, no one should tell them what they should be spending their own time doing. But until Open Source "grows up" and starts listening to its users it will never be popular and shouldn't expect to be.
Parent
Multiple issues with that ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hunting down articles doesn't require to you learn any programming language. Anyone can hunt down articles, very few people can program. So the two groups aren't coincident.
What "worry"? Linux is very easy to install and run
Now, if your "average user" does not use those features, then Linux is easier than Windows and on par with a Mac.
The "problem" is that most of the HOME user market DOES want those features. But the CORPORATE/GOVERNMENT desktop will NOT focus on those features.
So it all depends upon how you segment the market on whether this is an "issue" or a "critical problem".
Eh, whatever. It's a tool. You use whatever works best in each situation. The key point with Linux is that it CAN be modified to suit your requirements.
The home desktop market will be the LAST market segment that will fall to Linux.
First will be the servers - we're already seeing this happen.
Second will be the corporate/government desktops - this is just beginning.
Last will be the home market - there are just too many limited-run, proprietary hardware pieces out there that work "good enough" right now. In time I believe they will migrate to Linux. But focusing on the LAST segment and claiming that there's a problem when the OTHER segments are starting to migrate is just silly.
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Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux is going to have to get better if it's going to compete with OS X. Competing against Windows isn't that hard. Linux is basically at par with it in most areas. The real problem for Linux is that it has to be not just as good as Windows, but better than Windows and its other competitors. And right now, other competitor #1 is OS X, and OS X just 'stole' a Linux developer by being easier to set up sound cards.
Is it a little thing? Yes, and that's exactly the problem: In OS X, the little things, just work!
Parent
Re:Torvalds next OS X user? (Score:5, Funny)
maybe i should submit a story about what OS my neighbour runs, or perhaps his brother and wife
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Re:I also don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of the difference in definitions of the word "supported". In MacOS, that word usually means "auto-detected, driver already present or on companion CD-ROM, plug-and-play". In Linux, it can mean exactly the same, or it can mean "look online, read config file comments, experiment, deal with lack of meaningful error messages" and more.
In the end, whether you value time or money more is entirely your own decision, and the people who find the Mac "better" probably value their time more. You don't have to agree, but it probably helps to understand why.
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