Mac OS X 10.3 vs. Linux 659
M.Broil writes "This is a nice and fairly complete 'first look' at Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), but author Chris Gulker, who I happen to know was an Apple PR guy years ago, spends a lot of time comparing the Mac 'Panther' release to Linux, which he seems to use most of the time these days. He obviously likes a lot about Panther, but he doesn't think many Linux users will switch to it, and that a lot of 'Classic' Mac OS users may not want to move to it, either."
what about all 3 major OS's (Score:4, Informative)
its not up to date but its a pretty good comparison
MacOS X 10.3 vs. Linux? Or MacOS X data sheet? (Score:1, Informative)
The article is interesting for me: I don't know almost anything about the panther thing...
But it isn't a real comparison between Linux and MacOs X.
The author only says there isn't any compelling reason for switching fron linux to panther.
Even at this hour... (the Article) (Score:2, Informative)
An early eval of Apple's Mac OS X 10.3
By: Chris Gulker
Apple's BSD-based Mac OS X 10.3 Panther offers 64-bit processor support and new features wrapped in the latest version of a GUI that has its roots in the NeXT desktop. While Panther sets a new standard for ease of use and interface look and feel, it still lacks features that Linux users have long enjoyed.
Panther, billed as "the evolution of the species" and built on the open source Darwin project's version of BSD 5, really is an evolutionary step -- not a revolutionary new operating system. Panther does offer admirable user-interface consistency and ease-of-use, but its new Finder is bound to draw complaints from died-in-the-wool Mac users,
particularly the large base of users who still cling to Mac OS 9 "Classic."
*NIX users will find this one of the most polished GUIs ever bolted onto a UNIX-like OS and probably won't have issues with the file browser. Mac developers groaned audibly when Steve Jobs presented an OS X Finder based on the NeXT columnar file browser at the ADC conference in 1998, and Mac OS Classic users continue to resist it in favor of traditional Mac windows, icons, and folders. In Panther, columnar view is the default window behavior.
Apple has taken the sleek, brushed chrome interface featured on apps like iTunes and Safari and applied it to the new version of Finder, the always-on application that provides the Mac desktop and handles chores like connecting to servers and other shared resources. Gone are many of the shiny, translucent Aqua interface widgets and light gray pin stripes that debuted barely three years ago.
Finder windows offer a new pane, called a Sidebar, that weds the NeXT-like columnar file hierarchy view with a Windows XP-like list of storage devices and common sub-directories in the user's home folder. Buttons on the customizable window allow users to select iconic, list or column views and turn the Sidebar on and off.
While this will be handy for people who are at home with hierarchical file systems, it has potential to confuse others because it can mask parts of the hierarchy, particularly when the list or icon views are selected. At first glance, files appear to live at the top of whatever directory is selected in the Sidebar -- intervening folders and subfolders are not shown. Sidebar does not have an option for the tree view common to Linux and Windows desktop windows.
ExposZ allows for one-click tiling of all open windows.
A new feature called ExposZ allows one-button (or one-click) tiling of all the open windows as thumbnails, and is a very handy way to find a specific window on a crowded desktop with many apps running.
Panther continues Apple's commitment to making it easy to use Macs in heterogenous network environments. Mac OS X 10.3 offers easy one-click access to network servers in the underlying BSD 5 subsystem. A click-to-start list in the Systems Preferences Sharing panel turns on ASIP (AppleShare over IP), SMB, Apache, FTP, and printer sharing via LPD/LPR and CUPS. NFS, surprisingly can only be turned on using the command line or a GUI config app like Marcel Bresink's NFS Manager.
Panther also discovers and connects to virtually any Windows or *NIX server, although, in practice, the process didn't always work smoothly, and occasionally not at all. Panther generated username/password errors and refused to connect to a Red Hat Linux 9 box running NFS on a local subnet. For its part, the Red Hat box could see the Mac in its UNIX network browser, but returned an error when attempting to open a directory. For some reason, SuSE 8.2 worked fine, in both directions, and the Mac happily connected via ASIP to the netatalk server on the RH 9 box.
Panther also features Rendezvous, Apple's version of zeroconf, that does a good job of discovering
Mac User since 9 (Score:3, Informative)
I love 10.1 (and hopefully 10.3 once I can find 70 to drop for the students edition) - I can do 'boring' stuff on it, like run Word or Powerpoint. I can do arty / photographic things on there (Photoshop), and also run Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl to develop websites.
In addition thanks to Fink I can use debian style package management tools with ease. Damn good OS.
Re:One line that sums it up IMO (Score:2, Informative)
Amazing Apple XCode was not highlighted !?!?! (Score:1, Informative)
Apple includes a full cd of developer goodies and timing analysis tools (CHUD) on the fourth cd in every box of the faster better Panther 10.3 OSX.
This Xcode compiler-IDE environment allows distributed CPU distributed Mac compiles. It also has lots of modern high tech link and compiler techniques and the cool stuff pioneered on NeXT Step in late 1990 that was partly implemented as proof of concept a few years later at Apple (DINKER - dynamic linker).
But the dynamic linker technologies in XCode allow changing and radically altering single routines while an ap is still running, without having to compile without most popular optimizations.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/jun/23xcod
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/xcode/
Linux installs rarely have GUI based debuggers and GDB has some really ugly hacks to make it work with mice, but rarely are there any great low level (driver debugging) gui based debuggers on Linux.
xcode makes programmers much more productive and this artcle refused to compare compiler tools.
Naturally, mac users can also use FINK if they want to and install most all other popular open source apps without RPM hell.
Also Mac now includes full "The X Windows System" x11 on the thhird installer cd and includes "The X Windows System" sdk on the developer cd now, to aid in porting high end scientific apps momentarily before being redressed as pleasing cocoa interfaced apps.
The main reason to use Macs is that they are cheaper than intel for cpu power, that is why the number 3 spot on www.top500.org list will be the VT University 1100 node mac cluster in november when the list is publicly posted.
intel, itanium, AMD cannot compete against the dual g5 in performance and price. Especially if you need 8 gigabyte of physical RAM (Mac) and PCI-X 133Mhz 64bit slots (Mac) and 64 bit integers (mac) etc etc etc.
record breaking 16 Gflop/s per mac (with FMADD) !!!:
A fused multiply-add (FMADD) is f0 = f1 * f2 + f3, which is two floating point operations in a single opcode. Each FPU on a G5 can execute an FMADD each cycle. So:
1 FMADD per cycle = 2 flop/cycle * 2 FPUs = 4 flop/cycle * 2 CPUs = 8 flop/cycle * 2 GHz = 16 Gflop/s per 2999 dollar list price mac with the fast DVD burner and pci-x slots and 8 gig ram limit and 4 S-ATA drive connectors, OPTICAL SPDIF in-out, usb 2, firewire 800, etc etc etc
Do not get me wrong.... LINUX is interesting, and almsot became popular, but most the people I know that supported linux that have jobs adn incomes all switched over to macs even before the dual g5 shipped and many more have switched to mac since. They run linux servers but use macs for enjoyment, and personal productivity.
Some also run macs as servers but not the ones taht have no need for science or no need of apples dirt cheap cheap Fibre channel 14 drive raid array. (xRAID).
Ah well... i wish this article was written from a DEVELOPERS point of view.
people fought the mouse from apple for years and fought icons and scrollable resizable windows.. the Mac won that war and now even pc users use MS Windows (a copy descended from the Mac GUI pioneered on apples September 1983 Lisa computer)
people fought mice and people fight osx but the osx will prevail
But freebsd, openbsd, netbsd all keep apple honest and on their toes.
Linux people never remember linux was a ripoff of MINUX source code originally, and a rippoff of GNU tools), True its come a long way in recent years, but a lot of those types of hobbyists ARE buying macs.
Xcode is one of the reasons.
I formally request that no one bother commenting on this post. Without comments, and without seeking comments on these informative facts i am BY DEFINITION not being a troll because a troll implies trolling for responses and i formally request NO RESPONSES to these facts.
thanks.
Re:MacOS (Score:3, Informative)
Scaling down is easy. You can disable the GUI and the extraneous services, though if you are going to do that for all of your systems its probably best just to install Darwin by itself.
As to supercomputers, the Terrascale Computing Facility would certainly seem to qualify. If you are talking things like crays, I'd call that a limitation of the hardware support and not a limitation of the OS.
>Sourcecode modification of your gui?
Well, you can run X11 with GNome if you prefer.
Re:My opinion (Score:5, Informative)
It is usually possible to tell there's something wrong with a post when someone starts ranting and raving about GIMP. Yep, it's free, and no, it's no patch on Photoshop. In fact, GraphicConverter is in many ways better than GIMP.
Great, you've got 13 000 packages (and I hope you've tried them all, too!) - but no Photoshop? How about, say, Final Cut Pro? Hmm, I feel like a game of Diablo. Oh, what's that? You can only run it in emulation?
The point is, it comes down to quality, not quantity. Professionals use professional tools, not some I'm-a-CS-graduate-and-know-how-to-program-stuff. I'm willing to assert that a majority of the 13000 pkgs are under 500k. They're probably really neat, you'd probably download them and stick them in your utilities folder and they'd never get seen again.
1. It has the honour of being the first OS to do this, I suppose?
2. Can't make omelette without cracking a few eggs etc. GCC 3.3 broke shit. Get over it.
well, it'd also be the first OS to have hardware incompatibilities with one single type of chip. FFS buddy, nobody has not killed something somewhere along the way.
Yeah, and with every point release adds more features than Linux gets in a full digit release.
that, my dear friend, is a complete contradiction in terms. Apple's hardware is shiny, but their OS utterly dominates everything else out there in the desktop stakes. that's what makes apple zealots. It's also the reason so many people continually pine for OS X on Intel. The hardware's kinda cool, but the software kicks hind tit.
"Down hill". Hmm, I can think of all the
Linux certainly has it's place in areas where organisations can develop a full system, but where you want to go out and buy something and have it all work, intuitively, and stable-y, and without spyware, and without MS groping your HD, you go buy a mac. Simple.
-- james
Re:One line that sums it up IMO (Score:1, Informative)
i found that while in WinXP i could always bring up the windows security dialog, often if a program hangs it would take control of the mouse and keyboard, so while i could bring up the task manager, i couldn't actually use it
OS X apps (Score:1, Informative)
Re:MacOS (Score:1, Informative)
Here are the applications... (Score:2, Informative)
Recommend Mac's to novices? (Score:4, Informative)
Personally I will stick to Linux because I like it but I think for a lot of novice computer uses currently using Windows because 'theres no other choice', I think should consider switching to Mac OS X.
I had always sort of them as being extremely expensive but the ones in the shop (which sells both Windows and Mac computers) were about the same price as the Windows ones.
The major problem is that as the sales guy explained to me, people don't realise a 800mhz G4 is far better than say a 1.5Ghz Pentium however when people see the 800mhz mac costing more than the 1.4 ghz PC they obviously go for the PC.
Kind of reminds me of the old saying that if it wasn't for Apple's pathetic marketing practises they would be the dominant software company of today (whether that is good or bad I don't know).
However, I think that for novice users who arn't quite ready to use Linux as a desktop (in its current form), then they should be recommended a Mac as they are atleast half way there and all competition is good for the computer industry, better than everyone dominated by one large monopoly anyway.
Re:DAV over https? (Score:3, Informative)
Or at the very least, when I try connecting to my svn server over https it still says "The Finder cannot complete the operation some data in "url" could not be read or written (Error code -36)"
Re:Switching... (Score:5, Informative)
Given, OSX's Aqua has cleaner better solutions than that, IE, GIMP runs fine under the X11, or you can pay $$25 and get an Aqua'd version from Open OS X [openosx.com]. As for virtual vesktops, there's a host of 3rd party apps for it, but make sure you give Expose a try first. Greatest thing since slice bread.
Maintenance (Score:2, Informative)
Only if you screw with it a lot.
The extent of my regular maintenance for the last few years is running apt-get to get security fixes.
Only occasionally a kernel upgrade.
I've found my linux machine needs much less work to keep it running smoothly then my windows machine, which starts acting weird every few months.
killing loginwindow usually resolves GUI problems (Score:5, Informative)
Re:what about all 3 major OS's (Score:5, Informative)
Just thought I would point it out.
Re:A dumb question but... (Score:2, Informative)
All from memory mind you, so hit the salt lick.
Bemopolis
Re:MacOS (Score:4, Informative)