Bill Joy on Linux and Mac OS X

(rfm)2 writes "In a Wired interview, Bill Joy mentions he just got a new dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac with 8 GB RAM and half a terabyte of internal disk. He is clearly underwhelmed by Linux: 'Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.'"

Re:8Gb RAM?

[lylonius]

and sometimes even 5 orders of magnitude:
ram access time is ~100ns
disk access time is ~10ms (10,000,000 ns)

Re:In a sense, he's right

[lullabud]

i have to say i feel the same way. i like the way KDE is coming along, but it really isn't as responsive, consistent, and clean looking (ie: tearing) as OS X. i still have a few linux boxes around, but only one of them still runs x. i think the alt-right-click and shift-right-click, and other tricks like that definitely give KDE some advantages over other UI's, but OS X is my fav, and it has only broken on me once, during a system update i might add... another thing i'd like to say about the user experience on the mac is that launchbar is INCREDIBLE, and is by far the best navigation tool i've ever used, hands down, no questions asked, period. if the old OSS guys made something like launchbar for KDE they'd be doing everybody a big favor, and getting innumerable brownie points.

Re:8Gb RAM?

[Graff]

Oh, just try running OS X on 8gig box vs. 256mb or so one ... The difference in responsivness is tremendous.

After about 512 megs of RAM you don't see much speedup for normal tasks. Large databases and such will improve with gigs of memory but for normal home and office use 256 is absolute minimum, 384 is the minimum preferred and 512 is plenty.

I currently have 1.5 gigs of RAM just because it was cheap and I occasionally do some larger tasks, but I almost never use it all. I've had this machine up for days and running all sorts of programs and compiling projects and right now I have 600 megs of RAM inactive and 560 megs free. Basically I'm only using 340 megs of RAM or so at this moment (4 or 5 user processes running)

Re:Yeah, but...

[Graff]

MacOSX is fundamentally minor tweaks on proven technology and proven interface design, using a proven operating system that's older than the Mac itself. I don't see why anybody thinks MacOSX is cutting edge.

Mac OS X is cutting edge for the simple fact that it is the first OS to combine all of these proven technologies (and many more) into a package that just works and is slick to boot. Individually these technologies are nothing new but combined they represent the cutting edge of OS design.

One nitpick: the kernel is Mach (well, Mach-based), the BSD tools are layered on top of that (along with GNU, NextStep, and much more)

Re:sure -- I'd do the same

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ridiculous to say that Macs are out of the spending range for mere mortals. You can get a dual 1.8 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive, Radeon 9600 Mac for under $3000. Anyone with an average salary can afford that. You can buy iMacs (with the screen) for $1300. You can get an eMac for $800.

Sure, you can blow $10,000 on a Mac; but have you priced dual Xeon workstations lately? A Dell equivalent (dual 3.06 Xeon) to Bill Joy's Mac, but with 4 GB (since 8 GB isn't even an option) was about $7700. Subtract $2600 to reduce Bill Joy's Mac to 4GB, and it comes down to about $5900. It doesn't look all that expensive any more, does it? And it still includes the digital audio, Firewire 800, and Airport Extreme over the Dell box.

Re:Slightly Egotistical

[C_nemo]

Im not the grandparent poster, as the nick so clearly states, but i think i can ansver alot of your questions.

As a linux and mac user i know drag'n'drop the proper way. The mac way, that is. It's amazing, you can drag'n'drop everything everywhere, drag a url to the desktop -> web link, drag marked text to the desktop -> textClipping which you can read later, drag a folder icon from the titlebar to the Terminal.app -> path on the command line. Linux is nowhere near the userfiendlyness of OSX in any way.

As for the Linux install he described, it sounds just like an average install of Gnome 2.4, which you can get onto a fully working system (Fedora Core 1) with just pointing and clicking in the installer. I would say it takes next to no brains to get Fedora onto my system, it auto detected my GeforceFX, TV-tuner card, LCD monitor, USB mouse, CD-Burner... you get the general idea.

The features he described are there as deafult, in the preferences menu there is a button for "screen resolution", i think that one is fairly obvious. The "font" button is also pretty self explainatory, click "details" and you get an option to open your font folder, just drag'n'drop fonts there.

I just tested drag'n'drop between Nautilus (filemanger for gnome) and konqueror (file manager for KDE) picked up a file and dragged it from my home dir in konqueror and to the Desktop folder in nautilus, and it actually worked (I was pretty amazed, actually). Then i tried darag''n'drop from Nautilus to K3B (a cd burning application for KDE), lo behold! it also worked (I'm was even more amazed).

If you dont stray from the Gnome/KDE path i would say you where in for a pretty smooth ride. And i dont think novice user would have the brains to end up in enlightenment or fluxbox by mistake.

Fedora Core 1 also comes with RHN notification in the "system-tray" by default so clicking this will easily set you up for system update the friendly way. yum (apt like tool for RPM from yellowdog linux) also comes preinstalled and preconfigured so keeping the sytem updated can also be done by doing "yum update" as root.

The only issue I have with fedora is the lack of Mp3 support and video player. This lead me to the only separate install apart from the main distribution, i installed apt-get for Fedora Core from freshrpm.net and installed Mp3 supprt for xmms and mplayer with two commands.

I cannot comment on printing at the moment (I dont have one) but i've had a obscure Canon printer/fax machine/copy machine thing up and running on another box with Suse 8.2 and Ximina desktop2, it took me about 10 minutes (5 minutes to determine ip adress and queue name on the damn thing)

Re:8Gb RAM?

[andrewleung]

i guess not all of us have read the 256MB to 8GB RAM G5 test results... [xlr8yourmac.com]

some interesting results. diminishing returns after 1.5GB of RAM. (which is a good choice now)

i wish they had more video coding tests... especially for higher res....

Re:In a sense, he's right

[larry bagina]

MAC hasn't done any worthwhile innovation on the desktop since they ripped of Unix's X, (Which MS quickly ripped off for Win95).

Hint: The first Mac was released in 1984, which means the Mac OS GUI was in development before then. The Lisa (1983) had a mac-like GUI as well, and it's well established that they were based off the Xerox/PARC work. MIT athena wasn't started until 1984, and wasn't publicly available until 1986. X Windows itself didn't even feature a GUI - toolkits like Athena, Motif, GTK, QT, etc are needed if you want UI features like buttons, menus, etc.