Bill Joy on Linux and Mac OS X 223
(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.'"
In a sense, he's right (Score:5, Insightful)
Missing the point ... (Score:5, Insightful)
David.
UI Guidelines for Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Does the Linux community have a set of UI guidelines?
2. Do Linux app developers follow them?
If the answer to either question is "no" then Linux is not likely to take over the desktops of average (= your grandma) users.
Re:UI Guidelines for Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Does the Linux community have a set of UI guidelines?
2. Do Linux app developers follow them?
1) I suspect there are UI guidelines for KDE and Gnome, but not a unifying standard. The KDE/Gnome difference is part of the problem when you're looking for UI consistency.
2) No, but the same can be said of Windows developers. Microsoft has a standard, but people don't seem to follow it with any consistency.
painful to say (Score:5, Insightful)
Slightly Egotistical (Score:5, Insightful)
And if Linux was entirely about re-implementing what Bill Joy designed in 1979, then he might have a point.
But the things Bill Joy designed and partially wrote back in the 1970s are functionally inferior to features found in modern Linux.
Sure, Linux and BSD share similar APIs, but it is more than a little deceptive to claim that BSD and Linux are the same design. Internally they're completely different.
This is like a 100 year old Mr Ford looking at a modern V8 EFI car with independent suspension and AWD and ABS and saying "pfft, it's not very interesting, I designed all this back in the early 1900s". It shows a complete lack of comprehension regarding the modern state-of-the-art.
Re:Missing the point ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
seriously, he's spot on here. there's lots of good things about linux, but few of them are technical. OS X is doing real new stuff.
Re:UI Guidelines for Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize you just make linux that much less appealing to end users on desktop systems every time you and your kin start with this bullshit?
I personally find this very interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
A: Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally.
[...]
Q: All right, you win. What are you doing for fun these days?
A: I'm figuring out a meditation wall for my apartment in New York. Eight feet high by 12 feet wide, with an array of overlapping rear projectors, each with a tiny Linux box and connected by gigabit Ethernet.
Fascinating.
Linux is 1979 technology and yet runs the projectors for his meditation wall -- built by a Walt Disney Imagineer and the inventor of massively parallel supercomputing.
I should like to ask Mr. Joy why these projectors are not running Mac OS X or even Solaris. Perhaps he owes a greater debt to those kids 20 years his junior than he imagines?
Thomas
Re:painful to say (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure it can. You might not ssh in and use Microsoft Office X, but I can't ssh into my linux box and use KOffice from the command-line either. But I do ssh into my G5 for remote sysadmin activities, same as I used to do with my NeXT slab (well, it was telnet back then).
Re:I personally find this very interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
He may be cool on linux, but he didn't trash it per se, he just said it wasn't interesting to him. Not that I feel an overwhelming urge to defend this guy... but if I had been hacking this stuff out at CSRG 20 years ago I'd probably pass on heavy linux involvement too...
Re:UI Guidelines for Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
2 : Yes, Gnome developers and others not core applications are now in a very intensive use of the HIG
all the core gnome applications use it _now_ (gnome 2.2/2.4), all not core applications are in use or in implementation of them (gnumeric is now hig, gimp is in work, abiword is mostly hig, evolution 2 will be, gaim is,and so on )
openoffice 2 will use the gnome HIG
it's not joke. it's very now, in suse 8.x and upper, mandrake 9 and upper, Redhat 8/9 and fedora now. and other recent distribution (end 2002/ begin 2003, mostly)
of course, it has many works to do , many application to "hig", but it"s a really concern of many opensources developpers now. many speak about in their development, many "mature project" think about
in the same time, KDE is striving to inform developpers to follow some official guidelines to do "good" kde applications.
so, is linux is likely to take over the desktop of average (my grandma don't use computer at all and only watch tv for informations) users ? yes, because many developpers and industrial player WANT that , and there are still some Huge Work to do. but it grows well.
I recommand people to read some website like http://www.gnomedesktop.org or http://dot.kde.org to know that two community, and see (sometimes) presentation of new project or improvment of old project.
I also remind that two community can HELP MAC OSX
KDE applications could be use with GPL edition of QT for osx
and fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net) help to install some gtk/gnome applications which can useful and nice to use with osx X11.app.
linux is not about reinventing "unix"
it was done years ago
it's about a FREEDOM and OPEN COMPLETE OPERATING SYSTEM and DESKTOP Environment
linux is the KERNEL
GNU/Linux is the OS
GNOME is the desktop environment (for bsd, irix, aix, solaris and other)
all is VERY much more powerful and re-conceived from technologies of 1979.
to think it's now only re-inventation of the old good unix, is completely nonsense
or maybe, he has only a Vi and some shells on a poor lonely 2.2 linux kernel ?
very strange.
in the same time : OSX is a GOOD os. not so free, but very mature.
and HO, it mostly re-imaginated many unix concept too
the kernel is MACH, not so old good "unix"
the whole os fondation is BSD, so unix, but complete rewrite (and free of at&t copyright ) of the so good old unix
the userland high level API is COCOA, re-implementation of OPENSTEP, completely NOT unix, NOT xlib, NOT xtoolkit
the whole user interface is AQUA : a re-imagination of the nextstep interface.
in plain short : Mac OSX is _NOT_ the plain old unix no more than linux
in some part it's bsd, some mach, some gnu, some next, some new apple additions
to criticize linux to simply reinvent "unix" is also criticize OSX.
thanks to read me. I use daily linux, OSX and freebsd (at work and for my own need) , to chidlishly criticize one or all of them (with some dumb comment about the old unix) is a plain insult to ALL.
and please, I urge you to think about the fact a FREE(freedom) and the need to access sourcecode is also a goal which worth to write an OS. even if already good os are available.
Give the guy a break (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should he be totally into Linux given his background. And why shouldn't he enjoy OS X on this droolproof hardware?
Give the man a good gui or go whine about something else.
I think Linux *could* one day make a comprehensive home user system - if that were a goal in itself - but I'm pretty sure most linux contributors are not the ones you should ask about the hi/gui guidelines. They don't care.
And as long as that's the situation, it's totally understandable someone prefers OS X for the everyday stuff and Linux for doing rocksolid stupid stuff like meditation walls - as long as he doesn't have to set it up himself.
I can dig linux for servers, since you expect the thing to not give you a head-ache *once you set it up*, but to do this constant maintenance on your main machine without the benefits a windows or os x machine gives you, ffff that takes guts and balls, not for me...
Joy doesn't seem to work the Unix way any more... (Score:0, Insightful)
- The Mach+BSD server design is a kludge creating unneccessary bloat,
complexity and performance overhead without exploiting any of the
potential advantages of a microkernel design like better portability or
Hurd-style hack value like filesystems running as daemons in userspace
etc.
- In any case, Linux 2.4 and all the more 2.6 should beat, in terms of
performance and scalability, the crap out
of MacOS X' combination of vintage Mach with vintage BSD and a bloated
GUI on top
- Debian and NetBSD don't have compatibility bloat like the "Classic"
virtual machine, m68k-CPU-Emulation and "Carbon"-API in MacOS X
- They have much cleaner filesystem layouts
than OS X with its inconsistency of Unix directories (/bin,
/etc) which
are hidden on the GUI level and application folders inherited from
NextStep
- They have a more consistent and robust configuration system than
MacOS X with its horrible Registry-like "Netinfo" database that
replaces some, but not all configuration files in
/etc
- They come with a more complete (and especially in Debian's case
thanks to GNU) powerful set of classical Unix commandline applications
- For the software which is not installed by default, they have consistent package management while MacOS X has a
number of simultaneous/incompatible package managers and databases which
don't know each other's dependencies: MacOS X install images, fink,
GNU/Darwin, BSD-style pkgs/ports...
- They install programs like vim, mutt, shells etc. with sensible default
configurations while I find the commandline userland and MacOS X almost
unusable they way it is configured out of the box
For someone who primarily works on the commandline and needs graphical programs only for the occasional web browsing, graphics/pdf and video viewing (for all of which excellent free, X11-based solutions like mozilla-firebird and mplayer do exist), MacOS X offers no advantages over a GNU/Linux or NetBSD system in which all the system- and commandline-level things are done cleaner and better. So it seems Bill Joy doesn't write in vi and work the Unix way anymore, otherwise he would have better things to say about Linux.Re:UI Guidelines for Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Overall I'd judge both Gnome and KDE as about as good as Apple in this regard, although I prefer the Apple way of doing things. I also think Apple clearly hides the guts of Unix better than either Gnome or KDE do. (Try setting up internet sharing for instance)
The problem is 3rd parties. We have the big apps like OpenOffice which in effect have their own windowing model and standards. There are a few other big apps like this. Then there are all the smaller applications. Few, in my opinion, pay much attention to UI. Part of this is the basic utilitarian and pragmatic view that Linux users have.
Compare this though to the Mac where both developers and users fixate on UI. They are vocal about their complaints and won't use applications with poor interfaces unless they have to. Further they truly dislike inconsistent interfaces. (I think that's what most of the griping about brushed metal reduces to)
Now if Linux had that mindset in their community I think Linux would be far better off. (Even including all the excesses it brings in the Mac community) The fact of the matter is that most significant users in Linux are willing to put up with a lot of crap most people won't. This is echoed in most of their tools which are anything but easy to configure - even for standard situations.
So there are two problems in my mind. A significant number of non-standard inconsistent UIs for applications and a general willingness to put up with this UI wise.
Apple's not perfect. We've all griped at various inconsistencies in Apple products. (The toolbar button in the Panther Finder along with selection color in the same are two great examples) But overall Apple hides the guts far better than any Linux distro I've used. It also requires the user to do far less. Heavens, even using package systems on Linux (or even Fink on OSX) are not trivial. Compare this to how most applications run on OSX. A lot less hassel.
Re:Missing the point ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Until the the Net1 release, the Berkeley code was intermingled with Bell Labs code, considered a derived work, and needed the purchase of an AT&T license. Your "BSD yesterday" corresponds to about BSD 4.4-lite, from 1994.
See Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable [oreilly.com] for details.
In a way OzPixel's post [slashdot.org] got it wrong too. People in the academic environment got the freedoms of liberal distribution, but people outside of the university environment who were interested in learning about or using these technologies were out of luck. Linux expanded to a wider audience than BSD was capable of reaching.
Re:Slightly Egotistical (Score:5, Insightful)
All this inferior-superior stuff is what you're looking for. Not me, and I doubt parent poster had any of that in mind.
Most people are looking for an experience. If you dig compiling, recompiling and using x systems on top of each other, not allowing for drag and drop between them, can't set your monitor resolution without turning your machine inside out, don't have the luxury of font management, printing, etc etc. then Linux is for you!
If you're not the adventurous type, not a programmer and don't enjoy beating your own system (see above), maybe OS X is really what you're looking for.
I don't mean to bash Linux here, but you all should stop pretending Linux is easy. It's not. It's wonderful, who would have thought it, but it's not for those a lot of Linux adepts deem "dumb" - even if they might one day give you a heart transplant.
Let me put it real simple: Linux is not for people who are not into Linux. And Mac OS X - even Windows (the horror) are systems for people who basically don't give a fuck. If I had done what mr Sun has done, I would not build a computer from spare parts and program drivers to get my linux box talking with my other stuff, I'd go out and buy a monster machine running OS X - if I were him.
So put all that superior-inferior crap where the sun doesn't shine (forgot where that was, somewhere between Lancre and Badass). That most certainly was not the point.
Hope you enjoyed my rant, Cheers!
Re:Joy doesn't seem to work the Unix way any more. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In a sense, he's right (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you tried the newest KDE3? Best UI i've ever used. Beats XP AND OS X. And I don't have to pay 100+ every few years to keep the "privelege" of using it.
Re:UI Guidelines for Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
You want to sell people on the idea of "Linux on a Desktop?"
Its less of a mouthful than "Linux with GNU tools, a UFS file system, the KDE window manager, and the bash shell running on a Desktop Computer"
Which is technically more accurate and more complete, covers the four principle components of a unix operating system, and is completely unintelligible to my mother.
If you want people to start adopting it, let them think of it as "linux on the desktop." When they say it needs a set of UI guidelines that people follow, just nod and recognize
Re:In a sense, he's right (Score:5, Insightful)
I have the exact opposite opinion, I've been using KDE (on SuSE) as my desktop for over 3 years now. I've been very pleased at the evolution of KDE over the years. But I have to be realistic, it is still not as clean or consistent as OS X, or to a lesser extend, Windows. There are many aspects of system maintenance and configuration that are still far behind on a linux machine. The user interface has much improved in recent years, however, I still find many of the standard K apps to be inferior to their counterparts on other operating systems.
I recently (2 months ago) purchased my first ever Mac. It is now my primary machine, and I'm not looking back at all. I use the machine for all of the tasks I used my linux machine for, and more.
I agree that eye candy does not a user interface make, however, consistency in UI elements, and accessibility of configuration options *does*. And in those areas, KDE and Linux in general still falls short.
For what it is worth, I do keep my Linux box around, although I use it much less frequently. I also was quick to delete all Microsoft software off of my new Mac (Internet Explorer and Outlook).
I'm not particularly upset at having to pay $100 a year for the privilege of using such a high-quality operating system. As a software developer, I believe in paying for software I use, so I pay for SuSE updates every year or so anyway.
-Spyky
Posterboy for the *nix geek who doesn't get it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Heheh. It's precisely this type of attitude about *nix why it's no surprise that Linux just isn't "there" yet. I still find it amusing that it was Apple that brought *nix to the masses.
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd honestly like to know what this "real new stuff" in MacOSX is.
The kernel is BSD. That's the 1979 technology that Bill Joy was so quick to dismiss.
The display system is Display PDF. That's not exactly a gigantic leap from Display Postscript in the late 1980s.
The desktop interface is traditional Mac (the menubar at the top) from 1984 with the addition of a panel at the bottom. The panel concept is mid 1980s.
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.
That said, I think MacOSX is a sexy interface, the PowerBooks are great value for money, and the entire package is extremely slick. But I'm always baffled when people say shiny buttons demonstrate technological leadership. It's just shiny buttons! The technology in MacOSX is really ancient.
Re:I personally find this very interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
They asked about Linux and what he thought about it. Don't forget he worked for Sun for a couple of decades after the initial BSD push as well.
What if your entire life revolved around, say, rocket science, and you came up with some great propulsion theories and vehicles during your day. Now, you're not so much into rockets, but about the dangers of space travel, and people ask about your opinion of the new shuttle design. But you've designed shuttles. Really good ones. But life isn't utopian because of it, and you are re-focussing your energy.
What would you say that wouldn't sound all cocky and dismissive?
Not to say most of us here aren't cocky and dismissive at the drop of a hat, anyway...
Re:Joy doesn't seem to work the Unix way any more. (Score:5, Insightful)
- Classic is not bloat. It's a feature to allow compatability. Classic doesn't introduce overhead to a system unless you NEED to run an old app. I didn't have Classic installed for over a year and never missed it. It's only on my machine now because I did a clean install of panther.
- Carbon API is an equal partner with Cocoa on OS X. It is based (heavily) off of the Classic Mac APIs but it isn't bloat. It's another enviornment that has benefits and disadvantages compared to Cocoa (or standard BSD libraries). The is a reason why the Finder isn't Cocoa.. it works better as a Carbon app.
- "Vintage BSD" is often a lot faster than your vaunted Linux. I know 2.4 and the upcomming 2.6 have made big strides, but the Linux compat in FreeBSD was faster than Linux for a long time, and as far as I know, still occasionally is faster than real linux.
- Linux files systems are anything but clean. Different distros put stuff in different areas, Major apps switch install and config locations between versions. For the most part, you rarely ever need to dig into the filesystem on OS X. Apps go in
- Netinfo was depreciated in 10.2 and it's pretty much not used in 10.3. Apples moved everything into the BSD files and/or LDAP. Anyway, There really wasn't much in Netinfo. Comparing Netinfo to The Registry is total flamebait and it shows your lack of knowledge.
- consistent package management on Linux??? HAHAHA If I could count all the problems I've had with RPMs..
Fink automatically handles dependencies. The system software updater tracks packages. In general, the software install tools for OS X work fantastic. Package Manager is way better than anything on linux. And don't forget the use of Bundles. It makes a lot of software installs as easy as copying over an icon [which is a directory with all the goodies inside, but looks to the user like an app]
- haha, you consider the Mac OS unusable out of the box, yet you love linux. With so many distributions of Linux, do you really believe you wouldn't have to apply as much configuration to a distro you weren't intimately familiar with?
Give OS X 10.3 a real try and come back with a comparison to Linux. You'll find a quick, responsive machine. A great bundled development environment, best of class bundled apps, and a hardware accellerated X11 right out of the box.
ffakr.
I have to disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
If Linux was as easy to get installed, and was a bit more universal in how things work, I would consider switching to it. But for now, it takes me a minimum of 2 hours of interactive work to install (due to 5 billion packages), and countless hours after that getting things set up.
On a Mac, I pop in the install disk, answer much fewer questions, get in and customize a few things, and drag and drop install a few apps. I can get my Powerbook back up and running the way I had it in about 3 hours total. That includes my commonly used folders, interface changes, etc...
Simplicity, but with power underneath. This is the way to go.
Linux has power, but no simplicity.
Windows has simplicity but no power.
Re:UI Guidelines for Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
I beg to differ. The only applications on Windows I fail to grasp at a glance are almost exclusively ported over from other (unix/linux) platforms. Windows application in general have a very consistent look and feel, mostly because there is only a single set of widgets (controls/dialogs/toolbars) used by all of them.
The opposite is true. Microsoft's own tools don't help you follow those guidelines, which they do publish, and even Microsoft doesn't follow them. First, you can see that Microsoft distributes their own custom widget toolset for their major products, like Office and Visual Studio .NET. To easily see this, open a project in Visual Studio .NET on Windows XP with one of their colored themes enabled. Notice that the scrollbar in the Solution Explorer or Class View on the right is a standard, skinned scrollbar, while the one in the editor window is an old-style Windows 2000 grey scrollbar. Someone is using custom drawing code there. Notice that in Office XP and VS.NET, the toolbars and menus are different than the standard operating system ones other applications pick up by default. In Office 2003, the menus and toolbars have again been changed to an ugly pastel blue, which again is in contrast to the rest of the OS.
The Microsoft development tools don't help you to write conforming UIs for their own platform, as they should. Creating buttons in VB, for example, does not make them a standard size; you must drag a box on the screen to be whatever size you want. Spacing between controls is not enforced, or even suggested, in VS C++ or VB. This leads to the well-known problem of options screens that are tremendously cluttered, with spacing between controls limited, group boxes are singleton controls, unclear relationship between options, and so forth. Furthermore, Microsoft pursues its tabbed-based options screen in Office, options screens with categories in a left tree-view in VS, and third parties to fend for themselves. In addition, MS now puts options screens under Tools->Options, while some developers put it under View->Options or View->Preferences (which MS used to do), and Netscape still uses the ancient Edit->Preferences. MS does not give developers a hint by, say, creating a default Options menu item under the Tools menu when you create a desktop application.
Contrast this with the Mac platform. The free development tools they distribute set up applications by default with all the standard options in their standard places. Options screens are standard (with a small number of violators, notably Microsoft, here and there), toolbars are standard, etc. The Interface Builder tool, which is a WYSIWYG application for building application screens and dialog windows, similar to that embedded within VS, brings up guides to help with control placement and spacing, and the culture of the development community is very much focused on UI consistency and usability, which, despite what you say, is not true of other platforms, which includes Microsoft. The only thing MS developers seem to agree on is the necessity of overly-cluttered toolbars filled with indistinguishable tiny little 24x24 icons, the majority of which are never used by most users.
I agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately I'm not the ambitious 20-something I was when I started with unix. I don't want to recompile my kernel every week any more. All the linux I run now is imbedded (net integrator box and dreambox satellite recievers), exactly because I want the power without the maintainence. I think OSX is going to become the burnout hacker's choice of desktop OS exactly for that reason. All the power, none of the fuss. The point is that it's a finished OS. My G5 gives me an experience superior to any desktop OS with superior power than the Sun, AIX, and OSF workstations of just a few years ago. And a full unix implementation to boot! I couldn't be more happy.
Granted there a few non-unix annoyances, but for the most part, it is what I waited and worked 8 years for linux to become, today. It amazes me how fast they threw it together and how well it came out. It is definately the best example of a successful non-open-source project coming together I have seen in a long time.
Re:8Gb RAM? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually that's about what I'd expect for a program like Photoshop and large files. Photoshop is not a typical home or small office application, it has much higher system and memory demands. If you notice what I said was:
When using programs such as Safari and Microsoft Office you are not likely to see much improvement with large amounts of memory. On the other hand someone who is a programmer, digital artist, filmmaker, database programmer, etc. is more likely to be doing the types of activities that can benefit from large amounts of RAM. With those people a couple of gigs of RAM is a good thing indeed.
Bill Joy's problem (Score:3, Insightful)
His comment on Linux is simply demeaning to all the hundreds of thousands of developers who develop for it (and I use Mac OSX!). Linux has become more important than Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, like it or not, Mr Joy, and those (IBM) who saw this coming are now reaping the benefits and those who didn't (Sun) are now struggling to catch up. Mac OS X is hugely successful, precisely because it appeals to all the people that want the OS to just work, but that in no way means that Linux or the BSDs are worse. They are very good at what they do.
Re:Joy doesn't seem to work the Unix way any more. (Score:3, Insightful)
I had to take a bite on this, however, ffakr, covered most of what I wanted to troll on.
There is one more thing though...
MacOSX's kernel is more of a hybrid kernel, than a pure microkernel. There's only a single layer that messages get passed through to communicate with the kernel, and vice-versa. No one has been able to produce a microkernel that has a.) portability and b.) performance. L4 is by the far the best implementation of a microkernel that is somewhat comparable to the speed of a monolithic kernel and retains all the design goals of a true microkernel.
I believe microkernels ultimate goal was to create a portable operating system with a BSD operating system interface. It achieved that slowly, but performance was terrible. Linux has solved this problem, and people don't pay as much lip service to microkernels as they use to.
Microkernels also aren't as small and streamline as you believe. Mach was just as big a monolithic kernel, and to streamline any of its processes, you had to run kernel extensions in kernel space, not user space, nullifying the user-level kernel extensions goal.
Microkernels also inherently will have more overhead than monolithic kernels. They have to buffer and analyze messages that get passed through each layer in the operating system, just like a network architecture does.
Object-oriented frameworks like Java, Cocoa and Carbon, would crawl on a microkernel because of the number of interrupts generated in such systems.
But MacOS X has great Java support. Cocoa is heavilty object oriented, but is a fast API.
This fast/portable/small microkernel-stuff about MacOS X is a myth. It's a hybrid like NT.