Confessions of a Mac OS X User 989
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting commentary on OSDir.com about one Mac OS X user's guilt over using it instead of Linux on his laptop, and how he's been burned by the dreaded iBook logic board problems so much that it underlines the tyranny of hardware vendor lock-in: it's not that Mac OS X isn't F/OSS, but that it only runs on Apple hardware. It also raises the obvious question: have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?"
Average users (Score:2, Informative)
Build quality issues? (Score:1, Informative)
I've considered a Powerbook, but to be totally honest I haven't seen the stunning build quality that is so often remarked upon in the Mac community. Sure, they're better than cheapo eMachines-type kit, but they're still Taiwanese ODM systems and I keep reading about problems with warping, logic boards failing, screen scratches, duff drives, dodgy touchpads, and so on. I think I'll settle on a Thinkpad or Toshiba Sat Pro - they're built like tanks.
By the way, here's the URL of one report I was reading: http://www.insanely-great.com/features/011130.html [insanely-great.com]. Can anyone confirm this guy's musings? It'd be interesting to hear from other Slashdotters on the matter!
Er OS X is based on open source (Score:5, Informative)
But OS-X has at its core DARWIN which is an open source version of BSD which apple puts out. The parts of the OS that isn't opensource is the graphics layer above OS and a few other bits (hfs+ the file system is not open either I think.).
They've given back web browser code, updates to GCC etc. etc.. So all told they're not bad guys.
Re:OSX is not open source (Score:5, Informative)
The puritans are running amok outside of reality again.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OSX is not open source (Score:5, Informative)
How is something so blatantly WRONG modded up as interesting? Since when was utter ignorance at all interesting?
Need I go on with how Apple differs from Microsoft and SCO?
You are soooo wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
They've made many documented improvements to KHTML, gcc, the *BSDs, and others. They've also made the entire underlying operating system available as OSS.
Can you even come close to saying anything like that about Microsoft and SCO? Those two companies are the ones who testify in from of congress that OSS is unconstitutional and will destroy the US economy.
Apple also doesn't lock down their hardware, and it's totally possible to run other OSes on Macs. Their is one proprietary part that is required to run Mac OS, but if you don't want to run Mac OS it's not a problem.
Ever heard of OpenFirmware? It's an open standard that Apple, Sun and others use instead of the antiquated BIOSes found in PCs. What do MS and Intel want to replace the BIOS with? A locked down firmware that will implement DRM for media and software and possibly even OSes at the most basic hardware level. That's open?
Apple uses standard components and has opened up many of their hardware innovations like FireWire.
In other words: you're nuts.
Re:hard disks locked inside the ibook (Score:5, Informative)
Look at the following picture [geocities.com] (and the rest of the instructions [geocities.com]). The disk does not sit under the keyboard, and requires the removal of the back of the laptop and many other screws.
Re:This article doesn't make sense..... (Score:5, Informative)
I seem to make similar posts in Apple threads where iBook logic board discussions arise. I'm a happy owner of a Dual USB 600MHz iBook which has been used for 4 hours or more per day since I bought it nearly two years ago. It's been over the Atlantic three or four times since then and it's travelled all over the UK in my car, on buses and on trains.
It's bombproof, and I still get 2 hours on a full charge even at this age (down from the original 5 or 6 hours when new).
I've never owned a more robust piece of hardware, and that includes my sledgehammer and welding kit.
Re:Er OS X is based on open source (Score:2, Informative)
>> management).
They might shun Microsofts DRM implementation, but they have their very own. Remember those AAC files that people get for 99cents on the itunes music store? Thats Apples very own DRM.
Re:Makes perfect sense... (Score:5, Informative)
Take a drive out of a PC and put it into another PC - Check.
Take a drive out of a Mac and put it into another Mac - Check.
Both work equaly well. In fact, its even easier on the Mac. You don't even have to take out the drive!! Just hook the two Macs up via Firewire, hold Cmd-T while booting up the Mac with the problem, and have the functional Mac boot from that Firewire drive. If its a drive problem, you've just found it.
The parent has no idea what he's talking about.
Re:OSX is not open source (Score:1, Informative)
Re:This article doesn't make sense..... (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Facts about Linux On Apple Notebooks (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
article mirrored here: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What?! (Score:5, Informative)
Easy: Open a complex Microsoft Office document and not lose any layout settings because of conversion issues...
Well that's one. Let me give you a few others:
-Real world page layout (quarkxpress, indesign)
-Photoshop (CMYK) editing
-Real time video editing/post production work of HD streams across ANY IEEE1394 video device.
-Wake up from sleep in less than a second
-Connectivity to a Microsoft Exchange Server
-Actually play Warcraft 3 (and sign up for the worlds of warcraft beta test!) (and no, buying WineX and dealing with the emulation layer isn't good enough)
I can go on and on (like professional MIDI software for musicians) but I just remembered you asked for one thing "OSX can do that linux cant."
Now sure, I can't run it on my Lego Mindstorm, but I think the stuff I listed is a little more important. and with my hardware accelerated X11 server, I can do alot of the stuff that you linux guys can do too.
Re:Makes perfect sense... (Score:5, Informative)
Let's take this one step further:
Take a drive out of a PC and put it into a Mac - Check.
Sure you can't boot off of the drive without installing a Macintosh operating system but all of the data on the drive will be accessible to the Mac if the drive was formatted with FAT or NTFS. I've done this a number of times to help my PC friends recover data from their crashed PCs and it works without a hitch.
Sure Mac OS is proprietary, but it hardly locks you in to a specific operating system. In fact Mac OS does a damn good job of trying to cooperate with as many other operating systems and file types as possible.
Re:Executive summary - (Score:2, Informative)
Free and Open are not about money (Score:4, Informative)
Wake up. Free and Open have little to do with money or salaries or commercial interests. It has to do with rights, freedoms, security, and doing the smart thing for your own company and your clients.
My company runs Linux on all desktops (yes, we're small and nerdy so we can do this) and production servers (just good business, here). We pay money for our operating systems, just like we would to MS or Apple. We happen to pay RedHat and SuSE for our operating systems. We get fantastic support (so far). We make (small) profits here, and we're able to pay our programmers. The RedHat and SuSE people get paid, so they're okay too. Our products save our clients money, so they're doing just well also. What the hell is the problem? Yes, we release nearly all of our own products Open Source, under the GPL. And it doesn't prevent us from charging money to people for them.
If my company goes under, our clients have a lot of piece of mind that the latest source is available to them. Lately, there have even been 3rd party consultants who have taken our source and added features that we simply don't have time for (or disagree with), and they're able to make a living (partially, at least; I'm not sure) at that. Yee ha. There is no lack of money in Free and Open if that's what your goal is.
Dammit, Free and Open are not about money.
i do! (Score:5, Informative)
i spent an entire year preaching Linux to all my friends but i have to admit that all the way i've been having tons of problems with it... USB devices were not working, attempts to switch keyboard layouts gave me XFree86 errors, trying to do accounting with Gnucash was a lunacy, and could XMMS be ANY UGLIER? Then i tried installing XD2 from Ximian (which I still consider the best "graphical shell" for Linux) and that just broke *everything* on my laptop... On that day i just got so mad i walked down the street and got a powerbook G4...
so, back to the guilt thing.... yes, i do feel guilty - probably because i kind of showed myself as a hypocrite - preaching linux to others then getting an Apple machine. i think the key with Linux happiness is to recognize whether it's APPROPRIATE for what you do. if you need email, web browsers and a shell then Linux IS perfeect... but if you try to use it the way i did (USB, Music, several business applications, multimedia), then you better know how to recompile things yourself (i don't).
Re:Don't ask me.. (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? I assume you have found the Terminal application and used it? I am a Sun/Solaris admin and I just replaced my good old Blade 100 with a G5 and nothing really changed for me. There are only four apps that I run constantly from the GUI: Terminal, Mozilla, Mail, and Acrobat. Everything else is done from the command line. You might want to check it out. Almost everything in OSX can be done from the command line. If you need some help to find your way around, check out the "OS X for UNIX geeks" book from O'Reilly.
Re:OSX is not open source (Score:3, Informative)
remember that buffer overflow problem [slashdot.org] on OS X not too long ago? someone was able to look at the source code and had a fix within hours. You think that will ever happen with a closed source and proprietary OS like MS Windows?
Re:OSX is not open source (Score:3, Informative)
Actually Apple has always been good and they weren't always the underdog to Microsoft. Go back 25 years and they were both shoestring operations but Apple was bigger than Microsoft.
Apple has always been good because they are a combined hardware/software company with geniuses on the payroll (eg, Raskin, Burcell, and Wozniak). What Apple does is Real Computing. Microsoft is a software company that rips off ideas from others, then rewrites history to pretend that Microsoft did it first. There's no honour in what Microsoft does. It's kinda lame.
Apple-critics like to say that Apple ripped off the GUI from Xerox. But it's not true. Xerox had basic ideas like windows and mice. Apple had to create dozens of new concepts for the GUIs used on the Lisa and the Macintosh. It's fairer to say that Xerox started something and Apple finished it. That's another big point in Apple's favour.
One thing I've always disliked about Apple is (sadly) the Apple community. They're more rabid than Linux fanatics and more clueless to boot. I have listened to various Apple-fanatics defending cooperative multitasking, lack of protected memory, benefits of RAM Doubler, any justification at all for forked filesystems, etc. It always boggles my mind that they can talk about how much more "productive" they are because of 2-second savings in changing focus, but they suddenly go quiet when they have to wait 5 minutes during a reboot because their computer crashed. Thankfully MacOSX has fixed the foundational problems with MacOS.
But leaving the rabid community aside, Apple from the 70s and 80s would have been top of my list of Places I'd Like To Work if I'd been old enough at the time. Even with the downside of Steve Jobs having to be there. Apple does cool stuff. They always have. They still are. They're among the few companies that have kudos in the geek community, even if you didn't particularly like MacOS <= 9 because of the foundational faults in its design.
But Microsoft has always sucked. Bill Gates has always been a dickhead and his company has always been the McDonalds of computing. He might be rich but he has never been cool. There's nothing nifty about Microsoft software. It gets the job done on a budget. That's about the nicest thing you can say about Microsoft.
Re:Don't ask me.. (Score:1, Informative)
Then buy a 3 button mouse and plug it in to your Mac. I agree that control-click is not as easy as right-click - which is why I use a multibutton mouse with my Mac. Right-click and scrollwheels are supported at the system level; you just need a mouse that has those features. And any Mac compatible mouse with more buttons than that (such as the MS Intellimouse Explorer) should come with software to configure the extra buttons with.
Re:RMS and vi (Score:3, Informative)
Re:how about keychain access on the command line? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple provides a neat little tool named security [apple.com] for this purpose. It allows full access to, and manipulation of, the keychain.
To retrieve my Slashdot password from the keychain, I would do the following:
Note that the first time you use security to access a keychain item, you will receive the standard Confirm Access to Keychain dialog. It would be unwise and unhelpful for this to happen when you are trying to access the keychain remotely via SSH, therefore it would pay to first access the keychain in this manner when you have access to the UI to Always Allow security to access that keychain item.Re:Don't ask me.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OSX is not open source (Score:3, Informative)
Cases, motherboards, and most expansion cards (inasmuch as they're Mac-specific, anyway) are the only items you listed that can be said to be "locked in" on the Mac anymore. There's no special hard drive you need to buy for a Mac, they use DDR RAM, same as most PC motherboards, and the peripherals all use the same USB and Firewire as PC peripherals and are almost always compatible with both if they're compatible with a Mac.
What the difference between the Mac and x86 boils down to for this argument is that Apple sells its boxes as one package, same as its competitors (Dell, HP, Gateway), and there's no convenient route for the hobbyist or expert to take if you want to construct and maintain a machine piecemeal. You'll have as much luck upgrading a Dell piecemeal as you would a Mac - you can swap out most parts, but in general it was designed as one package, not as a box that can conveniently let you swap out motherboards.
Consider, too, that most of the time that I buy a new PC motherboard it's at a point where technologies have changed all around. I'd need a new processor to go with the board, then new RAM (either a new standard like DDR or a faster speed variety to take advantage of the new motherboard). If I really want to keep up, then a new hard drive (a faster ATA standard, or maybe even serial ATA) would be in order, and maybe a new video card to take advantage of a faster AGP port. I could get all that fairly cheaply compared to a whole computer from Apple, Dell, or another complete package vendor, but that comes down to a difference in markets, not different levels of lock-in.
On the whole, I think you have to come up with more than cases and motherboards to declare it evil lock-in. Another respondent mentioned software investment, but as I said there, almost any software purchase on any platform is going to lock you into the OS it's designed to run on. And if you design your software choices so that you can compile them anywhere, then it barely matters where you run 'em, PC or Mac - there's a bit of a price advantage to upgrading a PC piecemeal, but if you're just using the Gimp on KDE and a bunch of other open source tools you'll do just as well buying a Mac to run them then later switching to a PC and running the same things, when you're buying a package computer.
Re:This article doesn't make sense..... (Score:3, Informative)
Whoever came up with those problems was talking bullshit:
1) the video chip is on the underside of the logic board - pressing down on the case next to the trackpad would just push down on the section enclosing the hard drive, which is mounted slightly proud of the logic board with rubber grommets - there would be no way to affect the logic board by pressing on the case from the top.
2) the logic board couldn't electrify the screws - the whole laptop uses DC, so while it's possible to have the screws at a higher PD than some other component in the computer, you'd have to close the circuit to get current to flow - ie, connect it to the negative terminal of the battery. So, you'd have to touch the screw, then touch the battery's negative terminal to feel any shock, and that's assuming the screw is somehow connected to the battery.
2b) DC very rarely arcs at such low voltages (12 to 24 volts at 1.8 amps in an iBook) over the sort of distance it would have to in order to go from logic board to frame. His claim of arcing between the logic board and the frame is silly - where was the frame earthed? The board is already connected to the negative battery terminal by design, so there's no way to force a path from positive to negative battery terminals via the logic board and a spark to the case. It's also very hard to get a low current to arc - it's why arc welders use such high currents (50 to 200 amps or more).
3) While the power cable has been seen to spark at the plug, this is due to the fine copper cables touching together and coming apart as the cord is moved. It's not dangerous, but it does mean your power supply is borked.
4) sometimes the power and video cables to the display get pinched in the display hinge, causing them to break, this is correct. However, there is space for them if they're fitted properly.
Here's a picture [jo-ham.com] of the inside of my iBook (taken when I upgraded her hard drive with a more spacious model). As you can see, pretty much all of the metal parts inside there are already attached to the logic board - nowhere for this mysterious electrical arc to go to!
Re:This article doesn't make sense..... (Score:3, Informative)
So much for the iBook issue (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
Not as good as no problems, but I don't think you can expect too much more than this. Can we get back to bitching about 1 button mice now?
Re:Don't ask me.. (Score:2, Informative)
One biggie is that text windows work much better on linux.
Have you noticed that any application developed with the Cocoa framework gets all of the following for free, in any text window: multiple undo support, optional spell checking, keybindings, printing, unicode support, etc...
On Linux, you would have to implement every one of those things yourself, if you were writing an application with text windows.
Re:This article doesn't make sense..... (Score:5, Informative)
Say what you like about Apple, but they're willing to stand behind their problems once they recognise a fault (witness the whitespots on the Powerbook G4).
-- james
Re:Don't ask me.. (Score:2, Informative)
Personally, I find that I don't really need to right-click that much in Mac OS X anyway. The interface is well-designed enough that almost all of what I need to do doesn't require a right click, and frankly, even if Apple offered a two button model, I'd still spring for the one button. I happen to think it's just plain more elegant. YMMV.
yours
Re:Don't ask me.. (Score:3, Informative)
Regarding Apple Pricing (Score:1, Informative)
Apple has to charge more because:
a) their stuff is built MUCH better...and designed better...and built with better components..many of which are custom made. They are built in smaller quantities too, which jacks the pricing up.
b) they pay their employees well, and give good benefits. we have comfortable chairs, can requisition comfort appliances (armrests, back supports, wrist straps, left handed mice, etc) we actually GET PAID for our overtime, we get real vacations, we get holidays...if there's overtime we get fed. in other words..we're treated well. I was trained for almost 4 weeks before being sent to work....so I *gasp* actually knew what I was doing when I started.
c) they make a profit (a novel concept in a capitalist society, I know)..dell probably has to sell 4 shitty laptops to make what apple makes selling one. this isn't greed, it's good business sense. don't sell cheap crap..it makes you look bad and is unprofitable..sell quality products and people will pay more.
d) SOMEBODY has to fund all the R&D that goes into UI design. ever notice GNOME, KDE, Windows, and many others look a hell of a lot like the mac UI? SOMEBODY PAID FOR THAT RESEARCH...and it was Apple users. (don't even bring up the Xerox parc history....apple borrowed the following ideas from them: a mouse, a pointer that points at buttons on the screen. the rest was Apple.)
so essentially, if you buy a mac you're paying to do the research and development for the rest of the copycats in the computer world. blame them, not Apple.
the money you spend on a mac is NOT going directly into Steve Jobs' wallet.
Re: I lean more towards OS X than Linux too (Score:4, Informative)
I found it amusing that the Gothic designers would spend hours and hours on beautiful 3D rendering for their almost illegible Gothic fonts, leaving the fonts you actually had to use as unreadable as ever
So you have two type of people working on Gnome/KDE, the types who want to not frighten people by making their system look as much like Windows as humanly possible, and those who do want to frighten people with morbid images! What an unbeatable combination.
(I might sound less bitter if I'd succeeded in getting just one of the Gothic themes to actually work on my Linux PC. I actually like the Gothic types, but I can't resist poking some gentle fun at them).
Anyway, with that setting the stage, you can see how much of a breath of fresh air MacOS X was to me. It's an original interface, that looks lovely and owes debts to nothing save its NeXTian ancestors. The fonts are lovely out of the box; you don't have to install complex X-Windows extensions with elaborate 15 step procedures to make them look ok; you can make 'em look great without any effort whatsoever. You can use great applications like Final Cut Pro and GarageBand, together with Unix stalwarts like emacs and all the command line stuff I know and love.
I don't find MacOS X deficient in command line operation at all. There is emacs (although I wish there was a graphical version that used lovely Cocoa fonts), all my friends tar and ssh and gcc and so on are present and accounted for. It's true that command line administration is a bit obscure, but if you (like me) don't do a lot of administration on your personal computer, that's perfectly fine.
It looks like I echo a lot of MacOS X users, when I note my 10-odd terminal windows and my 10-odd web browser windows. The value of the GUI seems to be primarily in the web browser when I'm doing work. Of course that might be because I develop web sites.
There's definite value in having Unix and Photoshop on the same machine, and that alone makes MacOS X beat Linux and other Unix variants effortlessly.
It's one computer for functions that used to take two or more. Not bad at all.
D