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Apple Businesses

Apple OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard 422

Posted by chrisd from the office-ain't-done-till-bsd-won't-run dept.
We've had a number of posts noting that Boston.com's digitalMASS has a very decent article on Apple's OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard.
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Apple OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard More

Apple OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard

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  • had to beg for a job? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CommanderTaco ( 85921 ) on Friday December 14, 2001 @10:11PM (#2706995)
    seems hard to believe that he had to struggle to land the job at Apple, as such a prominent OS developer. I would have thought that the more successful/visible open source developers would have their pick of jobs at any firm... and Hubbard would be especially well suited to work on OSX, since it's based on freebsd. i bet he's just being modest...

    • Re:had to beg for a job? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jkh ( 3999 ) on Saturday December 15, 2001 @02:12PM (#2708822) Homepage
      This is something which got a little confused in the translation. What I said was that it took me several months to come to Apple after my initial interviews because a little detour to Wind River happened in the middle (for reasons I won't go into). This somehow got permuted into my spending months chasing the job. In reality, Apple never gave up after "losing" me to WindRiver and their persistence coupled with my desire to get involved with MacOS X is what finally induced me to leave WRS.

  • Mac OS X.1 and Open Source Developers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TellarHK ( 159748 ) <tellarhk.hotmail@com> on Friday December 14, 2001 @10:28PM (#2707046) Homepage Journal
    About two days ago, I submitted a review of OSX to Slashdot, but got rejected. Am I sore about it? Not really. Since I'm not anyone of note (yet), it's expected. But this provides a nice chance to say what I said in the review. I won't cut and paste it, as that'd be quite long, but I'll summarize and suggest MacNN [macnn.com]'s OSX forum as a place to check it out if you're so inclined.


    Essentially, I spent the last ten years of my life shackled to Microsoft products with the all-too-infrequent practical use of Linux. As Microsoft's business practices continue to get ever more predatory, and the Microsoft operating systems become increasingly marketing tools rather than productivity tools, I decided that it was about time to try something new.


    I found an inexpensive, new iBook, and bought it. An "icebook" with a 500Mhz G3 processor, I've been quite happy with it so far. The construction of the iBook is quite decent, with a few common blemishes in the casing and a few mechanical defects reported. However, the real shining star of Apple's lineup has got to be OS X. This BSD alteration (Or enhancement, or bastardization, or annexation, call it what you will.) is positioned in the perfect place to bring intelligence back into the use of personal computers. Functionally, OS X is a wonderfully complex yet artistically presented program interface which does an admirable job of concealing the true nature of things from the average Macintosh transitional user, while providing an extremely high amount of flexibility for the more technically oriented. With the Macintosh userbase, there's actually a very devoted core that could use the help and assitance of open source efforts despite the problems with Apple in regards to certain areas of the system. (The interface, primarily)


    Projects suck as Fink, an excellent tool for porting unix applications to the OS X environment are a great start, but what will really help Apple prove a real challenge to Microsoft is the conscious effort by Open Source developers to port applications to Apple hardware so seamlessly, that the average user won't even have to know that The Gimp was actually a unix application.


    This is where Apple has succeeded as a core business, making computing simpler for the artistically, rather than the technically minded. The best thing Open Source can do is aid the Apple userbase in proving that the Mac is a viable alternative. Yes, Linux and BSD themselves as well as all the other systems out there, deserve to continue to be the primary focus of most efforts. But it just may be that the most effective way to open up the operating systems market will be to back the entrenched underdog.

  • Apple has suceeded where others after years of trying have failed. They have created a Unix with an interface intutive enough that you could give OS X to your grandmother and not be hounded by calls. Honey how do I....

    Now if Apple would get a clue and drop their prices they could gain some serious marketshare in the business commmunity.

  • Apple is arrogant, at least Hubbard is (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rob Kaper ( 5960 ) on Saturday December 15, 2001 @12:02AM (#2707231) Homepage
    Jordan Hubbard held a speech at a meeting of the Dutch UNIX Users Group which I attended. To be honest, he was quite arrogant.


    His speech basically came down to "open source failed to do anything on the desktop, and without proprietary, commercial vendors like Apple it will never go anywhere either". He almost sounded like he ment to say "only Apple can make UNIX a success on the desktop", but he explained all he ment to say was open source couldn't, when I asked him about that.


    Martin Konold, who like me was present to hold a speech about KDE, responded that KDE already deliver all the stuff Jordan Hubbard was talking about, even before OSX was on the shelves.


    The "open source developers can only developer for themselves and never think of end-users" view is just not true. GNOME and KDE prove that every day. Knowing these projects only exist respectively 5 and 4 years, while Apple (and Microsoft) have been in the desktop market for a much longer time gives me plenty of confidence and hope that open source can definitely bring UNIX to the desktop. Just imagine what KDE X (pun: OS X) and GNOME XP (pun: Windows XP) will look like.

    • Re:Apple is arrogant, at least Hubbard is (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15, 2001 @12:40AM (#2707330)
      I do not mean to start a flame-war, and hope this post will come up merely as an opposing viewpoint, but:

      GNOME and KDE do not provide an end-user experience until the end-user has already gotten past the usual linux hurdles -- getting X to work with their graphics card, configuring their network and so on. This is trivial for a lot of us, but it is not for my standard of maturity for a user-interface ready for general deployment: "Can your mom set it up without your help?"

      The answer, generally speaking, is no.

      MacOS X is the first counter-argument to "Unix is not for peasants" that is pretty much true across the board. Your mom can install it and use it. It's really friendly, and it's really effective.

      It's redundant to point out that the Aqua interface and the MacOS Finder are simply a candy-coated veil covering up a very mature and stable bsd/unix environment appropriate for the same range of tasks to which desktop linux distributions are currently applied.

      Whether or not KDE and Gnome, or the open source movement as a whole is "thinking about the end user" is a moot point, but that these things are not ready for general distribution to Your Mother is pretty much inarguable.

      As a user of both types of systems, I can say that OS X has provided me with the best user experience since the first time I sat down in front of a NeXTstep system.

      Something I've barely seen mentioned heretofore is that MacOS is not really new, so much as it is a complete overhaul and Apple-ification fo NeXTstep. The NeXTstep user experience was unparalelled at the time, and I'm glad to have it back in a thoroughly modern form with such a magnificent GUI.

      As I see it, an open-source base OS is apple offering a laurel wreath to the open source community and extending a modern standard to everyone (why else would they release an intel version themselves?) that can be freely used without the commercial side of the product. However, if you're willing to fork over the money / buy a macintosh, you're in for one serious treat -- probably the best user experience you'll ever have.

      I would like to see someone light a fire under apple's butt to get a few details straightened out like a better software sound subsystem and support for the peripherals traditionally associated with the apple market -- like scanners (AHEM!) and the Soundblaster, and I'd like them to return to providing onboard audio input so i didn't have to talk into what approximates digital soap-on-a-rope, but I wouldn't switch to anything else despite these issues (And the basic support i need is still available in OS X through the classic environment, so a lot of these concerns are taken care of in a temporary way a the time being) and I would never be able to sit down in front of GNOME/KDE with a straight face and say, "this is ready for the market! woopee!"

      -JSJ
    • I agree that it is arrogant to say that open source will never catch up to commercial software for desktop applications, but I hope you understand how far behind it is in the desktop arena, and I think many readers do not.

      First and foremost, we must consider the interface. Here we are talking about OS X/XP vs KDE/GNOME. If you have used all four you can attest to the fact that KDE/GNOME have come a very long way, but are still very far behind, and if we strictly talk about KDE/GNOME vs OS X (since the play-doh theme in XP has shaken what faith I had in MS' interfaces), you must admit that the open source desktop environments are 2-3 years behind. Now what troubles me more is that readers are in denial about this, and this lack of understanding about what the experience needs to be stemming from the fact that OSS OSes are used primarily by programmers/admins/etc. prevents open source desktop environments from competing. Even you say,

      KDE already deliver all the stuff Jordan Hubbard was talking about, even before OSX was on the shelves.

      I hope this is not meant to insinuate that the KDE experience is comparable to the OS X experience. I actually read a post that said that Apple should, "port Aqua to X windows". If you think that you can run the Aqua interface on top of XFree86 (or one with comparable features, not just a bunch of pretty pixmaps, which is what the Mozilla organization seems to thing Aqua is, most unfortunately for those of us who want to use Mozilla for OS X), the future of OSS desktops is doomed.

      Now, while I find the "open source is doomed forever" attitude unfair, if we take a look at where desktop functinality is right now, open source has lost. As I said, KDE and GNOME are not even competitive with OS X, the GIMP is nowhere near being competitive with Photoshop, nothing is competitive with Final Cut Pro or Premier/After Effects, nor are there substitues for the iApps (simple, but still extremely funcitonal consumer-level apps), there are very few games brought to open source operating systems, although Apple has a problem with this too, they manage to get a port of virtually all the top-shelf games, apps like Maya that used to be the domain of UNIX-like OSes are now on OS X, eliminating the need for a Photoshop Mac and a Maya SGI on your desk, and finally I must say that open source office products are competitive with MS Office, but must also admit that Office v.X is truly a very powerful suite and the best availible tool, although still only worth a fraction of its $500 price tag.

      So to summarize my points, open source software for the desktop is currently not in the same league with the commercial software, but it could get there if more effort was focused on it, and it is completely reasonable for Hubbard to go with Apple and focus solely on making the best possible software, as open source solutions, even though they may become an extremely viable 3rd desktop platform one day, probably will never reach an elegance of interface of Apple products.

      • Just a quick comment:

        nor are there substitues for the iApps (simple, but still extremely funcitonal consumer-level apps)

        Have you taken a look at the Applescript functionality of the iApps? I'd be surprised if there was much that you could do with any of the Linux or Windows apps that you couldn't do with the iApps and Applesscript..

    • (paraphrase of Hubbard): open source failed to do anything on the desktop, and without proprietary, commercial vendors like Apple it will never go anywhere either
      The problem is that it's true. I've tried twice to install Linux (PPC first, then intel), and failed both times. Linux sure isn't doing much for me on the desktop.

      I don't think it's really the open-source developers' fault. It's just that there's too much hardware out there that only loosely supports a particular set of standards, and a lot hardware developers refuse to share the info with open-source developers.

      The obsession with running Linux is doing real harm to the open-source community. It ghettoizes open-source apps. It's as if there was an art gallery with beautiful paintings in it, but every time you tried to go there, the roads were closed and the subway wasn't running.

      I really don't see it as a problem with software usability. I run GIMP and Freeciv on MacOS X, and although they're a little harder to use than commercial software sometimes, you just have to read the documentation. IMHO, the real problems have to do with the OS-hardware interface.

    • I may be arrogant, but not for the reasons stated. In the presentation I gave at the NLUUG this year, I was merely being a realist. :-)

      I think the essence of my talk was also somewhat distorted by Rob Kaper's summary of it. He failed to mention that my specific "grievance" with open source on the desktop so far lies primarily with its failure to standardize on a single set of "higher level APIs" that ISVs/VARs rely on to bring their applications quickly and cheaply (well, as cheaply as possible) to market. Having a multitude of desktop environments to choose from might be wonderful from an engineer/power user's perspective, but from an ISVs perspective it's a nightmare. They don't want multiple solutions to choose from, they want a SINGLE set of APIs which will enable them to reach all the users in their target market. By APIs I'm also not talking about fopen() and the rest of libc, I'm talking about all the things which enable things like buttons and scrollbars to appear on the screen and for applications to share data between them. Where the open source engineering community consistently "fails" is by making this a technical argument, going to great lengths to point out that things like the WIN32 API and ActiveX are difficult to use, buggy, fraught with security problems, whatever. From the ISV perspective, however, those very same things allow them to reach a user base of millions and are well-documented and "rich" enough in functionality that they can provide a reasonable-enough (deliberate choice of words) user experience to sell their application to some of those millions. From their perspective, that's literally the bottom line and all that counts.

      It's a pity that Mr Kaper didn't go to the trouble to describe that portion of my talk since it's where I put the most energy. I didn't want engineers to hear my talk and walk away simply branding me as an anti-KDE or anti-GNOME guy, I'd far prefer that they actually *get the point*. Perhaps that's something you can only do once you've worked for a big ISV who's job it is to deliver mainstream desktop apps, however. Until you've done that, you just haven't really felt the pain of trying to do something like printing or font selection from X.

  • Why Hiawatha Bray is Irritating (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nova Express ( 100383 ) <lawrenceperson&gmail,com> on Saturday December 15, 2001 @01:31AM (#2707433) Homepage Journal
    For one reason why some computer users (including a lot of Mac heads) find Hiawatha Bray so irritating, take a look at this:

    Meanwhile, there's Apple, with its closed, secretive software design and its relatively toylike point-and-click interface. No self-respecting open-source geek would touch these products with a barge pole.

    Now people have known that BSD was going to be the core of OS X for at least three years. To create this false "Apple vs. Open Source" strawman merely to knock it down is lazy writing, and this late in the game it's actively insulting for anyone even remotely familiar with BSD or OS X. This is "Look at me! Look at me!" writing that needlessly draws attention to itself, something real writers don't need to do.

    Indeed, this paragraph mars what is otherwise a reasonably adequate column. But at least it's not as irritating as the average Jon Katz [slashdot.org] column. Speaking of which, I see that more votes have been dropped from the dump Katz poll. [slashdot.org] The numbers don't even add up anymore...

  • Why OS X uses Mach (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by Animats ( 122034 )
    OS X is architected on top of Mach to keep Apple stockholders from asking why Apple paid $400 million for NeXT, bailing out Steve Jobs and his buddies.

    The argument for cancelling Copland (the original MacOS 8) was that it was going to take another year to make it work, and buying NeXT would get the new OS up faster. A similar argument was advanced against BeOS. That was, what, in 1996?

    The MacOS really needed a new layer underneath, but UNIX/Mach wasn't a great match. I'm not suprised it took Apple almost five years to make them play together.

    The original MacOS only supported one app at a time, and the addition of "multitasking" was a horrible hack internally. No memory protection, no process dispatching, no interprocess communication, and no way to reliably get an app that crashed cleaned up without a system crash. Developers used to call it the Mess Inside. Apple desperately needed a new kernely, and it should have happened around 1992 or so, by which time all new Macs had enough hardware for a good protected-mode OS. Basically, Apple was nine years late with their new OS, which is part of why Apple tanked.

    I once wrote an entire dial-up PPP implementation for the MacOS, called "Simple PPP". It was not fun.

    • OS X is architected on top of Mach to keep Apple stockholders from asking why Apple paid $400 million for NeXT, bailing out Steve Jobs and his buddies.

      Regardless of what you think, Steve Jobs alone has made more than $400 million for Apple. In that regard, Apple stockholders have nothing to ask about.

    • bailing out Steve Jobs and his buddies.

      What're you talking about? Jobs was (and continues to be) the catalyst/architect of Apple's return to respectability. If anyone did someone a favor, Jobs did it for all of Appledom.

      The argument for cancelling Copland (the original MacOS 8) was that it was going to take another year to make it work

      I worked at Apple before and after the Copland deal, and I've had lots of friends there over the years. Copland was a complete disaster. Apple was headed for a huge meltdown because the people at the top had absolutely no idea that Copland was in such a pathetic state.

      A similar argument was advanced against BeOS

      The BeOS was a lot of fun to hack on. I used it and developed on it for almost a year. However, the BeOS was horribly flawed from the beginning, due to its Fragile Base Class design. As a result, even though BeOS was young, you had to constantly be aware of every application/os version interdependency. The situation would have only worsened as the BeOS application base had matured. Every time Be released a new version of their OS, you had to scramble around to update all of your applications that might have then broken because of C++ library incompatibilities. That would have gone over like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl for the average Mac user.

      The MacOS really needed a new layer underneath, but UNIX/Mach wasn't a great match

      There was no "good match" between the old MacOS and any "modern" OS. Teeth pulling to get the compatibility layer to work was inevitable.

      Apple desperately needed a new kernely, and it should have happened around 1992 or so, by which time all new Macs had enough hardware for a good protected-mode OS. Basically, Apple was nine years late with their new OS, which is part of why Apple tanked.

      No argument here. I blame all the dumb-ass MBAs that loaded the company down after Jobs left. Jobs isn't perfect, but the Apple community is fortunate to have him at the helm, overall.
    • OS X is architected on top of Mach to keep Apple stockholders from asking why Apple paid $400 million for NeXT, bailing out Steve Jobs and his buddies.

      No. OSX is architected on top of Mach because OSX is NeXTSTEP, and NeXTSTEP was always built on top of Mach. The decision to use Mach was a sound one, as proved by NeXTSTEP/OpenStep's durability and portability across many diseperate architectures over 15 years after its birth.

      The argument for cancelling Copland (the original MacOS 8) was that it was going to take another year to make it work

      No. The argument for cancelling Copland was that it was never going to work. Copland was a horrible idea to begin with, and rapidly became the textbook example of an out-of-control, death-ship project. By the time Hancock performed the mercy-killing, Copland was over three years behind schedule, and what little in terms of development SDKs had dribbled out of Apple had been universally panned by developers.

      The MacOS really needed a new layer underneath, but UNIX/Mach wasn't a great match. I'm not suprised it took Apple almost five years to make them play together.

      No. Apple had functional, usable builds of Rhapsody (OpenStep on PPC with a MacOS Classic look-and-feel, and "Blue Box" fullscreen OS8 emulation) within a year of the NeXT acquisition. I personally used such a box in early 1998; it was quite slick. This product was later released as "MacOS X Server 1.0".

      The reasons that OSX "consumer" didn't ship until much later were twofold: First, Apple listened to feedback from their existing developer base, and realized that they were risking alienating a substantial amount of them by trying to force an immediate migration to the OpenStep APIs. (Adobe, in particular, dug in their heels and threatened to discontinue Photoshop development for MacOS.) In response to this, Apple had to develop the "Carbon" API layer, which was a substantial effort. Second, Apple made the decision to take the time to re-engineer the user interface and display layers ("Aqua" and "Quartz"), on the (likely) theory that the MacOS UI needed a facelift.

      Apple desperately needed a new kernely, and it should have happened around 1992 or so, by which time all new Macs had enough hardware for a good protected-mode OS.

      Blame IBM. Apple had a new base OS technology in 1992. It was called "Pink", and ironically was very similar in conception to OpenStep. Unfortunatly, as part of the original Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance, Pink was given over to IBM, who renamed it "Taligent" and promptly buried it.

      Basically, Apple was nine years late with their new OS, which is part of why Apple tanked.

      Ah. I was not aware that "tanked" could also be used to mean "wildly profitable in a year when Dell, Compaq and HP are hemmorhaging money." Fascinating.
    • Mac OS X Server (Rhapsody) was released in January 1999, and could run NeXT apps natively and Mac apps in a compatibility environment and it fit the specs on the NeXT deal pretty perfectly (Mac OS 8 interface, protected memory, preemptive multitasking, runs Mac apps). Since then, Apple has just continued to add more and more cool stuff to Mac OS X, as well as dramatically improve their hardware, cutting all the legacy stuff and putting antennaes and FireWire in everything. Putting in digital flat-panels and gigabit ethernet is all the pro models. What's going on now is that the world is starting to catch up to Mac OS X ... people are realizing what they can use it for, why they would use it. Developers are familiar with it and are starting to exploit it better. There are a lot of native apps now.

      So, my point is that Mach and BSD probably have very little to do with Mac OS X's timelines. Legacy-free hardware and new application environments and display technologies are much bigger jobs. I can see waiting for USB and FireWire to mature (and for three years of hardware to be out there with those ports) and making Carbon and Aqua being much harder overall than the really low-level stuff, which is decades more mature in many cases.

  • Mac Hardware (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have been a fan of mac hard ware for a long time now but have never bought any. This is because its so closed. I can't go buy a MotherBoard for the G4 and put it in my case. Well I could but I would be buying it from Apple. I think thay could of stomped Microsoft and Intel if thay where more open with their HardWare. I know I would buy a G4 and the likes if I could costomize it like I can X86 stuff. But then with the new Athlon's and P4's(which suck) G4's are looking less and less sexy.

    OH and I am still mad at them for what thay did to BeOS.

    011000011001111

    • Re:Mac Hardware (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Simba ( 15214 )

      Believe it or not, closed hardware is a good thing. This is why Apple, IBM, and Sun all have legendary support and OS integration statistics. They don't have to worry about a motherboard from Dr. Wong's House 'O Chips being so out of spec and cheap that it doesn't work with their software. They save money on support and portability issues by keeping their hardware under lock and key.

      The result of doing this is they are able to release a much higher quality "product" on the whole. Apple is a computer company. They sell computers. OS X is a tool to help them sell computers.

      Buying a Mac is like buying a BMW. Sure, it's more expensive then a Ford. But it's also faster, more reliable, and has a far greater build quality. It's also worth more should you wish to sell it a few years down the road and buy a new(er) one.

      Anyway, "still mad at them for what they did to BeOS" ? What exactly did Apple do to BeOS? It's more like what they did not do, they did not buy a company that would have failed to make something like OS X a reality in the short term. NeXT could, and did.

  • Pointless conflict. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dgou ( 542390 ) on Saturday December 15, 2001 @02:41AM (#2707566)
    Bickering proprietary 'nix vendors lost the chance to shut MicroSoft out. Now bickerin' open source 'nix lovers are doing the same. *BSD or Linux is irrelevant. "Its the interface, stupid."

    Apple at least has a chance to push past that and get to the meat'n'taters of selling apps built on a real multitasking protected memory O/S. Building on 'nix clone was a biz decision, not a political one. MicroSofts unity of vision (at least as presented outside the company) gives it enormous advantage over what should be an insurmountable enemy of open source fanatics working their asses off for nary a penny. Except for Divide and Conquer. MicroSoft didn't have to divide the 'nix community, its quite capable of doin' that itself... of shootin' itself in the feet, kneecaps and elbows.

    Here's hopin' that a strong market presence can bring some unity to the open source community, even if it is starting off with a few baby steps.

  • It;a always amusing to see what you guys think (Score:4, Insightful)

    by faust2097 ( 137829 ) on Saturday December 15, 2001 @05:19AM (#2707813)
    I always love reading Slashdot posts about Apple because a thousand people who haven't even touched a piece of Apple hardware in 5 years come forward and bitch. Yes, the Macintosh is a propietary platform, yes, the hardware is more expensive. The fact of the matter is though that there isn't a better end user experience in the world.

    Hey kids, you get what you pay for. Remember that little blurb about Linux only being free if your time is worth nothing? It's true and no computer commercially available today is as fast and easy to get rolling as a Mac. It might not be the king of the benchmarking circuit or the cheapest possible solution but the people giving their money to Apple aren't flushing it down a toilet as some would like to have you believe.

  • Developer Tools: A Quiet Revolution (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hiendohar ( 133407 ) on Saturday December 15, 2001 @08:19AM (#2708001) Journal
    One aspect of OS X that seems to have gone largely underreported is the decision to distribute developer tools with the operating system. The developer tools include the Project Builder IDE and Interface Builder GUI constructor, as well as gcc, gdb, cvs, make, perl, and the Java JDK.

    The integration with Java is alone remarkable; full Cocoa bindings means that your Java applications are no-less "mac-like" than apps implemented in c/c++/objective-c. The file-bundle structure (executables are packaged in hierarchical directories with resources and XML files providing metadata) completes the encapsulation: a Java app looks and launches just like any other.

    On the other hand, you can double-click ".jar" files, and programs that use AWT or Swing, and run them as well.

    Providing the facility to write first class programs "out of the box" is an important, if unheralded, aspect of Apple's "open" philosophy. It's a form of user empowerment. It may not go far enough to please the proponents of some open source ideologies, but for the great majority of personal computer users it represents more freedom than they know what to do with. I think it could have a significant effect in introducing people to programing. IANA Windows programmer, but my impression is that the barrier to entry is considerably higher.
  • I hope that Jordan Hubbard being employed by Apple does a little bit to speed the development of the PPC FreeBSD port. Linux on PPC has some serious issues (most notably random lockups, due to which I had a very important ext2 partition NOT survive an fsck the other day, causing me to lose about a week and a half of work). 2.2 was much more stable, but 2.4 performs significantly better.

    I would love to run a more solid OS on my Powerbook, but the FreeBSD port isn't in a useable state yet, and OS X has a few interface issues that just make it COMPLETELY unuseable for me. First of all, the menu bar at the top of the screen. While I understand the appeal, it breaks any hope of using sloppy focus - you can be in a situation where you simply can't get to the menu bar of an app without crossing over another application's window, which would give it the focus and change the menubar. Sure, you could rearrange the windows so you can get up to the menubar, but that's an annoyance and kinda annuls the main point of using sloppy focus in the first place (speed)! Second of all, and this is a minor bitch because it can be easily fixed, I need GOOD virtual desktop support. Space.app just doesn't cut it. I need virtual desktops to switch quickly and to have FUCKING HOTKEYS! Third, and again, this is easily fixed (but I'm surprised it hasn't been yet) - how about a decent native terminal emulation? Terminal.app is shit! My terminal application should NOT eat my page up/page down keys.

    *deep breath*. Ok, now that I've gotten that off my chest... :) I'm probably going to end up reinstalling OS X.1 on my laptop sometime in the next few days, just because I can't trust the Linux kernel on PPC, which is a shame because I use Classic apps fairly frequently and Mac-on-Linux runs much better than OS X's Classic on lower-end hardware (I'm running a Powerbook G3 Wallstreet, 292mhz, 192MB RAM). Maybe I'll take a crack at writing a decent virtual desktop enabler. But DAMMIT, I want FreeBSD :( Oh well. I'll probably just end up running OS X with Xfree86 most of the time.
    • OK. I'm typing this from a FreeBSD workstation, so believe me that I'm not trolling. I would like to see the FreeBSD/PPC port come along a little further too. However, we BSD lovers already have a couple of options besides OS X, which is lovely, but somewhat slow on older hardware.

      Try NetBSD on your PowerBook. I had the opportunity to play with NetBSD the other day. It is not as friendly to set up as FreeBSD, but it is not bad. Just as with FreeBSD, it found and Just Worked(tm) with all of my hardware (Linux generally takes some fanagaling).

      NetBSD should support your PowerBook. They seem to support every other damn piece of hardware known to man.

      NetBSD seems to have a really clean design, and it feels good if you are used to FreeBSD as well.

      Also, I hear OpenBSD works well with the Macs. I generally find that OpenBSD makes a pretty good workstation.

      Well, I hope this helps. On a side note, if OS X has done nothing else for BSD, it has made my Mac friends nod in approval when I say that I'm a BSD guy.


      -Peter

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