Could Apple's Intel Desktop Threaten Linux? 818
esavard writes "
If Linux enthusiasts don't want
Mac OSX on Intel to become a threat
for the future of Linux Desktop, they must rethink the concept of Desktop as we know it today.
Symphony OS did exactly that and propose some fresh concepts about how a desktop should and should not be.
If you want to know more about Symphony OS, a good starting point is a Wikipedia article
describing the innovations proposed by this new desktop OS. The Linux Desktop Community must encourage such initatives
massively to compete against Mac OSX and Windows."
Symphony looks like the Apple Lisa? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma... (Score:5, Interesting)
We discussed this earlier this week when Dvorak trie d to piss on everyone's parade with the same opinion.
It was BS then. Its BS now. All Apple on x86 does is give street cred to the idea of switching away from the Bitch from Redmond. Eveeryone else benefits at that point.
In other news - the sun shines, the earth rotetes, life goes on.
Why should OS X be a threat? (Score:5, Interesting)
Forget the desktop... (Score:3, Interesting)
Here are some market stats for the first quarter of 2005:
Mobile Phone Handsets:
170 million units sold (19% growth YTY)
PCs:
46.2 million units sold (11% growth YTY)
iPods:
5.3 million units sold (558% growth YTY)
PDAs:
3.4 million units sold (25% growth YTY)
Video Games (Portable):
3.8 million units sold (72% growth YTY)
Volume rules...control mobile platforms, and the desktop comes for free. That's where Linux UI developers should focus their efforts.
Re:Beautiful (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, for one, that's just putting words in my mouth. I never said that any package systems "were not ready for the desktop". I said that package systems create a dependency hell in complex systems that's just as bad as DLL Hell.
Secondly, my post pointed out that Windows tends to fall flat with mislinked associations, broken application, and other "minor" issues that are quite annoying to users.
Thirdly, *what* Windows XP package manager? The closest thing Microsoft has to such a beast is the MSI format. And that's not so much a package format (where package format is defined as a standard structure to track dependencies and thus maintain system integrity) as it is a standardized installer archive. And even then, I've met a couple of programs that I couldn't install because something was screwed up in the checks done by the MSI or Installer program.
Re:Beautiful (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh well, my macs will be up for grabs (to be shoved up Stevo's you-know-what) as I move back to Fedora on 64bit.. I wanted OSX because it was 64 bit and Open Source.. I was a sucker, I believed the marketing
Why does processor make a difference? (Score:3, Interesting)
Supposedly Intel processor makes Apple somehow better? What is it, speed? What else? But then, does this mean that the Linux community is filled with people who don't use MacOS X ONLY because Apple isn't making Intel-based Macs? I somehow find this to be hard to believe.
Re:Why should OS X be a threat? (Score:4, Interesting)
Both will get dropped. iwon't buy any Mac with an x86 CPU or without OpenFirmware. Simple as that.
Anyone who knows a little about Chip design or actually just did some Assembly programming on more than just x86 knows what a crippled and cumbersome Archtecture x86 is.
And anyone who knows a little about PC Startup knows what cumbersome and crippled process the whole BIOS (in combination with the good ol' blessed x86 real mode) is.
The recent Slashdot story about the Mach kernel with all the wrappers around it being an intense Performance hog did make me think a little. Mircrokernels rule, Mach is just an outdated implementation put into wrappers to make it backward compatible. Now Apple computers will have the same sticky things happening on the CPU level as well.
I guess I'll start building my own computer. ARM Kits aren't that expensive. And with a few friends in manufactoring I can put them in shiny cases too. Or that new open Cell Platform could be interesting too.
More like, Linux is a threat to Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact is that the Linux GUI is constatnly approaching "Apple Quality" and it will only be a metter of a few years before it gets there. Apple is trying to position themselves so that they can skimm off the top of the Linux boom and cut out a niche for themselves.
Re:Beautiful (Score:3, Interesting)
And that's a very lovely idea and will make for very easy packag installation. It is not something you'll ever get on FOSS Linux however. The FOSS software community improves it software in an evolutionary sort of way - you get a whole lot of different versions of basic libraries and tools, and eventually you get some consensus on them. The key is that the whole system can be overturned - perhaps E17 will turn out to be truly amazing and a shift will occur, perhaps Y-Windows will get completed and turn out to be well worth pursuing... the point is that these decisions are made not by corporate management, but simply by what manages to get the most hackers interested in and coding for/with it.
What I'm really trying to say is that FOSS is utterly chaotic, but draws strength from those chaotic qualities. What you're talking about is eliminating some of that chaos - and I think there's certainly merit in that idea, I just don't think it will mix well with FOSS. If you want a organised mandated structured set of required libraries and APIs use Apple (or start your own OS). If you want the masses of software and vitality of the FOSS world, you have to accept a certain amount of chaos in return. What we need is better mays of managing that chaos: I don't think we can eliminate it.
Even singular repositories screw up. A few years ago when I tried Debian, I ran into dependency hell out of the main repository. That wasn't supposed to happen. I've even had it happen in my favorite repository, the FreeBSD ports tree.
But things are getting better. Check out Smart [smartpm.org] a new dependency resolver with far better algorithms than apt (along with more flexibility at the backend package level). As I said, I don't think you can eliminate the chaos, but you can do a lot better job of dealing with it.
Repositories are useless for commercial software. I understand that OSS developers think everything should be free as in Airplane Peanuts, and free as free to go to a Hawaian Backyard Party, but there are still plenty of examples of commercial software that can't go in these repositories.
And that's where things like Autopackage [autopackage.org] come in. As long as your base libraries are managed by something like Smart, then Autopackage is fine for those 3rd party extras - it will use the libraries if you have them, but it can grab whatever else it needs if you don't.
Don't fight FOSS's strengths, instead figure out how best to cope with the weaknesses that are the flipside of the strengths.
Jedidiah.
What's so wrong w/ KDE or Gnome (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Beautiful (Score:3, Interesting)
But from a standpoint of supporting a diverse ecology of software producers and lots of competition, the cathedral isn't the most desirable structure. It seems that when one pays a draconian cost (central control) to solve smaller problems (package dependencies, file locations), it might not be the best deal in the end.
The part that boggles my mind about this argument is that the Cathedral already exists. Distro maintainers that use central packaging systems have already agreed to be that Cathedral. If they could leverage that Cathedral slightly more (e.g. a standard API base), then there would be less work and fewer frustrations for everyone.
Re:Beautiful (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Beautiful (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm really not so sure that would work as well as you suggest. Many of the distros survive by letting you install as much or as little as you want, by letting use GNOME or KDE or XFCE or *box or play with dev versions of E17. The distros themselves work hard to remain flexible in what software they suck up and include in the distribution.
I'm sure, if you wanted to you could mandate a firm API - just don't expect FOSS developers to necessarily agree and develop against the paritcular APIs you chose. Try telling the Firefox crew to abandon XUL and use pure GTK+ or QT. Who knows where the next must have app will come from - maybe someone will develop a truly revolutionary new "must have" application using Mono - are you using Mono for your mandated API?
There is as much life and vitality in FOSS as there is because the developer can use whatever library, whatever API suits his or her needs. The distributions, in turn, keep an open and flexible system to make it easy to add new libraries or applications using new or different or otherwise obscure APIs.
Linux, I think, does as well as it does because it can rally such a vast array of applications, and it does that by supporting applications using the console, pure GTK+, QT, GNOME, KDElibs, FLTK, Edje, XUL, Mono, or whatever takes your fancy. Apple does well because it has cornered a niche and has a pretty guaranteed market, so plenty of people are willing to develop for it - particularly in the commercial software for designers realm. Apple also gets support via Fink, but from what I gather that's back to the dependency management and lack of rigid APIs thatb you're complaining about. A new OS, or distro is not going to get much use if it can't get enough applications - if you can't promise a market like Apple can, and you can't promise freedom to develop however you like as Linux can, well... I suspect you end up like BeOS and NeXT, just hoping you can get bought out by someone bigger.
Jedidiah.
Re:Beautiful (Score:3, Interesting)
OSX has
If you need libraries you're going to have to install them. OSX might want you to put everything into a single statically linked binary but it really doesn't work that way, except for very simple applications.. that's why you build
Unfortunately because there's no uninstall your hard drive gets clogged up with all the apps you've installed and you eventually have to reformat. I've had to do this twice since I got my Mini due to libraries and whole applications sticking themselves on the disk and unable to remove them.
Re:Beautiful (Score:2, Interesting)
There is nothing "simple" about having a different package upgrade mechanism for every program.
If developers DO require more functionality, they can put that extra code into libraries that are inside the application bundle. Since it's usually very application-specific code, it's not going to be something that other apps are going to need/want, so there's no issues with wasted space due to non-dynamic libraries.
You're confusing cause and effect. It's not that Apple has magically figured out which packages make most real-worlddevelopers happy, it's that Apple's developer and user community has become reduced to a group of people that happen to be happy with very little. For a regular UNIX user, the Macintosh is painfully limiting.
Re:Beautiful (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Beautiful (Score:5, Interesting)
A solution that seems to make the most sense to me, which nobody seems to have tried yet, is the following:
Don't rely on one big repository (e.g. debian, gentoo, etc.) but also don't make the whole thing file-based like in OSX. Do keep repositories if you want, but in addition to having a bunch of basic repositories, (e.g. Ubuntu vs. Debian Unstable) you also put information not only on what other packages are required, but also how to get those other packages into each package.
For example, this could be done by pointing to a bunch of mirrored URLs that point to some XML data describing the package at that mirror. The installer could pick the most recent version, choose the fastest mirror, whatever.
Additionally, some sort of 'compound packages' would be useful. That way, you can ship rare libraries directly with the application. They may or may not be installed once downloaded, depending if you've already got the same or a newer version of them on your system. This could be especially helpful for systems that don't have internet connectivity. (gasp!)
Sure, it's not perfect, but it beats RPMs (I use SUSE so I experience this myself) and the debian system any day, because you can just go and download packages off the internet and install them, without having to go and hunt for the dependencies yourself. Most likely whoever made the package actually had the necessary libraries installed (and the package system can remember where he got them from!) so all that is needed is to convey that information to the user's system.
The case where it breaks down is of course when all the mirrors eventually die, for example if a package ends up becoming unmaintained. But if it's not been updated for that long, it and its dependencies could be added to the various monolithic repositories. I'm sure organisations would pop up that would keep 'dead' packages around for people to use. The way to combat this would be to have as much redundancy as possible, of course.
I don't know. It might just work better than what we've got at the moment?
~phil
Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh (Score:2, Interesting)
The thing that you can find in Control Panel > Software. It's far from perfect, but at least it lets me see all the installed software on a system and remove it with a single mouse click. It's not as nice as Linux package managers, but it's a whole lot nicer than Macintosh, where I have to go hunting around the file system and can never be sure whether dragging the application into the trash will actually remove all traces of it (in fact, it won't).
Secondly, my post pointed out that Windows tends to fall flat with mislinked associations, broken application, and other "minor" issues that are quite annoying to users.
Macintosh and Windows both permit, but don't require, applications to modify global system directories on install. Applications that do will be susceptible to this on either platform. So, there is no intrinsic difference between Windows and Macintosh in this area.
Linux needs Spotlight, badly (Score:3, Interesting)
Having said that: If Linux doesn't come up with a live search technology like Spotlight in OS X, the personal desktop aspect of it is dead in the water. "Tiger" comes with a lot of hype (I am completely underwhelmed by Automator, for example) but Spotlight is awesome. Together with the Neolight plugin for the OpenOffice format (thanks for the quick work, guys!), live search has changed the way I use my computer in a very basic way. Want to listen to a certain song? Just type in the name. Need somebody's telephone number? Just type in the name. It takes a while to get used to, but after a while it becomes the interface of choice. For those of us who don't like mice (regardless of how many buttons they have), it is bliss.
So, there is simply no way I will be using an operating system for my desktop anymore that doesn't have this function. Unfortunately, and this is where I wonder if Linux can cut it, because Spotlight seems to involve changing the code of very basic Unix commands like cp to work. How is Linux going to make that happen? The patch would seem to apply not only to the kernel, but also to user space programs that are outside of the kernel developer's control. And remember, Spotlight also works from the command line, too. This is a biggie.
I'm really wondering how this is going to get into Linux.
Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't have a "Software" icon. I assume you mean "Add or Remove Programs"?
If so, be aware that it is *not* a package manager under the definition I gave. If you're not clear on what a package manager is, please reread the description I gave in the grandparent post.
And I have to disagree about it sucking less than OS X. Under OS X, I just drag the applicaiton to the trash and empty it. No more program. Under Windows I have to use an uninstall program that rarely even removes all of the program files, much less extraneous files left behind.
The only weakness on OS X is the installer. However, that installer is almost never used for user programs. Only Unix utilities and system updates use it. Most users will ignore any desktop program that comes in an installer. (Which usually just builds an APP folder anyway, but the develoers didn't understand Mac distribution.)
Mac os will still only run on Mac's.... sure? (Score:2, Interesting)
If there is OSX running on x86 there will be a patch to run it on a PC 10 days after release.
If Microsoft could not stop people for running Linux on the Xbox, even with full control of the hardware, what can Apple do against someone making a patch to make it run on PCs..... !!!?????
Thats much easier to do, and probably you will not require a modchip, and if you think you need hardware to emulate the firmware, then someone will make the hardware mod.
In conclusion, if OSX is released for inteles, it will run in regular PC's sooner than later. I bet you there will be dual boot PC's in a few months afterwards. I hope Steve Jobs is considering that.....
-Ale
OSX software installation far behind Linux.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Admittedly I'm a reluctant user of OSX, having to use it at work from time to time and haven't spend more than a couple of weeks working with it. From the outset, a useability deficit was immediately apparent; OSX still hasn't provided a means of finding software and delivering it to the user.
How depressing it was to find that Apple users are still stuck with the oldest problem in software installation, and that is finding the software first. Windows users considering switching will find this to be as depressing as it was on win32, and similarly we hear Mac users that have moved to Linux cheer endlessly about the ease of software installation using a system such as apt.
So boring it is to spend countless hours trawling around websites looking for software, and there's so little on the machine out-of-the-box. OSX really doesn't push much further than the windows paradigm in this regard. There's this fink but last time I tried it was all a bit hacky and suffered issues worse than those in any Linux distribution I've used.
In short, nothing I've tried comes close to software installation in Linux; Linux brings the software to me.
Where the *.dmg is concerned, while convenient (once you have actually found the bloody thing), it is certainly not unique to the Apple platform. Linux already has two perfectly good solutions to this would-be problem.
One is http://autopackage.org/ [autopackage.org], and a completely different approach (and quite impressive) is Klik http://klik.atekon.de/ [atekon.de].
Then again last time I looked searching for a package and clicking the conspicously named "Install" button in Kpackage or Synaptic seems to suit vast numbers of lazy, or just plain busy Linux users out there.
The beauty of Autopackage is, as a developer, I can make one package for all distributions of Linux. With Klik, I only 'install' the software for that session (in fact it is run from cache).
Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh (Score:3, Interesting)
People keep saying this, but I just haven't found it to be true. I've used a Mac for about two years now, and in that entire time I have never had an APP screw up my system. The only APP I have that even installs a kernel module (a VPN client) loads the module dynamically. Which means that the module will get cleared by the next reboot at the worst.
So, would someone like to produce some actual evidence of an APP damaging their system?
Nice review about SymphonyOS (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed, I have painted the ideal, but seriously in most cases this is actually how it works. Very rarely do modern apps every install other binaries outside of the bundle. Removing the app is seriously as simple as moving it to the Trash and emptying it. If an app happens to leave any binaries on the system, than it's merely one of those rare misbehaving programs, and life goes on. I suppose that's why Mac OS X's usage growth is increasing and Linux's growth is decreasing? Now we see that you're just a troll, because you don't and probably can't back up your claims. What would possibly make 'complex software configurations' impossible on Mac OS X? Hmm?
Re:Windows XP installer sucks less than Macintosh (Score:3, Interesting)
I call bullshit.
This is a load of shit, the add/remove programs absolutely does not remove all traces for many applications on windows. 3 days ago I was installing America's Army 2.4 on my Athlon. Since I downloaded the full installer I had to use add/remove programs, choose remove app, then go to the Program Files folder and remove the folder that is left behind.
If the damned add/remove programs system actually worked worth a damn, I'd not have registry traces left behind by apps, and "registry cleaners" would be pointless. Not only does the add/remove programs not remove all of the crap that a program installs, some apps come with spyware that stays on the system after uninstalling the original app, and has no listing. On OSX or linux even I can trash the equivalent to windows messenger (which I don't and won't use and is simply another exploitable hole), and expect it to expect it to stay gone without resorting to registry hacking or the like. And before it's asked XP Pro, yes I've removed this shit by hand, no it was not something a normal user could do, and I use either Trillian or Fire, depending on which machine I am using, and lastly no I don't use IM on Linux, all my linux boxes are servers and GUI/Head-less.
What would be good of Apple to do is to make a disk clean up wizard (perhaps Symantec or whoever is in the cleaning up business . Which can check your preferences to see which aren't being used. Frankly I don't mind using the extra space since sometimes I remove a multiple gig game, and can reinstall it at any time without losing my save games.