Marvin

XNU is the Mach Kernel and parts from FreeBSD put together.

Got to love wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_kernel

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"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without trying to invent any more of it."

MBirchmeier

(Mainly at Marvin) so what's the problem with the way OS X has done things, it looks like they did a bit of research, figured out, than pick and choose what *nix functionality people wanted, layred some UI based on customer research, then used their weight in the industry to promote a popular, standardized OS based on their design and usability research.

Is this not a good first push for moving people over to a *nix platform, and if not what should change, or what would you expect to work?

-MBirchmeier

Marvin

OS X has done a great job. But you have to own an apple to use it and that is not cheap. Please dont tell me you can run it on your non-apple PC, because its illegal and apple never inteded it in the design to run on all hardware. The thing that makes OS X so stable is the limited amount of hardware it has to support.

It does have its issues. Apple have app packages which all you have to do is copy from the disc and then move to the applications folder or where ever you want. To uninstall its seems simple, you just delete the app package. But that does not remove the libs and settings files it created on its first run. So its not perfect, but it is simple. There is the installer program which some software uses, but there again no uninstall capability in that program.

OS X and Linux are quite different from the users perspective. KDE and Gnome are nothing like the Apple GUI.

There is of course alot of commercial software for it, which is because there is only one version of Mac OS X (i know about the sever version but its not designed to run user software). There is one set of API's, one file system layout and one config file layout. You can say that when you publish your softwarem, open source or commercial it will run for example on OS X 10.3.9 or better. With linux you get told you need to have x version of this lib, y version of this app for your software to run. Dependencies are still there, no matter how much you hide it in a package manager.

If linux were to become like OS X, having a standard API, file system layout, and config file structure. It would be alot easier to distribute software. You just say you need linux standard version x or better for this to run.

If a commercail software company wants to port its programs to linux it needs to be able to know what version of libs, systems app you have to support it. Just imgaine calling customer support and saying you have linux version 2.6.12, Gnome 2.12, libc 2.4 etc, you could be on the phone for ages and probably get no where in idetefying where the problem lies. Now if you could say i have a linux distro that adheres to my linux standard verison x, the customer service rep can say "ah yes, we found an issue with that on some pc's download this patch". Would that not be a great advantage for commercial software companys.

Just to add, with this system distributions creators could add updates to their older os's in one huge patch, rather like service packs. The patch would upgrade the system form my linux standard x to x+1(or whatever). So much simpler than downloading 50 packages to modernise your linux system.

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"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without trying to invent any more of it."

uman

There is a push to standardize Linux distributions. It's called LSB.

Just to nitpick, KDE and Gnome aren't part of Linux proper. You can certainly run them on top of Darwin, and you can certainly run a Linux distribution without them. I hardly ever use Linux, but when I do it's with Fluxbox.

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King

With most package managers you can just click update and it does everything for you, this is not simple enough for you? And the good thing about doing it by updating the packages separately is if you want you can go in and pick and choose what you want to update; you can't do that with a service packs in Windows or MacOS. Linux gives you more control over your system. Also, installing programs in Linux isn't really all that difficult anymore (for the most part). With package managers it clearly outlines what you need for the new package to work. And for bigger commercial software they usually have there own installer for it, and it will tell you if it needs something you don't have, which I have been running into less and less lately. The way Linux does things isn’t for everyone, so if you don’t like it stick with Windows or MacOS, simple as that.

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I am Addicted to Linux!

Marvin

I think linux has a great future, but only if it gets windows and Mac OS X simple. The average PC user want something that is easy to get their work done. They dont want to worrie about what needs updating, one update to update the whole system is easy and simple. Flexibity is what geeks want, so they can tweek etc. The average user simply does not care. They want easy support, commercial apps, and no hastle.

Linux can do this, then we will be able to say its the year of linux on the desktop. The whole development mentality has to change. Instead of making it soley for geeks who love to learn how to install invidual packages and tweek the config file, they need to make it user friendly for the average user. You can keep the complex stuff, but make stuff simpler.

Your average PC user does not even appreciate what an OS is let alone there is an alternative. If linux became more user friendly, easy to maintain(Service Packs etc) just like OS X and Windows do then it will increase in useage quickly. If that happens commercial apps will be ported, therefore making it even more attractive for your average user. Then we might see linux on your average PC you get from the superstore.

Im not sure however that the Linux geeks who write most of the software really care about this. They just want something that is not windows and is free. If that is the case Windows and OS X will be the main desktop OS for the next 10 years.

P.S. When i say Linux i mean GNU/Linux. I am talking about linux on the desktop, not on servers, clusters etc. I know at server level you dont need a GUI and the administrator should know alot about Linux so does not need a single install system or any stadards. So please listen, i am talking about linux for the average desktop user.

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Jimbo

About the updating thing: back when I was using FC4 (a little over a year ago, and it was my first Linux distro), about once a week there'd be a little icon in the taskbar that would have a list of all the packages that needed updating. I could just hit OK and Continue a few times and it would fetch the new .rpms, check dependencies, and install everything. At that point I didn't know what any of the packages were except for the kernel and a handful of others. It was like Windows Update, only it happened a lot more often. I'm pretty sure Ubuntu has something similar, though I never really used it (I've got a installation disc for when I clear a hard drive though...). Now, running Gentoo (where I can tweak all I want), when it comes time to update, I can just type "sudo emerge --sync; sudo emerge -uD world" and it'll update all the packages on my computer to the latest releases (in the case of dependency collisions or blockage, it'll stop before installing anything). Of course, it takes forever to install stuff from source, and things get updated quite often, but I can just update when I want. From my limited experience, I'd assume that system updating is pretty well covered.

As for software, many things do have counterparts on a Linux system. For browsers there's Firefox and Opera, plus KDE and Gnome each have Konqueror and Epiphany respectively. For office productivity, there's OpenOffice. For software development, there is always the text editor of choice + gcc (or appropriate compiler), but there's also several IDEs (Anjuta, KDevelop, Eclipse). Graphics has some issues, with Gimp being the closest replacement for Photoshop, and not much else (that I know of) to compete with Adobe's suite. Flash also has very poor support (no Flash 8 plugin AFAIK, they're waiting till Flash 9 comes out to release the next Linux version). And there's obviously more, but it's slowly changing.

Hardware as mentioned is possibly one of the biggest weaknesses of a Linux system. I know that video drivers are a pain from nVidia and ATI (Intel has open-source drivers IIRC, but who wants Intel graphics? :p). Printer support is lacking at best (this I know first-hand). As was mentioned, one of Apple's secrets to stability is the extremely limited hardware set they support. And one of Windows' greatest successes IMHO is their mostly functional support for almost any piece of hardware (yes, some still need drivers, but it's not nearly as big of an issue; the Windows HCL covers a good share of what a typical user will have).

Linux over the past few years seems to have become much more friendly for new users (I don't know first-hand, first tried it a year ago myself). The desktop oriented distros (FC, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc...) are making strides to automate or at least simplify many of the difficulties in maintaining a Linux system. However, each one is taking a slightly different approach, which is the Linux way of doing things, I guess. That's just how it goes...

big_k105

I have to agree with Marvin on this one, there does need to be more standardization in the linux world. Package management would be one to think about. It would be nice if all distro's used the same package manager, this way once you learn how it works you can still use any distro out there and you can install packages just fine. I personally find the Ports system to be one of the best package managers there is. One thing that I think could be improved is the way gentoo installs proprietary software. Like take a look at how you install Sun's version of Java, you have to run the emerge command once and it gives you a url to download a package and put it somewhere and then you have to run the same emerge command you just ran over again so that this time I can install that package that you had to download from Sun. Well this could be simplified if say sun had an installer that once you download the package you run it by either entering it in cmd line or you double click on it and then the system will automaticly know that it needs to run the portage system to install it and find the dependencies. I know this route wouldn't be perfect but it would make it alittle easier then the way you have to install propietery software as of now with gentoo. This way atleast portage would still have it on record of what software is installed and what dependencies it installed with it.

Another thing that has been mentioned is the layout of the file system. Every distro does the layout slightly different. The main structure is the same but placement of different files are in different places. The linux community needs to agree on where everything should be put so that everything is in the same place no matter what distro you are running. This along would make creating installers alot easier as you wouldn't have to figure out what distro you are running so that you can tell the installer what distro you have so it can figure out what layout that distro is using so that it can finally install the files where that specific distro likes things put.


One other thing though. I personally can't see linux ever being fully adopted by the mass public, and to tell you the truth I think in the back of every geeks head they are saying please do not become a widely used OS. The reason I think it is because we geeks like to be different, and using linux besides the fact that we consider it better then other OS's out there we also know that it makes us alittle different. But as linux is growing more and more popular, it is actually making the OS we use the norm and most geeks don't like to be normal so once Linux is adopted by the masses we are all going to end up switching what we use. I don't know how many people feel like that but I think that it has some truth to it. If you don't think it does then I guess it don't matter.

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BIG K aka Kyle
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Please do not PM or email me programming questions. Post them in the forums instead.

King

@ Marvin
OK, stop saying "make it easier to maintain"... if you want easy, click the full update button in your package manager and it will do everything for you... if you are too fucking retarded to be able to click a button then you should be killed. As far as having commercial apps for Linux, there are some... but for the most part people use Linux for free software, so they don’t give a shit about commercial software. These “average PC users” you are talking about should use Windows if they don’t like how Linux is doing things.

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I am Addicted to Linux!

Marvin

Thats exactly the feeling I get from using the distributions and reading some of the comments made. Geeks want linux to stay in the domain of the geek. Though that would mean that windows will be #1 for the next 10 years+. If Mac OS X could make inroads by making more reliable cheaper hardware(a contraction i know) then it might take 20%+ within 5-10 years.

Linux's one advantage is that its free as in beer (most people dont care about the speech part). There is alos alot of forums that will support it. But its just not a feesable replacement for your average user.

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"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without trying to invent any more of it."