Re: War on the Wintrolls

On Thu, 18 May 2006 03:34:36 -0700, Donald L McDaniel wrote:


"Snit" <SNIT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:C0915476.4E88C%SNIT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"TheLetterK" <non@xxxxxxxx> stated in post
pan.2006.05.18.02.38.02.42697@xxxxxxxx on 5/17/06 7:38 PM:

Don't worry--you'll get tired of it again in 2-3 years. OS X has some
very
fundamental problems, in both the UI and in the underlying technology.

Such as?

Trying to meld the Nextstep UI with the Mac OS UI, for one. Causes quite
a few UI inconsistencies, that. OS X's interface is actually rather
schizophrenic compared to something like GNOME--it takes random concepts
from Nextstep (like, say, the dock) and marries them to seemingly random
concepts from Mac OS (like, say, the Mac OS style menu bar).

How are the dock and the menu inconsistent?

With the examples cited above, you end up having Mac OS's
document-oriented
menuing system combined with Nextstep's atrocious window management.
Sure,
Apple put together a kludge to alleviate the immediate symptom
(Expose)--but a
more elegant (and intuitive) solution would have been to simply fix the
underlying UI inconsistency that causes the problem in the first place.

What inconsistency?

Don't even get me started on the stupidity of Apple's decision to use XNU
for OS X's kernel. They would have been much, much better off using a
real
BSD kernel.

In your opinion.

Users just don't realize it for awhile. Apple's philosophy regarding
software design and pricing isn't exactly endearing either.

Well, that's a personal matter, isn't it? I mean, if one takes the
attitude (as I do) that Macs cost what Macs cost, and don't pay too much
attention to it, then Apple's pricing doesn't mean too much.

If you don't care about pricing, the pricing doesn't matter? How
profound.
I think I now understand why Apple has 3% of the desktop PC market.

I do care about pricing. Apple offers me better value. You may decide
differently... so be it.

I switched to
Mac. Then figured out it was a waste of money and switched to Linux.

Interesting. I tried Linux and figured out that its a waste of my TIME:

Me too, George.


1) Steep learning curve

Less steep than OS X, really. If I handed someone a pre-installed Ubuntu
or SuSE box, I'd lay good money on a new user figuring out how to work
with it before they would OS X on a new Mac.

I had absolutely no trouble with the OS X learning curve. I was up and
running within minutes, while I could waste a whole day trying to figure out
Linux.

1999 called, they want their complaint back. Really, try something
released in (at least) the last year or so. GNU/Linux advances a lot
faster than Windows or OS X does, so even an 8 month hiatus could be long
enough to have your problems fixed.



You have nothing to back that up though, do you? Not a shred of
evidence.

2) Real "geeky" UI

"Geeky" AND confusing.

Less confusing than OS X, if you're interested in anything other than what
Apple ships OOTB. About the same as OS X, if your expectations are that
low.



How so?

3) Very little results - I.E. essentially no major software, and
Linux equivalents are feature poor

Most of the people I hear complaining about OSS software make the
claim that the UIs are bad, not that the applications are lacking
features. Can you cite some examples (maybe four or five major Linux
applications that are lacking major features compared to their Windows
or OS X equivalents)?

Does Gimp have anything like "smart objects"? I do not know.

Does OO.o have *real* MS Office compatibility. Last I used it the
answer was no. Like it or not that is important.

OOo has better Office compatibility than Office does OOo compatibility
(Though that'll change whenever someone writes an ODF plugin for Office.
It's good enough for most people. Most of the problems arise when you have
objects from other parts of Office embedded in word documents.


In addition, OO.o has no PIM/email/Usenet client as Office does.

So pick one of the myriad options--Evolution is decent enough.

Too
bad that Sun decided to remove the email client when they "improved"
Star Office and renamed it OpenOffice.

StarOffice still exists. It's a commercial version of OpenOffice, with a
few extras added (and commercial support, for companies that want another
company to yell at when things go wrong). I'm also not aware that any
e-mail client was ever included in StarOffice.



What does Linux have to compare with Dreamweaver? Flash? Illustrator?
iLife?

Is that a "rhetorical" question?


, slow to get problems corrected,

Uhh, what world are you living in? Even wintrolls hesitate to say that
OSS
software (on the whole) has a slow release cycle.

Slow release cycles and slow to get problems solved need not be the
same thing.

and suffer
from the well known "too many chefs in the soup" syndrome.

My brother and I get in constant arguments because of that syndrome (but
in the kitchen, rather than the office).


Can you support this claim? OSS has a different development model,
yes. GNU/Linux also tends to be a fairly chaotic platform, as a whole.
But there are a lot of advantages to going in every direction at once.

There are also downsides... such as much less consistency which leads
to a harder to use system.

Not cutting it down, mind you, just didn't like it.

Just like how I think OS X is, at best, a mediocre operating system.
Certainly not worth paying Apple's premium for it.
X
"Premium"? $129 for an off-the-shelf copy of OS? When XP Retail costs
anywhere from $199 (for Home) to $299 (for Pro)?

And Novell Desktop Linux, which goes for only $50? Or Ubuntu, which you
can get shipped to you *for free*? Both of which include far more software
than OS X does?


A "free" OS is worth exactly what you pay for it, in my opinion. And it
really isn't so "free", anyway, when one factors in the download time to
download a minimum of 3 CD images

I don't think I've burned a three CD set for a Linux distro in the last...
three years. Many, many distributions these days have netinstall images
(Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo, etc), where the installation system
downloads the required packages during installation. Debian's installers
will fit on two floppies--or a USB key drive. Or you could netboot the
installer and need no media at all.

, and burn them to a CD,

That's the easiest method, but certainly not the only one.

and the EXTRA
download time (as well as the stress) to re-download them, when your
download goes wild, and you wind up downloading a crapped out image
rather than an OS.

In four years of using Linux and playing musical distributions, I've had
that happen exactly *once*.

And not to mention the unresolved dependances from
missing files.

Again, what was the last distribution you used? Redhat 8? Use a decent
distribution, like Debian (or Ubuntu, if you're looking for something
brain-dead simple).


And then the commandline configuration for hardware without Linux
drivers which one must be punished with because of downloading a "free"
OS.

A) You don't *have* to configure anything on the CLI, unless you have some
very strange hardware. If it bothers you, use something like SuSE, with a
fancy graphical configuration frontend for everything. OpenSuSE costs
nothing, and neither does the commercial evaluation version.
B) OS X's hardware support is *even more limited than Linux's*.

And the recompiling of the Kernal when you finally find a driver
for that hardware, cause the OS you downloaded doesn't include it in the
pre-compiled Kernal.

That is a blatant lie. Linux loadable kernel modules have been around
since Linux 1.2 (back in 1995).
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: War on the Wintrolls
    ... Trying to meld the Nextstep UI with the Mac OS UI, ... then Apple's pricing doesn't mean too much. ... Then figured out it was a waste of money and switched to Linux. ... download a minimum of 3 CD images, and burn them to a CD, and the EXTRA ...
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