4 ms·

Easy wins. As much as I love downloading and building everything from source... actually, no, I hate that. Apple built that first easy app install experience,

by paul 17y ago

Easy wins. As much as I love downloading and building everything from source... actually, no, I hate that. Apple built that first easy app install experience, and that's the reason people love it, not because of some ideological preference.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago
"downloading and building everything from source"? Look, I'm typing this on a MacBook, but that's the most ridiculously outdated Linux cliché in the book. The App store is just package management, which Linux has had for a while, and which Mac OS X is sadly missing.
- glhaynes 17y ago
  "The App store is just package management, which Linux has had for a while, and which Mac OS X is sadly missing." Ergo the users of Macs would have a better install/uninstall experience if they were running Linux. Ummm, OK.
  - SwellJoe 17y ago
    Ergo the users of Macs would have a better install/uninstall experience if they were running Linux. Ummm, OK. I don't understand your sarcastic tone...they would have a better install/uninstall process if they were running Linux. Mac OS X has horrible package management (effectively none), while apt-get and yum are really, really good.
    - glhaynes 17y ago
      The average install/uninstall process is ridiculously easier on Mac OS X. Literally, it's: 1. Drag the single icon (regardless of instruction set or sizeof(int)) into your Applications folder. 2. Double-click the icon. Oh yeah, step 1 is optional. Certainly if Mac OS X were primarily used for installing command line tools / daemons, a package manager would be a stark omission. But that's not what the incredibly vast majority of its users do with it. For the average Mac OS X user, application management is more pleasant than for the average Linux user.
      - SwellJoe 17y ago
        The average install/uninstall process is ridiculously easier on Mac OS X. Literally, it's: 1. Drag the single icon (regardless of instruction set or sizeof(int)) into your Applications folder. 2. Double-click the icon. What icon? Where do I find this icon? Does it magically appear on my desktop? Nope...you've got to go find the website, and then the download page, or you have to go out and buy the CD or DVD that contains the software. On a Linux system, if I know what it's called or what it does, I can find it and install it easily, using either a GUI or the command line. And, of course, it works well for things beyond simple applications, including packages and systems of packages that include hundreds or thousands of files. A weakness should not be held up as a strength. There are many strengths to Mac OS X, but package management is not one of them.
        glhaynes 17y ago
        What happens when the user wants to install software that's not in one of the install's default repositories? The web page walks them through adding another repository URL to their package manager GUI [which is YA of a dozen]? I'm attracted to the idea of just building a sufficiently sophisticated app management utility and then everything will work perfectly, but in practice it just doesn't seem to happen. What a package manager does is build a necessarily-leaky abstraction over the set of operations needed to manage an application instance lifecycle. What if a non-experienced user wants to move an app from one system to another, though? No "mere mortal" is going to be able to accomplish that task on an average Linux box. Mac OS X instead relies on a convention of bundling all necessary files together into an app bundle that's self-contained (and represented as such) and thus can be treated by the user as a cohesive, unitary Thing. Thus installation, deinstallation, sharing, and migration of the app are all done through an identical metaphor which also applies to the other filesystem entities that users care about: documents. So, sure, Mac OS X doesn't have "package management" (as part of the vendor install) but its users have a more pleasant and unified experience. This provides a tremendously better sense of empowerement and relaxation to most users than a wholly separate GUI full of messages about "dependency resolution" and the like. Again, I understand where you're coming from, and in certain aspects and particular vertical instances I have no doubt the Linux automatic installer over package manager model could provide a better experience, but the average computer user is far better off with a less sophisticated system. (Yes, many Mac OS X apps use a separate install routine. I think this is unfortunate, but I don't get the sense that it's high on Apple's agenda because they're so pleased with the App Store model, which is another essay for another time.)
- paul 17y ago
  If the "cliché" is so outdated, why was I building apps from source just earlier this weak? Perhaps I'm just dumb, but I've never found myself doing that on the iPhone... It's amazing to me that people here would think that Linux has anywhere near the level of simplicity that the iPhone has. I don't even know where to start explaining...
  - SwellJoe 17y ago
    Linux, on your desktop or server, isn't something a reasonable person would compare to an iPhone. If you'd like to talk about Android devices vs. an iPhone, there are useful comparisons to be made (and Android may not come out ahead in all such comparisons). I'll also ask what Linux distribution you're using, that would lead you to building things from source on a regular basis? I build things from source as part of my job and I don't even do it more than a couple of times per month. Nearly everything I use on my servers and desktops is available from yum or apt-get repositories, and it would never cross my mind to build from source, except for the tiny number of packages I need either custom build of, or I'm the developer of. When I've maintained Mac and Windows servers, on the other hand, I was building software all the time. Everything I used had to be built from source. This has improved a little bit over the years, particularly on Mac OS X, in the form of fink, but a lack of a good standard package manager in Mac OS X and Windows is a major deterrent from me using them. Keeping on top of updates on a stack of a couple dozen packages all built from source, is a security and stability nightmare.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    Why don't you tell me why you were compiling from source? I don't see how playing guessing games helps. I recently installed the latest SVN snapshots of an unreleased version of a fairly geeky media centre app including the latest support for my GPU's video acceleration capabilities all without compiling anything from source so if you've got a valid reason to do so then I'm thinking it's going to be obscure. I'm fairly confident that whatever you where doing wouldn't even be allowed on the iPhone, so the average user limiting themselves to the many thousands of apps delivered via their default repository doesn't have to worry about missing anything in this (somewhat contrived) comparison.

by paul 17y ago

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

"downloading and building everything from source"? Look, I'm typing this on a MacBook, but that's the most ridiculously outdated Linux cliché in the book. The App store is just package management, which Linux has had for a while, and which Mac OS X is sadly missing.

glhaynes 17y ago
"The App store is just package management, which Linux has had for a while, and which Mac OS X is sadly missing." Ergo the users of Macs would have a better install/uninstall experience if they were running Linux. Ummm, OK.
- SwellJoe 17y ago
  Ergo the users of Macs would have a better install/uninstall experience if they were running Linux. Ummm, OK. I don't understand your sarcastic tone...they would have a better install/uninstall process if they were running Linux. Mac OS X has horrible package management (effectively none), while apt-get and yum are really, really good.
  - glhaynes 17y ago
    The average install/uninstall process is ridiculously easier on Mac OS X. Literally, it's: 1. Drag the single icon (regardless of instruction set or sizeof(int)) into your Applications folder. 2. Double-click the icon. Oh yeah, step 1 is optional. Certainly if Mac OS X were primarily used for installing command line tools / daemons, a package manager would be a stark omission. But that's not what the incredibly vast majority of its users do with it. For the average Mac OS X user, application management is more pleasant than for the average Linux user.
    - SwellJoe 17y ago
      The average install/uninstall process is ridiculously easier on Mac OS X. Literally, it's: 1. Drag the single icon (regardless of instruction set or sizeof(int)) into your Applications folder. 2. Double-click the icon. What icon? Where do I find this icon? Does it magically appear on my desktop? Nope...you've got to go find the website, and then the download page, or you have to go out and buy the CD or DVD that contains the software. On a Linux system, if I know what it's called or what it does, I can find it and install it easily, using either a GUI or the command line. And, of course, it works well for things beyond simple applications, including packages and systems of packages that include hundreds or thousands of files. A weakness should not be held up as a strength. There are many strengths to Mac OS X, but package management is not one of them.
      - glhaynes 17y ago
        What happens when the user wants to install software that's not in one of the install's default repositories? The web page walks them through adding another repository URL to their package manager GUI [which is YA of a dozen]? I'm attracted to the idea of just building a sufficiently sophisticated app management utility and then everything will work perfectly, but in practice it just doesn't seem to happen. What a package manager does is build a necessarily-leaky abstraction over the set of operations needed to manage an application instance lifecycle. What if a non-experienced user wants to move an app from one system to another, though? No "mere mortal" is going to be able to accomplish that task on an average Linux box. Mac OS X instead relies on a convention of bundling all necessary files together into an app bundle that's self-contained (and represented as such) and thus can be treated by the user as a cohesive, unitary Thing. Thus installation, deinstallation, sharing, and migration of the app are all done through an identical metaphor which also applies to the other filesystem entities that users care about: documents. So, sure, Mac OS X doesn't have "package management" (as part of the vendor install) but its users have a more pleasant and unified experience. This provides a tremendously better sense of empowerement and relaxation to most users than a wholly separate GUI full of messages about "dependency resolution" and the like. Again, I understand where you're coming from, and in certain aspects and particular vertical instances I have no doubt the Linux automatic installer over package manager model could provide a better experience, but the average computer user is far better off with a less sophisticated system. (Yes, many Mac OS X apps use a separate install routine. I think this is unfortunate, but I don't get the sense that it's high on Apple's agenda because they're so pleased with the App Store model, which is another essay for another time.)
paul 17y ago
If the "cliché" is so outdated, why was I building apps from source just earlier this weak? Perhaps I'm just dumb, but I've never found myself doing that on the iPhone... It's amazing to me that people here would think that Linux has anywhere near the level of simplicity that the iPhone has. I don't even know where to start explaining...
- SwellJoe 17y ago
  Linux, on your desktop or server, isn't something a reasonable person would compare to an iPhone. If you'd like to talk about Android devices vs. an iPhone, there are useful comparisons to be made (and Android may not come out ahead in all such comparisons). I'll also ask what Linux distribution you're using, that would lead you to building things from source on a regular basis? I build things from source as part of my job and I don't even do it more than a couple of times per month. Nearly everything I use on my servers and desktops is available from yum or apt-get repositories, and it would never cross my mind to build from source, except for the tiny number of packages I need either custom build of, or I'm the developer of. When I've maintained Mac and Windows servers, on the other hand, I was building software all the time. Everything I used had to be built from source. This has improved a little bit over the years, particularly on Mac OS X, in the form of fink, but a lack of a good standard package manager in Mac OS X and Windows is a major deterrent from me using them. Keeping on top of updates on a stack of a couple dozen packages all built from source, is a security and stability nightmare.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  Why don't you tell me why you were compiling from source? I don't see how playing guessing games helps. I recently installed the latest SVN snapshots of an unreleased version of a fairly geeky media centre app including the latest support for my GPU's video acceleration capabilities all without compiling anything from source so if you've got a valid reason to do so then I'm thinking it's going to be obscure. I'm fairly confident that whatever you where doing wouldn't even be allowed on the iPhone, so the average user limiting themselves to the many thousands of apps delivered via their default repository doesn't have to worry about missing anything in this (somewhat contrived) comparison.