8 ms·

An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

24 points by rams 18y ago

apgwoz 18y ago
> I know Ubuntu is free software, but I don’t care about that. It’s more important that my system be good, not cheap. (And if it was really that great, they’d charge for it, right?). I wanted to stop reading right there, because the reviewer is ill informed by what it means to be "free," however I stuck it out and he gives a favorable review.
- etal 18y ago
  The first 10 paragraphs seem to be intentionally echoing the usual gripes and fears, in an ignorant-sounding tone. The author could have made it more clear, but I think he meant for it to sound flippant or somewhat mocking, then rebut most of it in the rest of the article. It's a decent Mac-user-tries-Ubuntu anecdote, not so much a review. But he does bring up one good point: Apple spends hojillions on advertising, and Microsoft at least matches that. Word of mouth is great for converting power-users, but there's a reason the advertising industry churns through so much money -- it works.
  - felixc 18y ago
    While the point about advertising is interesting, I think it's a bit of a red herring: Apple and Microsoft are trying to make money by having people use their OS, so naturally they have to convert people, or convince them to not switch to the competition. Linux on the other hand doesn't need to convert people. Sure, the more users you get, the more potential developers there are, and the better the system will end up being. And of course there are commercial Linux distributions. But in general, Linux doesn't need advertising, because it doesn't need to "win." It just needs to stay alive for those of us who want to use it!
petercooper 18y ago
This wasn't a bad article to read, although it doesn't really get anywhere. A reasonably novice Mac user tries out Ubuntu, finds some pros and cons.. the end. Quite well written though but some of his insights don't quite make sense.. > I had heard that Linux users still use a command line. Instead of pointing and clicking, they actually type in obscure commands – a series of numbers, letters, and squiggly things. It’s very Russian spy, black hat, deep nerd. So do most technically minded OS X users. Admittedly he says he finds the command line quite useful on page 2, but Linux's command line offers no benefits over OS X's. > My test laptop was using the GNOME desktop interface. On start up, it offered me a choice of interfaces (KDE, GNOME, etc.) The oddness of this struck me: isn’t Ubuntu enough? It appears I still needed to select a separate desktop interface. [...] The Linux desktop needs to eliminate that extra choice if it wants to reach a mass audience. That's what Ubuntu is attempting to do: enforce a standard. I don't recall Ubuntu asking me this question with a default install. You're never going to be able to eradicate the ability to choose though, because people on both sides of the KDE/GNOME fence are pretty diehard. I can see why, because I "quite like" GNOME and think KDE is a bloated, ugly, block piece of Windows-inspired junk (basically, I respect KDE as much as I respect Comic Sans) and I don't usually take sides on things like this..
- ajross 18y ago
  I might quibble with the "Linux's command line offers no benefits" line. It's true that the shell is identical. But OS X, out of the box, is lacking huge chunks of what you expect to find out-of-the-box on a typical Linux distribution. That's a problem for anyone who wants to be able to portable scripts, etc... Add that to the fact that the existing package managers for the command line tools are kinda lacking, and I'd honestly put OS X behind even cygwin as a good example of a OS command line environment. The bit about Gnome vs. KDE is a sore point, alas. Canonical itself is clearly a Gnome shop, and that's what they ship on their core Ubuntu Desktop distribution. But KDE has a huge user base of near-fanatic volunteers, who insist (how dare they!) on maintaining the Kubuntu distribution in parallel. Both desktops work very well, and at this point neither is likely to disappear. FWIW, I use Gnome and prefer the architecture and API.
  - evgen 18y ago
    The stock OS X box comes with enough of the standard command-line toolbox that if you are actually writing a "portable" script you are not going to have a problem running that script on OS X. The biggest differentiator is probably that OS X is a part of the *BSD lineage and so you will need to do more tweaking of a Linux script to get it bsd-ready than you will need to tweak a standard bsd script to move it from FreeBSD to OS X. While macports is closer to the freebsd port system, it is close enough to apt-get that you should really have no problems switching from one to the other.
    - ajross 18y ago
      It's been a few versions since I paid close attention, but as I remember OS X ships with only the bare POSIX tools, plus a few extras from the FreeBSD userspace. It lacks stuff like perl, python, curl, wget, ssh (maybe: not sure about that one), tcpdump, etc... That's all stuff the poor user is going to have to figure out how to get. And as mentioned, the existing package systems for OSS software are really primitive. There's just no equivalent for, say, the Ubuntu synaptic tool for new users. I'm not trying to make this into a flame war: clearly you can achieve a pretty solid command line experience in OS X if you know what you're doing. But you're never going to learn it there without a bunch of headaches if you don't already have that expertise.
avinashv 18y ago
> It’s not just cool, it’s great for workflow. You can have files and documents open on one desktop – maybe you’ve got four browser windows open, researching something – and a single click takes you to a fresh desktop, with documents and apps open as you like. The article was written on May 2, 2008, well after the release of Leopard which ships with Spaces. > The results come up in different colors, which helps you locate things. (I think.) The article is filled with little nibblets like this that scream novice user. > And what the heck is ‘KDE’?” The Linux desktop needs to eliminate that extra choice if it wants to reach a mass audience. Probably the most significant thing in this article: I wholeheartedly agree that for everyone else, it should ship with one desktop interface--likely the more popular one. I imagine that would be Gnome. I agree with him that if someone like my grandmother tried to start up Ubuntu for the first time would see this and think she had done something wrong.
- jcl 18y ago
  Probably the most significant thing in this article: I wholeheartedly agree that for everyone else, it should ship with one desktop interface... I don't know if this has changed recently, but when I installed Ubuntu, it did not ask me to choose -- it defaulted to Gnome. If you later wanted KDE, you had to install it separately (or you could have installed the KDE-only Kubuntu in the first place). It makes me suspect that the friend that set up the Ubuntu box went through the additional trouble of installing both environments, so that the author was not playing with a vanilla install: http://www.watchingthenet.com/switch-between-gnome-and-kde-desktops-in-ubuntu-or-kubuntu.html http://www.watchingthenet.com/switch-between-gnome-and-kde-d...
  - avinashv 18y ago
    Actually, it's been a while since I had been on Ubuntu--I can't remember for sure! I was going by what he said.
Angostura 18y ago
Another Mac user here. I gave Ubuntu a spin the other week, running in Virtualbox on my main machine. I thought it looked slick and was very usable. Then I tried downloading and installing Firefox 3. I grabbed it, unarchived it and then.... then what? Where's the bloody installer.
- cstejerean 18y ago
  ubuntu hardy comes with FF3 installed, and typically you can install most software you need using Synaptic (from the GUI, apt-get from the command line). You might also be able to find a binary version on the site where you downloaded from (look for .deb files). If that's not an option (which is possible with FF3 if you're using an older version of Ubuntu) then chances are you need to build the software you downloaded from source and this is where it gets more complicated (although not that complicated unless you happen to get errors). In case anyone is new to Linux and curious here are the typical steps to building a package from source. > wget http://example.com/somefile.tar.gz (or you can download with the browser) > tar zxvf somefile.tar.gz (or you can extract the archive using your desktop manager) > cd somefile > ./configure (if you don't see a configure and there is a file called Makefile present you can skip this step) > make (this will compile the software) > sudo make install (if you didn't get any errors during make you can use this to install the software) Depending on the specific software you are trying to install you might need to pass configuration options to ./configure, you should typically look for such things in the instructions for the particular software you are trying to install. Also note that on Ubuntu you should install build-essential first (sudo apt-get install build-essential).
  - Angostura 18y ago
    Many thanks for the explanation. Much appreciated.
- there 18y ago
  you installed it wrong. on mac os or windows, you download a program from /its/ website and run /its/ installer. on ubuntu (or pretty much any linux distribution or *bsd), you look to your vendor for pre-compiled packages of this software (linux distributions using dpkg, rpm, whatever, bsds using ports/pkgsrc/packages). so on ubuntu you run whatever package management utility comes with it and tell it you want to install firefox 3. it fetches a package built by another ubuntu user and installs it. of course, you can manually download/configure/compile/install any of this software, but using pre-compiled packages is usually much easier, faster, and integrates better with your other installed software.
xlnt 18y ago
Safari's video support and general works-well-ness was bad 3 years ago, but it's just fine now. edit: he doesn't seem to know that macs have a command line
- hernan7 18y ago
  "edit: he doesn't seem to know that macs have a command line" Yes, I found that bizarre. That, and the part where he writes that Ubuntu "does everything that Windows does".
lpgauth 18y ago
"Eeek! It’s a Command Line! (Run, Hide…)" If only he knew the power of the CL...
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
  If he could be turned, he would be a powerful ally.
bouncingsoul 18y ago
I think this is a normal Ubuntu review that's been spiced up by painting the reviewer as an amateur user and Mac fan. I don't believe the last part though. The amateur user thing just doesn't seem consistent throughout. And the way he talks about his limitations as a user ("I’m not a software engineer; if I can’t grab it off the shelf, I can’t use it.") just strikes me as reciting a persona. Two other obvservations: * His experience with OS X must have been a long time ago because there's no mention of Exposé, Spaces, or Spotlight – which are all comparable features to the Ubuntu ones that impressed him. And if he was truly an OS X user all these years he'd know about them because they were the main features touted on the upgrade boxes. (Unless he's never upgraded from OS X 10.1.) * From my memory and quick research Ubuntu doesn't come with KDE – you have to install it. I'm guessing the journalist read about the Linux war between Gnome and KDE and decided the throw it into his story even though it didn't actually happen to him. (Though it's possible Virginia Tech gave him a customized Ubuntu install to play with.)
tlrobinson 18y ago
As a Mac user, this article made me cringe. > And that Safari can’t handle certain Web features, including plenty of videos. That's not really true, unless he's talking about crappy IE-specific sites. Most videos will play with the appropriate codecs installed (Flip4Mac and Perian cover most) > ...and some even still use the command line. (The command line? Oh, geez…) This says much more about your level of experience than your platform of choice (though I imagine the average Linux user uses the command line much more than the average Windows or OS X user). To his credit, it seems he sees the light later in the article. > First off, immediately, before anything: the rotating desktop. Damn, that is totally cool. You click an icon in the screen’s lower right, and the desktop rotates to a fresh view. Remarkably, you can have up to 16 different desktops. OS X has that too! Up to 16 different desktops! (it's called "Spaces") Granted they copied it directly from Linux, but it's there, rotation and all (I think OS X may have actually had the rotation effect first, with Fast User Switching)
- hernan7 18y ago
  Agreed. BTW, multiple desktops were around since before Linux. Unix workstations had them since the late '80s or so.
- thwarted 18y ago
  No, most people only saw the effect first on OSX. http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/ http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/ I'm sure it predates that too. Every so often, I come across some weird "new" effect I swear I saw implemented in Enlightenment, which always seemed to have some cool eye-candy, years ago, but the hardware just wasn't up to it at the time.
mdasen 18y ago
He seems like a real novice Mac user. Ubuntu is nice, but both Ubuntu and GNU/Linux aren't without flaws that don't exist in the Mac/Windows world (that a novice might not notice). Examples: Software. I can grab off the internet or the shelf any piece of "Windows" software and put it on my computer. Likewise, I can do the same with the Mac. I can't say that about GNU/Linux. Why? Because each distribution (and new version of a specific distro) has different dependencies taken care of by a regular install. Distros get around this by providing repositories (and Ubuntu's is excellent), but it's still different than being able to just grab stuff. GNU/Linux is much more in a state of flux which means that it can progress very quickly, but also that software requires more tweaking for each distro. Proprietary stuff. This has come a long way since I started using Linux in the RedHat 9 days. Ubuntu 8.04 allows for easy installation of proprietary codecs, but things like DeCSS (for DVD playback) is still a pain and flash (becoming more important in the YouTube generation) is absolute crap. Not the fault of GNU/Linux, but it does still lessen my enjoyment of it. UI stuff. I like GNOME's HIG for the most part, but GTK+ is starting to look old. Look at Adium and Pidgin. Pidgin is a fine piece of software, but it just looks cludgy by comparison. Likewise, there are just somethings that no one seems to want to fix (the minimize animation is crap). More abstractly, none of the desktop environments seem to be hitting what I'll call the Firefox level. Specifically, that nice balance between simplicity and complexity that Firefox seems to hit. GNOME goes for simplicity to a fault while KDE will throw every useless thing into the mix and tell you that you should just be comfortable looking through a cludgy list of a million settings. GRANTED, there are many thing that are simply superior about GNU/Linux. Examples include software updates that don't require restarts, some of the best multi-tasking I've seen (where Windows and Mac might make other processes hang a bit in responsiveness), and of course being free. It's truly amazing, but there are some annoyances. If I were to lay out some milestone's in GNU/Linux's future, I'd have to argue that these would be important: like LSB (Linux Standards Base) becoming the norm (which I think will happen when developers start seeing the number of new things they can add decline and they focus on environment stability); getting consumers off proprietary codecs and environments (like flash or DVD - yes, this is out there); and a change in one of the two desktop environment's philosophies to be more Firefox-like in terms of verbosity and the like.
jdbeast00 18y ago
i tried ubuntu over the weekend (this time for real, not on a VM). I was severely shocked to see that in order to have multiple monitor support, I would have to start editing config files. I'm a tad bit linux savvy (i know what cd is, in other words) but this was just too much hassle. I stuck with vista... :(
- 0x44 18y ago
  Knowing how to change directories isn't really evidence of "linux savvy", considering the command is the same in Linux, Unix, and Windows. As for multiple-monitor support, your hardware vendor will often have a GUI configurator just like they provide for Windows. ATI's is called Catalyst Control.
pi3832 18y ago
>There’s a reason that Apple has always been the choice of artists and musicians. The machine itself is artful. Yeah, it’s expensive, and it crashes, but it’s artful. And that counts for a whole lot. What? Apples crash?! Unpossible--Apples are the greatest computers evar!
swombat 18y ago
I'm certain I've read this article before. Given all the anachronisms in the article, that really points to this being an old article. Google didn't turn up anything though :-/
Kilimanjaro 18y ago
He tries so hard to look like an Apple user that I hardly believe he really is one.
tptacek 18y ago
"Granted, I was testing on the campus of Virginia Tech, which has a fire-breathingly fast Net connection. But I’ve often checked out Web page load time while standing in an Apple store – and you know that’s optimized for speed – and it still wasn’t as fast." Here I stopped reading.
hs 18y ago
ubuntu-desktop stays true to its name ... an OS for average users only for desktoping you know a unix OS is broken when you google "how do i compile / patch vim in ubuntu?" or when you can't ssh to ubuntu-desktop machine Ubuntu is an OS designed by committee ... it's secure by being weak The only thing good about ubuntu is its supports for new hardwares; however, quality is questionable.
- Tichy 18y ago
  Well on OS X I googled for "how to rename a file" and "how to copy a file" (OS X file manager doesn't support cut+paste). On the other hand, I just installed vim on Ubuntu the other day with synaptic, no problems whatsoever.
  - nailer 18y ago
    I still don't get how 'Get Info' on a file would be used to change the program it opens with. And OS X software installs freaked the hell out of me the first time I tried (ran the app from the package dir, and it didn't work properly).
  - hs 18y ago
    "apt-get install" is not the same as compile from source you are at the mercy of repositories "make install" on the other hand, gives you more freedom vim patching problem was kinda solved by using intrepid repo instead of hardy's ... but also gave birth to other problems To me, a unix system that is unable to compile from source (only binaries) is on the same level as windows even on mac, i can use port, it fetches the sources and dependencies, compiles everything, beautiful! NB: yes i did apt-get dev-compilers & libraries & dependencies shrug I guess Ubuntu is not there yet
signa11 18y ago
smith-n-wesson the 'original' point and click interface :o)

24 points by rams 18y ago

> I know Ubuntu is free software, but I don’t care about that. It’s more important that my system be good, not cheap. (And if it was really that great, they’d charge for it, right?). I wanted to stop reading right there, because the reviewer is ill informed by what it means to be "free," however I stuck it out and he gives a favorable review.

etal 18y ago
The first 10 paragraphs seem to be intentionally echoing the usual gripes and fears, in an ignorant-sounding tone. The author could have made it more clear, but I think he meant for it to sound flippant or somewhat mocking, then rebut most of it in the rest of the article. It's a decent Mac-user-tries-Ubuntu anecdote, not so much a review. But he does bring up one good point: Apple spends hojillions on advertising, and Microsoft at least matches that. Word of mouth is great for converting power-users, but there's a reason the advertising industry churns through so much money -- it works.
- felixc 18y ago
  While the point about advertising is interesting, I think it's a bit of a red herring: Apple and Microsoft are trying to make money by having people use their OS, so naturally they have to convert people, or convince them to not switch to the competition. Linux on the other hand doesn't need to convert people. Sure, the more users you get, the more potential developers there are, and the better the system will end up being. And of course there are commercial Linux distributions. But in general, Linux doesn't need advertising, because it doesn't need to "win." It just needs to stay alive for those of us who want to use it!

petercooper 18y ago

This wasn't a bad article to read, although it doesn't really get anywhere. A reasonably novice Mac user tries out Ubuntu, finds some pros and cons.. the end. Quite well written though but some of his insights don't quite make sense.. > I had heard that Linux users still use a command line. Instead of pointing and clicking, they actually type in obscure commands – a series of numbers, letters, and squiggly things. It’s very Russian spy, black hat, deep nerd. So do most technically minded OS X users. Admittedly he says he finds the command line quite useful on page 2, but Linux's command line offers no benefits over OS X's. > My test laptop was using the GNOME desktop interface. On start up, it offered me a choice of interfaces (KDE, GNOME, etc.) The oddness of this struck me: isn’t Ubuntu enough? It appears I still needed to select a separate desktop interface. [...] The Linux desktop needs to eliminate that extra choice if it wants to reach a mass audience. That's what Ubuntu is attempting to do: enforce a standard. I don't recall Ubuntu asking me this question with a default install. You're never going to be able to eradicate the ability to choose though, because people on both sides of the KDE/GNOME fence are pretty diehard. I can see why, because I "quite like" GNOME and think KDE is a bloated, ugly, block piece of Windows-inspired junk (basically, I respect KDE as much as I respect Comic Sans) and I don't usually take sides on things like this..

ajross 18y ago
I might quibble with the "Linux's command line offers no benefits" line. It's true that the shell is identical. But OS X, out of the box, is lacking huge chunks of what you expect to find out-of-the-box on a typical Linux distribution. That's a problem for anyone who wants to be able to portable scripts, etc... Add that to the fact that the existing package managers for the command line tools are kinda lacking, and I'd honestly put OS X behind even cygwin as a good example of a OS command line environment. The bit about Gnome vs. KDE is a sore point, alas. Canonical itself is clearly a Gnome shop, and that's what they ship on their core Ubuntu Desktop distribution. But KDE has a huge user base of near-fanatic volunteers, who insist (how dare they!) on maintaining the Kubuntu distribution in parallel. Both desktops work very well, and at this point neither is likely to disappear. FWIW, I use Gnome and prefer the architecture and API.
- evgen 18y ago
  The stock OS X box comes with enough of the standard command-line toolbox that if you are actually writing a "portable" script you are not going to have a problem running that script on OS X. The biggest differentiator is probably that OS X is a part of the *BSD lineage and so you will need to do more tweaking of a Linux script to get it bsd-ready than you will need to tweak a standard bsd script to move it from FreeBSD to OS X. While macports is closer to the freebsd port system, it is close enough to apt-get that you should really have no problems switching from one to the other.
  - ajross 18y ago
    It's been a few versions since I paid close attention, but as I remember OS X ships with only the bare POSIX tools, plus a few extras from the FreeBSD userspace. It lacks stuff like perl, python, curl, wget, ssh (maybe: not sure about that one), tcpdump, etc... That's all stuff the poor user is going to have to figure out how to get. And as mentioned, the existing package systems for OSS software are really primitive. There's just no equivalent for, say, the Ubuntu synaptic tool for new users. I'm not trying to make this into a flame war: clearly you can achieve a pretty solid command line experience in OS X if you know what you're doing. But you're never going to learn it there without a bunch of headaches if you don't already have that expertise.

avinashv 18y ago

> It’s not just cool, it’s great for workflow. You can have files and documents open on one desktop – maybe you’ve got four browser windows open, researching something – and a single click takes you to a fresh desktop, with documents and apps open as you like. The article was written on May 2, 2008, well after the release of Leopard which ships with Spaces. > The results come up in different colors, which helps you locate things. (I think.) The article is filled with little nibblets like this that scream novice user. > And what the heck is ‘KDE’?” The Linux desktop needs to eliminate that extra choice if it wants to reach a mass audience. Probably the most significant thing in this article: I wholeheartedly agree that for everyone else, it should ship with one desktop interface--likely the more popular one. I imagine that would be Gnome. I agree with him that if someone like my grandmother tried to start up Ubuntu for the first time would see this and think she had done something wrong.

jcl 18y ago
Probably the most significant thing in this article: I wholeheartedly agree that for everyone else, it should ship with one desktop interface... I don't know if this has changed recently, but when I installed Ubuntu, it did not ask me to choose -- it defaulted to Gnome. If you later wanted KDE, you had to install it separately (or you could have installed the KDE-only Kubuntu in the first place). It makes me suspect that the friend that set up the Ubuntu box went through the additional trouble of installing both environments, so that the author was not playing with a vanilla install: http://www.watchingthenet.com/switch-between-gnome-and-kde-desktops-in-ubuntu-or-kubuntu.html http://www.watchingthenet.com/switch-between-gnome-and-kde-d...
- avinashv 18y ago
  Actually, it's been a while since I had been on Ubuntu--I can't remember for sure! I was going by what he said.

Angostura 18y ago

Another Mac user here. I gave Ubuntu a spin the other week, running in Virtualbox on my main machine. I thought it looked slick and was very usable. Then I tried downloading and installing Firefox 3. I grabbed it, unarchived it and then.... then what? Where's the bloody installer.

cstejerean 18y ago
ubuntu hardy comes with FF3 installed, and typically you can install most software you need using Synaptic (from the GUI, apt-get from the command line). You might also be able to find a binary version on the site where you downloaded from (look for .deb files). If that's not an option (which is possible with FF3 if you're using an older version of Ubuntu) then chances are you need to build the software you downloaded from source and this is where it gets more complicated (although not that complicated unless you happen to get errors). In case anyone is new to Linux and curious here are the typical steps to building a package from source. > wget http://example.com/somefile.tar.gz (or you can download with the browser) > tar zxvf somefile.tar.gz (or you can extract the archive using your desktop manager) > cd somefile > ./configure (if you don't see a configure and there is a file called Makefile present you can skip this step) > make (this will compile the software) > sudo make install (if you didn't get any errors during make you can use this to install the software) Depending on the specific software you are trying to install you might need to pass configuration options to ./configure, you should typically look for such things in the instructions for the particular software you are trying to install. Also note that on Ubuntu you should install build-essential first (sudo apt-get install build-essential).
- Angostura 18y ago
  Many thanks for the explanation. Much appreciated.
there 18y ago
you installed it wrong. on mac os or windows, you download a program from /its/ website and run /its/ installer. on ubuntu (or pretty much any linux distribution or *bsd), you look to your vendor for pre-compiled packages of this software (linux distributions using dpkg, rpm, whatever, bsds using ports/pkgsrc/packages). so on ubuntu you run whatever package management utility comes with it and tell it you want to install firefox 3. it fetches a package built by another ubuntu user and installs it. of course, you can manually download/configure/compile/install any of this software, but using pre-compiled packages is usually much easier, faster, and integrates better with your other installed software.

xlnt 18y ago

Safari's video support and general works-well-ness was bad 3 years ago, but it's just fine now. edit: he doesn't seem to know that macs have a command line

hernan7 18y ago
"edit: he doesn't seem to know that macs have a command line" Yes, I found that bizarre. That, and the part where he writes that Ubuntu "does everything that Windows does".

lpgauth 18y ago

"Eeek! It’s a Command Line! (Run, Hide…)" If only he knew the power of the CL...

LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
If he could be turned, he would be a powerful ally.

bouncingsoul 18y ago

I think this is a normal Ubuntu review that's been spiced up by painting the reviewer as an amateur user and Mac fan. I don't believe the last part though. The amateur user thing just doesn't seem consistent throughout. And the way he talks about his limitations as a user ("I’m not a software engineer; if I can’t grab it off the shelf, I can’t use it.") just strikes me as reciting a persona. Two other obvservations: * His experience with OS X must have been a long time ago because there's no mention of Exposé, Spaces, or Spotlight – which are all comparable features to the Ubuntu ones that impressed him. And if he was truly an OS X user all these years he'd know about them because they were the main features touted on the upgrade boxes. (Unless he's never upgraded from OS X 10.1.) * From my memory and quick research Ubuntu doesn't come with KDE – you have to install it. I'm guessing the journalist read about the Linux war between Gnome and KDE and decided the throw it into his story even though it didn't actually happen to him. (Though it's possible Virginia Tech gave him a customized Ubuntu install to play with.)

tlrobinson 18y ago

As a Mac user, this article made me cringe. > And that Safari can’t handle certain Web features, including plenty of videos. That's not really true, unless he's talking about crappy IE-specific sites. Most videos will play with the appropriate codecs installed (Flip4Mac and Perian cover most) > ...and some even still use the command line. (The command line? Oh, geez…) This says much more about your level of experience than your platform of choice (though I imagine the average Linux user uses the command line much more than the average Windows or OS X user). To his credit, it seems he sees the light later in the article. > First off, immediately, before anything: the rotating desktop. Damn, that is totally cool. You click an icon in the screen’s lower right, and the desktop rotates to a fresh view. Remarkably, you can have up to 16 different desktops. OS X has that too! Up to 16 different desktops! (it's called "Spaces") Granted they copied it directly from Linux, but it's there, rotation and all (I think OS X may have actually had the rotation effect first, with Fast User Switching)

hernan7 18y ago
Agreed. BTW, multiple desktops were around since before Linux. Unix workstations had them since the late '80s or so.
thwarted 18y ago
No, most people only saw the effect first on OSX. http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/ http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/ I'm sure it predates that too. Every so often, I come across some weird "new" effect I swear I saw implemented in Enlightenment, which always seemed to have some cool eye-candy, years ago, but the hardware just wasn't up to it at the time.

mdasen 18y ago

He seems like a real novice Mac user. Ubuntu is nice, but both Ubuntu and GNU/Linux aren't without flaws that don't exist in the Mac/Windows world (that a novice might not notice). Examples: Software. I can grab off the internet or the shelf any piece of "Windows" software and put it on my computer. Likewise, I can do the same with the Mac. I can't say that about GNU/Linux. Why? Because each distribution (and new version of a specific distro) has different dependencies taken care of by a regular install. Distros get around this by providing repositories (and Ubuntu's is excellent), but it's still different than being able to just grab stuff. GNU/Linux is much more in a state of flux which means that it can progress very quickly, but also that software requires more tweaking for each distro. Proprietary stuff. This has come a long way since I started using Linux in the RedHat 9 days. Ubuntu 8.04 allows for easy installation of proprietary codecs, but things like DeCSS (for DVD playback) is still a pain and flash (becoming more important in the YouTube generation) is absolute crap. Not the fault of GNU/Linux, but it does still lessen my enjoyment of it. UI stuff. I like GNOME's HIG for the most part, but GTK+ is starting to look old. Look at Adium and Pidgin. Pidgin is a fine piece of software, but it just looks cludgy by comparison. Likewise, there are just somethings that no one seems to want to fix (the minimize animation is crap). More abstractly, none of the desktop environments seem to be hitting what I'll call the Firefox level. Specifically, that nice balance between simplicity and complexity that Firefox seems to hit. GNOME goes for simplicity to a fault while KDE will throw every useless thing into the mix and tell you that you should just be comfortable looking through a cludgy list of a million settings. GRANTED, there are many thing that are simply superior about GNU/Linux. Examples include software updates that don't require restarts, some of the best multi-tasking I've seen (where Windows and Mac might make other processes hang a bit in responsiveness), and of course being free. It's truly amazing, but there are some annoyances. If I were to lay out some milestone's in GNU/Linux's future, I'd have to argue that these would be important: like LSB (Linux Standards Base) becoming the norm (which I think will happen when developers start seeing the number of new things they can add decline and they focus on environment stability); getting consumers off proprietary codecs and environments (like flash or DVD - yes, this is out there); and a change in one of the two desktop environment's philosophies to be more Firefox-like in terms of verbosity and the like.

jdbeast00 18y ago

i tried ubuntu over the weekend (this time for real, not on a VM). I was severely shocked to see that in order to have multiple monitor support, I would have to start editing config files. I'm a tad bit linux savvy (i know what cd is, in other words) but this was just too much hassle. I stuck with vista... :(

0x44 18y ago
Knowing how to change directories isn't really evidence of "linux savvy", considering the command is the same in Linux, Unix, and Windows. As for multiple-monitor support, your hardware vendor will often have a GUI configurator just like they provide for Windows. ATI's is called Catalyst Control.

pi3832 18y ago

>There’s a reason that Apple has always been the choice of artists and musicians. The machine itself is artful. Yeah, it’s expensive, and it crashes, but it’s artful. And that counts for a whole lot. What? Apples crash?! Unpossible--Apples are the greatest computers evar!

swombat 18y ago

I'm certain I've read this article before. Given all the anachronisms in the article, that really points to this being an old article. Google didn't turn up anything though :-/

Kilimanjaro 18y ago

He tries so hard to look like an Apple user that I hardly believe he really is one.

tptacek 18y ago

"Granted, I was testing on the campus of Virginia Tech, which has a fire-breathingly fast Net connection. But I’ve often checked out Web page load time while standing in an Apple store – and you know that’s optimized for speed – and it still wasn’t as fast." Here I stopped reading.

hs 18y ago

ubuntu-desktop stays true to its name ... an OS for average users only for desktoping you know a unix OS is broken when you google "how do i compile / patch vim in ubuntu?" or when you can't ssh to ubuntu-desktop machine Ubuntu is an OS designed by committee ... it's secure by being weak The only thing good about ubuntu is its supports for new hardwares; however, quality is questionable.

Tichy 18y ago
Well on OS X I googled for "how to rename a file" and "how to copy a file" (OS X file manager doesn't support cut+paste). On the other hand, I just installed vim on Ubuntu the other day with synaptic, no problems whatsoever.
- nailer 18y ago
  I still don't get how 'Get Info' on a file would be used to change the program it opens with. And OS X software installs freaked the hell out of me the first time I tried (ran the app from the package dir, and it didn't work properly).
- hs 18y ago
  "apt-get install" is not the same as compile from source you are at the mercy of repositories "make install" on the other hand, gives you more freedom vim patching problem was kinda solved by using intrepid repo instead of hardy's ... but also gave birth to other problems To me, a unix system that is unable to compile from source (only binaries) is on the same level as windows even on mac, i can use port, it fetches the sources and dependencies, compiles everything, beautiful! NB: yes i did apt-get dev-compilers & libraries & dependencies shrug I guess Ubuntu is not there yet

signa11 18y ago

smith-n-wesson the 'original' point and click interface :o)