2 ms·

Back in early 2000s it was a top choice if you wanted some kind of unixy box with a polished GUI desktop that "just worked", especially if you wanted a laptop.

by tomxor 2y ago

Back in early 2000s it was a top choice if you wanted some kind of unixy box with a polished GUI desktop that "just worked", especially if you wanted a laptop. BSD and Linux were fine, but as a desktop OS they were a very different experience from today, took way more tinkering even on a desktop PC as anyone who had to write their own X11 config will tell you. Today installing a Linux desktop distro is so easy and hardware compatibility is so good that the tables have turned, also if you are the type of user that wants a big DE (no judgement) the Linux DEs today are far more polished, people still complain today but if you go back in time it was a mess. These days MacOS seems extremely restrictive and awkward by comparison, on the one hand a huge chunk of the userland got stuck in time, while Apple have become more and more hostile to any kind of changes and customisations to the more unixy side of the system.

pjmlp 2y ago
Sun had an agreement with Toshiba for Solaris laptops, but they were rather pricey. UNIX is stuck in time, hardly anything improved beyond file systems, and small API improvements, and that is what macOS is measured against, POSIX certification. To note that the only standard UNIX UI is CDE, and anything 3D isn't part of POSIX.
- anthk 2y ago
  ZFS, BcacheFS, HammerFS... I think OpenBSD will have a better FS soon. On modern FS', the plan9/9front ones are pretty much ahead of almost anything; but plan9 it's a Unix 2.0. It went further. On 3D, forget POSIX. GL was the de facto API and now Vulkan, and the most common middleware multimedia API it's SDL2.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Yeah, but none of that is UNIX(tm). While IrisGL was born on Irix, it was placed under ARB stewardship, which after Long Peaks disaster became Khronos. Vulkan only exists thanks to AMD offering Mantle to Khronos, an API designed originally for game consoles, very much not UNIX, and had it not been for AMD, Khronos would still be thinking what OpenGL vNext was supposed to look like. SDL also has very little with UNIX history, as it was created originally to port games from Windows to Mac OS (not OS X) and BeOS.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
Linux isn’t too bad on desktops these days (at least if you’ve got well-suited hardware), but laptops are still hit or miss. Even laptops with well-supported hardware running something like powertop often have middling battery life, which isn’t helped by how on many distros things like h.264 hardware acceleration is not enabled in browsers out of the box. System76 is great and all but we really, really need a vertically integrated “Apple” of Linux laptops that goes the extra mile to dial in everything to perfection.
_yb2s 2y ago
I don’t think much has changed, MacOS is still a good desktop Unix for development that is simple and just works, and Linux still lacks good hardware support, especially on laptops. Although in truth most of my MacOS development is actually in Linux containers.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I use macos and Pop_Os as my two main systems and both work really well. I got over the bleeding edge linuxism years ago as my 20s passed into obscurity. Both are respectable systems, and my need to tweak and adjust my setup has gone by the wayside. These days I just want something that works and both work fine for the jobs I need of them and can run a couple of weeks or more with no crashes or need to reboot until the next security updates come out. Linux does have limited hardware support, but it's easy to remedy if you do a little research, macOS is naturally limited in hardware selection; both are easily worked around.

by tomxor 2y ago

pjmlp 2y ago

Sun had an agreement with Toshiba for Solaris laptops, but they were rather pricey. UNIX is stuck in time, hardly anything improved beyond file systems, and small API improvements, and that is what macOS is measured against, POSIX certification. To note that the only standard UNIX UI is CDE, and anything 3D isn't part of POSIX.

anthk 2y ago
ZFS, BcacheFS, HammerFS... I think OpenBSD will have a better FS soon. On modern FS', the plan9/9front ones are pretty much ahead of almost anything; but plan9 it's a Unix 2.0. It went further. On 3D, forget POSIX. GL was the de facto API and now Vulkan, and the most common middleware multimedia API it's SDL2.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Yeah, but none of that is UNIX(tm). While IrisGL was born on Irix, it was placed under ARB stewardship, which after Long Peaks disaster became Khronos. Vulkan only exists thanks to AMD offering Mantle to Khronos, an API designed originally for game consoles, very much not UNIX, and had it not been for AMD, Khronos would still be thinking what OpenGL vNext was supposed to look like. SDL also has very little with UNIX history, as it was created originally to port games from Windows to Mac OS (not OS X) and BeOS.

cosmic_cheese 2y ago

Linux isn’t too bad on desktops these days (at least if you’ve got well-suited hardware), but laptops are still hit or miss. Even laptops with well-supported hardware running something like powertop often have middling battery life, which isn’t helped by how on many distros things like h.264 hardware acceleration is not enabled in browsers out of the box. System76 is great and all but we really, really need a vertically integrated “Apple” of Linux laptops that goes the extra mile to dial in everything to perfection.

_yb2s 2y ago

I don’t think much has changed, MacOS is still a good desktop Unix for development that is simple and just works, and Linux still lacks good hardware support, especially on laptops. Although in truth most of my MacOS development is actually in Linux containers.

EasyMark 2y ago
I use macos and Pop_Os as my two main systems and both work really well. I got over the bleeding edge linuxism years ago as my 20s passed into obscurity. Both are respectable systems, and my need to tweak and adjust my setup has gone by the wayside. These days I just want something that works and both work fine for the jobs I need of them and can run a couple of weeks or more with no crashes or need to reboot until the next security updates come out. Linux does have limited hardware support, but it's easy to remedy if you do a little research, macOS is naturally limited in hardware selection; both are easily worked around.