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Why is this down voted to oblivion? It is the hard truth, albeit he meant to say Unix not Linux. OSX is merely an "okay" OS. The points in the article about Mis

by nbevans 11y ago

Why is this down voted to oblivion? It is the hard truth, albeit he meant to say Unix not Linux. OSX is merely an "okay" OS. The points in the article about Mission Control being slow and laggy are completely true in my experience (2014 MBPr 16GB 512GB). Windows is architecturally a better OS than OSX.

acdha 11y ago
It's just trolling. Describing OS X as a Unix derivative is roughly as accurate as describing Windows 10 as DOS-based. If he wanted to have a nuanced conversation about OS architecture, he could talk about something specific rather than huge generalizations with terms which make it clear he doesn't know enough of the details to be qualified to make such broad statements. Similarly, talking about one benchmark on one device for a feature which many people don't even use is not a good foundation for comparing the merits of entire operating systems. That's like saying you should buy a particular car because it has awesome door handles, as if there are no other possible factors which you need to consider.
- geographomics 11y ago
  But OS X literally is a Unix derivative. Its precursor NeXTSTEP was built on top of the Mach kernel and BSD. In comparison, Windows 10 has its roots in the Windows NT lineage (starting with NT 3.1, and including Windows XP), which is separate from the DOS-derived Windows line that ended with Windows ME. (That said, I agree that he was just trolling.)
  - acdha 11y ago
    I don't disagree that it's a Unix – Apple even got it certified in years past – but it's not that simple: Mach is not a Unix kernel and the Mach interfaces percolate up to the higher levels for many tasks which aren't covered by the POSIX layers. The bigger difference, though, is higher up. While you certainly can compile POSIX code on OS X, most of the applications which people run use Cocoa and that owes far more to the NextStep side of its lineage than the Unix bits. The better comparison might have been Win32 rather than DOS, where most of the interfaces were designed by the Win95 developers even though they were also implemented on top of the NT kernel. I've often wondered how much better things would have been in the late 90s/early 200s if David Cutler's team had been able to get the Win95 team to follow their generally much better instincts rather than the other way around. If nothing else, they wouldn't have needed to spend a decade duct-taping security onto a single-user design.
    - geographomics 11y ago
      That's an interesting point, and indeed NT has a curious history in that regard - Microsoft was originally planning an OS/2-based API as the dominant one, and it was only due to the success of Windows 3.0 that they ended up adapting the Windows API to 32 bits. Microsoft has always been dominated by backwards compatibility constraints so there probably wasn't much scope for a massive redesign of the API, as it was in their best commercial interests for 16 and 32 bit Windows APIs to match as closely as possible, to ease porting of third party software.
      - acdha 11y ago
        Backwards compatibility was definitely a driving factor for a lot of bad decisions back then. Here's a great example of how they wanted to avoid breaking a few apps written for a Win95 beta build: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11/03/55532.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11/03/55532... That's a bit silly but it also meant things like dutifully porting the real-mode Windows messaging system's feature which allowed any app to execute code in any other app: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_attack Like, say, sending a message to the anti-virus software running as SYSTEM to get root… The most entertaining bug I found was one of the times they failed at portability: one of the Win32 APIs to enumerate the contents of a directory worked 100% of the time on the Windows NT systems our development team used but returned no results on Windows 95 unless you had enabled network sharing (you didn't even need to share something; just starting the service was enough). This manifested in a very confused user wondering why our open dialog showed C:\ as empty when Explorer showed their files were still there.
    - nbevans 11y ago
      This post backs up the statement you hated so much though. That OSX is just a mod of various components plus an old era Unix kernel at the core. You literally validated the point. OSX is a strange OS to use. It looks and feels good at first glance but when you have used it for a year, one really longs to return to a pure Windows environment. OSX has weird bugs like the beachball cursor which is something that simply shouldn't happen in a modern OS. The last Windows to have a global lock like that was 9x.
rz2k 11y ago
It begins with “obviously” then says a few silly things. What does “with a lot more experience in software development” mean? Does that mean that the team at Microsoft is generally later in its career than the team at Apple? That’s kind of weird and unsubstantiated. Maybe it is trying to say that Windows is more mature, because it has been around longer? Yet, both operating systems are better from the result of many significant overhauls and redesigns, rather than refinement alone. Even determining which one is older would be a pointless discussion, since there are so many different ways of measuring the age of different components. Finally, “merely a mod of components from Linux”? I don’t think anyone cared about the distinction between BSD and Linux or GNU user space tools. Things like a kernel with a multiuser system and different permissions are the types of improvements that were once difficult to handle on most consumer machines, yet they were also incorporated into Windows with NT. UNIX is part of the Mac OS being a modern operating system. Even if you lose the weasel word “merely”, OS X is not only a window manager or desktop environment, at a low level there are significant architectural distinctions between OS X and FreeBSD, and differences between OS X and FreeBSD compared to Linux that were developed at Apple. The point is not that they cannot be compared, but that they have actual merits to compare rather than weaselly arguments as though we were in a 1990s chat room or forum.

by nbevans 11y ago

acdha 11y ago

It's just trolling. Describing OS X as a Unix derivative is roughly as accurate as describing Windows 10 as DOS-based. If he wanted to have a nuanced conversation about OS architecture, he could talk about something specific rather than huge generalizations with terms which make it clear he doesn't know enough of the details to be qualified to make such broad statements. Similarly, talking about one benchmark on one device for a feature which many people don't even use is not a good foundation for comparing the merits of entire operating systems. That's like saying you should buy a particular car because it has awesome door handles, as if there are no other possible factors which you need to consider.

geographomics 11y ago
But OS X literally is a Unix derivative. Its precursor NeXTSTEP was built on top of the Mach kernel and BSD. In comparison, Windows 10 has its roots in the Windows NT lineage (starting with NT 3.1, and including Windows XP), which is separate from the DOS-derived Windows line that ended with Windows ME. (That said, I agree that he was just trolling.)
- acdha 11y ago
  I don't disagree that it's a Unix – Apple even got it certified in years past – but it's not that simple: Mach is not a Unix kernel and the Mach interfaces percolate up to the higher levels for many tasks which aren't covered by the POSIX layers. The bigger difference, though, is higher up. While you certainly can compile POSIX code on OS X, most of the applications which people run use Cocoa and that owes far more to the NextStep side of its lineage than the Unix bits. The better comparison might have been Win32 rather than DOS, where most of the interfaces were designed by the Win95 developers even though they were also implemented on top of the NT kernel. I've often wondered how much better things would have been in the late 90s/early 200s if David Cutler's team had been able to get the Win95 team to follow their generally much better instincts rather than the other way around. If nothing else, they wouldn't have needed to spend a decade duct-taping security onto a single-user design.
  - geographomics 11y ago
    That's an interesting point, and indeed NT has a curious history in that regard - Microsoft was originally planning an OS/2-based API as the dominant one, and it was only due to the success of Windows 3.0 that they ended up adapting the Windows API to 32 bits. Microsoft has always been dominated by backwards compatibility constraints so there probably wasn't much scope for a massive redesign of the API, as it was in their best commercial interests for 16 and 32 bit Windows APIs to match as closely as possible, to ease porting of third party software.
    - acdha 11y ago
      Backwards compatibility was definitely a driving factor for a lot of bad decisions back then. Here's a great example of how they wanted to avoid breaking a few apps written for a Win95 beta build: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11/03/55532.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11/03/55532... That's a bit silly but it also meant things like dutifully porting the real-mode Windows messaging system's feature which allowed any app to execute code in any other app: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_attack Like, say, sending a message to the anti-virus software running as SYSTEM to get root… The most entertaining bug I found was one of the times they failed at portability: one of the Win32 APIs to enumerate the contents of a directory worked 100% of the time on the Windows NT systems our development team used but returned no results on Windows 95 unless you had enabled network sharing (you didn't even need to share something; just starting the service was enough). This manifested in a very confused user wondering why our open dialog showed C:\ as empty when Explorer showed their files were still there.
  - nbevans 11y ago
    This post backs up the statement you hated so much though. That OSX is just a mod of various components plus an old era Unix kernel at the core. You literally validated the point. OSX is a strange OS to use. It looks and feels good at first glance but when you have used it for a year, one really longs to return to a pure Windows environment. OSX has weird bugs like the beachball cursor which is something that simply shouldn't happen in a modern OS. The last Windows to have a global lock like that was 9x.

rz2k 11y ago

It begins with “obviously” then says a few silly things. What does “with a lot more experience in software development” mean? Does that mean that the team at Microsoft is generally later in its career than the team at Apple? That’s kind of weird and unsubstantiated. Maybe it is trying to say that Windows is more mature, because it has been around longer? Yet, both operating systems are better from the result of many significant overhauls and redesigns, rather than refinement alone. Even determining which one is older would be a pointless discussion, since there are so many different ways of measuring the age of different components. Finally, “merely a mod of components from Linux”? I don’t think anyone cared about the distinction between BSD and Linux or GNU user space tools. Things like a kernel with a multiuser system and different permissions are the types of improvements that were once difficult to handle on most consumer machines, yet they were also incorporated into Windows with NT. UNIX is part of the Mac OS being a modern operating system. Even if you lose the weasel word “merely”, OS X is not only a window manager or desktop environment, at a low level there are significant architectural distinctions between OS X and FreeBSD, and differences between OS X and FreeBSD compared to Linux that were developed at Apple. The point is not that they cannot be compared, but that they have actual merits to compare rather than weaselly arguments as though we were in a 1990s chat room or forum.