Interesting. These are just my thoughts, I'm not flaming or being a r****d, just fighting my corner
I spend all day fighting windows (I'm the programmer of a commercial cad tool) - but like mac os it has a single consistent (ish) GUI and a standard API (ok .net & winfx are diluting this), which means a heck of a lot to a software developer.
I'm also a linux advocate, I have various linux boxes that do various random tasks for me at work, and most of the time access is by ssh.
So.....
wozzaa said:
OSX is awful i have used a mac i dont like it. its full of little features ot help people who wanna get things done easily without knowing what actually lies underneith.
But that's 99% of the home computer userbase!
They fire up their web browser and they read their emails and possibly write the odd letter.
But the fact remains that it's all there, start up a terminal and you can do whatever unix type things you want to do.
wozzaa said:
The linux gui's arent gonna be unifed and consistent because people dont always want a gui. My mate runs linux no gui he used a command line for everything.
But mainstream software requires GUI's if you want usability for the masses, from a developer point of view it's a nightmare, what do you write your software for, X? KDE? Gnome? All three? (<- nightmare!)
And if you link to the KDE libraries then you can't ship commercial software unless you pay trolltech for the QT license, because some idiot thought it'd be a good idea to base KDE on QT.
wozzaa said:
Linux is much more configurable. And the mac os i dont particularly rate. But why waste loads of resources for the GUI which the mac system does?
I'm not sure in what way linux is more configurable given that they're both posix OS's, just drop to terminal and have a look in /etc, you'll find all the usual suspects.
Infact OS X provides lots of nice simple GUI's for configuring stuff like that, take for example apache, press one button in the preferences panel and you're good to go. It's configured out of the box for each user to have their own site too.
At least apple isn't stuck in the past with "X". They wrote their own GUI (or rather NeXT did) which didn't have all the crap that X windows has because of it's age.
OS X also offloads most of it's graphical niceties to open-gl, so the penalty hit is much lower than you might imagine, this is a trick that vista is going to utilise too.
Plus install apples X server, compile you're favourite linux software and it'll run.
wozzaa said:
It really is a computer made for dumb people or those that arent into computers know what there doing generally its a lot easier for someone to go on a mac system and bodge there way about and work out what to do, The same cant be said in linux when its stripped down.
But again that's 99% of the home computing population. I could stick linux in front of nearly every single one of my friends and certainly in front of every member of my family and they'd not have a clue on what to do.
I write embedded software & windows software, so I'm definately not dumb and I'm definately into computers, so mac os x is obviously offering me something that windows or linux doesnt.
wozzaa said:
And i said would basically be the same i wasnt talking about gui's etc. The hardware the mac hardware is not as good as PC hardware in general that is pure fact its not an opinion its a fact. the drivers arent as good again fact. nvidias are alright but there still behind a bit in them. ATI's are just sh*te in that OS area.
Apples have been shipping with ATI cards as the default card for years, there's nothing wrong with their drivers.
Slashdot says otherwise about the hardware, the macbook pro running XP in photoshop tests beats every other core duo laptop out there on the market, and that's without accelerated drivers! (the intel mac's use EFI which means that there are currently no XP graphics drivers).
wozzaa said:
OS X at the core is just another version of unix. Whats put over the top is just software you could probably find a good copy of OS X's gui for linux to be honest.
Yes, it's another POSIX implementation, but it's GUI that's the killer. I've not seen any linux GUI that comes anywhere near to OS X, although I'm more than happy to be proved wrong