“In early 2005, Apple was announcing the Mac mini computer. It was the answer to what I was looking for in a computer, so I bought one. This is a report about the early months with my new Mac, and how it compares to a Linux computer. (I have never owned a Windows computer.) In short, I am now both a Mac and a Linux user – Apple gets GUI simplicity, usability, and coherency right, and Linux everything else,” Thomas Driemeyer writes for bitrot.de.
“When switching operating systems, there is a strong tendency to whine about all the things missing in the new OS, or that are done differently and require a change of habits. The advantages become obvious only after some time. I’ll do my best to take that into account and present a balanced review. There are a few fundamental problems that I cannot ignore though,” Driemeyer writes.
“No doubt, the Mac mini is the most sexy box I have ever owned. For some reason, perhaps cost, a PC is invariably a boring big brick where all the designers’ creativity goes into coming up with yet another front plastic bezel, usually on the far end of the ugliness scale. It truly amazes me how PC designers have managed to produce one design disaster after another for thirty years straight, while Apple just gets it right every time,” Driemeyer writes. “But that’s not the reason I bought a Mac mini. The reason why I refuse to buy another PC is that today’s PCs are built for stone-deaf speed nuts who think it’s normal that a CPU must generate more heat per surface area than a stove, and require something that sounds like a jet engine to cool it lest it disappears in a rapidly expanding plasma cloud. I was looking for an unobtrusive and quiet machine that I can put on my desk without going deaf or getting sunburned. And I don’t care about gigahertz ratings when I do desktop work. I get all the horsepower I need for 3D rendering at work.”
“As happy as I am with the MacOS GUI, I am disappointed with the underlying operating system. It’s based on FreeBSD, a powerful and well-respected Unix variant, what can be wrong with that? It’s not a leading-edge OS, sure, but it is tightly controlled by a professional team. I understand why Apple chose it; I am sure they felt it’s more manageable than Linux with its countless features and developments. I am sure they also liked the license… To someone who knows Linux, FreeBSD is a little quaint. It doesn’t even have a /proc filesystem, many utilities like ps or ifconfig evoke happy memories of the early 90’s, network services are sparse (no rsh and no rdist, for example) and there just isn’t a lot of tools included. But it’s perfectly adequate for Apple’s purpose, and very stable,” Driemeyer writes. “So why am I disappointed? Because Apple botched the job. They totally crippled MacOS X with proprietary additions. In particular, they tore out some of the lower layers and replaced them with a Mach-like microkernel. Microkernels were all the rage fifteen years ago, but the idea totally crashed and burned because performance and resource usage was pitiful. All implementations failed, and today it’s deeply buried and forgotten.”
Full article, a very interesting read, here.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Chicago Sun-Times: Apple’s Mac OS X ‘the easiest, most reliable, and overall best operating system’ – November 28, 2005
Gartner: Ignore Microsoft Windows Vista until 2008 (why not just get Apple Mac OS X Tiger today?) – November 12, 2005
Windows switchers, now’s your chance: Apple Mac mini with Mac OS X Tiger for $379 – November 03, 2005
News & Observer writer dumps Dell with Windows for iMac G5 with Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger – October 23, 2005
Microsoft’s Windows Vista will attempt to incorporate many features from Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger – August 01, 2005
Windows users who try Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger might not want to go back – June 07, 2005
PC World names Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘Best Operating System’ – June 01, 2005
Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘is the most advanced operating system on the planet’ – May 31, 2005
TrustedReviews: After using Mac OS X Tiger ‘going back to Windows XP is something of a joke at best’ – May 18, 2005
Oops! That’s Pascal. Sorry!
gorufo: have you bothered to do ANY maintenance on your Mac since you’ve purchased it? I do know about spinning beach balls but have to admit that I have not had the bad experiences reported through out this forum unless there was a serious problem (such as bad ram, permissions or preferences problems). I would suggest (for starters) running something like YASU http://www.jimmitchelldesigns.com/yasu.html (best of the GUI utes I’ve found). Make sure to update your prebindings (just check the checkbox in YASU) as well as the normal routines it runs.
Good luck!
gorufo – I’ve also switched from the PC to the Mac recently. I don’t have the latest iMac G5, I have the first G5 iMac and I’m not experiencing the beachball issues you are. I’ve got the RAM maxxed out and I’m accessing the network through an Apple network.
I do wish I could resize the windows without having to use the little arrow in the lower right of the window. I’ve searched for a solution and have determined that only switchers are even aware of this short coming. If the scrollbars are giving you headaches, contact Apple. I did, they’re interested in the “Switcher” opinion, hopefully as more of us move over for security reasons, Apple will adopt our suggestions and OS X will become more Windows like and a much better OS.
Hello?
Sorry?
What’s that?
I tried to read about the Linux stuff (“It doesn’t even have a /proc filesystem, many utilities like ps or ifconfig evoke happy memories of the early 90’s,…”)…
But I was too busy kissing a girl.
Good luck with the geek stuff, I like Mac.
~M
MacWrath:
Thank you for your detailed answer. You see to critique an article the way you did would be more helpful than just rejecting it.
My post was a more general response based on principle. I think as a community of Mac users, we need to be more open to critical analysis. Any such article will likely contain errors and erroneous conclusions, big or small, important or trivial. It is helpful to know these things in MHO. But we need to accept critique or risk stagnation.
As for “..maybe you’re a Linux troll..”, I’ve had linux and Unix experience (as well as Windows, Atari and Amiga, among others), but I’m definitely closer to being a Mac “Fanboy” than any other kind.
Sorry Bub. Utilities like ps (running process list) are standard industrial grade unix utilities. I’m sure there are alternatives in the amateur (Linux) world, but BSD, Mac OS X, and most other Unix versions are POSIX compliant. That means that they must include a prescribed set of standard Unix commands (like ps), so that people familiar with most versions of Unix can be assured that the basic commands are always available. There will always be those off the wall versions of Unix and Linux that have whatever features various tinkerers think are cool, but it makes little sense to complain about their absence in a serious Unix system or in Mac OS X.
The guy makes a number of good constructive criticisms, especially in the area of GUI inconsistencies.
I have a few constructive criticisms about his article, though.
1. He throws around the term “modern,” but all he really seems to mean by it is “like KDE.” Sorry, but I’m pretty sure Windows 3.1 had the ability to resize a window from any edge. Hardly “modern,” and arguably more confusing than helpful for 75% of users.
2. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Mac OS X kernel isn’t actually a straight Mach microkernel, it’s a hybrid kernel called XNU that incorporates Mach and BSD elements. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xnu. Whether it has issues with parallelism, or the user-level software just isn’t multithreaded well, is another matter.
Too Hot: you are absolutely correct in your second post. Peace!
Gregg Thurman,
How the hell did you miss the sarcasm in my ridiculous post?
In simple English, the writer will never be happy with our ‘Not Linux’ OS.
I’m a *nix systems engineer; I (and my team) support literally thousands of servers of all flavors – HPUX, Solaris, Linux, AIX, you name it. And after using Linux for years – and yes, KDE – I’ve used a mac for exactly four months and you’d have to have a gun or a lot of money to get me to go back to other *nix on the desktop.
Certainly Apple could spend a little more time abstracting and parallellizing the filesystem code; but anyone who’s tried to do anythign useful on a linux system when a mounted NFS fileserver goes down knows that it’s not limited to OSX. There’s no beachballs, just blank unresponsiveness.
Basically, as others have said, this article’s criticims basically boil down to “It’s not linux, dammit!”
I can’t vouch for any of the low level stuff he talks about but on the subject of Objective-C, I find his attitude a little strange. Having done a small amount of it, I can say that Cocoa (Apple’s Obj-C API) appears to be as good if not better than any C++ API for the GUI level stuff. It’s not that hard to pick up the basics and the way that the interfaces are built is cool compared to, say, most Java IDE’s. I don’t see how he can praise the GUI generally and then go on to dismiss the way that it is achieved (it surely won’t matter to most people anyway). We all know the difference between a Carbon and a Cocoa app when we see one and it just feels *not quite right* (Carbon=C++). I think that this article shows a few prejudices, the Linux one already mentioned in this post and the C programmer superiority complex to name but two
‘point’ – as in what was your point?