Subject: [OT] OSX (was Re: MacOS 9.1 to X.1 Upgrade ¿dangerous?.)
From: Nathan A. McQuillen (nm@steaky.dhs.org)
Date: Fri Nov 30 2001 - 01:54:55 MST
This is just a little report on my feelings about OS X and Linux, on the
occasion of my being able to type this message in Pine on 10.1, prompted
by the recurring questions about OS X speed, usability, etcetera. It's not
technical or really useful at all, just thoughts. So.
<rambling="oblique">
Well, for all the criticisms I've levied against Apple's premature X
release, I'm finally running 10.1 on my Lombard 400 and I have to say,
it's darned impressive. Usable speed more than doubled from 1.0.x to 10.1
and now that I have devtools, fink and XDarwin installed, it's got all the
things I always missed on the Mac (well, almost; still no 3D immersive
filesystem viewer but that's just going to have to be MY killer app :-) ),
while Aqua is approaching the functionality, if not the Zen elegance, of
the 9.x look & feel. Also, it's definitely NeXTStep in many ways, and I
finally feel like I can let go of my longstanding jealousy of a high
school friend who purchased a NeXTCube in '92... I still don't have the
sexy grayscale display, and I'd pay good money for one of those black
laser printers, but I can pretend.
Seriously, though, while it ain't Linux, it's going to run the Mac stuff a
lot of us need to make a living with (but woe on anyone cursed to run
anything in Classic...!) and at the same time will talk happily with our
beloved Linux systems and let us use our hard-won command-line skills to
impress and frighten coworkers who ask for a hand with their iMacs. It's
no threat to Linux, in fact I think they're symbiotic: the fact that there
are ten or twelve actions I could list off right now that will render the
system unusable (e.g., mount an SMB share with > 100 items in the root
share, and enjoy the spinning rainbow beachball as it renders the Finder
unusable for upwards of 20 minutes figuring out God knows what) and the
fact as well that the console is constantly reporting resolver and
interface errors on a relatively OTS system, speak to the plodding pace of
bug resolution and the rather proprietary roots of the system, whereas
there have so far been only three things I've been unable to set up in YDL
2 (my Farallon 10/100 card, HFSplus for obvious reasons, and any inkjet
printer at all (cursed serial port BS)). In general I think I'll be
keeping the YDL tower server/Mac laptop client pattern going, just with
OSX running on that laptop.
That's the thing: it remains a Macintosh, with some of the same sacrifices
and tradeoffs, and much of the same design philosophy. I think the Jobs
hivemind probably hates extra filesystems and weird kernel modules to run
hardware three people ever use and all the other kludgy, brilliant
features than make Linux Linux about as much as it hates floppy drives and
extra mouse buttons. Still, for what I need to do (keep up with the
Joneses in Adobe versions and have easy access to half a dozen different
Linux servers from within a print graphics and DTP environment) I've been
pleasantly surprised by how much real work I can do on this system and how
robust and responsive it has so far proven to be.
If they'd bother to work out OpenGL support for my machine, I'd be even
happier, as would I if I could use my SCSI burner; but hell, it's only
Apple. Remember when you couldn't format a third party SCSI drive with HD
SC Setup? Those were the days, man... ;-)
</rambling>
- n2
On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, dano wrote:
> I work with X 10.1 and X 10.1 Server on a daily basis and agree that
> it is not as productive as 9.2.1 or 9.1. I get more work done faster
> because there is much s/w available for 9.x.
>
> X is too slow on anything PPC slower than 533MHz.
>
> X Server is a pain, though not a pita.
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