Subject: Re: [OT] OSX (was Re: MacOS 9.1 to X.1 Upgrade ¿dangerous?. )
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Nov 30 2001 - 16:20:32 MST
At 9:52 AM -0500 11/30/01, cbsled@ncia.net wrote:
>On 11/30/01, at 02:54 AM, "Nathan A. McQuillen" <nm@steaky.dhs.org> said:
>
>>That's the thing: it remains a Macintosh, with some of the same
>>sacrifices and
>>tradeoffs, and much of the same design philosophy.
>
>Right, and that philosophy hasn't changed in over 15 years. They threw out
>some of the best available *nix features, like virtual desktops,
Which isn't a *nix feature. UNIX does NOT imply X11 with a
windowmanager that supports virtual desktops.
>and held on tight to all the truly annoying and dysfunctional parts of
>the Mac GUI, along with its traditional "We Know What's Best for You"
>lack of configurability. Before anyone flames me for that comment, go
>take a look through the KDE Control Center. Now compare that with OSX.
>It's pretty and elegant, yes, but it's also pretty clear that they went
>for style over substance in the interface design.
If the person whom you're addressing also enjoys KDE's design
philosophy (slavish if crude imitation of Windows wherever possible)
and the usual billion knobs of modern X11 window managers (many of
which are cryptic enough that you practically have to read the source
to figure out what they're going to do), then sure, you've got a
point.
But if that person just wants to sit down and start using a computer
without having to search through a gazillion badly designed interface
panels just to figure out why windows are behaving strangely, you
don't. I've been through the KDE/Gnome dance too many times. Trying
to set up either of them to my liking is harder than figuring out how
to use most command line tools.
Sure, I wish that Apple offered a little more flexibility. But they
should not be looking to KDE as the paragon of GUI excellence.
>Then there's the matter of the 1Gig base os install footprint... And I
>thought Microsoft was the king of bloatware. OS X is over 5 times the size
>of 9.1. On a laptop? Better make it a new one. I dumped OSX off my
>Wallstreet Powerbook within a week.
20GB 2.5" drives are about $100. Hard drive space is cheap.
Installing "everything" in YDL 2.1 takes 1.8GB, BTW. My YDL 2.0
gateway computer has a stripped down installation with no X11 and
little software aside from the services it is supposed to have and
compilation tools & libraries so I can compile software (mostly
kernels) on it. It's still almost 500MB.
>Including the "developer tools", which
>don't include a compiler BTW, it's over 1.5G.
You clearly didn't look very carefully. The developer tools include
a compiler.
-- Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Fri Nov 30 2001 - 16:33:15 MST