An Apple User Tries Ubuntu • Hacker News Board

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#21

Post by etal » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 7:07 PM UTC

apgwoz wrote: post #2

> I know Ubuntu is free software, but I don’t care about that. It’s more important that my system be good, not cheap. (And if it was really that great, they’d charge for it, right?). I wanted to stop reading right there, because the reviewer is ill informed by what it means to be "free," however I stuck it out and he gives a favorable review.

The first 10 paragraphs seem to be intentionally echoing the usual gripes and fears, in an ignorant-sounding tone. The author could have made it more clear, but I think he meant for it to sound flippant or somewhat mocking, then rebut most of it in the rest of the article.

It's a decent Mac-user-tries-Ubuntu anecdote, not so much a review. But he does bring up one good point: Apple spends hojillions on advertising, and Microsoft at least matches that. Word of mouth is great for converting power-users, but there's a reason the advertising industry churns through so much money -- it works.

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#22

Post by tlrobinson » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 7:12 PM UTC

As a Mac user, this article made me cringe.

> And that Safari can’t handle certain Web features, including plenty of videos.

That's not really true, unless he's talking about crappy IE-specific sites. Most videos will play with the appropriate codecs installed (Flip4Mac and Perian cover most)

> ...and some even still use the command line. (The command line? Oh, geez…)

This says much more about your level of experience than your platform of choice (though I imagine the average Linux user uses the command line much more than the average Windows or OS X user). To his credit, it seems he sees the light later in the article.

> First off, immediately, before anything: the rotating desktop. Damn, that is totally cool. You click an icon in the screen’s lower right, and the desktop rotates to a fresh view. Remarkably, you can have up to 16 different desktops.

OS X has that too! Up to 16 different desktops! (it's called "Spaces") Granted they copied it directly from Linux, but it's there, rotation and all (I think OS X may have actually had the rotation effect first, with Fast User Switching)

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#23

Post by nickd » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 7:20 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #19

evgen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock OS X box comes with enough of the standard command-line toolbox that if you are actually writing a "portable" script you are not going to have a problem running that script on OS X. The biggest differentiator is probably that OS X is a part of the *BSD lineage and so you will need to do more tweaking of a Linux script to get it bsd-ready than you will need to tweak a standard bsd script to move it from Free…

It's been a few versions since I paid close attention, but as I remember OS X ships with only the bare POSIX tools, plus a few extras from the FreeBSD userspace. It lacks stuff like perl, python, curl, wget, ssh (maybe: not sure about that one), tcpdump, etc... That's all stuff the poor user is going to have to figure out how to get. And as mentioned, the existing package systems for OSS software are really primitive…

I'm running Leopard right now, and I have python, perl, curl, ssh, and tcpdump. I have no idea why wget is left out of the default install, but I just get it with macports, which is just a download and double click install away. Anyone who would be using these tools wouldn't have any problem setting it up. A few revisions of OS X ago things did seem relatively odd to the average Bash user. The shell was tcsh, and being based on BSD everything felt a bit off to someone switching from Linux, but these days it's pretty much all there. You should give it another look if you get a chance.

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#24

Post by etal » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 7:24 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #8

Another Mac user here. I gave Ubuntu a spin the other week, running in Virtualbox on my main machine. I thought it looked slick and was very usable. Then I tried downloading and installing Firefox 3. I grabbed it, unarchived it and then.... then what? Where's the bloody installer.

The package manager is Linux's killer app, but new users coming from Windows or OS X don't expect it, don't understand it and don't use it. Blub phenomenon.

(If an open-source program isn't already installed. click the Applications menu, go to Add/Remove, and select the programs you want to install. Any dependencies are taken care of automatically, even for complicated packages like web servers. Click "Apply". You're done. If a free but closed-source program like Skype isn't shown, try adding the Medibuntu repository.)

Another interesting example of death-by-alternatives is the beleaguered Linspire's Click-N-Run initiative:

http://www.cnr.com/

Stillborn? Perhaps. But in theory, CNR should have been an easy way for new converts to download and install programs the way they're most comfortable, and still benefit from the OS's package manager.

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#25

Post by rplevy » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 7:30 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #4

petercooper wrote: post #3

This wasn't a bad article to read, although it doesn't really get anywhere. A reasonably novice Mac user tries out Ubuntu, finds some pros and cons.. the end. Quite well written though but some of his insights don't quite make sense.. > I had heard that Linux users still use a command line. Instead of pointing and clicking, they actually type in obscure commands – a series of numbers, letters, and squiggly things. It…

I might quibble with the "Linux's command line offers no benefits" line. It's true that the shell is identical. But OS X, out of the box, is lacking huge chunks of what you expect to find out-of-the-box on a typical Linux distribution. That's a problem for anyone who wants to be able to portable scripts, etc... Add that to the fact that the existing package managers for the command line tools are kinda lacking, and I…

Don't forget the lightweight xubuntu distribution, which uses the xfce window manager. It is nice and fast. It works nicely on older machines with less resources.

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#26

Post by mdasen » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 7:32 PM UTC

He seems like a real novice Mac user.

Ubuntu is nice, but both Ubuntu and GNU/Linux aren't without flaws that don't exist in the Mac/Windows world (that a novice might not notice).

Examples:

Software. I can grab off the internet or the shelf any piece of "Windows" software and put it on my computer. Likewise, I can do the same with the Mac. I can't say that about GNU/Linux. Why? Because each distribution (and new version of a specific distro) has different dependencies taken care of by a regular install. Distros get around this by providing repositories (and Ubuntu's is excellent), but it's still different than being able to just grab stuff. GNU/Linux is much more in a state of flux which means that it can progress very quickly, but also that software requires more tweaking for each distro.

Proprietary stuff. This has come a long way since I started using Linux in the RedHat 9 days. Ubuntu 8.04 allows for easy installation of proprietary codecs, but things like DeCSS (for DVD playback) is still a pain and flash (becoming more important in the YouTube generation) is absolute crap. Not the fault of GNU/Linux, but it does still lessen my enjoyment of it.

UI stuff. I like GNOME's HIG for the most part, but GTK+ is starting to look old. Look at Adium and Pidgin. Pidgin is a fine piece of software, but it just looks cludgy by comparison. Likewise, there are just somethings that no one seems to want to fix (the minimize animation is crap). More abstractly, none of the desktop environments seem to be hitting what I'll call the Firefox level. Specifically, that nice balance between simplicity and complexity that Firefox seems to hit. GNOME goes for simplicity to a fault while KDE will throw every useless thing into the mix and tell you that you should just be comfortable looking through a cludgy list of a million settings.

GRANTED, there are many thing that are simply superior about GNU/Linux. Examples include software updates that don't require restarts, some of the best multi-tasking I've seen (where Windows and Mac might make other processes hang a bit in responsiveness), and of course being free. It's truly amazing, but there are some annoyances.

If I were to lay out some milestone's in GNU/Linux's future, I'd have to argue that these would be important: like LSB (Linux Standards Base) becoming the norm (which I think will happen when developers start seeing the number of new things they can add decline and they focus on environment stability); getting consumers off proprietary codecs and environments (like flash or DVD - yes, this is out there); and a change in one of the two desktop environment's philosophies to be more Firefox-like in terms of verbosity and the like.

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#27

Post by hernan7 » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 7:57 PM UTC

xlnt wrote: post #9

Safari's video support and general works-well-ness was bad 3 years ago, but it's just fine now. edit: he doesn't seem to know that macs have a command line

"edit: he doesn't seem to know that macs have a command line"

Yes, I found that bizarre. That, and the part where he writes that Ubuntu "does everything that Windows does".

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#28

Post by jdbeast00 » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 7:59 PM UTC

i tried ubuntu over the weekend (this time for real, not on a VM). I was severely shocked to see that in order to have multiple monitor support, I would have to start editing config files. I'm a tad bit linux savvy (i know what cd is, in other words) but this was just too much hassle. I stuck with vista... :(

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#29

Post by pi3832 » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 8:14 PM UTC

>There’s a reason that Apple has always been the choice of artists and musicians. The machine itself is artful. Yeah, it’s expensive, and it crashes, but it’s artful. And that counts for a whole lot.

What? Apples crash?! Unpossible--Apples are the greatest computers evar!

Re: An Apple User Tries Ubuntu

#30

Post by Timothee » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 8:24 PM UTC

tialys wrote: post #14

crescendo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. He goes on to describe the enhanced productivity of using multiple workspaces, as if the same cannot be accomplished on a mac.

That's what he's saying though is that he likes 'the cube' as a feature, not the ability to have multiple desktops. That, or I'm misunderstanding. I do know though that when I show people my ubuntu box they go NUTS over the cube so I think that is really what he's trying to show. It's nifty!

> "I thought to myself: this could increase productivity so much. Even with my huge Apple monitor, I'm always needing to move things around when I’m deep in a project."

No really, he doesn't know about Spaces.

Overall, I agree with the article doesn't go anywhere. He likes some things that exist on Mac too, he doesn't like other things (command line) that are on Mac too. He doesn't seem to know enough about what he's talking about to give any interesting insights on his test.