Apple crippled DTrace on MacOS X
blogs.sun.com
blogs.sun.com
I'm sure the RIAA and the MPAA had some concerns about that.
Yes, it's true: You will probably never have to worry about whether or not DTrace is compatible with the Linux version of iTunes. That is one problem you will never have.
You may also never have to use DTrace with the Linux versions of 1Password, Adium, Audio Hijack, Automator, Colloquy, GarageBand, Handbrake, Path Finder, Pixelmator, Quicksilver, NetNewsWire, Snapz Pro, Textmate, Transmit, Twitterific, VisualHub, or xScope. To say nothing of Photoshop or Logic Pro. Just think of all the bugs you will never have to find.
Of course, based on a quick Google search for "dtrace Linux", you don't seem to be able to run DTrace on Linux at all. But, if you could, I'm sure it would be perfect!
</snark>
Mind you, I love Linux and I use it all the time. Just not on my desktop.
I don't want to compare Apple apps to Linux apps, just point out that many Apple apps come with a nasty aftertaste. Maybe most apps on your list are clean, maybe not. It's all about trust to begin with, and I don't really trust Apple to do the right thing.
An excellent choice of words: "Roughly". You and I are in complete agreement.
I find your answer very illuminating. "I don't really trust Apple to do the right thing," you say, and yet of the 21 apps I listed (including DTrace itself), exactly three are Apple products. Another, Photoshop, is a Adobe product, and DTrace is made by Sun. I believe the remainder are all produced by little shareware shops, composed of one to five people, with a sinister "corporate agenda" that consists mainly of "make enough money so that we can keep eating and writing cool software." Or, like Colloquy, they're open source.
(There are interesting exceptions. NetNewsWire now has an exciting new corporate agenda: they are giving away the software and planning to make money by tracking audience numbers for the content that their subscribers read. In other words, they've chosen to become some combination of Google and the Nielsen folks. Is this scary? Perhaps. I'm not completely in love with this new development. But it's not as scary as Google itself, let alone Gmail.)
I would love to run a Linux desktop. Seriously. And, in a world where the market for Linux-based software was healthy, I could do that without regret. But the Mac OS X world is filled with elegant apps which have been honed, over the course of several years, by dedicated one-to-three person design teams. The result is that I can rip a DVD and put it on an iPod in two steps without thinking (Handbrake), or set up a flawless, bootable, automated system backup in two minutes. (SuperDuper -- I can't believe I left this off the original list. And that's not even counting Time Machine. My god, do you have any idea how many hours I wasted trying to get automated, bootable backups of my Linux box? At first I dared to sample the "rough" SuperDuper alternative, Mondo Backup. Gaaaack. After hours of suffering I fell back on rsync + Knoppix + detailed handwritten notes, the tried and true hard-core-geek solution.)
Unfortunately, these polished apps don't seem to exist for Linux. The market doesn't seem to be there.
Why not? I think the biggest reason is that Linux is an amorphous blob: although Ubuntu has done much to improve the situation, it's still the case that every Linux system is different from every other, often in nontrivial ways, and this creates a support nightmare for the one-person software vendor.
But I think there's another reason: if, for example, Agile Web Solutions were to port 1Password to Linux and start selling it for $39.95, significant portions of the Linux community would react by trying to run it out of town. They would denounce the company's sinister corporate agenda, demand that it release the code for free, and promote a bunch of "rough" free alternatives, many of which were produced in one day by a high school student who has already moved on to something else.
The attitude is pervasive. Your response to my snarky post was quite sensible, as these things go, and yet it was completely natural for you to unknowingly group the makers of Audio Hijack -- a $32 piece of software that, among other things, can strip the DRM from any piece of audible content -- with companies like Adobe. As Mac software vendors, they're all potentially "unclean". What in the world is unclean about them? Is it all that filthy money?
I don't deny that they do some things right, or at least set interesting trends. I am still amazed at how bad other companies are at copying apple's style (it does not seem that hard, but the clones are always horrible).
Anyway, I can only speak for Ubuntu, and I think they are really making giant steps towards usability. I am very happy with what is available on Ubuntu - it beats the usability of Windows in many ways, and personally I prefer Windows usability over OS X... One major gripe I have with OS X style is that it requires you to know so many things (like keyboard combinations). Windows and Ubuntu almost always let you find a way with the right mouse button. With OS X I often had to google to find out how to do trivial things (like cut+paste, file renaming, etc).
The latest Mac Book Air is a good example: the gestures on the mousepad might be a nifty feature, but they are something you have to learn somehow. There is nothing about the mousepad that suggests those features to you. Chances are, I personally would never learn them, just as I never learned to write the special letters on my Palm Pilot back in the day. But an OS X super-geek will be able to do wonders with them, perhaps, at least impress some girls at Starbucks.
You could be right that the true secret of Apple is the willingness of users to pay for stuff, hence more pretty shareware for Macs. Interesting!
But perhaps you can answer a question: is there a version of SuperDuper for Linux? Here's how it works: you plug in an external hard drive, and you boot SuperDuper. A wizard helps you click approximately five boxes. Then your external drive becomes a complete, bootable backup of your main drive, and it refreshes itself once per day (or more often, if you like).
(Things are a bit more painful if you have to unplug the drive occasionally -- you still have to unmount it by hand. Apple's latest Time Capsule product claims to solve that whole problem, but it doesn't do bootable backups. One-size-fits-all, maintenance-free, user-friendly backup is a really hard problem to solve, even in a universe of restricted hardware like the Mac. So I don't ask for miracles. I don't ask for a "stylized piece of crap" like Time Machine. Just SuperDuper will be fine.)
SuperDuper is very reliable, with one dedicated author who maintains the FAQ and answers tech support emails, typically within a day. The cost is $27.95, one-time only.
What's the equivalent for Linux? This is not a snarky question. I seriously want to know, because I have a Linux desktop system, and I wasted hours setting up the backups, and I waste another hour each time I restore them.
A Google search for Linux backup software brings me to pages advocating rsync, which is a wonderful tool which I use every day, but which is not Mom-friendly, or even particularly me-friendly. And it brings me to a 2006 article...
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2280165098.html
...that recommends "Simple Linux Backup", a nice open-source tool whose home page talks about bash, tar, gzip, gtk+, cron, the possible need to install Java 1.5 by hand, the need to unzip a tar.gz file, the many complicated options that I can use to organize my backups, and the complete lack of any warranty. "The Mac PPC version is brand new," it says, which leads me to wonder just how old this page is.
I want something better. I've been assured that Linux has the open-source solution for me. What is it?
It does not look too bad, maybe? But I must admit that I myself have neglected backups so far (source files and emails are on another server that has backups, though). My server uses something else, but I forgot the name (did not set it up myself).
One of the commenters on that post said:
They're more concerned with their image than doing the right thing. That is the essence of evil.