Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

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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’s very Russian spy, black hat, deep nerd.

So do most technically minded OS X users. Admittedly he says he finds the command line quite useful on page 2, but Linux's command line offers no benefits over OS X's.

> My test laptop was using the GNOME desktop interface. On start up, it offered me a choice of interfaces (KDE, GNOME, etc.) The oddness of this struck me: isn’t Ubuntu enough? It appears I still needed to select a separate desktop interface. [...] The Linux desktop needs to eliminate that extra choice if it wants to reach a mass audience.

That's what Ubuntu is attempting to do: enforce a standard. I don't recall Ubuntu asking me this question with a default install. You're never going to be able to eradicate the ability to choose though, because people on both sides of the KDE/GNOME fence are pretty diehard. I can see why, because I "quite like" GNOME and think KDE is a bloated, ugly, block piece of Windows-inspired junk (basically, I respect KDE as much as I respect Comic Sans) and I don't usually take sides on things like this..

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'd honestly put OS X behind even cygwin as a good example of a OS command line environment.

The bit about Gnome vs. KDE is a sore point, alas. Canonical itself is clearly a Gnome shop, and that's what they ship on their core Ubuntu Desktop distribution. But KDE has a huge user base of near-fanatic volunteers, who insist (how dare they!) on maintaining the Kubuntu distribution in parallel. Both desktops work very well, and at this point neither is likely to disappear.

FWIW, I use Gnome and prefer the architecture and API.

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 FreeBSD to OS X. While macports is closer to the freebsd port system, it is close enough to apt-get that you should really have no problems switching from one to the other.

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. There's just no equivalent for, say, the Ubuntu synaptic tool for new users.

I'm not trying to make this into a flame war: clearly you can achieve a pretty solid command line experience in OS X if you know what you're doing. But you're never going to learn it there without a bunch of headaches if you don't already have that expertise.

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.

wget is left out simply for licensing reasons. curl is an MIT license, wget is GPL.

edit: I second guess this now that I think about it. bash is GPL...

That is simply not true. Python is in /System/Library/Frameworks for example. OS X doesn't usually bother to imitate SysV, that's all.

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.

I like fluxbuntu better than xubuntu. It's not an official canonical distro, but i have a pretty old pc with only 64 mb of ram and fluxbox runs far better than xfce on it. I think xubuntu is a waste of time anyway, but i can't i8magine using gnome either, im kubuntu till death(mine, or theirs) Viva KDE.

Anyway, a friend of mine can get me a cheap mac(prices are unbearable outside of the us because of shipping and resellers adding up to the price) so I'm going to get pretty close to OS X and i know that its good, but like that guy i might choose to dual boot and have the OS X just there if i need it.

I've been using Fluxbuntu for quite a while now, I second your recommendation, it's pretty impressive and worth a shot for ubuntu linux users interested in an alternative to xubuntu.

He also seems to be stuck in the past on a few features. For example:

[On Ubuntu] 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.

Apple introduced the same feature (Spaces) with the Leopard release of OS X.

Damn, you beat me to it. I love how this guy is _such_ an apple fan yet he isn't familiar with Spaces.

There's a lot of these ill-informed and vocal mac fans out there that give the rest of us a bad name.

Forgive me, but spaces doesn't have the nifty cube does it? I think he just likes the 'eye candy' that comes with Compiz (which, btw isn't enabled by default).

Actually, the rotating cube effect started with the OS X fast user switching feature and was "borrowed" by a lot of virtual desktop systems like Compiz or the OS X virtual desktop apps "Desktop Manager" and "Virtue Desktops". Since Apple already uses this visual effect for changing users it is not going to use it for switching desktops and therefore went with a different visual effect -- if you really like the effect you can get it with the previously mentioned third-part virtual desktop apps.

OSX had 3d rotating cube fast user switching in 2002? Most likely it was "borrowed" for that from someplace else.

http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/oldnews.php

Like thwarted said, 3D desktop was doing this on Linux back around 2002, before OS X had multiple local users.. You'd zoom out, the cube sat in the middle of the screen, about 75% of your monitor, rotate, then zoom back in. It was a little flickery, but damn cool, and worked on the KDE setup I had at the time.

Actually the cube is a usability trap. I had to disable it because it increased my workspace switching time a lot even when I had increased its rotation speed. It looks cool, but gets in the way unfortunately.

Its a trade off: increased spatial awareness versus a few fractions of a second. Compare most office suites, which now smoothly show when new rows or columns are added to a spreadsheet for the same reason - animation shows you what's happening, and where its happening.

It's a lot easier for people to get the concept that they have another desktop around the corner, than that they have another desktop on an abtract flat plane.

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.

> Linux's command line offers no benefits over OS X's.

Oh cmon. The rarely updated BSD tools versus GNU? Massive amounts of packaged command line software available at the click of a button? Commands available for more stuff, to automate admin tasks? A tabbed terminal out of the box?

Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing wrote a much better article about switching to Linux from a Mac a couple of years ago. GIYF.

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