Linux vs MacOSX

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Q-collective · Post by **Q-collective** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 1:00 pm

First of all: congrats in digging up a year old thread.

akiross wrote:Umm to me, yes, OSX is nice but linux is faaar better for me. I've a iBookG4 with Panther on it... yeah, it's eyecandy, nice ideas, but it doesn't work like linux, it's slooow, it's heavy, linux apps works, yes, but doesn't work like on linux, of course. I use mostly linux apps, but the feel is to get them emulated as winapps on wine, I don't like to work this way.

Huh? Slow? Heavy? MacosX Tiger's GUI is fully accelerated on the gfx card.
And what do you mean with emulated? Most Linux apps just run on a mac, remember, it's just unix.

Oh well, and MacOSX isn't GPL

Yeah, the GPL issue weighs heavy for me aswell.

See ya

Bye?

Blood Fluke · Post by **Blood Fluke** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 1:34 pm

Q-collective wrote: Huh? Slow? Heavy? MacosX Tiger's GUI is fully accelerated on the gfx card.

So is XFree86.

And what do you mean with emulated? Most Linux apps just run on a mac, remember, it's just unix.

Yes, it's "just UNIX." Just a decrepit, anachronistic UNIX with bizarre, unnecessary differences from prevailing standards. OSX is a revenant from 1993 and it shows.

Broken threading (Linux performs an average of 8x better on the same hardware on threaded code)
Two ancient broken filesystems. (HFS+ is a joke. Apple's UFS implementation is, quite simply, broken.)
An abandoned binary format. (OSX is the only system left that uses Mach-O, and support for it is bitrotted in many, many tools. All other modern UNIX systems use ELF. Older UNIX systems use COFF and ECOFF. You have to go back to the eighties to find something that uses Mach-O.)
Horrendous system call overhead. This isn't just a Mach thing, this is specifically an OSX problem. OSF/1 was a single-server UNIX built on Mach and it never turned in performance numbers this bad. On the very same hardware, Linux frequently beats OSX by 40-60%, even on code that doesn't rely on OSX's broken threads.

It's not like Linux or Linux/PPC is an unusually good UNIX system; AIX, UnixWare, or Solaris can deliver the same sort of price/performance. It's that OSX is an unusually bad system.

Q-collective · Post by **Q-collective** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 3:05 pm

Blood Fluke wrote:
Q-collective wrote: Huh? Slow? Heavy? MacosX Tiger's GUI is fully accelerated on the gfx card.
So is XFree86.

Erm? Maybe you are in confusion with Xgl? Xfree86 and Xorg are only software rendered.

Blood Fluke · Post by **Blood Fluke** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 4:21 pm

Q-collective wrote:
Blood Fluke wrote:
Q-collective wrote: Huh? Slow? Heavy? MacosX Tiger's GUI is fully accelerated on the gfx card.
So is XFree86.
Erm? Maybe you are in confusion with Xgl? Xfree86 and Xorg are only software rendered.

No.
Most XFree86 drivers use hardware acceleration extensively. Close to the only exceptions are VESA and fbdev.

akiross · Post by **akiross** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 4:36 pm

Q-collective wrote:First of all: congrats in digging up a year old thread.

Thanks! Great discussions never die.

Huh? Slow? Heavy? MacosX Tiger's GUI is fully accelerated on the gfx card.

I said Panther. If you have a Tiger license for me, oh well i can accept that.
Anyway yes, it's slower than linux, with almost the same machine (both 256mb ram, athlon-tbird vs g4 both 1ghz, gForce2Mx vs Radeon9200)

And what do you mean with emulated? Most Linux apps just run on a mac, remember, it's just unix.

Yes, i knot it's unix, but native gui for macosx is cocoa acqua, not the x11. It's running natively of course, but i've got the same feeling that i've when i run windows apps on wine: just a feeling.

Yeah, the GPL issue weighs heavy for me aswell.

OSX is for sure a great piece of code, but this isn't userful if it's closed

CorpseOfMystic · Post by **CorpseOfMystic** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 7:15 pm

OSX is for sure a great piece of code, but this isn't userful if it's closed

Actually, Apple is known for having absolutely horrible code quality. Their software is unmaintainable due to a complete lack of abstraction. Consider the KHTML debacle, when the KDE developers could not merge patches back in because random OSX-specific crap was embedded in what was supposed to be abstracted over the system (and in the process, WebCore broke a large number of CSS features from KHTML, e.g. shadows and cursors). It would be utterly useless for Apple to open up their code; they can't make any sense of it, so I doubt you or I could either (not to mention that OS X is an inferior desktop anyway, with a total lack of concern for usability or consistency).

As for the claim OS X is not slow, lets just bring up this fairly recent gem: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520

akiross · Post by **akiross** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 11:27 pm

Umm i didn't knew about quality of apple's code - but actually linux code is confused too, respect ie freebsd.

Anyway i was talking about features: i prefer linux but some macosx's features do their job very well. First of all the graphic system (oh well, xorg maybe accelerated too, but the objects handling isn't the same i think) lots of features of apple engine aren't present - or are under development - on xorg.

Oh well, benchmarks can say what they want, but my gentoo run faster than macosx

I use everyday desktop apps for X, and on macosx it's slower. I don't know why, but this is.

Q-collective · Post by **Q-collective** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 3:21 am

Blood Fluke wrote:Most XFree86 drivers use hardware acceleration extensively. Close to the only exceptions are VESA and fbdev.

What a nice fairy tale

CorpseOfMystic · Post by **CorpseOfMystic** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 1:56 pm

Q-collective wrote:
Blood Fluke wrote:
Q-collective wrote: Huh? Slow? Heavy? MacosX Tiger's GUI is fully accelerated on the gfx card.
So is XFree86.
Erm? Maybe you are in confusion with Xgl? Xfree86 and Xorg are only software rendered.

You apparently have trouble with facts. Xgl uses 3D acceleration. XFree86 has had a complete cross-platform 2D hardware acceleration driver architecture (XAA) since 1996, and nearly all XFree and X.org drivers use it.

widremann · Post by **widremann** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 2:01 pm

CorpseOfMystic wrote:
Q-collective wrote:
Blood Fluke wrote:
Q-collective wrote: Huh? Slow? Heavy? MacosX Tiger's GUI is fully accelerated on the gfx card.
So is XFree86.
Erm? Maybe you are in confusion with Xgl? Xfree86 and Xorg are only software rendered.
You apparently have trouble with facts. Xgl uses 3D acceleration. XFree86 has had a complete cross-platform 2D hardware acceleration driver architecture (XAA) since 1996, and nearly all XFree and X.org drivers use it.

It's not complete and it's a piece of crap. Even on fast machines with nice video cards, there's still a slowdown with X compared to Windows on the same hardware. That's why they are getting rid of XAA in favor of EXA (another in a long line of band-aid solutions to X).

Q-collective · Post by **Q-collective** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 3:00 pm

CorpseOfMystic wrote: You apparently have trouble with facts. Xgl uses 3D acceleration. XFree86 has had a complete cross-platform 2D hardware acceleration driver architecture (XAA) since 1996, and nearly all XFree and X.org drivers use it.

Well, right, but I never meant 2D accel, who the hell cares for that old piece of shit? Yes old, development on 2D hardware seized about ten years ago.

widremann wrote: It's not complete and it's a piece of crap. Even on fast machines with nice video cards, there's still a slowdown with X compared to Windows on the same hardware. That's why they are getting rid of XAA in favor of EXA (another in a long line of band-aid solutions to X).

Exactly, it will take a long long time before we get rid of that 20+ year old infrastructure. Really bad that development of xgl/xegl just doesn't get the focus it really needs.

Wietze · Post by **Wietze** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 3:57 pm

linux > macOS

Blood Fluke · Post by **Blood Fluke** » Tue Sep 27, 2005 8:58 pm

Wietze wrote:linux > macOS

This would sum up the thread very nicely. You're just seven pages and two years late.

iainvt · Post by **iainvt** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 5:18 pm

I have to say something here, I use both Gentoo and Mac osx (tiger), what ever anyone says about osx, it well, just looks loverly, why anyone using a computer all day as I do would clunk around in M$ XP God only knows.

Linux is good, excellent in fact, kde-4 with vector based graphics will rival quartz, in the mean time osx vs kde-3.4 in linux, well kde just doesn't look as good! Yes you can make it look sort of similar, however it just isn't.

The above is only my own personal opinion, please dont flame back trying to ram an opinion down my throat and accept that everyone is different, we all like differnet things, yes we all accept Linux is better at some things to osx and windows and then the same is true in reverse also.

Cinder6 · Post by **Cinder6** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 2:11 am

Old thread, but I'll add my 2 cents here.

First off, I dislike OSX's UI (Aqua). While I do like eyecandy, I hate how everything is so gray (call it brushed metal if you will; it's gray), and I abhor having a menu bar that acts for every window and resides at the top of the screen.

Secondly, it just isn't customizable enough, and I don't like the fact you can only use it on Apple hardware--that cheap-looking, ricer-wannabe crap that's literally full of holes (PowerMac chassis).

sonixx · Post by **sonixx** » Fri Nov 11, 2005 2:13 am

monotux wrote:My only experiences from mac is from kindergarden - I was like 5 years old, and we had a MAC smaller than a TV, with a black and white display. We could play some really cool games using that monster...

my only experiences is from skool, too! But it was a Apple IIe and it had a green and black screen..... Damn thats old.....

mikegpitt · Post by **mikegpitt** » Sat Nov 12, 2005 11:35 pm

Ok gotta put in my 2 cents. I got an iBook about 2 years ago and was excited to try out OSX. After a while I just got so frustrated. I think the default look and feel is alright, but that's what you are stuck with. Apps that I like using were hard to get to work in OSX. Don't think that just cause it's BSD based you can find all your Linux progs and compile them and they will work fine. OpenOffice support was really bad too.

I get frustrated with people who say "OSX has all the unix tools I need". Most likely these are people who love to open a terminal and type in 'ls' because it makes them feel elite. I'd say yes, OSX has more unix tools than a windows environment, but not all the tools I'm accustom to in Linux.

In the end, I ended up putting gentoo on the iBook.

BTW - Apple has about zero quality control with their hardware. That iBook broke 6 times with the same issue, until they replaced it with a new one... this one also broke. I recently bought a new x86 laptop to replace the iBook, since I couldn't deal with Apple anymore.

telengard · Post by **telengard** » Sun Nov 13, 2005 8:56 pm

sonixx wrote:
monotux wrote:My only experiences from mac is from kindergarden - I was like 5 years old, and we had a MAC smaller than a TV, with a black and white display. We could play some really cool games using that monster...
my only experiences is from skool, too! But it was a Apple IIe and it had a green and black screen..... Damn thats old.....

Monochrome monitor, nice. I still have an Apple II+ and //c w/ a green phosphor monitor. Nice change of pace from Linux.

~telengard

Hauser · Post by **Hauser** » Tue Nov 15, 2005 12:07 pm

My experience with OSX is not very good. Maybe because I don't know much about it yet, but I have to use it (in college) when there's no windows terminal available. It feels sluggish, fonts look wierd (for certain languages); there's also the awkward single-click apple mouse (with no wheel!), confusing file structures, and so on. If I have a choice, I always choose windows over an apple terminal at school.

At home, well, I only use Gentoo. I like linux much better than OSX, period.

shredz · Post by **shredz** » Tue Dec 06, 2005 9:25 am

I used gentoo for 3 years or so (never re-installed it joy joy) and have switched to mac in the beginning of 2005. After using the machine exclusively in OS X, looking at a linux desktop just can't match it estethically. Obviously this doesn't improve its speed which compared to linux got a lot better on 10.4 but still can't match x86 gentoo.

Feature-wise, I did get used to expose on os x to such an extent that any desktop not having it feels really primitive. (try programming smalltalk with umpteen windows open at any given time under linux, then on os x)
As soon as kde had expose baked in it using accelerated stuff like the mac does, I think I might go back to linux for sheer customizability and speed though. If only I had a clue how to implement this feature for X composite :/

Another likeable feature is the drag n drop installation of 3rd party programs (e.g. nearly all software), a feature which dependency hellish linux prevents in itself. It's just nice to have all the apps in /Applications as sigular icons to the user (special treated directories by the .app extension). Obviously this is harder to accomplish on linux because of the dependencies, so all-static linked packages or including all necessary libraries with every independent program seem like the only option to ever get this done. (although you could just make drag 'n drop packages that would fetch and install said libraries/dependencies automatically and end up with graphical portage based around applications for lazy/'non-geek' users, thus tagging packages as program or library/system-like but again, this would make a whole other linux).

If this post sounds like mac fanboy material, sue me or implement ekspose

Archangel1 · Post by **Archangel1** » Tue Dec 06, 2005 8:46 pm

shredz wrote:If this post sounds like mac fanboy material, sue me or implement ekspose

Kompose?

shredz · Post by **shredz** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 3:32 pm

Archangel1 wrote:
shredz wrote:If this post sounds like mac fanboy material, sue me or implement ekspose
Kompose?

Last time I checked kompose it was a sorry excuse for an attempt at this, granted it's a nice application of the kde screenshot function but hardly as usable compared to the osx version of the feature. Clearly there is a difference between a smooth fast transition and kde taking its time (on an athlon 2500) to make a screenshot of every window and then display these scaled across the screen. The point is to get to your window fast, not wait for the pre-scaling to happen when more then 5 windows are open. Obviously I could be wrong and kompose has become what it should be, in which case, please tell me so I can ditch the mac

edit: a quick google revealed kompose can actually take the shots on the fly through composite. I'll still wait until it has animation to show up but at least it looks like it's gonna get there on linux jeej

Archangel1 · Post by **Archangel1** » Wed Dec 07, 2005 8:27 pm

shredz wrote:Last time I checked kompose it was a sorry excuse for an attempt at this, granted it's a nice application of the kde screenshot function but hardly as usable compared to the osx version of the feature. Clearly there is a difference between a smooth fast transition and kde taking its time (on an athlon 2500) to make a screenshot of every window and then display these scaled across the screen. The point is to get to your window fast, not wait for the pre-scaling to happen when more then 5 windows are open. Obviously I could be wrong and kompose has become what it should be, in which case, please tell me so I can ditch the mac

edit: a quick google revealed kompose can actually take the shots on the fly through composite. I'll still wait until it has animation to show up but at least it looks like it's gonna get there on linux jeej

I didn't find it all that bad last time I tried it, but neither was it perfect - I just thought I'd check that you'd tried it

Oh, there's skippy/skippy-xd too. Haven't tried those since I'm using e17 atm and they don't work in it