Last week I installed OS X on my Mac mini, which I consider my secondary desktop computer, in order to give it a second chance to impress me, because last time I tried it, I threw it right out after about 5 hours and installed Fedora Core 5, which by the way has great support for PowerPC machines (Kudos to the Fedora Core developers), which provided me with a nice and polished GNOME desktop, if you know me, or you’ve been reading my blog you might have noticed that I’m not the biggest fan of GNOME, but 2.14 is actually pretty nice.
Fedora Core 5 includes a great desktop search system called Beagle (Kudos to Novell for this one, and the KDE integration, Kerry, of it in SUSE Linux 10.1), right out of the box, and with a few “yum install” commands I had a wonderful music player, Banshee (Props to Novell for that one, again) and a great photo management tool, F-Spot (Props to Novell for this one as well).
Besides having applications that are Free Software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software), and superior in my mind, Fedora Core 5 outperformed OS X by multitudes, Mac OS X is probably the biggest resource hog in the form of an operating system that I’ve ever seen! It’s just a pig, the apps are slow to launch, the system over all feels sluggish etc. etc., plus the interfaces treats me like I am a total idiot, and the file manager, Finder, sucks!
Also, installing applications on Mac OS X is a bitch!
Sure it’s easy enough to install crap that’s packaged within a freaking disk image, after several mouse clicks and waiting (… ! ………… ) for things to mount, copy and all that crap, you have the application installed.
OK, let’s face a fact, Mac OS X is somewhat of a UNIX-based operating sytem, since it has somewhat of a FreeBSD base, which I’d say Steve Jobs did a good job of raping before releasing it to the public, since this is the case, I think it is more than fair to expect it to be able to run most, if not all, of the applications I would normally run under GNU/Linux or FreeBSD (I love both GNU/Linux and *BSD, I’m not single minded about what operating system I use, as along as the ones I do use are Free Software) such as the great music player called amaroK, which I find vastly superior to DRM-encumbered, super resource hungry apps like iTunes. Other apps I really enjoy on GNU/Linux and *BSD are digiKam, a cool photo management program, Konqueror, the swiss-army knife of file managers and does web browsing too, KOffice and lots of other stuff.
Even through Fink, this is just a bitch to install, after you’ve gotten used to the weird/crappy command prompt on OS X, you realize that none of say amaroK’s dependencies are installed right out of the box, so you need to install them all to reach your goal. After spending over an hour doing that, and then finally getting a “could not load shared library” error, I just gave up, people say installing software on GNU/Linux or *BSD is hard, well trying installing stuff on Mac OS X, then you know those people are full of shit, because on say SUSE 10.1, if the app I needed wasn’t available right out of the box, or wasn’t on the install CDs, I just point the YaST package manager to http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source, let it download the package information, go into Software Management in YaST, select the app I want, click Accept, let it download the application package, and boom it’s installed! That is about a million timers easisier, and a trillion times faster than installing stuff on Mac OS X.
In order to settle down after this enormous frustration, I stuck in the PPC version of Darik’s Boot and Nuke, DBAN, and did a Gutmann wipe, which is basically, disk erasing on sterioids! We’re talking 35-passes of random data generated by the pseudo random number generator, Mersenne Twister. I knew it’d take over a day to complete, but boy did it feel good to hit that F10 button, which makes it start.
So, to all the Apple fanboys who rave about Mac OS X all the time: YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT!!!
As I mentioned in a previous post, I wanted to buy OpenBSD 3.9 to support the developers because I like OpenBSD as much as I do, and guess what, that is just what I have done, I’ll post more info on that along with pictures later, so after the Gutmann wipe was finished I stuck CD2 of OpenBSD 3.9, which contains the PPC version, into the Mac mini, the total install took me just about 12 minutes, unlike OS X which took over an hour, very simple stuff, after the installation was completed and the system had booted up, I had a great UNIX command prompt, unlike the one in OS X which puts garbage into the prompt if you hit the wrong button.
After having gone through the simple process of setting up Xorg, adding a non-root user, and some other very minor things, I pointed the package management system to “ftp://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/OpenBSD/3.9/packages/powerpc”, which is a German mirror of all the packages of OpenBSD 3.9, with the export command, and then typed in “pkg_add -v kdebase kdelibs kdenetwork amarok digikam koffice” and let it do it’s thing, which took about 20 minutes on my ADSL internet connection which has a download speed of one megabit (About 102 kb/sec). After the installation of KDE, amaroK, digiKam and KOffice (Which is the apps I couldn’t get installed correctly on Mac OS X) which took just about 20 minutes, I started up X and KDE’s first-run configuration thing came up, asking for my country, language, amount of eyecandy I wanted and the theme I wanted, after that I was looking at a nice KDE 3.5.1 dekstop, with all the apps I needed to get my daily work done!
OpenBSD has had a reputation of not being desktop friendly for a while, but that saying is not correct at all these days, because it really works well, especially when you consider how secure this thing is, let me tell you something, the developers of OpenBSD has over the past decade pretty much gone nuts on making this thing as bullet proof as possible, they’ve done everything from a complete source audit, embedding strong crypto, and actually replacing functions in the C language which the OS is written in. I’m just blown away by this, I hope you’re looking at this Microsoft, you might learn something.
Getting rid of Mac OS X sure was a big refreshment, now I have a system that works like a UNIX system is supposed to, fast, reliable, and simple. If I wanna install an app on OpenBSD, say something like amaroK, I can either use binary packages, or the very nice ports system, which is a simple “pkg_add -v amarok” or “cd /usr/ports/audio/amarok && make && make install” respectively, and unlike Fink on OS X, this actually works! 😉
So, big kudos to the OpenBSD developers, nice job on 3.9!
You’re a moron, I will make it clear:
| Mac OS X
– Open the file
– drag it anyware you want
| its installed!
| OpenBSD
– point the YaST package manager to http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source
– let it download the package information
– go into Software Management in YaST
– select the app you want
– click Accept
– let it download the application package
| installed
Looks a lo more complicated.
nobody uses fink, you make it more complicated than it is.
What do you want, if you press the brake in your car it doesn’t go faster.
“pkg_add -v kdebase kdelibs kdenetwork amarok digikam koffice” aah jah 😕
“pkg_add -v amarok†or “cd /usr/ports/audio/amarok && make && make install†just drag dude, nobody uses fink.
Well, if it’s so easy to install stuff on OS X as you make it sound, tell me how to get amaroK, Konqueror and heck, even some of the GNOME apps built with Mono on OS X.
Since Apple advertises OS X as a UNIX, I don’t think it’s unfair to expect it to be able to do things just as eaisily as I do on Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. And I use a UNIX-like OS everyday,
Also, you mistook OpenBSD for SUSE Linux, the YaST package managet is a SUSE feature.
Also, the thing that annoys me about OS X’s app installation method is that it takes so freaking long in the case of bigger applications, even with big-ass apps like OpenOffice, SUSE doesn’t take half as long.
And, this is in no way a review from the point of view of a person like my mother, it’s from the point of view from me, personally, as a geek. And I don’t have a problem using the terminal, I don’t find it complicated to type things, so whenever I want a new app, I very often know what app it is, so I can, under OpenBSD, type “pkg_add -v appname” and it’s installed, I find that very simple.
You can’t apply “Simple” and “Complicated” to all users, sure the drag’n’drop thing in OS X is eaisier for people like my mother, but not for me personally, I’m sure it’s eaisier for other geeks, but to me personally, it’s not. I don’t care about dragging the app anywhere, I just wanna tell the package manager to install, and be done with it.
One more thing (I’m sure you’ve heard that one before), since you like using the word “moron” in reference to me, I assume you’re one of those Apple/Mac fanboys I’ve heard so much about! 😉
“One more thing (I’m sure you’ve heard that one before), since you like using the word “moron†in reference to me, I assume you’re one of those Apple/Mac fanboys I’ve heard so much about!” Bullseye!!
Well, i’m using Linux for everyday stuff, and i’ve been doing so for two and a half year. Therefore, i found it interesting when i had a chance to try something new. So, i’ve been using Mac OSX for a couple of days, and the experience has been somewhat of a mixed one. I agree in that the Mac OSX “GUI” (Aqua) is quite pretty, and that the dock is very good-looking. In other words; lots of bling.
What i’m not all that worked up over is the applications themselves.
The terminal application of Mac OSX is lacking a lot of the features that makes using the shell/command prompt attractive. Let’s compare: The Mac OSX Terminal, and Yakuake, the KDE Console Emulator (Yakuake is the half-way transparent beauty in the top of the screen 😉 ).
Moving on file management: Finder is quite bland and featureless. It isn’t any better than Nautilus and it’s really nothing when compared to Konqueror, the most feature-full file manager i’ve ever seen.
Also, the Control Panel of Mac OSX is quite limited when compared to the powerful KDE Control Center and the omnipotent PCLinuxOS Control Center.
Now, a lot of the hype surrounding Mac OSX is concerned with the “desktop”. I agree, the Mac OSX desktop is pretty – but i like the KDE one even better. Just look at it! 😉 !
So, the conclusion is, i guess, that both Linux (or “GNU/Linux”, rather) and Mac OSX are nice operating systems, but that Linux fits me the best, with it’s unbelievable amount of features, and it endless configurability. And you gotta love the looks of it 😉 .
— Bjerrk
Btw, I hope it’s okay that I’m bringing such an old thread up again.