OS Wars
by Tom Temple
Dec 10, 10:36 AM
I don’t think we’ve had this argument here yet.
My setup here is dual boot RedHat 9/Windows XP. I haven’t booted to RedHat in like 3 months. In fact, I’m not even sure the IDE cable is plugged in make that happen. That’s because of Cygwin.
I’ve got a little Cygwin command prompt window here and it may as well be a linux prompt. If I want to install some open source wing-ding or something, I can. It fails to compile pretty much the same fraction of the time as open source stuff on Redhat. Cygwin has pretty much everything that I ever use. A great analogy to Cygwin would be the OSX command line. It’s almost the real thing.
Another advantage of Cygwin over the dual boot is that it shares the same filesystem with Windows.
“But why not go straight up Linux?” you may ask. The answer is simple but it sort of betrays my attitude for the computer. Because Windows just works.
If I get some program or some hardware, I can just pop it in and it just works. Let’s say I want to play some flash game for which I don’t have an adequate player. I can just click on a link, click download, press enter (which I have as a mouse buton), click “Accept the terms” press enter two more times and I’m playing the game. Good luck doing that in linux.
I know some guys get off on making buggy ports work or on hacking drivers and the like. I like that too but only for easy ones that end up working and don’t take long. I get frustrated easily I guess. Switching back into the Windows partition is such a relief sometimes—like getting into the hot-tub after swimming in cold water.
Then there are the little things that sort of add up for me. For instance take my USB keydrive. In Linux, I have to mount it and unmount it and to do that I need to su. I know for some of you, “getting” to do that is some sort of affirming experience and I’ll admit that it was for me the first couple times, but not anymore1.
Then there are is the money software, like Half-Life, that regardless of your willingness to pay, you can’t have on Linux.
Finally, the Unix chauvenists act like there isn’t a command line interface in Windows. Don’t pretend that bash does so many more things than MSDOS2. I can write an MSDOS script that does {latex bibtex latex latex dvips ps2pdf acro32} just as easily in Windows as I can in Linux. Sure there are some commands absent but you can almost always download programs for them. And guess what? They’ll just work.
So guys, I went first. What OS are you using and why?
1 Actually, having to click on the safely remove icon in the tray is even too much for me. There should be a button on the stick that unmounts it. And that button should be in a place that I would have to touch anyway to pull it out.
2 Let me suggest aliasing “ls” to “cd”.
Dec 12, 01:35 PM
I really don’t want to get into a holy war on this topic. However, I will answer your basic question: I’m using MacOS 10, because it gives me the best of both worlds. I find the Macintosh UI to be elegant, usable, and attractive, and it lets me integrate easily between the graceful front-end tools and the powerful Unix back-end tools.
The power of the Unix environment isn’t the shell, it’s in the abstractions underneath: Pipes, concurrent processes, signals, files. The idea of being able to start a chain of processes, each taking input from its predecessor and passing output to its successor, and the whole thing just works, without me having to think about blocking, synchronization, or race conditions, is nothing short of remarkable. Prior to Vista (Longhorn) and MacOS 10, neither Apple nor Microsoft had anything even close to this combination of power and simplicity.
A shell looks primitive compared to a slick GUI, but I have never yet seen a GUI that will let me tie together my tools with such simplicity and economy of effort. What’s more, if I want to write more tools, I don’t have to do anything special to make them work with the existing tools—apart from just using the basic I/O facilities I would have used anyway. Input from a file? Output to a file? No problem. The target’s a printer? Same deal. The source is a network connexion? Yup, you guessed it, same abstraction.
Whether I’m wearing my user hat, or my programmer hat, that’s a win.
That’s why I chose MacOS over Windows. True, Windows has lots more interesting games (and in fact, I have a Windows machine at home just so that Sara and I can play games together). But so far, Microsoft has not managed to give me a GUI as nice as that of MacOS, nor is its GUI backed by the power of that Unix framework I like so well.
Dec 12, 03:03 PM
What Michael said. I don’t want to get in a holy war either, but OS X is objectively the best operating system available today.
That said, by recent experiences with Ubuntu have been fantastic. Great UI, flawless package management, great experience. It correctly configured my monitor, ethernet card, and wireless card on install.
For example, I recently found a program called sshfs. It lets you mount as a local directory tree any directory that you can ssh_ into.
sudo apt-get install sshfs
There were like a half dozen dependancies, and a kernel patch, and it all just worked. Then:
sshfs jonshea@server:remote/directory /local/directory/to/mount/at and BOOM! Suddenly my remote web server, chilco, is on my desktop. The text files open on emacs, and I even get icon previews for the pictures.
That’s magic. And you know that Linux has tons of things like that, if you look for them. Some percentage of them won’t work. That’s part of the deal. But that percentage is rapidly decreasing. Ok, it’s not. It’s probably like 35%, and going to stay there. But it is being shifted towards cooler and cooler things.
If you want to go pure Linux, though, you’ve got to give up iTunes, DVD support (either the menu interface, or other compatibility, you can pick), and most shockingly Quicksilver. Quicksilver’s a little piece of (free) OS X heaven that I can’t believe hasn’t been ported to the rest of the world yet. Living without Quicksilver is tantamount to regularly eating the flesh of humans. That’s right, you’re basically a cannibal.
It sounds like Windows has gotten a lot better since I last used it (in high school). If that’s what floats your boat, it’s fine with me. I’m not going to make fun of you. I’m not going to call you a barbaric, dim-witted cannibal or anything.
Dec 16, 01:56 PM
jshea is OTM about Quicksilver. I’m baffled that someone hasn’t ginned together some sort of Linux version. Absolutely baffled.
There’s nothing more satisfying than selecting a whole folder of, say, mp3s, zipping them up and emailing them to someone without ever taking your hands off the keyboard.