::scr A PC user speaks ...

[Simon Wistow]

> I've always admired Apple's hardware.  With very few exceptions, it has
> been well-designed, and built to a high quality.  What has let you down
> until recently is that fact that your operating system was a steaming
> pile of turd.  I don't care that it was "easy to use", because I am an
> experienced computer professional and don't need hand-holding.  

The one (ok, 1 of maybe 2 or 3) good thing about how X works [0] is that
it shows the abstraction between GUI and kernel. Ok, maybe that's not a
good thing but it shows the difference. I have wondered how long it
would take Apple to write new Kernel and slide it under Platinum and the
OS API. 

ObAside: Just to get some terminology down, as far as I'm concerned 

  OS == GUI + API + Kernel



Of course, this is sort of what Apple did with OSX except that Job's
NeXT Kool Aid and his refusal to accept that NeXT IS DEAD, STEVE! IT'S
DEAD! LEAVE IT ALONE. THE EQUINE SHAPED CORPSE HAS TOO MANY SCARS!

... means that they implemented NeXT again.



> There are still a couple of things I don't like though.  Having only one
> mouse button sucks.  

I'm actually beginning to not hate this as much as I thought. And of
course it's not that much of a problem on a desktop and I'm beginning to
wonder how difficult it would be put a double mouse button on the
laptops.

I also hate not having a nipple (*cough*) but that's personal
preference. Why more manufacturers don't do what Dell (?) have started
doing and putting both nipple and a track pad on I'll never know (I'm
guessing cost bt how much could it *really* be?)

> Having your own rendering engine - Quartz - sucks, as unlike X, it is
> opaque to the network.  I frequently run apps on one machine and want
> to display them elsewhere, either over a LAN or a WAN link.  On OS X,
> I can do that by installing XFree86, but that's an ugly hack and
> Quartz apps won't work with it so I'm limited to apps I can compile
> myself - no benefit from Linux on x86.  

I can count the number of times I've run X apps over the network on the
fingers of one very large, mutant hand. But it's not that much. But I
can see where it could be useful.

However I'd argue that, in fact, I've used it far more than any Mac user
would want to (although that's a difficult thing to gauge without there
ever having been an opportunity before). But in general Mac users don't
want to run apps over the network. I will come back to this later. For
now we will assume that it is desirable and not a security nightmare
waiting to happen and ask ...

... why X? X is dead, or, at least, it should be. X is a festering pile
of rancid dogs droppings and it's nasty to program for. Everything of
use is a bolted on extension. The only reason we've still got X on
Unices is because of backwards compatability and because nobody's been
bothered to write a replacement (Berlin doesn't count).

This is a perfect opportunity to do away with X and get something better
and easier to program.

Anyway, back to that point I said I was going to get back and THE BIT
THAT I SUSPECT WILL BE MOST INTERESTING TO THE LIST  ...

 ^
 '-- thought I'd demark it thoroughly as well for handy referencing


... there seem to be two types of MacOS X users . Three. There appear to
be three main Mac OS X users. 

1. Those that have bought a Mac because they've heard they're easy to
use, have been swayed by the pretty boxes and the swish marketing and
are either the most important people (being, as they are, very much akin
to the demographic that the original Macintosh was aimed at) or the
least important people.

2. Old Mac users, many of whom seem to hate  OS X. Whether this is
reactionism or whether it's because it's fundamentally flawed, usability
wise [SIMON looks hopefully at any usability bods who've used OSX who'd
be able to back this up] and who, in general (unless they're somewhere
between this group and the next) don't care about the Unixy goodness
lying underneath like the nougat in a Double Decker bar (the most
underated of chocolate bars)

3. Unix people looking to escape the horribleness of the Linux desktop
and combine an easy to use OS with a number of important apps (Office,
Photoshop, Illustrator etc) with Unixy shell stuff.

Simon


[0] For the none Unix spods round here this how the X Windowing system
works :

You run an X-Server on the machine you want to work on. Then you run
applications on another machine, having set a magic variable that tells
them where the Server is. These applications are called Clients. 

Why they were named that way confuses even Unix spods. It's probably
because many clients connect to one server but still ...

Most of the time the XServer is on the same machine as the clients so it
acts just like a normal computer.

It has been said that programming X is like trying to work out Pi in
Roman Numerals.



-- 
: i'm satisfied ... yet still strangely outraged.