Thoughts on OS-X/UNIX/and MacOS

The way I understood it was this:
OS X is a BSD flavor however it a desktop OS, a client OS.
OS X server is a BSD flavor as well, infact OS X and OS X server have the same base, Darwin,
but OS X server isn't bogged down with the stuff that a client OS is bogged down, or concerned with.

The purpose of a server OS is different from the purpose of the client OS.

I think that is what the post was aimed at... am I correct ?
 
I quoted that point to show that OSX does SEEM to be just "another *nix"...

R,
R...
ruzz@mac.com
 
Wait a minute... OS-X is *NOT* just another UNIX...

You are really seeing this from a questionable angle.... Mac OS-X is not - should not - and better not be - just another UNIX... We can quibble over the legal definition of UNIX all year long, but UNIX as we all know is more then just a label you attach to something.. It also implies a command line interface....

Why?.. Well, let me be perfectly clear on this - I LOVE UNIX, but no UNIX vendor has had *ANY* success in penetrating the desktop market - in fact, when they attempted to do so it did nothing but hurt their bottom line..... OS-X needs to be the next MacOS not another UNIX - I'm surprised you don't see that... People, in general, do not want to run UNIX on their computers at home.... MacOS people *ABSOLUTELY* will not.... (of course I am referring to the interface aspects of it....)

Sure, it can have a UNIX kernel.. Sure, it can have a lot of stuff from BSD.. But, the interface - indeed the experience needs to remain absolutely pure to MacOS......

MacOS is GUI through-and-through.... Mac OS-X needs to be too.... I don't care, really, about supposed power users who are really just UNIX zealots trying to spread the UNIX interface around.... They make up maybe 10% of the Mac market... What Apple, you , and I should be concerned with are the 90% of Mac users who have purchased Macs because of what they are and who will purchase OS-X because of the benefits it provides to them........

Thinking that if Apple creates another UNIX operating system they would suddenly gain a giant leap in market share is seriously *SERIOUSLY* bad magic.... Mac users are looking at this as "another upgrade", and it better not be UNIX they are upgrading to...

To suggest that something has a UNIX kernel and BSD parts is one thing - that does NOT make it UNIX.... The reason is the interface is part of UNIX - and it's something that Mac has stayed away from for good reason.....

But, I'm not really worried about this because the bottom line is developers will wise up I think... If you ahve 2 developers one who has a version of Apache that is appropriate for OS-X and another one that is just a ported UNIX application - which one do you think the 90% market will use?... The market will straighten this out , I think.... And if it doesn't, then Apple has just created another version of UNIX for all the geeks to play with and that 90% market will never get past Mac OS9...

The bottom line is if you want to run UNIX on a Mac get OS-X server but keep your command-line interface off of OS-X desktop.... Tht solves the problem wonderfully...

- Greg

[Edited by devnul on 10-27-2000 at 01:49 PM]
 
I agree that for OS X to become "just another Unix" would be a BAD, WRONG thing. The markets where the Macintosh is traditionally strong, e.g., print and web publishing, content generation, sound and motion picture work, etc., are populated by design professionals who will not, not, NOT use an OS that forces the use of the command line. People who spend 10 hours a day in Photoshop, or GoLive, or Freehand, or DreamWeaver, or Quark, will rebel and flee the platform if they are forced to type in commands at a blinking prompt on a blank screen or in a terminal window.

However, I think it would be a mistake for Apple to elimate the terminal completely. It should at minimum be an optional install. I don't see a problem with having it be part of a default install, nestled in a "Utilities" folder in /Applications, next to DiskFirstAid, etc. The CLI has its uses, and should be available for those who use it.

But any company that thinks it's going to make any headway in marketshare by releasing applications that require use of the CLI is flirting with disaster. No one should ever be FORCED to use the CLI for any application or system-maintenance tool, other than possibly for server-specific tasks. Any application-specific task should ALWAYS be easily done from the GUI, the same way it's always been under the Mac OS.

I believe that the secret to the Macintosh's success has been the freedom to accomplish a task however the user chooses to do so. To force a user to use a tool he or she is not comfortable with will always be a mistake.
 
The one and only logical location for the Terminal.app is in the Apple Extras folder on the install CD.

Yes, I agree that a large majority of Mac users will want to stay away from the command line. But I also think that this is going to be an ideal platform for interaction between the two extremes, Unix and Mac OS.

The old Mac OS has its geeks, people who gleefully throw away extensions, hack around with ResEdit, even manually edit PostScript files.
They will probably want to use the Terminal sometimes. They might want to learn a thing or two about Unix. Heck, they might even want to write basic apps using Project Builder and Interface Builder, anyone with basic ANSI C knowledge can do that after studying Apple's manuals for a week or so.
OS X will make the Mac a great computer for learning "real world" computer knowledge, not just staying locked high up in the ivory tower of the Mac GUI.
I think even Apple is fed up with the notion of the "stupid Mac user". But of course, I agree that all this must be purely optional. Nobody should ever be advised to touch the Terminal unless either as a last resort when something goes terribly wrong, or on a purely voluntary basis.

On the otherhand, maybe, just maybe some Unix heads, determined to make the desktop market, will eventually be forced to create a GUI or two, and realize that a purpose of a GUI is not just protecting the idiots and letting them use computers, but also to increase efficiency.
 
OS X opens macs users to the underworld of the Internet. Some of you know how bad Appletalk is with over 10 machines. I have three linux boxes running as servers and macs running 'user' programs such as photoshop. Allowing the mac users the best of both worlds is great and should not be questioned as 'this is not a mac OS'. In fact I believe that it will give mac users an advantage over the other OS's. Now if they update the kernel, like linux... game over.

J
 
Well I totally agree with the best of both worlds part but while reading
your post my brain started thinking when it his across the part where
people say "this is not macOS".... could someone define MacOS ?
By my understanding its an operating system designed by apple, produced
by apple, to run on apple made machines, (Since A/UX is out of the picture
this is a pretty accurate hypothesis don't you agree?).

When people see that MacOS X now has UNIX underpinnings and a terminal
they are "afraid" so to speak, and I do not want anyone getting offended by this
remark. I think that apple has made, or will make everythng that an average user
might need GUI driven so that people that do not want to use teh CLI will not
have to use it for anything.

Now there are hobbyinsts and experimentalists, and power users and a whole
bunch of other people that would like to use the CLI, and this is totally a user choice.
The OS now not only has it become a powerful server by having a UNIX base and all the
benefits that UNIX has accumulated over the years, but it is also a great guest, or
individual-user platform because it's stable and it has many nice things that apple
advertized that its new OS would have.

And it does run applications that were written for previews releases of the MacOS,
so it's not something totally new and foreign, like when you install BSD or Linux on your mac.

I think that MacOS X qualifies to be a MacOS on the basis of all of the above, sure the UI has
changed somewhat from the original MacOS, and I am sure that some people like it and some
don't. I am sure that people tosay use teh System 1.0 scheme of kaleidescope because they just
don't like platinum. You can't please everyone and because there is a market for customization
there will be shareware products to change OS Xs appearance just as there are for
previews version of the OS.

And what about the CLI ? Well apple wasn't alwatys GUI driven you know, and the first
GUI on the Apple IIgs did have a CLI with ProDOS for anyone that remembers, this isn't
a totally foreign concept. The gui is there for people that want to use it. If you think it's
useless and an eyesore, just do what I do to my "launcher" control panels (I really dont like the
launcher), just throw it away or put is somewhere you wont see it.


Sooooo, in conclusion I would like to ask what do you (The people readin this post) think
makes a MacOS a MacOS ??


Admiral
 
(I've been reading the comments but hadn't time to comment. I still don't have a lot, but I felt the urge to comment on a few things :) )

p wrote :
It seems really interesting to me how you guys seem uninterested in the intricate details of the Finder. On the other boards, there are really fierce discussions.
Click to expand...
The reason, I think, we hadn't been discussing the Finder is because our focus was not Mac OS 9 vs. Mac OS X, but Mac OS X vs. the Unixes. This is not to say that comparing both species of Mac OS is not a valid topic, only that we hadn't had this focus because of our focus on another possible threat for the new Mac OS : the the risk of losing the GUI emphasis of the Mac OS, because of the habits of some -- welcomed nonetheless -- newcomers from the Unix world. Yes, Mac OS X is a cultural shock for us, Mac OS 9 users, but probably not as big as for the traditional Unix crowd who must now come to grip with a radically new concept : the GUI is a compulsory part of an application, not simply a fancy add-on.

As for the Cramer vs... I mean Mac OS vs. Mac OS aspect of the discussion, my stance is very near from that of John Siracusa on Ars Technica, so I cannot say much more at the risk of repeating what has been written better elsewhere... And John Siracusa is right on target with the point of view of the traditional Macintosh power users (p's overworked crowd) : just as the current Mac OS lets you work anyway you like, the NeXT Mac OS shouldn't force everybody to work all in the same way. As p wrote :
In general, I think OS X must have as much as possible AVAILABLE, with making as little as possible NECESSARY.
Click to expand...
This applies as much to the presence of the Terminal.app than to the presence of an Apple menu. The adaptability of the current Mac OS is one of the reasons it has remained mainstream despite Apple's bad management. Think of the 1984 ad to have the true feel of the Mac OS up to 9. It would be a crying shame if the woman in red would sit, from now on, with the blue crowd ! But as devnul said :
Don't forget that many of the features you like in MacOS's Finder were not there in the original...
Click to expand...
As a Mac user since 1984, I wholeheartedly agree !
 
devnul wrote :
Experimenting with soemthing is awesome and occassionally things break..... Hopefully, OS-X will encourage the Mac users to wanna know more about UNIX... ;-)
Click to expand...
This part makes me a little bit nervous. In the Good Old Days, the Mac OS allowed anyone to fiddle with the OS' internals virtually risk free. Since even the system has been built in a graphical manner (go in ResEdit and see what I mean), it is easy to understand for anyone (as a side note : so easily, in fact, that some people mistakenly came to the conclusion that the OS was not powerful). This is not the case for OS X : it is a CLI OS with a GUI grafted on top. This means that it is possible to go even deeper in its bowels to modify it (probably too deep), simply by changing words here and there. The very idea of an OS refusing to boot because of a *typpo* (we never do some of those, do we ?) makes me shiver. Just try to find that offending typo in that gigantic sea of small files... But maybe am I victim of the cultural shock I mentioned in my previous post ? :)
 
I didn't like the fact that TextEdit had no border around my document (it poses legibility problems), so I opened its Nib file with Interface Builder, and made a large enough margin for my text field. To my astonishment, I found out that TextEdit was running all along, and it didn't just refuse to crash, but its active document windows took on the appearance I was designing, almost real-time!

This brings up a kind of an off-topic question: is it common in operating systems to be able to open and modify the GUI of a proprietary application?
With Interface Builder, I was able to open and change the GUI of every Cocoa app I found, whether it was by Apple or Stone Design or the Omni Group.

Shouldn't developers be allowed an option to shield their nib files from espionaging eyes of all users?! Or is this just a beta-like behavior?

 
I confess that I am not a Mac user since 1984 lol (if I were one I would be a child prodigy lol)
In any case, when I got my first mac at home, my Performa 635CD, I played around with the OS quite extensivelly, and
even though, as Pascal says, I played around with a GUI
I got lots of Sad Macs and my computer would not start up
( you guys must remember the Black Screen of theath with the hex values and the sad mac lol :p)
In any case, as devnul said experimenting is good, BUT it is not a sport for the faint of heart, or the people that don't like restoring their system when something goes wrong.
Sure the CLI gets you into the Bowels of the Power Beast that is OS X, and sure you can edit, and customize your system, BUT again it's an option to do so and if you choose to do so and something bad happens you can't throw your hands up and say "It's apple's fault" because you cannot protect people from themselves, and possibly from their stupidity. IF you choose to edit your system it's your responsibility to recover from it and not to blame your shortcomings on others.
When my Performa crashed I was bummed but I knew what went wrong and I learned a lesson, so I reinstalled my OS 7.5 on and on again. I was bummed, but I did not blaim others for my stupidity.
 
[This is not a reply to AdmiralAK's post above...]

Oh, gosh ! I hate it when I read a post paternalistically referring to Mac users as “idiots” and “normal users” ! Mac users are graphically oriented, but not stupid because of this. Use PhotoShop for a while and then discuss how feeble the GUI is as a paradigm ! The GUI is empowering, only it empowers the end user, not the programmer !

Apache is a nice application that a lot of people could use safely. There is simply no justification for the voodoo required for using it fully. One of the great lures of the Unix world is the belief that “CLI equals power”. This is deceitful. Yes, GUIs can be used to shield users from the innards of an application, but it is not the best shield available. The best one is a white cursor flashing against a black background. In that context, you are free to do what you want (or so you were told), but you can only do what you know : you cannot evolve simply by interacting with the CLI because it doesn’t give you any clues about what is going on or about what you could do in a particular context. You cannot learn from a CLI. If you do not know a particular command or its syntax, you are stranded. (It is a good memory game, however.)

Let us contrast this situation with one of my first interactions with a Mac, in 1984 (please remember the year it happened) and with one of the first interactions I had with a PC (DOS). Back then, nowhere in the manuals were there any explanations on how to copy from one diskette to another (there were manuals in 1984, although Mac manuals were never really good). After a frustrating five minutes going through the manual and the available menus, trying to figure out how to copy a document from one diskette to another, I decided to be bullish : I dragged the icon from one diskette to the other ! (Woah !) It worked !!! I could do this because it is a graphical interface. I didn’t need to know the computer’s parlance to cope with the machine. On the contrary, I had to ask to do the same on a PC because I had not figured the correct syntax.

Of course, figuring out a CLI is a real work, so when one has succeeded in that endeavour, one feels “intelligent”, “knowledgeable”, “initiated”, a member of the Cosa Nostra : this is the great lure of the CLI. What this elation hides, however, is the time required to learn all this secret magic. The learning curve is steep and, when you look at it quite frankly, is pretty useless when a good GUI could have made the thing so easy.

Back to Apache (I’ve got nothing against the programming team, though, Apache is only a case study !). I do not see what is in there that could not be done in a GUI. Remember : using a GUI does not mean being forbidden to use a keyboard ! It simply means using it to enter relevant info instead of using it to fight your way to access the same info.
Maybe Apple wants to do away with the stereotype of the "stupid Mac user"?
Click to expand...
Apple’s not the only one to wish this perception took the way of the dodo !

This being said, I am not against the CLI or the use of the keyboard in general. I am, however, against the puritanical approach of the die-hard CLI users. As AdmiralAK wrote :
We now have an OS that has both a CLI and a GUI (something that has not existed on an Apple Platform since the Apple IIgs). People should not just use the GUI and expect a GUI for every single UNIX command found in OS X, and people using just the CLI should not be bummed and should not b*tch about how the GUI is dragging them down and how it's better.
Click to expand...
The more ways available to the user to interact with the data, the greater the freedom the Mac OS will allow the user to have, the more popular the OS will become. There is no single better way.
I think CLI purists will just ignore the GUI if they don't like it. GUI purists, however, won't ignore the CLI: they will loathe it, and call an exorcist to deinstall it.
Click to expand...
This kind of approach only gets people in wars. Let us hope Mac OS X will breed peace, not hatred ! ;)

<FONT SIZE=-2>And the Angels sang, as the sound of the harps came from above…</FONT>

:D

[Edited by Pascal on 10-30-2000 at 11:20 AM]
 
ruzz wrote :
I quoted that point to show that OSX does SEEM to be just "another *nix"...
Click to expand...
Personally, I understand it this way : Mac OS X is a powerful Unix that was designed not to be used as a Unix system. Its power is tamed but is there nevertheless, available if you wish to unleash it. In other words it will behave as Mac OS 10 (with all its (almost) un-crash-able niceties), unless you wish it to behave as Mac OS X (ex)…

(About the Unix side of OS X : you can run OS X headless if you wish : you simply have to boot in “>console” mode….)

Jazzy_Jay wrote :
Allowing the mac users the best of both worlds is great and should not be questioned as 'this is not a mac OS'. In fact I believe that it will give mac users an advantage over the other OS's.
Click to expand...
Und so sprach Zarathoustra...

Jazzy_Jay : what do you mean, when you write : "if they update the kernel, like linux... game over" ?

[Edited by Pascal on 10-30-2000 at 12:02 PM]
 
I mean the darwin kernel. linux has advanced long way because the base kernel (OS) is always being improved upon. If Apple keeps updating the base UNIX OS then OS X will be better.
 
When I had Linux I never updated teh Kernel, I only had it for a year but there were updates for it.
I took a look at how to install new kernels and I could not manage to update it (in part because my swap partiotion was misbehaving).
If apple is going to update the kernel on a regular basis they oought to provide a GUI installer
because I doubt that people will want to go into the inners of the OS to update a kernel
(Even though this might be a simple task if you ask a linux head :p)


Admiral
 
For some reason I stopped getting email notifications of replies to this thread. I thought it had died and I've missed all kinds of great debate!

Work is crazy right now so I won't have a lot of time to get embroiled in the discussion but did want to spew a few random thoughts.

First, this just struck me. Work IS crazy right now but I'm much more productive than I used to be, thanks to ditching OS 9 and using OS X. FWIW.

P said, a while back:

"This brings up a kind of an off-topic question: is it common in operating systems to be able to open and modify the GUI of a proprietary application?
With Interface Builder, I was able to open and change the GUI of every Cocoa app I found, whether it was by Apple or Stone Design or the Omni Group.

Shouldn't developers be allowed an option to shield their nib files from espionaging eyes of all users?! Or is this just a beta-like behavior? "

No, it isn't common at all, but you were equipped with the developer tools. While I see this as a great aspect of the OS, I would guess that soon enough there will be a way to obfuscate the internals of an application in much the same way that you can obfuscate a java class so it won't decompile cleanly. This is a pity to me, because I'm a fan of the Open Source model.

Next random factoid. Since I last posted here, I've chatted with 4 or 5 non-Mac users who're watching OS X closely and contemplating moving over to the platform. All of these people are now either running linux on intel, or are admin'ing *nix boxes. I think Apple's play for the web development community is going to work (they're already working on the web design community, as we all know. I state this just to emphasize the difference between design and development)

Now I'll pick on P again:

"Have you ever administered a Lotus Domino server? It has an incredible number of settings, yet Lotus went through the pain and put a GUI over it. Yes, it's ugly, and not very intuitive, but once you learn it, I'm 100%-sure that it's quicker than using the command line. "

In fact, I have been a Domino administrater, and that GUI interface drove me bug-crazy! Every time I had to do something that I hadn't done in a while, it took me longer to find the right place in the GUI to make the adjustment than it did to actually change the setting.

Compare that to a text based configuration file, like apache's (this might wrap, but in a CLI its nicely formatted and very easy to read):

Want to set the server admin address? Scan through the file and you find:

# ServerAdmin: Your address, where problems with the server should be
# e-mailed.

ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com

Now let's set the server name. Scroll a little farther down and get:


# ServerName allows you to set a host name which is sent back to clients for
# your server if it's different than the one the program would get (i.e. use
# "www" instead of the host's real name).
#
# Note: You cannot just invent host names and hope they work. The name you
# define here must be a valid DNS name for your host. If you don't understand
# this, ask your network administrator.
# If your host doesn't have a registered DNS name, enter its IP address here.
# You will have to access it by its address (e.g., http://123.45.67.89)
# anyway, and this will make redirections work in a sensible way.

ServerName http://www.yourdomain.com

and etc.

The point I'm trying to make is, most people who use a computer are literate. Just because a configuration is text based doesn't mean it has to be arcane. And zipping (or searching) through a text file is a LOT easier than screwing around in Domino's GUI interface. Blech.

A good GUI is better than a bad text configuration file, but a good text configuration file is better than a bad GUI.

OK more fires to put out. Debate on without me!




 
OK not so serious but I have your attention :p
I absolutely hate that my machine is named localhost in my terminal and
I use the terminal quite a lot when in OS X.
How can I name my computer ???
** in the netwoking control panel I have named my mac, but I have apple talk off since
I am not on a network is there another way ???? **
 
In Control Panel => Network => TCP/IP you'll find a HostName field. Try that. That's filled out with "localhost" by default. (I haven't tested this... I'm just guessing. *smile* )

 
To Jaded (I'm also busy as hell, maybe you'll get back sometime):

So Domino has a bad GUI. I don't know too many people who administer it a lot, so I don't know if it has a generally "bad" perception, but even I, a GUI advocate, thought it was "bad" when I briefly looked it at a training session. Even the instructor (a Lotus partner) said that it was illogically structured.

But how about a GUI that say, reads the config file, displays it, jumps to specific locations, basically performs "search and replace"? A "config file editor" that is not unlike a word processor, but savvy to the structure of the config file?

This is just a tentative idea. This could be combined with wizards and tutorials for beginners, etc.

After all, a word processor can use a GUI too, even without formatting tools. Think BBEdit, the favorite of hackers. A word processor/text editor with a GUI can be bloated (like Word), or bad in a lot of ways, but using CLI text editors is archaic, I really don't see the advantages of doing that. Use TextEdit, and you'll get point-and-click, drag-and-drop, etc.

If Lotus based its word processor on Domino config GUI guidelines, it would have a different tab for every part of sentence, punctuation mark, and you'd need to click at the words rather than typing them.

So, it was a bad example. Sorry.
 
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