Aaaah yes. The age old argument. I cannot understand for the life of me why some people are on a crusade to bog Linux down with eye-candy. A flashy interface is a sure sign of a weak underlaying system. Please show me a single instance were I am wrong.
MacOS X. Please explain in *technical* terms why its underlying system is weak. Not in marketing terms.
Mac has a flashy interface and is currently being used by a stunning 0.00000000000001% (exageration) of the market. Mac can be deligated to statistical noise as far as market movers go. If you disagree you are welcome to show me the last time Mac has influenced the computing market in any noticable way. The last time was when MS ripped off their interface 3 billion years ago.
This is a marketing proof, not a technical proof. Besides your exaggerated statistic (there is an interesting ongoing discussion on one of the main Mac mailing list about the real size of Apple's market share. One of the interesting numbers brought up there was that 3% of all google searches are done by Macs. That's a bit higher than the number you quoted), you know that MacOS has always been superior to Windows as far as user experience is concerned. The people in Apple actually put thought into their design. They don't design eye-candy just for its own sake, they first research human-machine interaction.
If there is any lesson to be learned from Apple it's not the fact that translucent windows are cooler, or that "brushed metal" is the way to go. No. What GNU/Linux (or BSD, or my mother) should learn is that to design a good human interface, you need to research that topic and find out what the principles of a good interface are. Each program having its own way of saving files or presenting toolbars or clicking icons is *not* a good thing.
Both KDE and Gnome are painfully like Windows. I hate them both, and I just hope that one day, somewhere, some *innovative* geek will give us a better toolkit and a better workspace application. But stuff like that, which requires some social research rather than just algorithm development, seems to be out of the scope of the Free Software/Open Source community.
Lastly, both the above companies are commercial. Linux is not. Any comparison between the systems on a pure technical basis ignores this. What do you think drives the Windows and Mac developers? A love for computing? They are in it only to enhance stockholder interest.
Mmm. Not exactly. Windows is marketed for its own value. MacOS X is marketed in order to sell expensive hardware. This means that Windows doesn't have to be a good product at all, whereas Apple uses MacOS X as a marketing tool. This means different attitudes and different reasons for building stuff. It also means that Windows immitates every cool thing it sees on the Mac, whereas the Mac people actually invent it. Do you think MS would have made XP look so flashy if it wasn't for Aqua?
By the way, as people were discussing whether or not their computers were refreshing fast enough, I'd like to add that I use MacOS X on my 3 years old 400MHz G4, with one AGP card and one PCI graphics card, that *do not* support Quartz Extreme (which means that plain Quartz is used), and window moves, updates etc. are very good. Those people at Apple must know what they are doing. It may be absolutely silly of them (if their great software works well on old machines they don't sell new ones), but technologically, it rocks.
Herouth
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