On Sunday 14 July 2002 11:17 pm, Holden Hao wrote: > unlimited rants on the Internet about the useability of Linux. I was > thinking if the GUI of something like Mac OS X is available for Linux then > that would seal the deal for Linux on the desktop.
We really admire what Apple's developers did in placing an easy-to-use friendly face on Unix. Their usability concepts are pretty advanced and something that desktop-managers such as KDE and Gnome look forward to implementing on Linux. Usability is no easy task. I'd like to think that Apple's developers are extremely lucky. They are both a hardware and a software team. This allows them to integrate the machine's hardware and software setup more tightly. They have a very limited set of hardware devices to integrate, optimize and support. This saves them much time and effort in configuring a hardware and software computing machine. For example, let's take the case of with the new iMac. The Quartz graphics engine have been optimized only for GeForce-type graphics card. They have to configure and setup the iMac to use only one type of rewriteable DVD. They have to use only one type of LCD monitor. This is also the reason why game developers like making games for specific consoles, such as the PS2, Xbox, Gamecube instead of developing for the PC. They only have a single graphics card to worry about when doing consoles. Because of this, they are able to fully exploit the capabilities and power of the graphics subsystem, and allows them to develop the game at a much shorter time. Contrast this with Linux distributions. The window-manager, graphics server engine, device subsystem, kernel OS developers belong to different programming teams, each with their own agendas, working mostly for free, with no deadlines to beat, and no central authority to coordinate all their work. The X-server hackers have to make their server as generic as possible to accomodate all kinds of video cards, from the legacy Tridents and S3, to the most advanced GeForces, Radeons, and Parhelias. They also have to make sure that the different window managers can all coexist without stepping on each others' toes. The kernel OS developers have to ensure that the various networking devices (ethernet, wireless), disk subsystems (IDE, EIDE, SCSI), processors (Intel, AMD, Ultra-Sparc, etc..), and other important computing protocols are supported. The window-manager developers and the Linux-distribution integration teams have to make sure that their software layer can happily coexist with the graphics server, the kernel, and myriads of other possible devices that a normal computer user has. They have to ensure that their configuration tools can accomodate all. Given this current state of Linux distributions, it's really a wonder how they can integrate all these loosely-connected hacks and come up with something useful as a Linux OS. Don't despair Holden. A few years back, people said there were no excellent GUI web browsers on Linux. Now we have Galeon, Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, and Mozilla. A few years back, people said there are no journalized filesystems in Linux. Now we have these excellent journalized filesystems (ext3, ReiserFs, JFS, XFS, etc). Now people are saying that Linux is not user-friendly. Well we know certainly where this will lead to several years from now. mikol _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
