Thanks for the reply, John. I have done a fair amount of programming on OS X (Cocoa). In my opinion, Xcode has become increasingly difficult to use - the scheme for setting preferences in Xcode is a nightmare. I am still an amateur programmer - mainly I wrote simple physics demos using OpenGL (which is very, very badly supported in ppc linux). On the other hand, all of the gcc tools are there and there is even a Qt designer, my preferred environment, for OS X.
The file system doesn't matter to me. Nor does x86 compatibility. I still have my PS3 for linux programming and the Cell is a very interesting processor (my reason for buying the PS3). Of course, Sony did its best to make the linux experience on the PS3 very miserable due to their non-support for the GPU (I avoided some of this by using the 2D Xorg hack). Finally, I am not that concerned about Apple dropping support for the ppc (which they will do very soon). The OS is very mature and will still work for the remainder of my lifetime. There is very little of substance in recent years which requires x86 hardware (some video stuff, such as gmail video and netflix streaming, all of which I can do without). Of course the future is hard to predict, but I don't anticipate anything in the future which absolutely requires an x86 chip (they are not that powerful). I realize that my rant is somewhat off-topic (I posted a similar one on the Ubuntu forum). I still have not seen a really compelling reason to use linux - there isn't a single app (or feature) in linux which makes it worth going through (for me) all of the hassles of miserably supported hardware in ppc linux. On Jan 17, 2009, at 7:45 AM, John Michael Zorko wrote: > > Warren, > > I, too, really like OSX, and I view it as one of, if not _the_, finest > *nixes out there for a very wide range of tasks. Apple has done a > really good job with it I think. The OSX experience on Apple PPC > hardware is generally better than the Linux experience on the same > hardware (which is often _not_ the case with PC hardware -- the Linux > experience is often as good or better than the Windows experience). > > That being said, there are still reasons why Linux on Apple PPC > hardware might still be preferable, depending on what you need to do: > > 1. if you're a C / C++ developer (pro or not), there are differences > -- kqueue is not epoll (not that one is necessarily better than the > other as they both solve the same sort of problems, but they are > different), for instance > 2. if filesystem type is important, HFS+ is not ext3 (case > sensitivity, filename length, resource forks compared to xattrs, etc.) > 3. if you need AIO on non-file FDs, Linux will let you do that while > OSX will not > 4. the GNU toolchain is the same on PPC Linux as it is on x86 Linux, > while Apple's toolchain, while using gcc, is not the same as GNU's > toolchain i.e. Apple's linker is not GNU ld, Mach-O is not elf ... > again, not that one is better than the other, but they are different > 5. probably the biggest reason -- Apple likely won't support OSX on > PPC for much longer, so hopefully YDL will ... > > Regards, > > John > > Falling You - exploring the beauty of voice and sound > http://www.fallingyou.com > >> Actually, I just gave up running linux on my iBook (I reformatted the >> disk, deleting the linux partitions). I have spent quite a bit of >> time with three different linuxes: YDL 6.1, Yubuntu 8.10 and Yubuntu >> 7.10. Except for some easily solved problems, each one installed with >> few problems. After installation, I found that the user experience >> with the OS was far worse than with OS X and I repeatedly asked >> myself "why am I doing this?" > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > yellowdog-general mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.fixstars.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general > HINT: to Google archives, try '<keywords> > site:terrasoftsolutions.com' _______________________________________________ yellowdog-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fixstars.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general HINT: to Google archives, try '<keywords> site:terrasoftsolutions.com'
