Torvalds Switches to a Mac 1162
renai42 writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds said this afternoon that he's now running an Apple Macintosh as his main desktop, mainly for work reasons, although partly simply because he's a self-described "technology whore" and got the machine for free." And yes, he is running Linux on it ;)
Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:5, Informative)
So what. (Score:3, Informative)
He already stated this (Score:5, Informative)
smart people think alike (Score:4, Informative)
a) Linux on PPC is at least as good as on any x86 CPU.
b) Apple hardware is desired over your Average Joe's box from Dell or HP.
Re:Yes, (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nothing wrong with mac hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong
Apple includes full Developer's TOols with every version of OS X, including a customised version of GCC. So there is a compiler, and much more with OS X.
Actually I find OS X runs surprisingly well on old Macs (perfectly working on my 350MHz G3 iMac) but if you want to use Linux, that's cool too. Just don't make inaccurate statements about OS X.
Re:Nothing wrong with mac hardware (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What distro is he running? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:5, Informative)
--
Evan
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:5, Informative)
He has repeatedly said that he doesn't care about userspace.
He has also said that Mach, which is the microkernel OSX is based on, is a "piece of shit". Read "Just for Fun", his autobiography, for full details.
This is *SO* old (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:0, Informative)
Linus doesn't do desktop software.
Very "Insightful."
Re:He already stated this (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:5, Informative)
Now, now, while Linux is definitly not "ready for the desktop" no matter how many of the zealots tell you it is, I really can't say that it "takes all available free time to assemble some usable 'free desktop'".
Gnome and KDE handle this rather well in recent years and they come pretty standard with most distributions and even bootable CDs... Perhaps your requirements are different than others?
Yeah, it's easier to use all that crap in Windows because you're comfortable with it and it happens to work better in most ways but it's certainly not as difficult as you make it out to be to do it in Linux.
You are a complete dumbshit (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:3, Informative)
Which is a shame. Booting into OSX once in a while might give him an additional perspective.
True... it'd give him some excellent perspective on just how much Linux rocks. OSX has a great GUI, but the underlying OS has a fairly poor scheduler, disk accesses seem terribly slow and the VM systems tends to thrash really hard when you push it.
With regard to what Linus cares about, Linux isn't just a decent OS, it's a superior OS, better than Darwin, better than Windows NT and better in some ways even than "serious" Unixes, like Solaris and AIX (and not as good in other ways, but it's definitely in the same league).
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:1, Informative)
I'm finding quite the opposite. I have 3 machines with 3 monitors all sharing the same keyboard and mouse using Synergy [sourceforge.net] (which is a really a great piece of software). I can mouse over to any machine and use it with ease. The machine that I spend all my time in is Debian Linux. The Windows machine is almost always off (except when I want to write a quick test app in VS.Net) and the OS X machine basically just runs iTunes (though its no Winamp 5) and I occasionally use it to web browse when I need the extra screen real estate.
Granted I spend a lot of my time writing software and tinkering around doing things that a UNIX-like OS is best for. I guess for me, I've had a usable desktop in Linux for quite some time now, so it just feels natural and I don't have to spend time anymore to get things working. OS X is a new toy for me, and will probably get more attention at some point, but for the kinds of things I do I am just more efficient in Linux. OS X is UNIX, but the UNIX tools are lacking. For example, the Fink tools and repository just don't even come close to the quality found in Debian (unstable at that). I have yet to find a decent terminal app. Don't run OS X because its UNIX, run it because you want to run native OS X apps (which is where OS X really shines).
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:2, Informative)
$ man locate
Secure Locate provides a secure way to index and quickly search for files on your system. It uses
incremental encoding just like GNU locate to compress its database to make searching faster, but it will
also store file permissions and ownership so that users will not see files they do not have access to.
This manual page documents the GNU version of slocate. slocate Enables system users to search entire
filesystems without displaying unauthorized files.
Re:Nothing wrong with mac hardware (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Nothing wrong with mac hardware (Score:4, Informative)
Apples do not come with a C compiler. Here at work, I have an iBook I bought in October
Funny, my wife's iBook, purchased in December, came with a compiler. It wasn't installed by default; I had to install it from one of the CDs that came in the box, but that only took a few minutes.
Re:Why run Linux on a Mac, if you're not Linus? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:5, Informative)
Linus is probably biased about Mach though.... (Score:5, Informative)
The quick summary is that Andy Tanenbaum proclaimed Linux dead way back in '92, saying, "While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won."
Linus on the other hand much preferred the monolithic design of linux, for a variety of reasons. Mr. Tanenbaum even went so far as to imply that Linux wouldn't be a passing project for his class. Ironic, no?
Even so, Tanenbaum did and still does have some good points about the Mach microkernel. I can't exactly imagine Torvalds is the most impartial judge of the mach microkernel.
Re:The only reason I run Linux on x86 vs. G5 (Score:3, Informative)
Over local connections, images are stored in shared memory segments, messages are sent via shared memory over unix domain sockets, and hardware accelerated 3D is performed optimally.
Loss of performance? None. It is not uncommon for an X server to have considerably superior performance to that of GDI or Quart2D. It's also not uncommon for an X server to perform badly, because its drivers are poor.
It's even more common for toolkit authors to create radically suboptimal decisions, such as with Gtk+ and Qt.
In short, you have no idea what you're talking about. Presumably you've never written a display server, and thus don't really understand how they work.
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know, I'm just saying that the talk about an OS tax, as usually applied to deals Microsoft has with OEMs, seems to not-quite apply here any more (or less) than it would apply to talking about the OS tax on a Palm device.
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nothing wrong with mac hardware (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mac hardware != Mac (Score:2, Informative)
It's a Mac running anything, because APPLE built it and APPLE calls it a MACINTOSH.
Think things through, people....
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:1, Informative)
All Apple laptops have piss poor battery life compared to modern Pentium M laptops.
The Pentium M is so much faster than a G4 its embarrassing.
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:4, Informative)
What a truly ignorant statement. Microkernels are more stable than macro's (theoretically) but come at the cost of speed.
Its a tradeoff.
I know shit about kernel design as well but the arguments I see are as follows....
With kernels getting huge, microkernels could be easier to write and maintain since they have to be bugfree and stable. Macrokernels are easier to write generally but when huge can lead to problems. A kernel that has a bug brings down a machine unlike a userspace app. What is Linux? 70 million lines??
In this day and age of fast hardware and very bloated software and kernels, the argument to use a microkernel is quite strong. More userspace and less code touching the hardware can make sense. Also the speed difference is less and less of an issue today.
Qnx is a microkernel and so is AIX. Both are the most stable operating systems out there besides OS/390.
January Called (Score:2, Informative)
Tovalds: I personally also feel that ppc64 is interesting, and that's actually what I run on my personal desktop( it's a dual G5 Apple box, although it obviously runs Linux, not OS X).
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:3, Informative)
Currently the cost of maintaining a closed-source driver for linux is prohibitive, so any hardware maker that wants their hardware to work on linux is strongly encouraged to release their hardware specs, and plenty of them do. With a solid binary-only framework in place, there would be little to no encouragement to release specs, and so most drivers would end up being closed source.
To sum up: technically good, politically bad, so no go.
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:3, Informative)
You lose.... (Score:3, Informative)
From the Darwine FAQ:
Is the Darwin/Mac OS X release of Wine currently able to run Windows executable (.exe)?
No. We are currently working on integrating an x86 emulator in wine in order to run Win32 exe on a PowerPC Box. But on Darwin-x86 a Win32
Also let's clear up a few things:
Darwin != OS X
Wine != Darwine
Darwin is the open source part of OS X and has been ported to the x86 platform. Darwine is a port of wine to darwin. Darwine will run windows binaries on a x86 system but not a PPC system. Got that?
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Linus is probably biased about Mach though.... (Score:3, Informative)
NT was supposed to be microkernel like back in the OS2/NT days. But it's a macrokernel with a hal abstraction layer.
Even MacOSX is not a true mach like its nextstep predecessor.
last to get ports (Score:5, Informative)
It's cool that you brought up the port issue. I'll expound on my frustration with linux on PPC...
I ran a webserver on PPC linux (SuSE) for a few years. The SuSE folks did a good job porting all the standard linux apps and packages over from x86. But as I sought to customize my server with special CGI packages that did stuff like photo galleries and log analysis, I would run into roadblocks because necessary libs weren't available in PPC rpms. Sure, I could try to compile them myself, but in most attempts at this, I'd run into all kinds of compile errors for which I have no knowledge of how to troubleshoot.
Eventually I scrapped my PPC server and switched to an old dual Celeron x86 box running Mandrake. It was very nice to have everything readily available for my distro.
At the point that this server dies, I intend to replace it with my antiquated B/W G3 450mhz box. I see more development focusing on Mac OS X PPC than linux PPC as I think there is a significantly larger userbase on Mac OS X than linux PPC. So, unlike mr Torvaldis, I'll probably run my system (server) off Mac OS X at that point. My desktop will remain Mac OS X.
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:2, Informative)
You're speaking of Apple hardware. (Score:5, Informative)
Linus' claim is correct. A Mac without OS X is not truly a Mac, as it doesn't offer the full Mac experience. However, that doesn't mean that Apple's hardware is run-of-the-mill. It's quite superb, as you've pointed out, and there are other non-mac examples of this (iPods, Airport Base Stations [I think the express is a really cool product], we've even got a few LaserWriters still in use at my work).
I think this is one of the legitimate reasons why you SHOULD run Linux on a Mac. He's fricken Linus, man! It's hard to do what he does (work on Linux) without using Linux. He's made the choice for real, practical reasons. It frustrates me that several in the slashdot crowd want to run Linux on Apple hardware because they think there's some lame/n00b stigma attached to OS X. I've said it plenty of times before, and I'll say it again: OS X run's the majority of unixoid apps just fine. It's the best-fit for Apple hardware; the level of integration between hardware/software is going to be very difficult to reproduce with Linux, especially on a notebook. Don't make the switch unless you have stuff that needs to be done under Linux that simply CAN NOT be done under OS X...
Re:OS Upgrades (Score:1, Informative)
Bollocks. Where's XCode for OS X 10.1? Come to that, it looks like XCode 2.0 will be exclusive to Tiger - so Apple aren't even supporting OS X 10.3 with their new programs!
Compare this to Windows, where Microsoft are actively backporting all their cool technologies to their old versions. Avalon and WinFS will both be available to Windows XP users. Will Spotlight or Core Image be available to Panther users? I think not.
Re:Just hardware, no apple OS. (Score:4, Informative)
And eleven hours is amazing. How do you get that?
That laptop you mentioned is double the cost of an iBook though.
That Sony VGN-T150 is quite a different animal than anything Apple offers. It uses an Ultra Low Voltage Penitum M running at 1.1GHz. That's how it gets 6 to 11 hours of battery life with the extended-life battery.
The closest you could get with an Apple would be the 12-inch Powerbook with a Super Drive at $1700. The Sony runs between $1900 and $2000. But it's only 3.1 lbs compared to the Powerbook's 4.6 lbs and the battery life it gets is quite amazing. (even compared to the Powerbook's "up to 5 hours")
Of course, we're really comparing apples to oranges here (no pun intended) as these are very different machines for different needs.
Re:You're all missing the point (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linus is probably biased about Mach though.... (Score:1, Informative)
Guess again. MacOSX and NeXTStep both had 'true Mach'. Neither one is a microkernel: they use Mach for the services Mach provides (process scheduling, VM, IPC), and glue chunks of BSD running in the same address space as Mach to fill out the feature list (filesystems, networking, etc.). If the Darwin/NeXTStep kernel were a classic message-passing microkernel, these BSD services would be provided by userspace processes, not running in the kernel's address space.
Mach is just a minimal starting point. You can use it as the foundation for a macrokernel, or you can use it as the foundation for a microkernel. NeXT/Apple went the macrokernel route.
Re:last to get ports (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't specifically need Linux kernel, fink might be an easier option. You get access to the same packages as gentoo without, but setup on top of OSX is trivial. You can still run your server without UI if you want. Edit