post 107

By anders pearson 21 Sep 2000

we finally got our copy of the MacOS X public beta today. in general, playing with a brand spanking new operating system is geek nirvana. OS X did not disappoint. all sorts of fancy tricks and neat toys to play with. haven’t had time to really rip it apart and see exactly what it’s capable of, but here’s my initial analysis:

if you haven’t been paying attention, X is really freebsd with a candy coating. it must be a really cold day in hell now that macOS has a commandline. naturally, the first thing i did when i got my hands on an iBook with X loaded onto it was to figure out how to get a terminal window. they buried it down a few folders deep, but it’s there right from the start. my first beef with X is that it only has tcsh, sh, and zsh. no bash or ksh. otherwise though, all the standard unix commandline tools are there and work pretty much as expected. i was also pleasantly surprised to find ssh preinstalled and zero network deamons running by default. it makes me very happy to see that Apple has resisted the temptation that microsoft and most linux distributions seem to have fallen prey to of loading a billion things onto the default install like ftpd, webservers, named, fingerd, etc, etc. the standard rationale seems to be that the more stuff they have installed and running by default, the more users can do without having to read manuals or call support. unfortunately, the way it works in the real world is that 90% of the services go completely unused and after a few months a security hole shows up in one of them. since no normal users patch their systems on a regular basis, the script kiddiez get to run wild. hopefully, with future releases, apple will be smart and keep the default setup simple and tight.

i was also surprised to see that the Aqua interface is much less annoying to actually use than i figured it would be from the screenshots i’d seen. out of the box, it looks like some sort of child’s toy with buttons and window decorations that look like hard candy and all sorts of annoying animations that happen whenever you so much as look at it funny. fortunately, it took about 30 seconds to figure out how to change it to the “Graphite” theme, which changed all the candy buttons to a nice greyscale that wasn’t too painful to look at and another minute to figure out how to turn off all the silly animations. at that point, it became a fairly usable interface. seriously though, the animations and other pointless eye-candy were so distracting and annoying that anyone who uses it for more than 15 minutes will (if they are at least computer literate enough to figure out how) turn it off. it really makes me wonder why apple spent any time and money developing it all in the first place. the NeXT-style directory listing was a nice feature that i really liked and would love to see in some of the linux file managers that i use. i was also really amazed at how responsive the GUI was. MacOS 9 was built up of so many layers of emulators and hacks and workarounds that it really didn’t do the G3 and G4 chips it ran on justice. G3/4’s are significantly faster than their intel equivalents but OS9 is so grossly inefficient that you would never know it.

OS X has the potential of being a very Good Thing ™ as well as the potential to be damaging though. from what i’ve seen, it beats the older versions of macOS hands down. it will take a while for me just to get over the fact that i can now get a unix prompt on a mac. for me, that makes it a viable operating system. the mac people can have their fancy GUIs but if i need to i can still get work done on the machine. joy. what worries me is how Apple is/will be playing with the open-source and free software communities. traditionally, apple has been an extremely closed company. despite the underdog image that people tend to associate with apple, when it comes to cooperating and sharing with others, their tactics make microsoft look like angels. windows2000 is a closed, proprietary OS, but MacOS is a closed proprietary OS running on closed, proprietary hardware. they’ve inserted themselves directly into the middle of the free software community, using (arguably) the free-est of the free OSes. i’m curious to see how, or even, if, they give anything back to the community which has provided them with a large portion of their new OS.