Macs

[David Sanders]

2009/9/15 Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com>:
> NOTE:  Dang, someone needs to fix the list settings.  Sorry for
> sending that directly to you Liam.  Here's what I sent.
>
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Not even slightly, no.
>>
>> Mac OS X does not use the X Window System as used in most Linux
>> systems or all other graphical Unixes; it has its own display layer,
>> called Aqua, based around a rendering system called Quartz based on
>> PDF. It also includes many layers of Apple software: Core Image, Core
>> Data, Core Audio, Core Animation, QuickTime, & a large & extensive set
>> of Objective-C class libraries inherited from NeXT Computer.
>>
>> OS X does include an X server as an optional extra; it runs under
>> Aqua. So it's *MUCH* easier to get Linux (or other xNix) apps running
>> under OS X than it would be to get OS X apps runningunder xNix.
>>
>> Saying that, there is a FOSS reimplementation of the original NEXTstep
>> libraries and frameworks. It's caled GNUstep:
>> http://www.gnustep.org/
>>
>> If GNUstep got more attention & a bunch of updates, it might be
>> possible to recompiled FOSS apps for OS X & run them on Linux.
>>
>> FWIW, I think it's criminal that there isn't a distro based around
>> GNUstep & its NeXT-style GUI.
>>
>
> My friend's experience running X Windows apps under Mac OS X is that
> even with fast hardware the software runs sluggishly.  Open Office
> would indeed run but he constantly complained about it being sluggish
> and slow to respond sometimes.  I tried it out and he was right.  You
> CAN run some Linux software on the Mac but they don't run smoothly.
> Also, the software has to be recompiled in the Elf binary format that
> the Mac users.  It won't run native Linux binary format applications
> even with the X Server component.
>
> Open Office is now available in native Mac Aqua format.
>
> And, yes, Mac OS X is indeed Unix 03 certified:
> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-receives-unix-03-certification.ars
>

Unix-certified pretty much means diddly-squat - We're Linux users
here, not BSD users. The BSD/Solaris/HP-UX userland is no-where near
as modern or friendly as Linux (unless they've nicked the GNU utils -
which for instance BSD does).

Mac-OS X is a decent enough operating system, apart from that, IMO,
the Mach-kernel inside Monolithic kernel is a terrible terrible idea.

So, look at a few benchmarks for OSX vs Linux with apache, mysql
compiled with GCC 4.4 compared to Mac OS X and GCC 4.1 (latest
available in XCode AFAIK).

It's faster, cheaper, runs on anything you want to put it on. End of story.