Pharyngula

You know I love you, PZ, but Linux > OS X

Posted by: Heliologue | October 28, 2007 7:47 PM

Tell her to post what she thinks of it on her site; I know at least I'd be curious to know. I've been thinking of installing it myself, being one of these heretical Intel-box type users.

(I have a Macintosh; it's sitting on the floor of my office, gathering dust, since there isn't a whole lot of room in here to set it up and I don't have a KVM switch yet... I can't decide whether Teh Mack looks more like a beer can or a sneaker, neither of which I find particularly aesthetically pleasing, so I'm trying to figure out where I can put it so I can use it without having to look at it.)

Personally, I'm a marginally-unhappy Windows user -- paying, non-Windows technical writing jobs are few and far between, and I love both my job and eating. Does anyone know if RoboHelp runs under Wine?

Posted by: Interrobang | October 28, 2007 7:53 PM

Good for her!

I used to have a Mac with Ubuntu on it. It was great.

Posted by: coathangrrr | October 28, 2007 7:55 PM

Welcome, Skatje. Endless nights of fun messing with your OS trying to fine tune it are expecting you.

Posted by: Guido | October 28, 2007 8:09 PM

Why choose? With OSx86, I plan to have Linux, Vista, and Leopard all on one ThinkPad! I wonder if I should make a BSD partition...

Posted by: Randall | October 28, 2007 8:13 PM

Can't have wealthy Americans using poor peoples software, eh? What are all these poor people doing on the internet anyway, if they can't afford a Mac?

Posted by: dc | October 28, 2007 8:22 PM

She was installing some abomination called "Ubuntu" on her computer.

WHAT?!?!? OUTRAGEOUS! Where are the parents?!?!?

EVERYONE knows that only Gentoo, or at least Slackware, are the only acceptable Linux distributions! This "Ubuntu" upstart has GOT to go!

(What?)

Posted by: SMC | October 28, 2007 8:30 PM

Hey PZ, tell her to install Kubuntu instead .It's easier than installing KDE manually and if you can't run Slackware you can at least have a decent desktop.

Posted by: Timothy | October 28, 2007 8:35 PM

I really do like my Mac too, but quite a few of the recent Apple news were fairly disappointing. I also think that free software and people working together to improve it appeals to me quite a bit. So I'm no longer sure if I will buy a Mac again.

Posted by: Axel | October 28, 2007 8:37 PM

Sorry PZ, Ubuntu pwns!112

Posted by: Stephen | October 28, 2007 8:45 PM

There's something very ironic about somebody spreading malware to all their readers right when they're getting on their high horse about what software to use.

Posted by: Platypus | October 28, 2007 8:50 PM

You type in gibberish and a pretty picture pops up? I'll stick to Fedora.

Since I'm in marketing, that's pretty much my job description.

Posted by: John | October 28, 2007 8:54 PM

Linux is for people who enjoy treating their computer as an end in itself.

The Mac is for people who want to use their computer to do things.

Posted by: dzd | October 28, 2007 9:02 PM

Look at it this way: she could have been installing Vista.

Posted by: Alex | October 28, 2007 9:05 PM

Everybody knows that Ubuntu is a gateway operating system. What will it lead to?

SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Posted by: Michael G.R. | October 28, 2007 9:09 PM

Look at it this way: she could have been installing Vista.

Touché!

Posted by: Michael G.R. | October 28, 2007 9:10 PM

I love it when atheists get into religious wars. :)

Posted by: Marcus Ranum | October 28, 2007 9:14 PM

Nothing wrong with a dual boot at least. Ubuntu is very good. With a newer version, everything worked right away for me without much fuss. Maybe even you will be lured away from one shiny new OS to another. :)

Posted by: Chell | October 28, 2007 9:19 PM

Eh, nothing to worry about. Now, if she was installing Windows, then you should consult a competent mental health professional.

BTW, you did order your copy of Leopard with your edu discount, I hope?

-jcr

Posted by: John C. Randolph | October 28, 2007 9:45 PM

I use gNewSense, a variant of Ubuntu (basically getting rid of all the proprietary packages in the original distro). I like it. I've been a Red Hat die hard since I started using GNU/Linux, but this is, dare I say, much more polished.

Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | October 28, 2007 10:09 PM

Linux is a fine OS -- for servers. Stable, fast, capable of handling lots of connections. Good stuff. But unless you think of a GUI as something that gets in the way of your command line, or are severely masochistic, Linux is not a desktop OS. The GUIs are improving, but not fast enough to be worth the effort.

Ubuntu is currently more or less the best of the user-friendly Linux distros. I've tried it repeatedly. It's about as "friendly" as the Mac was in System 5, or thereabouts. Which is to say: not actually painful any more, but not as good as Windows 95, let alone Mac OS 8 or Mac OS X 10.4. Another five or ten years and they'll make it as good as System 7 was, which is an enormous improvement. The problem is that in another five or ten years, both Windows and the Mac OS will be five or ten years better than they are now, and they already both beat Linux.

I know a lot of Linux people will take issue with this post, assuming they read it, but (as usual when Linux people think about GUI issues) they will be missing the point. Linux GUIs were written by people who were comfortable with a command line, and who thought of a GUI as a way to put a command line in a window. Through natural selection, the user base of Linux GUIs consists almost entirely of people who either agree, or who have some motivation for playing along. There are very few people who use Linux who, for example, work in a public library and have to walk Joe Sixpack through learning to use a computer.

Those of you who read Terry Pratchett's Discworld books will remember that Death tries hard to act human, but doesn't understand doors, and built his house with solid pipes because he didn't know that water was supposed to flow through them. Linux GUI designers have roughly the same approach -- they know what GUIs look like, and they know that (for some reason, which totally mystifies them) most users actually prefer to click on icons and buttons and things instead of typing into a terminal, but they don't know how GUIs actually work. (Hardly surprising after years working with things like sendmail. There are two approaches to good UI design. Sendmail is neither.)

X11 is totally symptomatic of the Linux approach. It's very sturdy, and chock full of features that an overwhelming majority of users will never come close to needing, but which might be useful to some server admin who prefers the command line anyway -- you can run X11 on one machine and display it on another! Amazing! But X11 says nothing about consistency of design, or layout, and has a woefully small set of primitive interface elements. To Linux users, this makes perfect sense.

(The GIMP has a similar problem -- superficially, it looks like Photoshop, so Linux users like to claim you can do graphics on Linux. Anyone who has worked with graphics on a professional level will be able to tell the difference between the GIMP and Photoshop within about thirty seconds.)

Posted by: The Vicar | October 28, 2007 10:11 PM

The Law of Conservation of Rabies says that if you're not a raging fundamentalist on the topic of religion, you have to be similarly insane about something else. Now, I always assumed PZ was devoting his quota of insanity to atheism, but perhaps I was wrong, and he's really all mouth-frothy about Macintoys. It would make sense. I recommend getting him hooked on vegetarianism, partisan politics and global warming denial, thus spreading his rabid tendencies out and reducing the impact in any one area.

Posted by: Eric TF Bat | October 28, 2007 10:15 PM

KUbuntu 7.10 running Wine allows one to use the entire MS Office suite with no issues, if you have to interact with the poor folk who can't or won't run Open Office or Star Office. Mepis is alright, too, as is Knoppix, KateOS, Fluxbuntu, Berry, Feather or Mint. There truly are way too many (slight) variations on a few OSs, but if you have a handful of CDs you can run live discs until you find one that doesn't make you think of Windows 2.0 with less personality.

Posted by: Christ Davis | October 28, 2007 10:19 PM

I'm leaning towards Ubuntu for my next system, I'm sure as hell not getting vista. Won't get a mac either though.

I was a mac user way back when it actually was the best system around, but lately I find apple stuff aggravating... too limiting.

Posted by: craig | October 28, 2007 10:44 PM

Re: #5 Ian B Gibson

I tried a Macintosh once; the mouse wouldn't work properly so I went back to a real Unix.

For at least the last year desktop Macs have come with a *four button* mouse with a ball on top that does vertical and horizontal scroll. Mind you, it *looks* like a one button mouse and can be used as one, but it has three regions making left, middle, and right buttons, plus squeezing the sides does button four. Newer Mac laptops let you tap with two fingers to make a right click, and you've long been able ctrl-click and apple-click to emulate right and middle button clicks. Cut it with the old canard about one button Macs. They've worked with three button mice since OS 9. (i.e. since the late 90's.)

P.Z., as several other people have said, be happy it's Linux. I wouldn't be worried unless she does something insane like installing Vista. I do Debian Linux on the desktop and Mac OS X on the laptop. They're both wonderful environments in their own ways. And they're both Unix.

Posted by: Andrew Watts | October 28, 2007 10:52 PM

Ubuntu? I'd kill for Ubuntu. I'm stuck with Fedora on my computer, though seeing as we're a Canadian university, it does make a certain amount of sense to want everything as free as possible, but still... Fedora?

Posted by: Infophile | October 28, 2007 11:09 PM

PZ, you do know what the default e-mail client is on Ubuntu, don't you?

It's called Evolution.

Posted by: Rick @ shrimp and grits | October 28, 2007 11:35 PM

Ha, all the comments about Ubuntu "stealing" from OSX make me laugh inside. Perhaps you all are unaware that a very large amount of Apple's "innovations" have been brazenly stolen from many different places (eg the dock concept). They DO know how to make it more pretty and let you think they're all innovative, so if that's what you want then more power to you.

Posted by: tone loc | October 28, 2007 11:41 PM

You have the coolest daughter.

Posted by: Jonathan | October 28, 2007 11:43 PM

Next she'll discover UAE and the AMIGA....

Posted by: other bill | October 28, 2007 11:51 PM

Linux is a fine OS -- for servers. Stable, fast, capable of handling lots of connections. Good stuff. But unless you think of a GUI as something that gets in the way of your command line, or are severely masochistic, Linux is not a desktop OS. The GUIs are improving, but not fast enough to be worth the effort.

That use to be true - and still is if you use Fluxbox or Ratpoison or Ion or any of a dozen or so other minimalist Window Managers. It is definitely not true of the leading desktops KDE and Gnome (and some others as well). Gnome and KDE are highly polished, very functional Desktop Environments.

Ubuntu is currently more or less the best of the user-friendly Linux distros. I've tried it repeatedly. It's about as "friendly" as the Mac was in System 5, or thereabouts. Which is to say: not actually painful any more, but not as good as Windows 95, let alone Mac OS 8 or Mac OS X 10.4. Another five or ten years and they'll make it as good as System 7 was, which is an enormous improvement. The problem is that in another five or ten years, both Windows and the Mac OS will be five or ten years better than they are now, and they already both beat Linux.

I don't have any experience with pre-OS X Macs, but based on how old System 5 must be, I doubt your statements. Any modern, fully functional operating environment will be superior in many ways to such an old system. If for a moment we think otherwise, it is most likely nostalgia temporarily clouding our thinking.

As for "five or ten years", you must not have a good grasp of how fast Linux is moving. Linux is currently advancing faster than any other OS. The kernel, X11, various user-land "plumbing", and the Desktop Environments are all moving forward at a tremendous rate. It is already becoming rather difficult to argue rationally that Linux is "less advanced" than Windows or OS X. I believe that within three years it will be completely impossible to seriously argue that point.
Even the issues regarding driver completeness now look to be resolved by then.

I know a lot of Linux people will take issue with this post, assuming they read it, but (as usual when Linux people think about GUI issues) they will be missing the point. Linux GUIs were written by people who were comfortable with a command line, and who thought of a GUI as a way to put a command line in a window. Through natural selection, the user base of Linux GUIs consists almost entirely of people who either agree, or who have some motivation for playing along.

Again, this is simply not the case. I, myself, do prefer the command line for many tasks. However, my grandmother uses Linux very happily. Her user experience is generally not to different from what she would (and did) get from Windows XP. There have been a few issues I had to fix, but far fewer than the number of issues I had to fix on Windows for her.

I am also helping an elderly neighbor learn how to use his first computer. He bought a used computer and someone recommended he get someone to put linux on it. I was happy to oblige, and now I am teaching him how to use it. He doesn't have any more trouble learning it than he would with Windows.

There are very few people who use Linux who, for example, work in a public library and have to walk Joe Sixpack through learning to use a computer.

Many public libraries are turning to Linux, as they face tighter budgets.

Those of you who read Terry Pratchett's Discworld books will remember that Death tries hard to act human, but doesn't understand doors, and built his house with solid pipes because he didn't know that water was supposed to flow through them.

Good series. I haven't read the Death books yet, though.

Linux GUI designers have roughly the same approach -- they know what GUIs look like, and they know that (for some reason, which totally mystifies them) most users actually prefer to click on icons and buttons and things instead of typing into a terminal, but they don't know how GUIs actually work. (Hardly surprising after years working with things like sendmail. There are two approaches to good UI design. Sendmail is neither.)

Once again - this was true many years ago, but no longer. And what does Sendmail have to do with anything? It is non-graphical and yes, its config system sucks, which is why smart admins use Postfix or (depending on the requirements) even qmail or exim.

X11 is totally symptomatic of the Linux approach. It's very sturdy, and chock full of features that an overwhelming majority of users will never come close to needing, but which might be useful to some server admin who prefers the command line anyway -- you can run X11 on one machine and display it on another! Amazing! But X11 says nothing about consistency of design, or layout, and has a woefully small set of primitive interface elements. To Linux users, this makes perfect sense.

X11 says nothing about consistency of design or layout. Really. Do you have any idea what role X11 plays in the GUI? That is like saying DirectX (Vista) or GDI+ (XP) or CoreGraphics (OS X) says nothing about consistency of design or layout. Of course they don't! That is not remotely their job!

The Gnome HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) have a lot to say about consistency in Gnome apps, and KDE is getting a lot better in that regard as well.

(The GIMP has a similar problem -- superficially, it looks like Photoshop, so Linux users like to claim you can do graphics on Linux. Anyone who has worked with graphics on a professional level will be able to tell the difference between the GIMP and Photoshop within about thirty seconds.)

The Gimp has historically been a complete UI disaster, and movement to fix it has been slow. But it has slowly improved, and in fact the latest release came out a few days ago, and UI work was a pretty large focus. In a few more releases they should get the new GEGL core in, and then many non-UI deficiencies can be addressed.

Meanwhile, Krita 2.0 is in the works, and once this major transition to QT4 and the KOffice2 libs is done, they should resume their previous rapid development pace. I think there is a good chance of Krita surpassing The Gimp withing 18 months of the 2.0 release. And Krita has never had The Gimp's UI issues.

Posted by: Kelly Clowers | October 29, 2007 1:15 AM

The Vicar: KDE is hands down the best desktop in the world. It can do anything that windows or mac or gnome or any of the others do and more. If you think Linux is just for "servers" you simply don't know what you are talking about.

Believe it or not, the mac GUI is actually pretty lame. It's feature lacking and balanced excessively for complete neophytes. The only people who are happy with this are those who have been convinced that they don't ever need to learn anything about how to use their computer. But amazingly (to you, I'm sure, but we've known this a long time) this can actually be said about the modern Linux desktop as well. The difference is that with Linux desktops (KDE more than gnome, for sure) once you do realize that you want to do more with it you have the options to do things just about any way you would like and don't have to shell out an extra $30 to add on VERY basic desktop features as you do with a mac. You've also got a much nicer command line experience on Linux, which really is faster and more useful than a GUI for a lot of "real work" tasks.

If you do very little with your computer anything is sufficient and if you do a lot with it Linux is the best, minus a few categories where there software support is too limited or too immature. This has nothing to do with the quality of the desktop, however.

But come on, my mom used my Slack box (surely one of the scariest Linux distributions for outsides) for 6 months last year, when I moved and didn't have room for it for a while, and NEVER had problems. This is a woman who double clicks on web links because she doesn't fully grasp the distinction between desktop icons and elements of a webpage.

Posted by: Timothy | October 29, 2007 2:03 AM

@Kelly Clowers:

(1) like all Linux users, you have no clue that Linux's GUIs are broken in the first place, so of course you see nothing wrong with them and think KDE and Gnome are "highly polished." Speaking as someone who has taught (or tried to teach) people to use computers from scratch on three of the four systems (Mac, Windows, KDE, and Gnome -- I admit to never having tried to teach someone KDE, because I was teaching from Ubuntu, which comes with Gnome), KDE and Gnome rank far below both every version of Windows since 98 and every version of the Mac OS since about 7.6 in terms of consistency and usability. They have learning curves which are incredibly steep, but you've been using one or the other of them all along, so you don't realize it any more, the same way that, in the springtime, a temperature of 50°F feels warm because you've been used to temperatures below the freezing point.

Public libraries may be turning to Linux, although for reasons of my own I am skeptical of this claim. More importantly, I doubt they'll stay with Linux any longer than they have to. Librarians tend to be overworked, and Linux is an OS for people with time on their hands. Furthermore, libraries whose computer labs can't open Microsoft Office documents tend to lose their funding for computer labs, and the Gates Foundation is offering grants to libraries caught in that situation. (And no, I don't like Windows -- if Apple and all things Mac vanished tomorrow, I'd either switch to Linux or give up computers entirely. But this is the way the world works, and libraries are seldom willing to lose their funding over OS preferences.)

(2) You also don't know your history -- X11 was originally intended to be the answer to the window and control systems on Mac OS and Windows. And it was going to put them to shame because it was going to be technologically superior. It has been relegated to the role of managing the drawing of windows precisely because, well, even Linux users couldn't pretend it lived up to the promises made on its behalf. That's where second-tier management schemes like KDE and Gnome came in.

To answer the question you asked: Sendmail has to do with UI design because, even though it is a command-line program, it is a prime example of How Not To Do It, and the ways in which it does what Should Not Be Done are mirrored in how Linux GUIs work. Sendmail pulls a vast number of functions into one program. It is not tolerant of user error, and to use it properly requires either a lot of memorization or else constant reference to... well, if you're good at manipulating the command line, lots of reference to the man page(s), but for most people, lots of reference to a lot of reference material, including the man pages, at least one good FAQ, and maybe a book or two. Even longtime command-line gurus -- of whom, by the way, I do not claim to be one -- get confused and frustrated by it. Yet the Linux (and Unix) community has traditionally held onto Sendmail instead of replacing it with multiple simpler commands, preferring to fossilize the Sendmail-using scripts and wallpaper over the result.

Many parts of Linux GUIs are basically just command-line questions put into dialog boxes. (Look, for example, at CUPS -- I hope Apple cleans it up, now that they've bought the rights.) To an experienced Linux user, or even a sufficiently experienced user of some other OS, these dialogs are not too much of a problem. And, hey, they've replaced that command line with a GUI, so it's all good, right? But from a GUI design standpoint, they are failures. If the user ever has to know exactly what to type, the GUI has failed. If the user has to type the same thing into two different locations (or copy the same file into two different places, etc.) the GUI has failed. If the user ever has to look up documentation to figure out how to find a place to make a chance, the GUI has failed. Most importantly, if the user has to look in the documentation and finds that it is missing or out of date -- which is a huge problem on Linux, even bigger than bad GUI design -- then not only the GUI is wrong but the user interface as a whole is faulty.

It's like watching the mayor construct a gigantic modern hygienic sewage treatment plant in the middle of the downtown area -- first he's puzzled that nobody wants to go downtown any more, even with this spiffy new technological marvel to look at. Then he decides that the problem will be solved by improving the efficiency of the plant so that it can process even more sewage. When that doesn't work, he starts offering guided tours to bring more people in. The notion that the problem is the sewage treatment plant will never enter his head. In his idealized world, the mere fact that the plant is modern and clean trumps everything else. Plus he never had much of a sense of smell anyway.

P.S. I didn't say Linux was feature-for-feature identical to System 5 on the Mac. I said it was about as user-friendly. That isn't the worst possible rating by any means -- System 5 had all the old black-and-white Mac stuff evolved to more or less its final form. But it had lots of rough edges when you went to do certain things. Go look up some screenshots of the MacTCP control panel, for example.

Posted by: The Vicar | October 29, 2007 2:38 AM

Ubuntu rocks. What sucks is all the Ubuntu users ripping on Macs.

Ubuntu is more open, OS X is more usable. It's really down to which you prefer between open and usable.

- Ubuntu: Openness: Doing things to your computer.
- Mac OS X: Usability: Doing things with your computer.

I prefer the "doing with" (hence: Macs) over the "doing to".

What's interesting is, for a proprietary OS, OS X is quite open, while for a free OS, Ubuntu is quite usable. Even so, the differences are still notable.

Posted by: Caesar | October 29, 2007 2:59 AM

One last reply, and then I promise I'll shut up. (I've already wasted way too much space, and I'm aware of it, thanks.)

Believe it or not, the mac GUI is actually pretty lame. It's feature lacking and balanced excessively for complete neophytes. The only people who are happy with this are those who have been convinced that they don't ever need to learn anything about how to use their computer.

Believe it or not, the overwhelming majority of computer users do not want to learn anything about how to use their computer, beyond the absolute minimum needed to get their tasks done. This is normal, intelligent behavior -- most people have better things to do with their time. It's how people interact with most objects in their lives. Yes, they might be able to shave a few seconds off a few tasks if they took the time to learn more about their computers. But in general they would be spending several minutes to learn. The Linux GUI is a kind of alchemy -- it turns your spare time into less time.

Posted by: The Vicar | October 29, 2007 3:04 AM

I have no idea how anyone could think the Ubuntu GUI is in any way inferior to Windows. To rank it on par with Win95 or 98 is wildly inaccurate; I've been using Ubuntu for a couple years now both at home and at work, and while I love having the command line flexibility, I do many, many things with the GUI without ever having to type a single character. Oh, and Open Office reads Word documents too.

Posted by: Jerry | October 29, 2007 3:52 AM

Uh, TheVicar, X was released in 1984, windows 1.0 was release in 1985, the Macintosh was released in 1984. X was writtened to extend the features of other Unix based windowing systems. It was the first hardware and vendor independent window system. X came from the academic and commercial Unix world, designed to run on terminals. It wasn't available for PCs until 1992.

Posted by: John at UConn | October 29, 2007 4:15 AM

Debian is the One True OS.

That is all.

Seriously: re Linux is for people who enjoy treating their computer as an end in itself...

I use my Debian boxen (I have more than one) for setting up scores (LilyPond), for writing (OpenOffice writer), for editing video (Cinelerra, Kino, a few other tools, on and off), for mixing, recording and composing music... mostly just for the video, now and then (Jack, qsynth, RoseGarden, Audacity and other villains), and, of course, for programming (some Perl, some PHP, some Java, lots of C and C++), and, of course, for server maintenance stuff on webservers I've a piece of. In days of yore, when I couldn't get decent win32 stuff for some video editing I needed to do, I patched libdv--Linux's lib for handing Mini DV video streams--to get it do do what I needed/wanted... this hack has since become obsolete as the Linux video guys have made generally available everything I need in that department, but durn, it was nice to be able to do at the time. This flexibility is what makes it the sensible approach for me. Open source packages make so much more possible right now... screw looking around for some commercial package that happens to do what you need... more or less... and which may or may not actually exist, and which may or may not cost you more arms and legs than you happen to have handy. Mess with what's there, get it to do exactly what you want. With a lot of stuff, it's almost overstating to call it programming... it's more often about scripting, combining existing stuff to get what you want. Yes, there's occasionally some fiddling with setup. The video stuff, in particular, you need some patience to get going, on Debian, at least. But there's quite the reward once you do.

Beyond this, the very philosophy of the Linux stuff is frequently just more attuned to how I think... LilyPond is brilliance in this regard--a really obvious markup language for writing music--type with one hand on a laptop dumping it into a text editor while you work it out on the keyboard with the other--every commercial music typesetter I've ever met is heavy on mouse use. LilyPond? Doesn't even use it.

I do have an XP box. Mostly, my wife uses that. My quite young daughter has a Mac Mini, and it is awfully friendly, which is why I got that for her. I work on XP, to some degree, because that's the standard at my work (my work's a bit dual that way, though, actually... we use a lot of Linux and other Unices for chip architecture/design stuff). But all my fun stuff happens on Debian. Because it can.

Posted by: AJ Milne | October 29, 2007 5:36 AM

Katie rocks. I've been running Linux as my primary desktop for four years now and Ubuntu for over a year. Just upgraded to Gutsy Gibbon.

Posted by: Elaine | October 29, 2007 8:32 AM