Mac OS X = UNIX with a GUI?

Dear all,

I am having this discussion with a friend of mine who is a Mac preacher searching for converts (and I am the one he is trying to gain for the Mac religion ).

We are at a point of the discussion where it's coming down to whether Mac OS X is or is not a UNIX with a GUI (an excellent GUI I must say) bundled with extra software.

My claim, based on having worked for a long time with Linux (Redhat, Debian), HP-UX and Sun Solaris, is that Mac OS X is a UNIX + GUI (I stress probably the best GUI ever built on top of a UNIX-like OS) + a bunch of bundled software/applications intended for non expert users.

Ever since I abandoned the Commodore Amiga religion, I have a pragmatic approach with computer platforms. I love UNIX but at the same time I recognize that 90 % + of the world computers use Windows, therefore for my day to day operations, I use Windows.

For my non day to day operations, Linux is just great. And given that when I am using UNIX I rarely use any of the high level stuff, I prefer to go shell/filesystem instead (actually the ability to have full control of the OS from the shell is the reason why I like UNIX in the first place), I don't see any reason to move to Max OS X. Simply put, I don't see anything in Mac OS X that I cannot get from either Windows or Linux. The high level software bundled with Mac OS X doesn't compensate for having a minority OS, not for me at least. And as I said, I try to stay completely away from religious OS wars, I am done with that stage of my life.

So basically guys, do you agree with the statement Mac OS X is a UNIX + GUI + a bunch of bundled software/applications intended for non expert users?

Thanks!

Sure!

But my question is more direct. There is a difference between being a descendant (or even borrowing ideas from) and being a clone (or an almost clone). In the case of Mac OS X, if I take away the GUI and the high level stuff, all I see is a UNIX, same file structure, same commands (mv, cp, top, etc work equally well in HP-UX, Solaris, Linux...).

Just want to make it clear that the posting is not intended in any way to be demeaning towards Mac OS X. I think that Apple did an excellent job with the OS, but somehow when I hear the preachers of Mac OS X they remind me to the preachers of Linux in the late 90s': they were convinced that theirs was an entirely new OS, ignoring the fact that both Linux and Mac OX X are UNIX-like-clones.

Cheers!

PS: Apparently, I read first an imcomplete version of your posting that only included the first two lines. I agree with your final point, I do like messing around wit the command line :-)).

Hey! That I am the one who agrees with you! I think it was a wise decision for Apple to go UNIX, as you say, the most stable and secure OS and certainly one of the most used OS's in mission critical apps. It's my Mac OS X friend preacher who is trying to convince me that Mac OS X is a complete different creature all together from all other UNIX-es.

From your answer, I infer that you and I are on the same page.

Cheers!

Yeah! I agree with that too. The UI is what makes Mac OS X different.
As for your last point, I just happen to be on the remaining 1%. To change the IP address there is nothing quicker than a ifconfig here and there. I find the Windows way painful (in Linux I just do it manually) but then again, it's what 90% + computer users have...

Cheers!

PB, Mr Me,

Thank you for your very good points. In fact, even Apple advertises Mac OS X as a UNIX with a GUI/UI (again, great ones!),

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html

So next time I have one of those Mac priests trying to convince me that Mac OS X is NOT a UNIX with a GUI, I'll tell them to read the sacred scripture of their church!!!!

Is Mac OS X to UNIX what Mormonism is to Christianity? Given that Mac OS X is UNIX certified, and the mormons didn't get the blessings of the Vatican while other christian faiths did, I am more tempted to say that Mac OS X is to UNIX what Anglicanism is to Christianity. For agnostics like myself, one will always find fanatics claiming that their denomination is better, but at the end of the day, they all look Christians to me, with very little differences from one another.

Cheers!

Yes. If Mac OS X had a worldwide market share > 40 %, I think this question would be a no brainer. The problem is that it's not the case and I think it's unlikely to be the case unless Apple decides to open the Mac platform to other hardware manufacturers. And there is the catch: if Apple wanted to make Mac OS X an open hw architecture, they would run into the type of hw support problems for which MS has been accumulating knowhow during decades. Not sure if it's an easy challenge.

As you pointed out, one of the best things of Windows, which is largely ignored by most of its critics, is that for all its shortcomings in stability and security, it supports a wide variety of hardware seamlessly. Mac OS X's stability comes at the price of a very tightly controlled driver support. That's nothing new. During the UNIX wars, that was the model Sun, HP, IBM and Silicon Graphics tried. And none of those workstations was able to capture a sigfinicant market share in the desktop. True that none of those workstations was price competitive either with Wintel or Mac. But it's also true that the average non geek computer user (ie, people like my sister) doesn't care much about the stability/security aspect beyond a very minimum threshold. They care more about having an easy to use platform that is widely deployed and for which there are insane amouts of hw/sw to choose from: that's exactly what Windows gives them.

And in my particular case, most of the stuff that I do day to day with Windows (text processing, email, etc) is intended to interact with users who are 90% + Windows users. I don't want to waste a single second of my life having to deal with file formatting issues; we all know that no file format conversion across platforms is ever flawless (not even from Mac MS Word to Windows MS Word and viceversa). And for my non day to day ops, I have Linux!

It seems to me that the answer is yes. You are even emphasizing that Mac OS X is actually real UNIX with 10.5, which is a good thing!
Some people's retoric try to deny that fact, in the same way that some Linux fanatics deny that Linux is UNIX. Oh well!


What I mean is that, in my case, I barely use any of the high level tools when I am in a UNIX environment. As an example, I do my backups with tar/gzip rather than letting some high level backup utility do it for me. Call me paranoid if you want, but to me (and to most expert users) that's the beauty of UNIX (which Windows lacks), I have full control of the OS from the shell. So, while I am sure many of the non expert users will appreciate the pro grade tools, I couldn't care less because I'll will not use them in most cases.


I have already played with Mac OS X, and the impression that I got is Mac OS X = UNIX with a GUI. And all the answers I've gotten so far, including yours, seem to agree with that statement (save a couple of pointless technicalities).


That isn't true. Windows is still by a huge margin the most widely supported platform for both HW and SW. And as I said, achieving such level of support is not a trivial task.
But even if I limited myself only to MS applications (Word/PowerPoint/Outlook), I still run the risk that I receive (or I send) a file to one of the many 90%+ who use Windows that has format conversion problems. Wasting 10 min to correct each such potential problems is not worth to me the change. Windows already takes care of that stuff. And for other stuff (like scientific computing), I have Linux. So, as I said, I really don't see the benefit of switching, for a user like me, unless Mac OS X was adopted by 40% + of users (which is unlikely to happen due to the strict control that Apple has on Mac OS X and the hardware).

Cheers!

I liked your answer. My friend said he'll lend me one of his Mac OS X computers (he has serveral) and I'll do some tests. However, it's unlikely that I switch because,

- As you said, Windows is everywhere. And to me, that's a big + of Windows despite the fact that, like yourself, I am not a a Windows fan. If the market share of Mac OS X increases to 40 %, then I'll give it a more serious thought. I know it's a chicken and egg situation, but I am into OS religious wars any more (ie, I am not going to adopt an OS just for the sake of fighting MS).

- In terms of cult following, I was (and in fact I still am even today in the deepest of my heart) an Amiga cult follower during my teens. Neither Linux nor the Mac can match the experience of owning an Amiga during the late eightes (when every other computer from the competition was years light behind in the multimedia and OS departments). And talking about cult following, the Amiga cult is pretty much alive despite the fact that no new Amiga hardware has been released for more than a decade. Whatever remains alive from the Amiga community is due to the loyalty of its followers. I haven't known any single computer platform able to match that type of following, not even Linux or Mac owners .

Cheers!

There will always be people who claim that Windows 98 is not Windows 95 (even that Windows 95 doesn't run on top of MS-DOS 7.X) or people who claim that Windows XP is not Windows NT, oh well!


This type of idiotic fanaticism is one of the reasons I run away from Mac OS zealots. No, I hope I'll never have to work with you. You come accross as a totalitarian bully, and that's totally disgusting. As a matter of fact, I try to stay away from people like you.

I am sure there are many down to earth Mac users. It's people like you who scare away the non fanatics who are just interested in evaluating an OS (which might I remind you, that's what Mac OS X is: a fucking OS, a fucking UNIX with a fucking GUI).


Now that you showed up your deep Narcissistic Personality Disorder, I understand that for you it doesn't really matter since I am sure you interact minimally with non Mac users (something like 90% + of the computer users). Have you ever read about the dangers of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink? For those like me who interact mostly with non Mac users, I refuse to waste a single second with these formatting issues, which can be very annoying and wasteful when one has to edit, as do, those .doc and .ppt files back and forth.

Anyway, the veredict from most of those who have spoken is clear: Mac OS X = UNIX + GUI/UI. Then is a question of taste. Vegans will never understand why people like me see Nirvana when they eat a good beef steak (geeeeee!, only thinking about it makes me hungry), as I will never understand how is possible that some people can live their entire lives without eating meat....

Cheers!

No, no, I am not the one confused. To me it's just a machine!

It's Mac users like aegisdesign who make it appear to the non Mac users that the Mac is a religion. And as such, I am very cautious/suspicious.

He is the one who turned the discussion nasty. I am not the type of guy who lets himself bullied without responding.

it's like,


Whomever has worked in large UNIX environments with tenths or hundreds of machines doing mission critical stuff (like myself) knows that for production the backup tools are mandatory (combined with high-end hardware like EMC's Symmetrix).

From this whole thread it was clear that we were talking about my desktop. Any additional software layer brings in the possibility of additional bugs, and therefore the possibility of corruption of data during the backup/restore operations. So, while I wouldn't suggest the use of tar/gzip for the massive backup/restore operations that go on in complex organizations, since it wouldn't be practical and the minimum risk of a bug is worth the amount of work saved by having the extra software layer, for my own data, I prefer to use tar/gzip because I know what I am doing.

So, the fact that Mac OS X has backup/restore tools is irrelevant from the point of view that it is a deskup running a UNIX with a GUI. Most expert users in such desktop will rather write a shell script with tar/gzip than use a high level backup utility.

The previous comment, and similar he did in the same line, were intented to be derrogatory. He got what he deserved.


Again, it's a question of how you define GUI. Are CDE/KDE/Gnome "plain" GUIs or do they add "frameworks"? A more interesting question, was Windows 3.X just a "GUI" (deserving a copyright lawsuit from Apple for stealing the look and feel) or was it a GUI + a framework totally different from the Mac GUI?

Most people are comfortable (and the most honest ones in the thread made it clear) with saying that Mac OS X is essentially a UNIX with a GUI/UI, like there are other UNIX-es with GUI/UIs out there: HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, RedHat/Ubuntu, etc... You are free to disagree with that statement but if you make derrogatory comments to those who don't see thinks like you do, you should expect some kind of answer (unless you are a bully accustomed to abuse people without getting any response).



As a matter of fact, I am. And while I was having these discussions I found the following(based on Panther),

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/

I read through it, some sections in more detail than others. From reading The Architecture section, and from the different responses, I am more convinced than ever that Mac OS X is a UNIX with a GUI (and since Leopard has been officially certified as UNIX, so this claim makes even more sense with the 10.4 version of Mac OS X).

Cheers!

Good point. To me, and I am OK if other people disagree, what makes UNIX be UNIX is its kernel and the minimum surrounding framework it provides: multi user, multi-process, (multi thread in the most recent versions), time sharing, IPC's, memory management (including but not limited to virtual memory and process context independence), hardware interaction, the filesystem and services provided to processes through System Calls (I am sure I am forgetting stuff but I hope you get the idea). Even networking services, that most UNIX kernels include by default, it's borderline to me. I mean, a UNIX kernel without the TCP/IP drivers/stack is still UNIX to me. In terms of user interaction, the minimum thing UNIX provides is the console or a shell. Why I think that's it? Because all the advantages that are cited for UNIX: stability, security come from its kernel and the minimum framework surrounding it. The higher level stuff provided to facilitate the interaction with the user (what Apple provides) it's not essential for a good OS from the robustness point of view. In terms of user interaction Vista and Mac OS X are very similar (I am already hearing the religious followers of each side screaming) but at core, Vista is NT and Mac OS X is UNIX, which gives Apple something to brag about in its battle with Windows but which leaves unimpressed those who are familiar with other UNIX-es with GUIs: "and your point is?" "ever since I met a UNIX for the first time when I was a little kid I knew UNIX was superior to either Windows 3.X/95 or NT".

To give an analogy with physics. It's like if you have lived your whole life thinking that Newton's law of physics were the state of the art in terms of knowledge of the physical world (which is what many people whose last contact with physics was an elementary class they took in high school might believe). Then suddenly and by chance, in your thirties, you discover the work of Einstein or the more recent work on String theory, which explains better certain phenomena and you try to gain adepts to your cause. Most physics professors will be unimpressed with you and will even look at you with a smile that it took you so long to learn that Newton's Laws of physics were archaic and incomplete. Still, the engineers working at Boeing or Airbus building planes will tell you: sure your Einstein staff is cute, but for us designers of planes Newton's Laws are just fine and much simpler to deal with.

Well, in this analogy: the guy who discovered Einstein's work in his thirties is the type of Mac user whose universe is limited to whatever Apple utters (therefore until the release of Mac OS X he didn't know much about UNIX), the physics professors are the expert computers users, and the engineers working for Boeing are the pragmatic computer users who might or might not know about Einstein's work.

Cheers!

Thanks for this authoritative remark. Nothing better than the opinion of one of the contributors to the core technology of Mac OS X to settle the issue. And as I said several times, this fact is indeed a very good thing for Mac OS X.

A different question is that of the benefits for the end user of using a UNIX + GUI OS, with probably the best UI among those those UNIX-es, in the desktop world when 90% + users are on Windows. I'll give it a try though!

Cheers!

PS: BTW, I didn't post my contact info because I am suspicious of spam/who knows what. Those intereested in getting it, I'll be happy to share it with you.