OK guys, let me tell you this thing: An Operating System must, as linus rightly says, be as invisible and as transparent as possible. But it does not mean that it must be stupidly advertising upgrades and forcing people to buy an upgrade.
Apple was very good in the begining. Their objective was to create an almost invisible OS, like how Linus now supports. But over the years, the OS has detoriated a lot in that feild. Originally, it was the ideal OS in my opinion. It was installed in a ROM, and this made booting up a real fast experience. But now its just like windows, coming installed in HDD. Look at the EEE PC. They once again went back to the past ways, by placing the main OS in a locked flash partition(almost like a ROM) and the configuration files are in another partition, this way, the OS loads extremely fast. Look at the new Linoups. They are devices with the OS(linux) in a Flash and the user files in a HDD, along with configuration files. Linux is fast becoming an OS that Mac was once about to become, but changed course.
Now all we need is for linux vendors like Red Hat, Canonical, Mandriva Soft, etc to shift from developing the OS(which can be done by the community) to developing professional softwares, which if done, will result in Mac and Windows having their market shares cut to less than half their current one in a span of 7 years.
And yes, if you want to really see how good/bad the filesystems of Windows(NTFS), Mac(???) and Linux(ext3) are, just head over to the below thread and follow the instructions
*www.thinkdigit.com/forum/showthread.php?t=79745
@ Grudge: Mac is what it is only because of looks and all the apps in iLife that are not available anywhere else. The naming of stuff in the apple is also an important part for its selling. Please don't flame great people like Linux Torvaldis, who are experts in OS technology, and are much above us.
@ Saurav: Windows is a topic that has been covered countless number of times. So please don't try to use the same points again and again. All of them have been delt with by lots of guys.
@ Soumya: Why won't you stop targeting Linux, Mac and Windows ? Almost all your threads deal with some sensitive windows or mac or linux issue and we have a flame war
@All: Apple hardware isn't half bad, if apple wasn't so ignorant of the fact that cost plays a major factor in popularity. Infact, look at this quote from apple's website:
Fools at Apple's Website said:
Better bang-to-buck ratio.
The most advanced and affordable Mac notebook ever gives you a blazingly fast mobile architecture in a beautiful design that costs less than slower, clunkier models. It’s like getting a sports car for the price of a scooter.
Does that make even little sence ? look at the following specs:
*www.asia.apple.com/macbook/specs.html
And look at the price:
*www.apple.co.in/store/
Are apple really ignorant, or big liars, or both ? For iLife that Apple provides, even if you include its Rs. 4000/- cost in proper Books, MacBooks cost a lot more.
I'm serious. I know like 6 linux geeks. Whenever I meet them, they are always showing me some new beryl install where a window goes up in flames, or some network tweaks or something. Then the guy talks about terminal codes and all that. And of course, he will also for once make his linux desktop look exactly like a mac desktop and smirk. Sure they do work on it as well, I don't seriously think that they are forever tweaking.
But if you look at the three systems, there's a lot of tweaking and settings going on in Linux. The fact of which is evident from the numerous settings that come along with any linux app/distro.
So where does this leave us with transparency? OS X comes with all it's settings optimised after what I assume is a lot of market research. So there's not much to tweak, and Mac users are generally happy about the settings. Can't say the same about Linux (talk about driver hunts, getting WINE installed, and I don't know what else).
thats because you are describing linux Geek version, which all geeks like to use. Linux also has "normal" releases in distros.