Apples On Intel: Follow-Up
Posted by Skrud at Thursday, June 9th 2005 at 12:29am
Okay so by now we all now that Apple’s software won’t run on your typical commodity PC, which makes sense given that Apple is – and always has been – primarly a hardware company. To open up their software to run on any kind of computer would be ludicrous. In fact, the new Apples with Intels will have a whole host of interesting devices and methods to keep OS X running on Apple hardware only. There has been lots of speculation but the point is clear: Mac OS X won’t run on a non-Apple computer. (I’m sure there will be some hackish ways of getting it to work anyway, just like you can get Linux on your XBox … it would probably be impractical).
Given that, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just the first step in part of a larger master scheme by Apple. Maybe in another few years Apple might actually open up their software to run on any Intel-based platform. What if they beat Longhorn to the punch? Either way, I bet Microsoft is starting to feel cornered, with Linux and Apple hot on their heels.
The interesting thing is going to be the effect all this has on Linux (and to a greater or lesser extend, Open Source). If Apple brings forth an affordable Unix operating system to the desktop – that runs on all common hardware – then what’s Linux going to be left to? Likely it’ll forever remain underground and cult. Steve Vaughn-Nichols has a great article on eWeek on the subject, and I agree with him very much. Linux isn’t anywhere near ready for the mass market Desktop (although I think Ubuntu is the closest it’s gotten so far).
The same slashdot article I found that article at also pointed out SymphonyOS, an interesting looking Linux distro targeted at user-friendliness and based off Debian (akin to Ubuntu), only SymphonyOS seems to focus on user interface. I’m pretty intrigued and would love to give it a shot… just having recently installed Ubuntu on my desktop (after scrapping LinuxFromScratch) I’m not very inclined to switch distros again.
Linux (the kernel) must die. It is not good for desktop, it is not good for a server. It uses ancient security model – no roles no audit…nothing. It’s API and ABI changes from release to release. Driver model sucks compared even to Windows.
And from my personal experience (maybe it’s cosmic rays maybe my bad luck) but the more I use it the more unstable it seems to me. I have server in remote location, with only SSH access to it, and RHEL Linux managed to corrupt FS on two different hard-drives (over 4 years after about ~2 years of uptime).
Besides RHEL documentation looks like a half-finished ENCS282 project. And many more little and big things to rant about.
Apple have a long way to go on X86, for the next ~5 years most on the software will run on emulator becuase I don’t think that Adobe/Macromedia/Game publisher will give you X86 version of the software you already bought.