Gary asks a follow-up question to How has open source helped or hindered?:
Why do you use Mac OS X as your laptop/desktop/development machines OS instead of a Linux distro?
There is really nothing religious about our use of open source. We use it because it’s better on the scales of merit that we care about. For infrastructure software, such as web servers, databases, server operating systems, programming languages, and web frameworks, the scales of merit lend themselves incredibly well to open-source development. Thus, we use it and are passionate about it.
For desktop operating systems? Not so much. There are just too many disciplines involved that programmers are not naturally good at and don’t have sufficient levels of taste to prepare masterfully. And programmers constitute the vast majority of builders in the open source community.
So it’s not unreasonable to think that these programmers will do exceptionally well when they’re designing for them and their kind, but at the same time do less well when they’re trying to figure out what makes a great iPhoto or iTunes or what have you.
Therefore I tend to think that open source is at a natural disadvantage at creating end-user applications, in which I include OS X and Linux destined for the desktop. It’s not impossible, just very hard.
Firefox is always heralded as a great example of good end-user software, but I do think that in part is because they’re mostly just doing great infrastructure advances (spec compliance, developer tools, security) in a familiar shell (how much difference is there between Firefox and the early browsers on the UI?).
Which interestingly enough is also how my usage of Firefox goes. I use it for development purposes (primarily because of the developer plugins, like Live HTTP Headers and Firebug) and I use Safari for recreational purposes.
So what I’m trying to say is that for me, OS X is just better on the scales of merit that I care about when it comes to an operating system that needs to be so generally applicable as to deal with my email, IM, browsing, music, pictures, productivity apps, and more.
In other words, I’ll stick to OS X on my Macbook Pro (tight integration between hardware, software, and services is the hallmark of OS X’s superiority), but be equally thrilled to use Linux and FreeBSD on the server.
brad
on 09 Nov 07Interesting that (from what I can tell) you assume that the Open Source community is restricted to just programmers. I am pretty sure that there are open source UI designers and graphic artists who participate in these projects as well. I think Novell’s efforts in this area (not to mention the rock-star that is Ubuntu) are evidence of that.
And aren’t you guys always saying that there can be a lot of crossover by developers into other domains? Who says programmers can’t produce beautiful UIs?
Perhaps at this moment the Mac is still a more beautiful experience, but in time, especially considering the move towards browser-based applications, I think Linux could challenge.
Uncommon Sense
on 09 Nov 07For me, open matters with respect to protocol and document standards; open doesn’t matter w/r/t source. So for me, OS X and Solaris make the most sense on the client and server respectively.
Ray Morgan
on 09 Nov 07I love OS X. It feels nice to use. I think that open source Linux desktops are good, but they lack the feel that makes things like OS X great. OS X has a very specific feeling from the hardware (and casing) to the UI design.
One day I hope (and believe) the open source community will match the ease and beauty of OS X. But currently none of the Linux desktop distros I have used feel right.
JohnO
on 09 Nov 07Linux can/could challenge, but even Windows doesn’t just work like the Mac does. I’m a switcher, nearly 2 years now, and very glad to be done with Windows.
DHH
on 09 Nov 07Brad, I didn’t say that everyone in the open source community were programmers, just the vast majority. And yes, I’m saying that such programmers (myself included) are generally not going to match up to the best UI designers at places like Apple.
I’m sure there are a few superstar-do-it-alls out there, but it takes more than a few to arrive at something as thoroughly polished as OS X.
And for the rest of them, the ones that aren’t the superstar-do-it-alls, the evidence is in on their general ability. Linux is still not anywhere near OS X in terms of taste and feel. That’s not a slam. I’m continuously impressed at just how well things are coming along, but it’s still just not on the same level.
But I do take your point about web applications. For a lot of people, a computer is a way to get on the internet. For this category of users, a Firefox-box can run pretty much whatever and they won’t care. So Linux certainly has a big place on the desktop, just not my desktop.
Charles
on 09 Nov 07David,
Excellent points. I will add one thing to your analysis of Firefox that contributes to the same point you’ve made. In “Founders At Work” Blake Ross describes the beginning of Firefox, and some decisions they made at the outset.
In essence, Blake & co. ended up being very dictatorial about the UI decisions made in the early product. As a result, they ended up being very opinionated about how they saw Firefox being more of an ‘end-user’ product and as a result put themselves in that mindset. In the process, they upset many other open-source developers who thought that wasn’t in the spirit of things… and who, in retrospect, may have unwittingly contributed to an inferior product from a UI perspective.
In sum, yes, open-source is a great method for insuring that lots of eyeballs see the process. This ends up being great for solving various statistical aberrances, like bugs, but less ideal for determining tastes. As they say, design by committee always produces less than ideal results.
james
on 09 Nov 07It’s funny. The same intangible quality that Mac users experience but find so difficult to communicate might be compared to the same intangible quality that would lead someone to use a 37signals product instead of something else. Pure techies could look at Mac OS X or BaseCamp and sneer that they are simply the same bits of code that everyone else has, rearranged and painted up real pretty. And from that point of view, they might be right. But users of those products may realize that there is great value in holistic integration, workflow optimization, and presentation. Enough value to beat “free.” The design-by-committee of open source is not always able to match a tightly focused singular vision, and as much as the pure techies might dismiss the value of design and workflow-oriented usability, the value is very, very tangible:
People will pay for it.
brandon
on 09 Nov 07I couldn’t have said it better myself, james.
I find that my biggest annoyance when I am forced to use a Windows machine is that there are an overwhelming number of choices, preferences, and places that things are stored.
Linux is better than that in many ways, but I think that even file management is more daunting on Linux than Mac OS X. There is clearly a vision for what the Mac experience should be. I don’t think there’s much hope for Windows, but Linux UIs can still get improve.
Edmundo
on 09 Nov 07Let us not forget that although Firefox is perhaps the most successful end-user open-source client in recent years, a lot of the interface design decisions for Firefox came out of stealing from other browsers, notably Safari and Opera who were designed by private companies. Remember when the feed button used to say [RSS] for a bit just like Safari’s blue [RSS] button? :)
I wish they Gimp guys did the something similar and made a usable open-source image editor.
Stu
on 09 Nov 07“Why do you use Mac OS X as your laptop/desktop development machines OS instead of a Linux distro?”
WTF? They do web design! They need Photoshop!
Brian
on 09 Nov 07I’ve been using Ubuntu on my desktop exclusively for a year now, but I am just a programmer who was fed up with Windows. As Linux copies more and more design elements of OS X, I’ve realized that I’ve been missing out. Yesterday I ordered my first Mac. :)
Scott
on 09 Nov 07A little off-topic, but Safari 3 essentially has a built-in FireBug clone. Enable the debug menu, “defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1”, restart Safari, and Show Web Inspector.
Scott
on 09 Nov 07A little off-topic, but Safari 3 essentially has a built-in FireBug clone. Enable the debug menu, “defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1”, restart Safari, and Show Web Inspector.
Ian
on 09 Nov 07To pick up on the comment by james on the intangable quality of the UI; I did a few years of architecture study (of buildings, not software) and the school seem to understand, well, when a student got their brain around the intangable qualities of good (and bad) buildings – and sent the student to the next year of their degree.
Building architecture is an old discipline and universities are now reasonably good at organising courses to give students that understanding of good building design. Software and UI design is a relatively new profession and I think we are just coming to grips with the skills of UI design particularly.
I think the software industry, particularly software education, could borrow more from building architecture; we have already borrowed “architecture” and Christopher Alexander’s Design Patterns. I’m sure there is more to be mined from that other discipline.
Noel Hurtley
on 10 Nov 07Scott is right. Safari has a great debugging tool baked right in. But Firebug is pretty hard to top.
Jorge Chollet
on 10 Nov 07I have used Windows for years and I ’ve also tried a few Linux distros – like the latest Ubuntu – and none of these systems are as polished as OS X. I ’m still using Tiger, so when I get Leopard I ’ll probably be even happier.
Nathan Bowers
on 10 Nov 07You need more than an OS, you need software. OS X runs Adobe apps, Textmate, the Ruby on Rails stack, a real command line, and Subversion all at once like no other platform can.
The super smooth UI is gravy.
Michael Long
on 10 Nov 07Developers tend to think the key to a great product is features and options and configurability. So if some are good, then more are better, and even more better still. Ultimately you end up with the uber-tools like, say, PHP, the language with a billion functions served and counting.
As has been noted, Apple’s touch with design often lies in knowing what to leave out.
Samuel Cotterall
on 10 Nov 07I have struggled with this answer myself.
As a convert from Linux (Gnome) to OSX I’ve been amazed with the emphasis that OSX developers put on the UI (take TextMate and Quicksilver for example) – where as, with Linux, the interface in general feels less intuitive, and too content with that functionality over form principle that has seemed to be an unwritten law of Unix-based systems since the beginning.
Then, of course, there is the fact that I can go into a store and buy some hardware or software, and the chances are that it will work without scouring the Internet for device drivers.
Gary R Boodhooo
on 10 Nov 07This statement is quite interesting to me in light of recent posts on the value of product roadmaps and user personas.
You don’t need a product roadmap
Personas?
It begs the question, what then does it take to figure out what makes a great app?
AkitaOnRails
on 10 Nov 07As a former Windows and Linux user I can say that nothing comes close to OS X. On the other hand I agree with DHH: nothing comes close to Linux on the server-side. Though I would be very happy to have an internal corporate XServe with Leopard Server.
People have to separate concerns here: just bloating software with everything is hardly good. For years window manager guys from KDE and Gnome try to emulate both Windows and Mac features at the same time: this is bloating. Choose a vision and stick with it.
I hope that Shuttleworth does a better job integrating all those messy (albeit good) pieces in a cohesive whole. Ubuntu is in the right direction, but there are still too many independent pieces being developed without any kind of guidance, which makes for a terrible user experience. And tweaking it to be more useful is hardly something I would waste my time doing when OS X offers it out-of-the-box.
Darren Woodley
on 10 Nov 07@Edmundo: GIMP’s UI overhaul is currently underway; check out gui.gimp.org
It all comes down to usability vs. customization. I don’t think it’s as much that the Linux distros are incapable of having a good looking / cohesive UI, but there are some hurdles they have to overcome that don’t exist for Apple:
- Linux devs have no idea what machines their distros are going to be run on, while Apple can always be sure that certain hardware capabilities will exist on the machine they’re developing for (ie, compositing).
- customization vs unity: How do you design a attractive, cohesive UI that can easily be completely scrapped and replaced by the user if they don’t like it? Correct me if I’m wrong, as my OSX experience is limited, but I’ve never really seen any Macs customized to the level of a power user’s linux box
drivers: enough said.
Right now, you can get a good UI experience in Linux if you’re willing to spend some time with Compiz Fusion and your desktop manager. Things look like they might get a bit better on the KDE side of things once version 4 is released, GNOME still has a lot of work to do imo. But it seems to me that the default environments will always be at least a little generic in comparison in order to allow people to change whatever they want.
Jim Jeffers
on 10 Nov 07Great points! Perhaps there needs to be some sort of catalyst to help drive more UX/UI experts to open source developments. I would think setting up a small community for developers to post design issues / ideas for their open source projects to the general public. In this way many UI people could possibly become interested in casually checking and participating by providing suggestions and solutions. At least it could be a start. UI folks are not always easy to come by so your point that MOST open source development tends to lack team members with this knowledge is very relevant.
metacircular
on 11 Nov 07Comment spam on 37Signals? Say it ain’t so!
Good on 37signals for making sure nofollow is appended to comment links.
nexusprime
on 11 Nov 07I can see where you’re coming from – Giving OS X Unix underpinnings is perhaps one of the smarter moves Apple decided to make, back in the day.
I don’t doubt the resurgence they’ve seen in terms of developers is due in small part to this choice.
Personally I use Leopard for normal home use (chilling back, day at the beach kind of stuff), for me it’s associated with downtime and relaxing, not a bad association.
I have Windows in the house purely for gaming. There are 5 icons on the desktop, each is a game.
Since I work as a Windows software developer, I’m less tempted to overwork if I’m running Leopard primarily at home :P
And if the dev bug strikes me, there’s always Ubuntu for a nice Unix developer friendly ecosystem.
Works for me.
AkitaOnRails
on 11 Nov 07@Darren, that’s the point: why would I want to waste my time customizing something (the OS X GUI and Apps) that ain’t out of place (broken) to begin with?
Apple was really smart: they control their own hardware. And this is an advantage. They don’t want not need to have huge market shares of underpowered and undersupported machines. They earn as much or more than Dell or HP without having to go through all the hassle of supporting crappy hardware.
Linux has a huge disadvantage: they are fragmented. There is no single vision, no unified platform. Some see it as good and democratic. There is good things to that, but on the other hand you end up having dozens of distros that work half ok. But no single one that stands out.
The other really smart move was supporting Unix as its foundation. This gives us the same developer environment that any good Unix have without all the hassles of hacking around things that should be trivial today.
The rest of the industry is actually late in the game. Compositing, for instance, is old news. Very old. It began on NeXT’s Display Postscript system back in the early 90’s. OS X’s Quartz began evolving since 2002, 5 years from now.
Good thing that everything works as advertised in the OS X arena: I can update any number of machines without tweaking any of them and I am back to the game, quickly, hassle-free. Frees my time to do real work instead of editing cryptic config files around and recompiling stuff seg faulting.
As DHH said: the server side is good. GNU/Linux is good enough for it’s commodity components. They are good at making GUI-less components that just works. But doing something that has to deal with the human experience is still a very far away goal. Only super-geeks likes to spend time customizing, most people don’t, even if they are developers. And that’s not being lazy, it’s being smart. Time is short and limited to waste doing trivialities as adjusting icons manually.
Anonymous Coward
on 12 Nov 07Akita, that’s very much the point that I was trying to make. OSX is, hands down, the best operating system one can get out of the box. My post was just my take on why OSX is currently so far ahead. Case in point, the compositing example. We all know it’s old tech, but even still, Linux devs still can’t just assume that it’s going to be supported by every computer.
My post was a response to the idea that there isn’t really an open source design community. The problem currently seems to be not the designers, or lack thereof, but of the complexities of designing software for a large number of hardware platforms, very often with little cooperation from the makers of that hardware. Now that Ubuntu has brought linux back into the mainstream a little bit, we’re starting to see better some better vendor / driver support (AMD / ATI for example). If that were to keep up and Linux devs had Windows-level driver support, I’m sure we’d see the desktop experience drastically improve over time.
Darren Woodley
on 12 Nov 07damn, forgot to post my name ^^
stuart Willis
on 12 Nov 07Steve Jobs once described that the difference between Apple and Microsoft as “culture”. Apple has it; Microsoft doesn’t. I think thats even more true when it comes to OS X / Linux.
You could probably use the term “taste” to describe the difference, but culture is more encyclopedic in what it captures.
Yeah, its snobby, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
Sebhelyesfarku
on 12 Nov 07If Adobe would release Photoshop/Flash/Illustrator with color management on Linux I’d trash Apple immediately.
Samo
on 12 Nov 07”@Edmundo: GIMP ’s UI overhaul is currently underway; check out gui.gimp.org”
That’s just an effort at reorganizing the current UI, from the little I have seen.
Linux people often just don’t “get it”.
“Case in point, the compositing example. We all know it’s old tech, but even still, Linux devs still can’t just assume that it’s going to be supported by every computer.”
Uh, so? That’s why software fallback mode was invented. A lof of Linux arguments seem like excuses. As if it would be extra hard to have two paths.
Linux might have designers, but hardy any good ones. And those who might actually be good enough to change something for the better aren’t listened to because there is a “process” where every contributor of a project can shit on said designer’s ideas until the point where the designer doesn’t care anymore. And speaking from experience, those who are the loudest and most annoying are those without a clue.
If Linux wanted to get closer to OS X, they would need a Design And Art Team that everyone listens to, have people included throught a formal review process and only interfer with their work if it’s really something that would be impossible to implement.
Samo
on 12 Nov 07“If Adobe would release Photoshop/Flash/Illustrator with color management on Linux I’d trash Apple immediately.”
I wouldn’t switch to Linux, but it would be a tremendous boost for it. Unluckily, Adobe doesn’t seem interested and probably won’t be for a long time. And my guess is that a big reason for that is the spaghetti code that those three are made of.
james
on 12 Nov 07And then this article came out today…
Information Week: “Apple’s Leopard is a Better Linux than Linux”
P.S. Adobe has made some posts on their user forums regarding their Linux position. From what I understand (I am not a coder) much of it seems to have to do with the “which distribution” question and the need for underlying technologies that are present in Win/Mac but not in Linux and which Adobe does not want to write from scratch.
Luca
on 14 Nov 07I think this express pretty well what I believe on this matter: Why linux
This discussion is closed.