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-220

OSX like Lunix bsaed OS

-220 points posted to Operating Systems by kingnewby Jun 2

Windows Vista has been the greatest thing that has ever happened to Apple. The Apple OS is sleek and actually quite robust for what it is, and what is it but a BSD shell with a GUI and a few copyrighted mods. Apple is first and formost a hardware company. As a whole the population in general hates Microsoft, so why not take the Apple IS and use it as non- microsoft alternative. There is a whole underground community doing it already, so why not get together with Apple and work it out. It works great, and If I can hack it and make it work on my laptop that now quad boots with XP, Vista, OSX, and redhat, a couple of multi billion dollar companies should be more than capable.

jdelidc
Jun 2		 dupe

but i like the idea

http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/61867/Add_Mac_OSX
zmjjmz
Jun 2		 Lunix? Like this: http://lng.sourceforge.net/ ?
Anyways, dupe a thousand times over, and Apple would never agree to it.
siger
Jun 3		 if you like os X buy apple and not dell.
jmxz
Jun 3		 @zmjjmz: "Lunix? Like this: http://lng.sourceforge.net/ ? "

I thought he meant Lunix like http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html which has a section which discusses it :)
aikiwolfie
Jun 3		 Apple is actually first and foremost a software company these days. Their hardware is fairly generic. Even the iPhone and iPod. Any company could have built those. It's the software driving them that makes the difference.

What Dell needs to do is make Ubuntu more visible and more widely available.
zmjjmz
Jun 4		 Or build their own distro?
Because Ubuntu is popular (I saw it mentioned in the NYT -- not as a news item, but as part of a Q and A).
And Apple didn't make money by taking plain ol' DarwinBSD, they made it by customizing it.
So a customized (highly so) Ubuntu (that's stable and usable, unlike gOS).
aikiwolfie
Jun 4		 Actually I'd be the first to say that Linux distro developers should be consolidating their distribution efforts. There are too many versions. Ubuntu has gather a lot of momentum. It has a huge support community. There are a lot of resources out there for Ubuntu. I see no sense in Dell pushing out yet another distribution. They're already deeply involved with Ubuntu trying to get drivers for devices into the main repositories.

I think that is the way to go. What Dell could do is put Ubuntu on the OS list for all compatible systems.
jmxz
Jun 4		 @aikiwolfie: "Actually I'd be the first to say that Linux distro developers should be consolidating their distribution efforts. There are too many versions."

Totally disagree. The range of distros is the reason Linux works well for almost any application - from large supercomputers, to odd CPU architectures, to tiny devices. Ubuntu (a young distribution) is arguably the first decent desktop distro. I'm very happy that Shuttlesworth wasn't content to just submit patches to Debian or Fedora in his effort to make a decent desktop Linux. Others claim SuSE was the first decent desktop. But when Novell bought SuSE and Microsoft bought Novell's soul, I'm sure glad there were other distros around to keep moving forward.

"I see no sense in Dell pushing out yet another distribution. "

I think this should depend entirely on how receptive Canonical is to Dell patches. If Ubuntu happily and efficiently accepts all the patches needed for hibernate/suspend/wireless/dell-printers/etc to work across Dell hardware, I'm happy if Dell stays with Ubuntu. If they're slow to do so, I think that's good justification for another distro, even if it is just Ubuntu+patches (kinda like Ubuntu is Debian+patches).
aikiwolfie
Jun 4		 Hmm I don't know. Depends on what you call decent. Knoppix was for a long time the easiest distro for newbies to use. I think it was also one of the first to use live CDs. SuSE only really started coming into it's own with version 9.3. But it still suffers from dependency issues and RPMs just stink. Deb packages are better. SuSE is also firmly targeted at the corporate desktop. Which is fine for corporate users. But leaves everybody else struggling. I used SuSE before switching to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu for me strikes almost the perfect balance between free open source software distribution and companies like Dell and NVIDIA. The software it's self is mainly free open source. But it's being pushed onto commercial products we can buy. Ubuntu also does a very good job of incorporating the best of the latest Linux features. Compiz-Fusion is the obvious example. I haven't heard of it working better or as good as it does on Ubuntu with any other distribution.

I think it's good that Linux is modular and adaptable. It's good that we can tailor distributions for specific purposes. But an awful lot of distributions really don't have any specific direction or just fail to meet the stated goals. Or they duplicate something that's already out there a thousand times over already.
he_the_great
Jun 16		 *caugh* gnubuntu *uncaugh* debian -> Ubuntu -> debian? Anyway as a comment to the original idea. "Apple is mostly a hardware company" so Dell should convince them to let it take some market? Apple likes their monopoly. You are also correct, Apple has done well because it has built off an Open Source OS.

Note on the Dell distro. Why not, it doesn't have to be anything big, could keep complete compatibility with Ubuntu, unlike it did with debian, They could have just change the theme and default wallpaper. They could just run a repository for their drivers.

Note on Compiz. I run it in Debian just as well as my friends do with Ubuntu, while Ubuntu is getting better, Debian is still my choice of OS.
 
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