With a spare 5 minutes, I decided to try and run some X programmes on my G4 over our network from our Fedora box. All i had to do is run a simple command:

ssh -X username@domain.com

fron inside an xterm and when I started, forexample, Gedit, from the command line, a full GUI instance of Gedit popped up in my OSX session.

Oh My Word….

and I am writing this post in an instance of Mozilla, started from that same command line.

Everyone is quacking about Dvorak and his article about how Apple will dump OSX and start to sell windows becacuse it is a hardware company and it wants to sell more hardware. There has even been talk of them selling a skinned version of windows that looks and acts like OSX, but which will run all windoze apps because its ….windoze.

I can think of no worse nightmare. The end of the best operating system ever written, dumped for the worst operating system written by the worst company ever. Apple, relinquishing control of the platform upon which it delivers its apps, meaning giving up complete access to APIs so that they can make things work perfectly.

That will (should) NEVER happen.

Even if M$ promises to allow them full access to all the Vista APIs, Apple cannot trust them to allow this forever. It will mean the end of Apple as a maker of computers worth buying – for any reason. We will be left with building our own boxen and running some future version of Gnome, whicih would be nice, but now that we have OSX, why on earth should we want go back to un-slick Linux as our sole environment? I run Fedora Core 4 to do all my heavy lifting, and run OSX for ‘UNIX with finesse’. Should this happy situation end, I would be a very unhappy person indeed.

This idea is so offensive, so wrong, so dumb it beggars belief that someone would even come up with it….unless …. its possible.

If it came with the gift of the open sourcing of OSX, the display layer and everything else…that might make it more tolerable. This would mean that OSX could continue to exist separate from Apple, and it would probably spread like wildfire, with millions of people dual booting. Sadly, it might mean that all the big players would stop all new development for OSX, and pour all of their effort into this abomnible skinned Vista. The whole thing does’nt bear thinking about.

I am personally responsible for the sale of 8 OSX running macs. All these people, who have switched to Mac are over the moon with it. Clearly they couldnt give a fuck wether its a frankenstinian version of Vista skinned to look and act like OSX, but that doesnt make it right; Apple can increase its market share without thnking about doing this. And also it needs to be said; why do they want to increase their market share at all costs?.

All this from one speculative article….

And back to what made me start this, UNIX, X, OSX are just so cool, so perfect, look at what you can DO with it, especially now that Apple are in the mix. To give this up, to relinquish control to M$, and break the UNIX bonds…

That would be a sin. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Geekn, Insanity.