Ubuntu With Linux 3.16 Smashes OS X 10.9.4 On The MacBook Air

[ssokolow]

or pressing the meta (windows? w/e they call it now) button

These days, the config I usually see is Alt<->Meta and Win<->Super.

[jimbohale]

The overview as executed by GS isn't great (the way it handles apps is far too basic) but it is a good step to take, nonetheless, imo.
OK, you've got an incredibly small number of apps installed. My sister's imac has icons that nearly span the screen.
I honestly can't follow your reasoning, but it's great that you've found an interface that matches your workflow so well, rather than having to adjust YOUR workflow.

Likewise your sister's workflow doesn't match OS X. Of course there isn't any way that you use that many apps regularly, it's just a matter of removing icons you don't use regularly but some people don't like that. I do. GNOME shell's workflow of either clicking at the top left of the screen or pressing the meta (windows? w/e they call it now) button is plain wrong. You shouldn't have to take two steps (or 3 if you're also switching workspaces if that's your thing) to switch between windows. You should have to do one action to switch between windows, and that's one. Unity as awful as it is in many ways understands that. Xfce gets it. KDE gets it. Fluxbox even gets it. GNOME shell should somehow (ideally cleverly in ways that I'm not smart enough to come up with) provide one-action task management. Additionally, as an end-user, I DO NOT want to use my keyboard for everything. This sounds picky but I can tell you that quite a lot of users feel the same way, and if GNOME shell is trying to appeal to the majority of users they need to address it. It's just too tedious to use. You can install random things like frippery and such to make it *better* but frippery is too ugly and misaligned and stuff. It's not their fault, it's just a side effect of how GNOME shell extensions are done.

tl;dr It's not that I'm a fan of the dock in itself it's that I'm a fan of one-action (ideally button) task management that doesn't look like ass. So far no Linux DE has figured it out, and so no Linux DE will get a lot of people using it because it's just too tedious. ElementaryOS has it, but that's a shameless OS X almost-clone that is done really, really well.

[liam]

Overviews are in my opinion stupid when made the primary task management system. They're incredibly inefficient for me and perhaps for others. Also, I have about 15 of those jellybeans that travel about a fourth of my screen horizontally and are very easy to use. By using the logic you've just used, Linux desktop is inefficient because you have to right click the desktop in order to open any app. Is that true for fluxbox? Yes. Is that true for anything else? Generally no, certainly not GNOME nor KDE nor Xfce nor Unity etc. It is what you make it, and it is VERY hard to fill it up all the way. I have roughly 15 or so things that I use the most regularly there and it has been great.

The overview as executed by GS isn't great (the way it handles apps is far too basic) but it is a good step to take, nonetheless, imo.
OK, you've got an incredibly small number of apps installed. My sister's imac has icons that nearly span the screen.
I honestly can't follow your reasoning, but it's great that you've found an interface that matches your workflow so well, rather than having to adjust YOUR workflow.

[jimbohale]

So say I! I find the dock especially bad on large screens as you have this vast swathe of jellybeans you've got to search that spans the width of the screen. For large monitors, and lots of apps, this attains considerable levels of suck, IMO.
A way to make the GS overview better is to grab the icon-over-window extension.
Actual usability isn't a strength of the gnome designers, unfortunately. They've yet to learn to differentiate simple from "too simple ".

Overviews are in my opinion stupid when made the primary task management system. They're incredibly inefficient for me and perhaps for others. Also, I have about 15 of those jellybeans that travel about a fourth of my screen horizontally and are very easy to use. By using the logic you've just used, Linux desktop is inefficient because you have to right click the desktop in order to open any app. Is that true for fluxbox? Yes. Is that true for anything else? Generally no, certainly not GNOME nor KDE nor Xfce nor Unity etc. It is what you make it, and it is VERY hard to fill it up all the way. I have roughly 15 or so things that I use the most regularly there and it has been great.

[chrisb]

Many of the benchmarks publicated here are graphics benchmarks using 3D games, benchmarkers and some applications, would be nice to see more server benchmarks like databases, web servers and etc, for example PostgreSQL runs a lot faster on OS X than Linux .

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...8_ubuntu&num=8

But do you believe it? There are two possibilities: 1) PostgreSQL can process 360% times more transactions when running on OS X versus Linux, or 2) there was some problem with the benchmark on that specific hardware.

Thousands of companies around the world run mission critical systems with PostgreSQL on Linux. It is very likely that if there were an easy 360% performance improvement to be made, someone would have figured it by out.

[liam]

I hate docks. But that's just me and I appear to be a loner in this regard. I find them obtrusive and offensive in their approach to real-estate. People seem to get wet between the legs over it, though and Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Thankfully I only see it when people want Apple support. Then I can get back to my pretentious life amongst GNUland and the 'rich ecosystem' that's all the UI's, DE's, apps, applets et al. And Windows. Damn gaming habit.
<SNIP>

So say I! I find the dock especially bad on large screens as you have this vast swathe of jellybeans you've got to search that spans the width of the screen. For large monitors, and lots of apps, this attains considerable levels of suck, IMO.
A way to make the GS overview better is to grab the icon-over-window extension.
Actual usability isn't a strength of the gnome designers, unfortunately. They've yet to learn to differentiate simple from "too simple ".

[monkey]

Userland was from NetBSD, not FreeBSD

OS X != FreeBSD, they took the FreeBSD userland, but the DRM kernel work of FreeBSD has no effect on OS X since it uses Darwin which is based on Mach.

That is incorrect, the userland was from NetBSD. There was a black and white "desktop published" brochure from Apple about OS X that stated that explicitly. People at the time were pissed at the netbsd project people about not taking better advantage of the "PR" like FreeBSD was doing. Later one of the bigwigs from the FreeBSD project was hired by Apple and the fact that the userland was taken from NetBSD slipped down the memory hole. I wish I still had that damn brochure

The kernel had work from FreeBSD and mach, the userland was NetBSD.

[stiiixy]

Many of the benchmarks publicated here are graphics benchmarks using 3D games, benchmarkers and some applications, would be nice to see more server benchmarks like databases, web servers and etc, for example PostgreSQL runs a lot faster on OS X than Linux .

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...8_ubuntu&num=8

Mike used to do that, I believe. Not sure what happened, though. It pointed out the performance differance between the my, post and that other one used for local single user purposes and small devices SQL's (=P).

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was him!

Give him time, anyway. He's busy finishing moving isn't he? And probably has a backlog of other stuff to do. And his main focus these days is seemingly graphics anyway.

[dante]

Have you been paying attention at all to the phoronix OS X benchmarks for the last 4 years (I can't speak about before that as that's about when I started reading phoronix)? The only area where OS X has ever beaten linux in benchmarks has been when compared to the Open Source graphics drivers, and even on those Linux is usually ahead. For all other cases OS X is significantly slower than Windows or Linux.

If you stop and think about it, it makes sense, because nobody who cares about performance is using a mac. Super computers are primarily running Linux. Linux, Windows, a few proprietary UNIXes primarily from IBM and HP, and FreeBSD are the only OSes that matter in the server room. Render farms for the big animation companies are all running Linux, and gaming is done on Windows. Thus nobody is pushing apple to develop for performance.

Many of the benchmarks publicated here are graphics benchmarks using 3D games, benchmarkers and some applications, would be nice to see more server benchmarks like databases, web servers and etc, for example PostgreSQL runs a lot faster on OS X than Linux .

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_osx108_ubuntu&num=8

[rober]

I've discovered that animation smoothness of GNOME/KDE/Compiz on Xorg on Linux has more to do wit the quality of the graphics drivers than anything else... Take the opensource nuveau driver for instance... I use Fedora as my primary Linux workstation OS, so there's a sensible gap between versions and especially in regards to Mesa, DRM, kernels and hence speed of nuveau... F18's nuveau, on GNOME as shipped by F18 (bare, no updates) is indeed sluggish and the window placing animation of the overlay the first time you press Activities or take your point to the upper left corner can be a slideshow, but it also depends on the card in question... For example, my wife's workstation has a Geforce GTX 520, when running nuveau in F18 my older nV 9800GT beat it at desktop animations from the get-go with nuveau hands down. If I installed the blob, they would both be butter smooth... If updated to a newer version of Mesa/kernel/DRM/nuveau (as usually is the case within the lifespan of a Fedora release), things improve dearly... Now we're running both F20, she's running Cinnamon with nuveau on her 520, and I'm running GNOME (S)hell on my GTX 760 with the blob, both smooth as butter. Compiz animations, though seem to be a bit more demanding at times, but also are more elaborate.

Just using the same video drivers (Mesa, I have Intel graphics) and the same laptop, I can tell you, animations in weston were very smoother and tearing free than those performed in GNOME Shell on X. I also tried to open many apps per second in weston and I cannot see another thing but a rainbow, it's amazing how cool and smooth the animation can be in a Linux desktop by just taking off X from the game. Maybe it's not Wayland by itself, maybe the Weston animation algorithms are just better.


For those criticizing docks, I really feel lost in GNOME Shell without it, it's great to have focus on one app, but I always got lost in the workspace without a visible reference of it. I agree it can take much space in 16:9 screens and I feel that's why MacBook's have 16:10 screens instead. I have my dock in GNOME and OSX always visible and doesn't bother me at all, but in my desktop with a 1600x900 resolution, I cannot say the same thing.

I also agree that there is not really cool dock out there in the Linux world (plank is fine... just fine...)