Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Does Ubuntu have the “Guts” to beat Apple?

Filed under
Ubuntu

Recently I've been thinking about the comments made a while back by Mark Shuttleworth that he wants to push the linux interface to be on par with Apple's Mac OS X. This statement made me relive an old thought that maybe the great Steve Jobs picked the wrong open source guts to put a proprietary GUI on.

Apples strategy was brilliant, take the benefits of an open source operating system and wrap Apples legendary, beautiful, ease of use proprietary GUI on top of it. But is having a BSD looters style license keeping it from obtaining the growth or popularity that GNU/Linux has and continues to enjoy since the GPL license style is much more give and receive.

Its made me wonder quite often if Apples OS X is destined to wither away due to its license style because it doesn't benefit everyone. Where as Ubuntu's GNU/Linux guts will continue to develop and flourish due to its GPL licensing.

rest here




Please...

I can't comment on the page of the post, so I'll post here. First, let me say that I love Linux and use it daily.

Ubuntu will never be what Apple is. Apple is a very savvy company that actually develops wonderful products that people line up to pay a premium for. Ubuntu doesn't develop much at all. In fact, most of their development is merely backporting Debian stuff. There is no innovation on the part of Ubuntu. Ubuntu's rise wasn't magical at all. Ubuntu took Debian and released it in an easy to install form, whereas Debian was still a long installation process that required some knowledge about your system. Ubuntu, then, gave it away freely, which is something many other distros weren't doing at the time. Also, they came along at the right time: Red Hat stopped selling their home desktop distro and aligned themselves with Fedora, which still isn't in the same league as Red Hat was in terms of quality and stability, SuSE was bought by Novell and angered Linux users, Mandrake, long known for shooting itself in the foot with its customer base, angered it's users by pushing them into the Mandrake Club, and other, once popular, distros were going the way of the dodo bird (Corel, Libranet).

So why all this fuss about Ubuntu? Why do users continue to think so highly of it? It's not a bad distro at all. I've used it in the past, and occasionally download the latest release to run in Virtualbox. However, they simply aren't even on the same playing field as a company like Apple.

As for Apple's license, I have no idea why this is something that would hold Apple back. Why would it? What does a BSD license on the OS parts have anything to do with 3rd party development? What makes an OS popular is the applications it runs. Apple has wonderful apps like iWork and iLife, not to mention very nice high end apps from Apple, Filemaker, Adobe, and others that are very popular. Don't get me wrong, I like using GPL'd applications like Gimp, Inkscape, and other OSS apps like OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird, and others. However, they don't have the same polish Apple puts on their stuff and even some of them will never be what others want them to be because those developers fear the Redmond Taliban.

re: Please

Nicely put, and doesn't your argument work as well for Microsoft as it does for Apple?

It always puzzles me the animosity towards Microsoft when Apple gets a free pass. When it comes to CLOSED SOURCE or PROPRIETARY GOODS - Apple far and away beats Microsoft, as does Apple's practice of shutting out any hint of competition or infringement.

So why isn't Apple the Mini Me along side of Microsoft's Dr. Evil?

I agree, but Apple sees

I agree, but Apple sees itself as a hardware company. The software is simply the lure to bring in hardware buyers. Their approach is to completely integrate your gadget life with their Macintosh computers. This approach is evident through the relatively inexpensive software they produce. iLife and iWork are a bargain on the proprietary landscape, the high end software like Apeture and Final Cut are relative bargains in their field, and even the OS is a bargain compared to the price of Windows. If they let clone makers in, they would have a difficult time making a profit. In reality, they're nothing like Microsoft, who's almost completely a software company with an accessories and gadget side business.

Personally, it's a ways off for me, but I anticipate buying an iMac and dual booting Linux on it. I'll never leave Linux... Smile

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.