The big CPU-Poll

[NejinOniwa]

Don't worry, Aurora. In the end, resistance is useless anyway.

[Bella]

I'm a traitor! I remembered that in my first post on this thread, I was a PowerPC Mac user who swore she wouldn't switch to Intel Macs for several years, believing Apple sold out yet again- first it was their switch to Unix (which I reluctantly accepted, when Mac OSX became good in its own right), and now their switch to Intel!

Since May, I've been using my MacBook as my main computer.

I didn't know you were a Unix Hater. >:V Out of pure curiosity, what did you dislike-- the change from tradition? (Because... I mean... Unix MUST be a lot stabler than whatever the Classic Mac OSes were based from).

And I don't get all this PPC vs. Intel stuff, maybe it's because I'm relatively new to the (Mac) game. >>

[Aurora Borealis]

Please don't hate me, but I'll try to explain myself!

I don't hate Unix itself, but there are some things that just don't sit well with me. I guess what I hate about Unix is the apparent hypocrisy: It has a good philosophy and all, designed as a simple OS, with a minimalist approach, yet for a long time had been prohibitively difficult and expensive for most people to use. And the stereotypical, condescending Unix users... ugh! They're scary! I've heard they're even worse and even more elitist than the stereotypical Mac users these days!

**AAARGH: Text walls, ahoy! Proceed if ye dare!**

The whole thing about Unix being an 'elite' thing out of the average chump's reach has been changing though, thanks to Mac OSX (with Darwin OS and NeXTSTEP by association) and the assorted Unix-based Open Source projects (FreeBSD, Linux, etc). I guess I'm a sucker for tradition when it comes to computers? Hmm. Maybe I hate what Unix had become when it was commercialized? I think that's when the hypocrisy I described happened.

And while I think Mac OSX's interface is very good, I miss the look and feel of the Classic Mac OS. That's why I think A/UX and Rhapsody are awesome- they have the stability expected from a Unix-based OS, but with the user-friendliness and the simple-yet-elegant look of the Classic Mac OS!

Oddly enough, I started using Mac OSX in 2002 when my parents upgraded the family computer to OSX then. I took the change quite well and became familiar with it right away, and didn't actually give the Classic Mac OS much thought again until 2006, and didn't start using it again until late 2008.
---------

Comparing stability between the Classic Mac OS and Mac OSX depends on which versions you're comparing. Cheetah/OSX 10.0 (and the Public Beta too, I think) is unstable, and were not well liked. A large majority of Mac users still sticked with Mac OS9 then. Puma/OSX 10.1 is better than Cheetah, but not still very usable. The general consensus is that it was with Panther/OSX 10.3 that Mac OSX became good in its own right, and more people started using OSX than Mac OS9.

Mac OSX gets increasingly better with each release. Using Leopard/OSX 10.5, and it's awesome!

The Classic Mac OS is a mixed bag in terms of performance, with some steps forward, and some steps backwards.

System 1.0 is limited in what it could do, mainly due to memory constraints. I don't know how stable it was, and it was slow in some tasks. System 2.0 is faster and more stable. System 3.0 is okay, but System 3.1 is was very buggy (with at least 30 bugs). System 3.2 fixed those bugs though. Not sure about System 4.x, and there is technically no System 5.

System 6.0.x had a bad start, with 6.0 being very buggy with major compatibility issues even worse than System 3.1! yet oddly enough, I have used this OS and hadn't had any problems with it. WTF?! That's right! I tried out System 6.0 expecting it to crash on me! The other 6.0.x versions are stable, except for System 6.0.6, which is technically the first unreleased Mac OS that had its own problems. Then there's System 6.0.8, which is still regarded as one of the most stable and reliable Mac OS versions ever made!

System 7.0.1 is stable, good overall, and haven't had any problems with it, aside from broken compatibility with some older apps. Same goes for 7.1, but System 7.5 was awfully buggy and slow, and one of the worst Mac OS versions ever, at least from my experiences. Mac OS 7.6 is very stable though, and another of the most stable Mac OSes. Mac OS8 is pretty good, but Mac OS9 was very much a 'love it or hate it' kind of OS.
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Well... This took longer than I intended!

[Raffaele the Amigan]

I have multiple computers. How can I partecipate the pool...

Is multiple voting allowed?

My POSSE of main computers I use daily:

1) AMD 32 single core Athlon 2500+ (1850 MHz real clock speed and  frontend BUS 400MHz)

2) PegasosII Freescale PowerPC CPU 32 bit single core (PPCG3 600MHz)

(PPC are not even listed in the pool)

3) Celeron Intel 32 single core in my laptop

4) Pentium IV intel 32 single core (Pentium IV 3 GHz socket 775)

Various other computers are not being used currently due to lack of space at home...

[Bella]

Fufufu, I'd never hate you over something so trivial-- I don't even hate that you hate Unix, as I partially hate it myself. I just thought it was an interesting statement. ^^'

I think that I dislike the Unix philosophy more than I dislike the system itself; in practise it works rather well, but it is rather shoddily designed compared to the great systems of Yore. It also seems to be like the Windows of the day-- pretty slipshod and unreliable, but an almost viral marketing campaign solidified it as the industry standard.

If you want to play the "what if" game, imagine if Multics, ITS and VMS had become the most popular systems of the time instead of Unix. The focus on computing wouldn't have so rapidly turned to single-user computers, and we might still be using computers as we do utilities (IE, paying for a "subscription" to some remote mainframe through which all your computing would be done). Think about what sort of stability and security our computers would have had those systems taken deeper root in the market instead of the (relatively) flimsy Unix.

As for the userbase, I dunno-- I've met quite a few Unix-users and they've always seemed pretty cool. Rather talkative and willing to answer any questions, if anything (you better believe I ask questions when I meet a Solaris or AIX user). I'd say the VMS people and the Multicians seem several orders of magnitude more intimidating, but the one VMS user I know is far from it and I'm sure most of the ex-Multics users would be pretty friendly, too, if you expressed interest in their OS.

In fact, the only hostile fanbois I've ever met have been Windows supporters (and it's been awhile since I've run into any of them). -v-

I used to think of Unix as very elite, but it's actually quite the opposite if you consider all the FOSS projects it's spawned (like you noted) and all the historic editions and emulators floating around in cyberspace. The Unix community seems to be the most open-source friendly, at least compared to Mac (that includes OSX) and Windows.

The look and feel comment is especially interesting; one of the things that's always bugged me just a little about OSX  is that there's no way to change the theme (even Windows has the "Classic" option).

Thanks for that overview of the different pros and cons of the classic Mac releases! That clarified things a bit for me. It can be funny how supposedly unstable OSes run well in emulators (for instance, Windows 2.0 always worked quite well for me in VirtualBox).

[Aurora Borealis]

That too. While Unix has gotten a lot better over the decade, it still doesn't seem right that as flimsy as it was back then, it still trumped over Multics and such, as you said. Unix was the Windows of its era!

Despite that, I much prefer the single-user approach that Unix popularized. Sounds like a lot less hassle than having to subscribe to a computer service, connect to a mainframe to do any and all work, and pay for it each time, though that comes at the cost of some stability and security.

I can't find it right now, but I recently read an article on Low End Mac that shows that Apple in the Mac OSX era is surprisingly supportive of Open Source tech!

[Aurora Borealis]

I have multiple computers. How can I partecipate the pool...

Is multiple voting allowed?

My POSSE of main computers I use daily:

1) AMD 32 single core Athlon 2500+ (1850 MHz real clock speed and  frontend BUS 400MHz)

2) PegasosII Freescale PowerPC CPU 32 bit single core (PPCG3 600MHz)

(PPC are not even listed in the pool)

3) Celeron Intel 32 single core in my laptop

4) Pentium IV intel 32 single core (Pentium IV 3 GHz socket 775)

Various other computers are not being used currently due to lack of space at home...

You don't have to do the poll (I didn't, because I didn't use any of the processors listed back then), but it's good that you participated in the discussion itself. The poll is good for most x86 users, which make up a large majority of OSC members, as far as I know, but it does leave out some other important modern processors out too, like PowerPC, which isn't dead!

I don't know if multiple voting is allowed or not, it seems I can't vote.

[Bella]

That too. While Unix has gotten a lot better over the decade, it still doesn't seem right that as flimsy as it was back then, it still trumped over Multics and such, as you said. Unix was the Windows of its era!

Despite that, I much prefer the single-user approach that Unix popularized. Sounds like a lot less hassle than having to subscribe to a computer service, connect to a mainframe to do any and all work, and pay for it each time, though that comes at the cost of some stability and security.

I can't find it right now, but I recently read an article on Low End Mac that shows that Apple in the Mac OSX era is surprisingly supportive of Open Source tech!

I don't know if Unix "trumped over" Multics, so much as Unix was marketed while Multics wasn't.

In all reality, Multics never posed a threat to Unix or any other OS for that matter-- it was created in a rather hostile environment by people who seriously doubted it would ever work (the project supervisors tried to kill it off a dozen times) and faced a sub-terrible (even sabotaged) marketing "campaign" by Honeywell. Many institutions chose the technologically inferior GECOS to Multics (mainly because GECOS had very good marketing), used the more popular IBM mainframes or forwent the route entirely in favour of minicomputers. -__-

Considering that processors (and therefore, computers) became steadily smaller and smaller, I half doubt that we'd be using computers as a utility today-- but the I believe the OSes that would have been made in the fall of those mainframes would have been immensely more reliable than the ones we know today.

I believe it-- isn't OSX built around an open-sourced kernel (Mach)? And I know Darwin is buried somewhere in the core of OSX too.

[Raffaele the Amigan]

I believe it-- isn't OSX built around an open-sourced kernel (Mach)? And I know Darwin is buried somewhere in the core of OSX too.

Mac OS X is composed by various different parts.

It incorporates Mach Kernel, Darwin, Free BSD, and Apple Aqua interface.

As a bonus in exchange to have using Open Source Free BSD, Apple released for free the Darwin OS that is based on Kernel XNU (Mach Kernel).

Darwin code is released for free at any release of Mac OS X, but then Apple can decide any time to retire the project and keep all the code modifications for themselves.

I think that is a smart move to make Darwin being free, so hundreds of free developers can found bugs and security leaks and fix it (and make all the job for free) and Apple could incorporate these free fixes in the new releases of MacOS X without paying any developer...

How smart...  ;019  ;020

Infacts there was also Open Darwin project, but it was retired by its team of developers due to the fact that:

OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects," and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed. They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

AFAIK there is an on-going Open Source project called Pure Darwin in order to rebuilt entire Darwin from scratch again as Open Source.

(My AFAIK was confirmed by wikipedia)

[Smokey]

PowerPC is dead, like the Motorola CPUs, but yes they do live on, albeit in the hands of afficionado's who can appreciate them...

[Sora]

I have a Intell Centrino in my laptop supporting XP-tan that hasn't let me down yet.

[os11tan]

i think i am using Q9550 with Mac 10.6 ..

[Smokey]

I have a Intell Centrino in my laptop supporting XP-tan that hasn't let me down yet.

Centrino is a platform ^_^
But likely you've got a Celeron in there

[Drudicta]

I really need to upgrade to a Phenom II quad , and get a solid state, I want a solid state more then anything though.

[AMDKurt]

@Drudicta: m8, i would really not advise getting the phenom II x4, wait till the x6 gets released in june, six cores at 2.8ghz