Powerbook Setup

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday 19 October 2004 12:31 pm, Paul Robinson wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 11:51:00AM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> > Thinkpads are quite expensive, more so than other PC laptops, so that
> > pretty
>
> See eBay. A Celeron-based Thinkpad with bluetooth shouldn't cost you
> more than $600. How much are iBooks and Powerbooks again? Even
> second-hand?

I must confess that all of my laptops thus far have been purchased by my 
various employers (even the very old Thinkpad I borrowed in college), but 
when I've looked at pricing replacements the Thinkpads seem very expensive.  
However, I haven't trawled ebay yet, so there are probably deals lurking 
there.

> See, at work I look after a 6-way Windows 2003 cluster. I think it rocks
> at what it does. I've signed off on purchases of Microsoft Content
> Management Server, SQL Server, etc. and I *know* that the £500k that
> went down that hole *could* have been better spent helping fund work on
> an open source CMS and back-end tools like MySQL. Problem is, there were
> other major political forces in my way. I know there was a
> double-standard on my part there, and I know my support of that Windows
> architecture shows duplicity in my own beliefs, but I want to try and
> get to the bottom of the OS X crowd who are splitting from FreeBSD. What
> are the actual factors involved in their decision, and are they really
> as vacuous and empty as excuses as I suspect they might be? I want to be
> proven wrong here.

Well, one thing is that I know that working on FreeBSD can be very tiring 
after a while.  Occasionally I go through slow periods in my FreeBSD work due 
to burnout and some folks just burned out more completely after longer 
stints.  If people burn out, then they are not going to be working much on 
FreeBSD regardless.  Working on OS X can provide a fairly familiar 
environment for folks who want to work on something new.  Since open source 
developers tend to be a bunch of geeks who don't always have the best social 
skills I think there is an even larger tendency for frustration and getting 
burned out in an open source community than at a job where the social 
interaction mixture is more diverse.

> > Different tools are good at different things, and I am quite comfortable
> > with FreeBSD + KDE, but I also like OS X as a desktop.  The fact that I
> > can fire up X11.app and then ssh in and run kmail, etc. over ssh just as
> > in FreeBSD is quite handy.  It also has native p4 binaries and xemacs in
> > darwinports allowing me to even do kernel development on the powerbook
> > when I'm at home.
>
> OK, but what would it take for you to see FreeBSD + X + whatever is
> better than OS X? I say it already is, but seriously, what would it
> actually take to get there? A different theme in KDE? What is the actual
> point of OS X if you already have FreeBSD? OS X is great if you're used
> to System 9. I don't see the upgrade path from FreeBSD. Can somebody,
> somewhere, please explain it to me beyond the vacuous details of how
> their Powerbook "looks neat" or that they like the fonts or the bouncing
> icons or whatever. Please?

Well, when I plug in the VGA output for a projector, it just turns on and lets 
me pick the resolution from a pop box independent of the main LCD display.  
It lets me do mirror or separate displays with a simple click, and it is all 
through a simple and intuitive GUI rather than reading man pages and hacking 
on text config files.  The fact that out of the box you plug in a digital 
camera and iPhoto just pops up with the pictures downloaded is another 
example of where the folks at Apple have put effort into the UI.  FreeBSD 
definitely has room for improvement here.  Also, the work they put into the 
idea of "locations" that define network configurations is done well and 
integrated into the UI well.  It's not so much grand sweeping changes as much 
as lots of details that have been addressed that can save time if all you 
need to do is surf the web, pop up some terminals or xemacs, etc.  (IOW, 
desktop use.)  Oh, and "switch user" from panther.  My wife and I often share 
the same FreeBSD + KDE machine at home and when I'm not using a laptop we 
have to keep logging out to let the other person use the machine.  Having 
switch user for KDE would be very, very nice.

> > XFree86 4.4 are better than older releases, but they still have a long
> > way to go.  Also, as someone who actually works on the code to get
> > suspend/resume to work on some laptops (my Dell is now finally able to do
> > S3 and S1 for the
>
> I have to admit I wasn't aware of that, but one reason cited for Apple
> kit and OS X being "better" than FreeBSD laptops to me, was that
> suspend/resume "just work". But for me, it's "just worked" since like,
> well... since forever.

Unfortunately suspend/resume mostly doesn't work on PC laptops nowadays.  :-(
Things like ACPI are supposed to help but many vendors don't always put full 
support into ACPI and require vendor specific drivers for what should be ACPI 
functions (e.g. battery time remaining on both of my laptops and on early 
Vaios).

> > Well, all I can say is that given that I personally know some of the
> > people who now work on OS X that used to work on FreeBSD, I think you are
> > just spouting random opinions without any basis in fact.
>
> You've just said it. Some people claim there is no brain drain, yet you
> yourself admit that there are people out there who USED to work on
> FreeBSD who no longer do so, because they're off playing with OS X. I
> don't have a real complaint with them, but shouldn't we be trying to
> stop this, or do we all just pack up now and just make 6.0 a link to
> Darwin and advise everybody to go out and but Apple gear instead?
>
> Wouldn't it be nice if instead of accepting defeat we were able to find
> ways of funding those people who used to work on FreeBSD full time to
> come back? I'm not saying it can be done, I'm saying is that not better
> than just having a mass exodus to somebody else's OS?

Well, I don't think there is a mass exodus.  Also, I think that it is actually 
good for FreeBSD for there to be at least some turnover in the developer 
base.  We want to be in the position where the Project doesn't go down the 
tubes if someone gets run over by a bus.  I don't think that it has harmed 
FreeBSD to have some of the folks go work on OS X instead.  In fact, in some 
ways the relationships there are helpful.  As I said earlier, I still talk to 
Mike occasionally to ask him for advice, etc.  Also, having Apple fund 
TrustedBSD work has been a big help to getting that work done sooner.  There 
also have been several minor bug fixes in libc and a few other userland 
places merged back from Apple to FreeBSD.

> That's nice and everything, but what I meant was, is the biggest draw to
> Darwin over *BSD the MSDOSFS stuff? Is there anything else in there that
> is worth porting? I accept TrustedBSD, but I thought most of that was
> now done?

No, the draw to OS X is the UI and a lot of the non-Darwin stuff.  The stuff 
in Darwin that they've fixed is out there sitting for anyone to go look at 
and try to integrate back into FreeBSD where appropriate.

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/