Re: Desktop Linux systems

TomB stated in post 20110731095126.302@usenet.drumscum.be on 7/31/11 1:16
AM:

On 2011-07-31, the following emerged from the brain of Snit:

8<

there is no real "system" - there are the separate parts. Not
really a whole. Thus the whole cannot really be more than the sum
of its parts - and you cannot have real *system* choice without
having a real *system*.

That's a bit of a challenging premise. You state as a fact that the
whole cannot be more than the sum of its parts, but you don't explain
why. So my question to you is: why?

I had to do a bit of searching to find at least part of the genesis of this
thinking, and it came down to what you said:

Your concept of 'desktop Linux' or a distro being a 'system'.
Which it isn't. It's many systems. And I don't care how it
is perceived by users who don't know about how the ecosystem
hangs together. That perception is wrong.

Now I still think you were wording things poorly here, but I pretty much
agree with the concept. There is no *coherent* system when you are talking
about desktop Linux - it is made up of many systems...

Hence there is no coherent system, and it is that coherence - that making of
a "real" system - which makes a whole more than the sum of its parts. In
the case of desktop Linux, it means there are few system level choices -
because there is no coherent system to make choices about!

You cannot make choices about that which does not exist. And, as you argued
well, there is no real "system" with a desktop Linux distro. There are many
systems - and, to be clear, there is a lot of choice in each (or at least
most) of those sub-systems and even choice as to which ones you want to use.

You also may take into consideration that OSX is put together much
like your typical GNU/Linux distro:

No, it is not. In fact, more so than any other system, it *also* includes
the hardware - Apple controls the full widget. They can integrate things in
ways that Windows and Linux cannot. This also means the users choices can
be limited... the system level choices have already been made and in many
cases cannot really be changed (or at least not without jumping through some
pretty major hoops).

This is why there can be system level goodies on OS X that do not exist on
desktop Linux: Services (as in adding ROT13 and All Caps to almost all
programs), PDF Services, proxy icons, universal color selector, media
browser, post-processing changes to video components in a screencast, etc.

You have the 'core OS' named Darwin, which is composed of the XNU
kernel (which itself is compsed of Mach and BSD components) and the
FreeBSD system utilities. This is very analogue to the concept of
coupling GNU with Linux. Only the name is slightly 'sexier' (GNU/Linux
vs. Darwin).

Unlike with desktop Linux, the components you list for OS X are all
controlled by Apple. Nobody controls all the desktop Linux components.

On top of that various components are layered to provide the framework
(APIs, services) on which the applications are run. This includes but
is not limited to the core services and application services such as
Quartz, Cocoa, OpenGL, Carbon... This is very analogue to the way
things are done in a typical GNU/Linux distro, using X.org, OpenGL,
Qt, GTK...

All of the OS X techs are controlled by Apple.

Who controls the desktop Linux components you listed.

On OS X you have one coherent system... where these things are made to work
together to make *a* system. As you pointed out, there is no such thing
for desktop Linux.

And you are right.

On top of all this, the Aqua GUI is stacked, just like is done with
eg. KDE and Gnome in a GNU/Linux distro.

So does your claim about the whole cannot be more than the sum of its
parts also applies to OSX? And if not, why not?

Because on OS X Apple works toward making a coherent system. Even when it
gets third party things it does not control (such as Apache), it integrates
them and offers its own GUI for them to tie into the rest of the system.
Hmmm, I have not checked this at all: but on desktop Linux distros do you
have a setting which ties together all the sharing forms and allows users to
make sensible choices for their *system*... something along the lines of
this: <http://goo.gl/nlovf>

[INSERT .SIG HERE]