Bypassing Windows altogether, Mark Shuttleworth has stated that OS X is the operating system to beat. With Ubuntu's 9.04 now in wide distribution, we look at how it stacks up with the competition.
Software Updates
Both operating systems can perform software updates through a graphical tool, although they take different approaches. Ubuntu’s Update Notifier periodically checks for new packages, which the user can then choose to install on a package-by-package basis, and users can manually perform updates with Synaptic. Apple’s Software Update also makes periodic checks, but Apple only infrequently makes releases. When it does, they are bundled together; iTunes and iPhoto may receive stand-alone updates, but updates to the core of OS X are all-or-nothing, whole-OS affairs.
Apple’s update tool begins downloading available packages in the background without user intervention, so when the user is notified that an update is available there is usually no waiting. On the down side, Apple’s system makes it impossible to downgrade to a previous version. Not only that, but Apple’s update service does not update all software on the machine, but only core Apple products. Any third party applications are not managed and must be tracked manually by the user. In fact, even Apple’s own software development suite is not integrated in this service! Synaptic on the other hand allows users to skip or roll back an update if it proves problematic, and can be used for any package available on any Apt repository. There are more and more third-party vendors running Apt repositories, including open source (e.g., Boxee) and closed (e.g., Google).Â
One of the best Ubuntu innovations in recent years is the Launchpad Personal Package Archives system, with which any developer or team can painlessly run a robust Apt repository for the package of their choice. It is easy to take such power for granted, but on OS X, if a non-Apple application wasn’t coded to automatically check for updates of itself (which some are), the only way to learn about a new release is to visit each application’s Web site and look for an announcement.
Grade: A+, for simple automatic updates, the ability to pick and choose, and integration of software regardless of its source.
Pricing
This category is a gimme for Ubuntu, which is free no matter how many machines you install it on, and no matter whether they are servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, thin clients, or anything in between. But it is also a good place to point out that not only is the OS free, but so are the applications. iTunes, Safari, and Mail have their legions of fans on OS X, but don’t forget that Apple charges for iLife, iWork, and MobileMe. It even charges for MPEG-2 support in QuickTime due to some 640 software patents which also affect free software users. Plus, the “professional” creative apps Aperture, Final Cut, Logic Pro, Shake, and the rest cost considerably more. As mentioned earlier, Ubuntu is still in need of better video tools, but a Raw photo workflow like Aperture provides is available for free, as are heavy hitters in audio editing and 3-D. While Ubuntu itself it free to install, commercial support is available for a fee, which means you can really get your money’s worth!
Grade: A+, because it can’t get lower than free. Use the money you saved on Ubuntu to buy hardware, or — worst-case scenario — a commercial Linux application or support.
Support
Both Apple and Canonical will sell support contracts attractive to enterprise buyers, but for a typical desktop user these paid plans are not the usual approach. To get help with Apple software, you can physically travel to the nearest Apple retail store, either making an appointment or waiting in line, and talk to an employee. Depending on the question, you might have to pay. You can also post to Apple’s discussion communities, which are organized by application, or search its online knowledge base.
Ubuntu has no retail stores, so face-to-face help is not an option, but it does have both online documentation and highly-trafficked user forums. In addition to the official Ubuntu documentation site, the user community manages an extensive “community wiki” with more tutorial and troubleshooting content. The ubuntuforums.org site groups discussions by release, desktop version, and subject, and hosts specialized forums for groups like local Ubuntu community teams (LoCos). All old discussions are archived, constituting years’ worth of questions and answers. Finally, the toughest questions that stump both wiki maintainers and forum regulars can always go directly to the developer. Launchpad provides bug tracking and the ability to get in touch with the actual programmers working on the product in question — something Apple would never allow.
There are weaknesses in Ubuntu’s support system, such as the tendency for wiki pages to fall out of regular maintenance and either become obsolete or confused by too many independent, sometimes conflicting edits. Sometimes the forums are so crowded that it can be difficult to search for an answer among previously-opened topics, many of which may sound similar from the subject heading and contain several pages’ worth of replies. Still, if you are persistent, the forum volunteers will eventually notice your question among the others and you will find personal help.
If all else fails, commercial support for Ubuntu is available via their founding company, Canonical.
Grade: A-, better options than Apple’s, although the sheer volume sometimes makes it hard to navigate. Commercial support available, but overall Ubuntu has less presence than Apple and no shopfronts.
Concluding Thoughts
Over all, Ubuntu 9.04 averages a B+ in this comparison against Mac OS X usability. Big changes in the last two of three years have raised the usability of desktop Linux as a whole — just consider the importance of being able to configure the monitor without editing xorg.conf; the difference is night and day. The areas in which Ubuntu comes up short OS X in this review are considerably smaller in scope — an unpredictable “suspend” here, a not-very-helpful help system there, some missing or difficult to use applications.
But that does not mean that filling in all of the small gaps is easy work; in fact it may get more difficult. As Shuttleworth admits, it is not going to be an overnight story. A part of that challenge, he adds, is figuring out how Canonical can inspire both consistency and innovation in the broader open source community. Ubuntu has also recently launched a project to fix niggling usability issues, called One Hundred Paper Cuts. The project aims to improve the user experience by identifying one hundred issues which negatively impact the user’s experience, but which can be fixed relatively easily. It’s certainly a move in the right direction!
That emphasis on the community is a critical point — Ubuntu and the other distributions can do integration work, and can accomplish impressive feats through integration, but pushing real usability changes through requires buy-in from desktop environments, applications, library developers, kernel developers, and everyone else in the Linux food chain. Shuttleworth thinks there is widespread interest in the usability challenge, noting that both GNOME and KDE have raised their commitment to usabilty. “Canonical is participating in their efforts, as well as driving the new cross-desktop-usability ideas we’re pursuing under the Ayatana flag,” he said, “Whether we can pull all of those threads together in something harmonious remains to be seen.” Bill Gates made the mistake of underestimating Linux when his product was in its crosshairs — we’ll see whether Steve Jobs learned anything from that story in the months and years ahead.
Comments on "How Does Ubuntu 9.04 Measure Up to Mac OS X?"
Seeing as you recently had an article on how powerful Kdenlive was becoming, I\’m surprised it wasn\’t mentioned as an alternative to IMovie or Final Cut.
The main issue today keeping people out of GNU/Linux and in Windows, desperate though they may be to get out, is the difficulty and most often impossibility of getting commercial Windows apps to work under Wine. This is the greatest issue facing Linux today, the issues in this article are all secondary to it. I think this article shows that the issues it touches are being dealt with effectively, often with enormous success.
When apps can be installed and made to run at all under Wine, one still needs to keep them running over the long term. Installing DirectX, .NET, Visual C++ libraries, or even other apps can render some or all apps under Wine mysteriously inoperable. I have used it constantly for three or four years, and to say it has been rough sailing is an understatement. Wine has had a magnificent history, and has had great success. When it works, it can work very well. However, all too often it can stop working at the drop of a hat. I don\’t see this as a long term solution.
It is urgent that software publishers be helped out of the closed-platform mindset. Commercial software apps need to stop being written in you-know-what IDE and written with tools and frameworks that are reliably cross-platform, like QT4 and wxWindows (any other suggestions out there?). For GNU/Linux to really hit the mainstream, people need to have true choice of platform, and that must include commercial native Linux apps. When you buy an app at Amazon, Fry\’s, or WalMart, it needs to run natively under Windows, MacOS, and GNU/Linux out of the box. No hassle, no Wine, no further actions required.
Every time I suggest to people that their penitence will end once they switch to Ubuntu, it\’s \”Will CS4 work?\”, \”Will [insert random commercial Windows game here] work?\”
It is no exaggeration to characterize this as nothing short of the single greatest emergency facing GNU/Linux today on its path towards mainstream acceptance.
@ hhemken:
I disagree with your insistence that Linux must honor Microsoft-based products. One effective point of the article is that, in a number of categories, there are products that are nearly equal to, and some superior to, similar to Apple products. And since many of the Apple products mentioned are SUPERIOR to similar Microsoft-based products, I think Linux, and especially Ubuntu, is becoming recognized as a major operating system on par to Mac OS X and Windows, in part for the large number of programs that accomplish the same goals as Windows-bssed programs. I think more and more people and business will be willing to abandon Windows and its problems for Linux, in part because of the ever-growing list of Linux-based apps as well as better security and lack of commercial crapware.
And I think Shuttleworth is right: the target for Ubuntu is Mac OS X, not Windows. Windows is already in decline — just note the reluctance of business users to upgrade from XP to 7, let alone Vista — and that will become more apparent as time goes by.
(If developers like Adobe, for example, truly wanted to make their products cross-platform, couldn\’t they develop Java-based versions?)
One of the points of the article I think it hints at but doesn\’t make clearly is that Ubuntu is still too much like Linux, in that it\’s still too geeky. Most people who switch from Windows to Mac OS X appreciate how well-designed and intuitive the GUI is, how they can get more done in X than they could ever do in Windows. The OS X GUI is easier to figure out for most people than Windows or most forms of Linux. Ubuntu has gone the furthest in bringing a relatively simple, intuitive, well-designed GUI to Linux.
If anything, the Ubuntu community needs to change those aspects of Ubuntu that is hard to non-geeks to figure out. For example, why not give the Update Manager as simple an interface as Software Update in OS X, so that a user can just authorize the updates that are ready for download and installation, without confronting them with cryptic package names? An expert mode could be chosen if the user wants to see the details of what they are downloading and installing. Also, Ubuntu should give more prominence to the Add/Remove Programs feature, by making it something like the App Store for the iPhone, including better descriptions of what all those Linux programs do, and the chance for readers to rate and comment on them.
The simpler and more intuitive, and less Linuxy, Ubuntu becomes, will help it become accepted as a viable operating system, raising its popularity above both Windows and Mac OS X. But that depends much more on growing the number of quality programs that will run in Ubuntu and improving Ubuntu\’s reliability and ease of use, not enslaving it to a declining platform.
@gladmax
I agree with your remarks, but they don\’t address what I believe to be the emergency. Users want their commercial apps to work now as a precondition to moving to GNU/Linux. They are not geeks such as ourselves, who have been willing to wait years and years for apps to appear and mature. I didn\’t mean to restrict myself to Windows, although that is the larger market by quite a stretch, and MacOS users will be less likely to switch than Windows users because Mac users don\’t seem to be particularly unhappy. If anything, as far as Windows is concerned, they are even more of a smug and snickering lot than Linux users. 8-)
My point is that commercial apps in general need to run natively under Linux as a pre-condition to large-scale popular use. I don\’t see Java as a solution. I use jEdit and OpenOffice all the time, and there are minor annoying issues that tend not to be present in compiled C/C++ apps. Their memory footprint is still larger as well.
Thank you for this write-up. I would like to take issue with a few points.
Installation: Linux may be easier to install for the cognoscenti. It\’s not as intuitive for a novice. (Someone who thinks that they\’ll gain more RAM by uninstalling programs and deleting old pictures.) I\’m not advocating disc-based installs, just that they are easier for one to understand.
Apps Apps Apps
Since the mac does not ship with Final Cut and since the cost is significant, it\’s unfair towards Ubuntu to get graded on this. For the average user (one that will not use extensions) Safari = Firefox. iChat is better than pidgin for ease of use. Mail is a much nicer program than Evolution. Looks better and is faster. Mail talks to everything. Evolution, like Thunderbird, is good at pop and IMAP. Exchange support is weak. I realize this really only affects SMBs.
For office productivity, one should really choose to compare Microsoft\’s Office for Mac, since that\’s the real choice for business. To expand on what hhemken says, familiarity is what drives the herd.
As far as Wine:
There\’s no incentive for publishers to potentially lower their profit margins by spending dev time achieving cross platform nirvana. The cheapest folks on the planet (we *nix users) are not going to be thrilled to spend $1400 on an Adobe product, no matter what platform it\’s on. Publishers would spend more and earn less.
The brilliant folks in the OSS community that are developing competing free products are paving the path to mainstream acceptance. Wine is a stopgap…a bandaid…albeit a comforting one.
I used to be a happy camper with my Mac OS X laptop in my previous job. Since switching jobs I haven\’t had the luxury of using Apple\’s machines so I\’ve had to go with the company standard and use a \”PC\” laptop. For the last three years I\’ve been trying out Windows XP, Vista and different Linux distributions (mainly Ubuntu and Fedora) on my laptops with unsatisfactory results. The anti-Windows sentiment has worn off during that time but the instability and performance problems of the Windows platform is extremely frustrating.
For me the main problems with Linux and Ubuntu have been hardware support and compatibility with company software infrastructure.
Since the laptop are the new desktop power management and suspend to ram/disk are extremely important. On many occasions this has been a show-stopper for my migration to Linux.
Our company uses MS Exchange email server which doesn\’t work properly with Linux based client software. We have the Outlook web access but the usability is pretty poor with browsers other than MS IE. The company VPN is another thing that doesn\’t work with Linux.
Other than these, unfortunately, Ubuntu just doesn\’t have the \”wow\” factor Macs have but right now I\’d just settle with a platform that allows me to be productive with my work.
Yeah. I appreciate articles like this, keeping the dream alive. But, I\’ve been banging away at Linux (and for many years somewhere in there, FreeBSD) since 0.9. I did the laptop dance for a long time and even wrote one of those beloved writeups for how to get a now bygone version of FC5 to work perfectly on a particular, aging Dell laptop.
I\’m 40 now. I have kids. I just don\’t have time to screw around to get my OS to work when I have to do computing that is integral to my personal life and work. I just want stuff to work. No amount of comparison with MacOS or Windows will tempt me away from those OSes if the analogous important apps don\’t work flawlessly on a Linux distro (be it with VMware, Wine, etc., or natively)
So my laptop (which is also my desktop) is duel boot, Ubuntu 9 and Win Xp. As a Fedora user I felt dirty and weak moving to Ubuntu… but you know… it just works. That\’s what I need, so that\’s what I have…. even if I much prefer yum over apt-get.
I\’m a geek and I\’m succumbing to this. Linux is just not ready for real-world demands.
Here\’s a post I have on Linux and other operating systems:
http://brian.pontarelli.com/2008/05/27/open-source-operating-system-quest/
In addition to my points in the blog post, I\’ll say this: Linux only stands a chance when someone realizes the complete mess that open source is and starts supporting commercial software and demands that open source licenses be voided or universally compatible to install on the OS. The issues with license conflicts and closed source software are not the concern of the users. We don\’t care! We just want stuff to work and be able to install software, regardless of whether or not it costs money. I don\’t care if some ASLv2 library can\’t be used with some GPL application. I just want them to work.
Plus, most Apple users spend money on software as long as it works. The number of people that actually buy CS4 is large. The number of people that buy iWork and other third-party non-free software is even larger. So, why spend money on software when there is a free alternative on Linux? Because OS X just works all the time and I never have to worry about licenses or figuring out why some little thing isn\’t working correctly. Plus, it looks a LOT nicer than Linux does. Unless you spend hundreds of hours getting Compiz perfectly installed and configured, Linux won\’t look nearly as good. Since time is money, OS X is actually cheaper if you do the math.
One other thing I forgot to mention is that all of Apple\’s applications integrate really nicely with each other and they work beautifully with my iPhone. Safari, Mail, iCal, Address Book, and integrate seamlessly. I can pull information from Safari into Mail, Mail into Address Book or iCal. That type of integration is possible on Linux, just much more difficult since most of the applications are written by different entities. Plus, I wouldn\’t even want to try and get my iPhone to sync up with Linux.
I think too that integration between applications is one of the more important goals for gnu/linux desktop systems, mostly if you compare to Mac Os X.
Being a KDE fan, I see that\’s there\’s a lot of things that can be better in my favourite desktop, but we are going in the right direction.
This is a very biased article. Name someone who has removed Mac OS X from their computers and installed any version of Linux, including Ubuntu. It simply doesn\’t make sense to do that.
Linux needs critics, not fanboys.
@hhemken:
Very well said. I\’m glad someone else also sees what could very possibly be the most urgent problem.
(Keep in mind though, that CrossOver Linux can be very helpful in this situation. It even runs Microsoft Office flawlessly. I suggest taking a look.)
@a.sicofante
No one loves Mac OS X more than me. That said, my perfectly-functioning Mac laptop has been sleeping in a bag on the floor ever since I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on a $400 el-cheapo laptop. I am just truly impressed with how far Linux has come. Everything I want is there, and nothing that I don\’t want is. And unlike Apple, it\’s not like the guys at Ubuntu had any *idea* what type of machine I would want to run it on, yet everything simply works right out of the box. Amazing!
I am using both OS X and Ubuntu 9.04. Ubuntu is much faster (although I have it on much faster hardware than my imac 2.66), cut and paste works far superior to OS X, opensource applications work great. I think it is a real competitor. Running the livecd version Ubuntu detects everything including airport correctly and looks great on the 24\” screen however, I do not have a dual boot machine at this point. I am waiting for snow leopard to make a final judgment.
Apple\’s strength at this point is the hardware and commercial software. The display is superb, the hardware is high quality, the os is very stable.
There are a lot of issues that both sides can used to fight this battle. Looking at the code, there are a lot of things that can be said both positive and negative. From the code perspective, Apple has it made… They are not trying to figure out what hardware you have in order to make the system work.
From a hardware perspective…
Many of the \”fanboys\” are using equivalent hardware (e.g. they have dedicated graphics chips without a shared memory architecture, they use 7200rpm drives with large caches, and leading edge or better network cards that support industry standards [or prestandards]). This means that Linux \”just installs\”. They have the benefits of the OS properly configuring compiz and all of the \”WOW factor\” items off the bat…
Many of the \”naysayers\” are using corporate hardware (especially laptops) or the cheapest system they can find, with shared memory graphics in which the OS team has determined that it is too hard to auto configure compiz because of the variables and settled for the \”good enough\” bare configuration. This setup does not give the \”WOW\” environment that the others are talking about so these semi-techie users head for the blogs only to get too frustrated at points to have a good opinion of Linux.
This is the equivalent of running Vista on a netbook. YES, it does run on a netbook, but horribly slow and with no \”AERO\” interface. It does not have the \”WOW\” factor either and if we were allowed to tinker with the code and configurations more, I\’m sure we could come up with ways to make AERO work on a netbook but it would be for those willing to do lots of work.
MY POINT… My wife\’s Vista works awesome on her 4GB RAM ASUS laptop. My Ubuntu 9.04 works awesome on my 4GB RAM Dell laptop. My sister-in-laws OS X works awesome on her 4GB Apple laptop. Apple is the only vendor which you don\’t have to be selective on the hardware with. They tailor their systems explicitly for their software and vice-versa. But if you are more selective of the hardware in your system (whether laptop or desktop), you can have a great experience out of the box with either Windows or Linux.
The answer is: There is a choice. The question then becomes: What will you choose?
@a.sicofante I actually run only Ubuntu on my macbook pro, I have removed os x. I dual booted for a while but just wasn\’t using os x and didn\’t want it anymore. Now I wish I had bought a cheaper pc with similiar hardware specs for 1/4 the price.
I ran Windoze Xpee Pro and Ubuntu (Hardy) on the same old IBM Thinkpad T40 but I\’ve upgraded the memory to 2G and the disk to 120G and replaced the CD/DVD with a later IBM model. For a long while I ran both in parallel. During that time Windoze has had 3 different Firewalls (none very good) and I\’ve bought 2 different anti-virus, and lots of utilities over the last 3 year. The result – a PC that can run well but not for long. Each update could kill it dead and often did as PnP screwed the hardware drivers and installed nothing I own. I also know it WILL get virus attacked – again.
Ubuntu Hardy installed with ease once I gparted the hard disk. No hardware issues apart from configuring ppp for the stupid cellphone modem. I\’ve upgraded to 9.04 and have nearly abandoned Windoze . Ubuntu has been a solid performer for me – a few ease of use issues but nothing major (Hey I started back in the dark days of pre-DOS CPM). Ubuntu just works and I appreciate that.
You guys are on crack. You compare a no maintenance *nix distro like OS X to Ubuntu? And you give Ubuntu updates an A+?
First of all, How did you (Ubuntu geeks) manage to munge Firefox? It\’s the default browser that ships with Ubuntu and it isn\’t up to date in even the latest distro, (8.10 and now 9.04). So let\’s say an end user hears about the latest FF and tries to update it on their Ubuntu machine. This is no big deal on windoze or OSX, they simply click \”check for updates\” right in the browser and it\’s done. On Ubuntu, that menu item is GREYED OUT. GREYED OUT? On Ubuntu, why are end users expected to wait f-o-r-e-v-e-r for browser updates or deal with a python script back door workaround to do something as fundamental as updating the default browser? Give me a break. Then there\’s the idea that they\’ve gotta deselect Firefox updates or they\’re forcefed an older version by Ubuntu\’s automatic updates. This is beyond a joke. It is a huge turnoff.
Either make a different browser your default or get out of the sed|awk|grep|csh dark ages and make updates transparent automagic for end users. Don\’t get me wrong. I\’m a fan of Linux from way back. But the last few days I\’ve spent my considerable time downloading OS86 kalyway torrents so I can strip Ubuntu off my Acer Aspire One and use an OS that is not so high maintenance.
I\’m delighted to see the Linux community finally focusing on the correct target to compare itself to: OS X. But I think you guys need to spend a little less time assuming everyone is a *nix sysadmin and spend some time using your distro a few days to perform common tasks like updating the web browser before you release it. Whatever you do, don\’t give yourself an A+ for a C- end user experience or you\’ll be asking why Linux adoption is so low 100 years from now.
Linux is a very similar to OS-X and visa versa. Apple took a open source OS BSD it grows because of Open source and both OS-X and Linux benifit. Windows has no such process. OS-X and Linux are part of a common Os family when one progresses so does the other.
Apple was smart to use Open source but putting its own twist just look at all the themes out for both Windows and Linux to emulate its look, but what is underneath OS-X is closer to Linux than Windows will ever be. So its comparing oranges with oranges.
For general use Linux works fine, OS-X just looks better and besides that there is a Apple following that is almost a religion, Linux I dought will ever get there. Windows will never get there.
I use all three OS\’s and I find they all can do what the user wants, but like many people I really just want to read my e-mail I care little whats under the hood.
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