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Hobbit_Boy
Mar 16, 2000, 03:09 PM
Ok, i just was wondering and pondering some things about OS X. I havent seen anyone asking these questions, or any information to them, so i decided to speak up.

How WELL will OS X run on the 400-500 G4's (with sawtooth)? I know there are new G4's slated for release around the time OS X comes out. Will it slow the machine down more so than OS 9?

With all the "eye candy" will OS X use a BUTT-LOAD more RAM than the huge 40mb+ OS9?

Will there be a way to get rid of aqua? (i prefer platinum myself..) I think the core OS looks good, but aqua looks like a toy. If this OS has some sort of UNIX in it can you get graphical overlays that look more like the traditional OS?

Will it be WORTH the upgrade price when OS first comes out? Should i wait a bit untill the kinks are worked out?

Will the masses be confused when OS X comes out? The new widgets look confusing and from what Macaddict had in their magazine, it looks
like many, many things have been redone.

Basically i want a FAST, STABLE, BARE-BONES, OS that is POWERFULL. Will OS X satisfy power users instead of the internet idiot that Jobs has been marketing to latley? (smart marketing though)

When do most people expect the consumer release of OS X? Everplace ive checked has a diffrent time estimate. Is there a general time period i can expect this new OS?

Basically, no one i KNOW knows much about OS X...it seems that some here have been using the Alpha software and i was just wondering what everyone's HONEST impressions are.

My main concern is the speed and power of this OS. If anyone can answer those 2 questions i would gratefull!! :-)

gotterdamm
Mar 16, 2000, 03:41 PM
Hope this helps:
<l>Will there be a way to get rid of aqua?</l>
A detailed way of removing Aqua was explained elsewhere in this forum.
<l>Should i wait a bit untill the kinks are worked out?</l>
Its not out yet. How can the final release have kinks if it doesnt exist.
<l>Will the masses be confused when OS X comes out?</l>
People where confused when windoze went from 3.1 went to 95, but they learned.
<l>Basically i want a FAST, STABLE, BARE-BONES, OS that is POWERFULL.</l>
It is all those things except barebones. You dont need to be barebones to be powerful.
As far as an exact release date, I don't think even Apple knows for sure yet. Expect late summer.
Most of your questions have been answered elsewhere in the forums. Spend an afternoon reading and I think you will be pretty well versed.
ps- alot of us already have the newest alpha. If you have any specific questions, dont be afraid to ask.



[This message has been edited by gotterdamm (edited 03-16-2000).]

Hobbit_Boy
Mar 16, 2000, 03:45 PM
[Accidentally erased by mjh. Sorry. http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/frown.gif]

[This message has been edited by markhers (edited 03-21-2000).]

nibs
Mar 16, 2000, 04:20 PM
get mac os x server if you don't want the frills. the main advantage to os x is not how fast it is. mac os 9 was pretty fast if you're working with only one application. the benefits of mac os x are in it's multitasking, memory management abilities, protected memory, stability, security, and the fact that mach was designed to automatically take advantage of multi-processor systems and distributed system with various configurations. plus it's fully bsd compatible. if you don't want the frills get os x server, or wait for a darwin gui (and for apple to upgrade the kernel to mach 3.0) and play with that (which is free). you can also download and install linuxppc 2000 (ha), and i think net bsd has already been ported to the ppc/g3/g4 architecture. either net bsd or free bsd, maybe both. you've got options.

Lazeruus
Mar 16, 2000, 07:17 PM
Yeah I would wait untill OS X 1.0 hits OS X 1.01. Thats the best bet if you want the real GM of it. Apple's GM is all the inside testers can do to make the OS as stable and as good as possible. Things like the X.X1 or X.1X are usualy when people that use the OS send in complaints and ideas and problems and ect... I would wait.. well.. no I wouldent... gimmy gimmy!!!

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In Velocity + Mass + Trajectory
You will find the creator,Fate.

rtamesis
Mar 16, 2000, 08:00 PM
Mac OS X DP3 runs pretty fast on my 266 Mhz Powerbook G3, so it should fly on your 400 mhz G4. Steve Jobs used either a 450 or a 500 Mhz G4 in his macworld demo, so you should be all set.

eucci
Mar 17, 2000, 12:04 PM
The big thing to remember (and this was cited on MacCentral as well) is that it's still pre beta! The Developer Preview releases exist primarily so that developers can ensure that their programs will run on MacOS X when it is finally released.


Since it is still pre-beta, there is a lot of debugging code enabled (which slows the OS down), and some less critical areas haven't been polished up yet (sound, serial ports, etc).


It's unfair to Apple to pre-decide against MacOS X based on it's current state, which I assume is why Apple is reminding people (aggresively) about their non disclosure agreements. It's still too early to make judgements without the information that will exist in the beta cycle and/or at the time of the WWDC.


So it basically can't be said yet how fast the final release will be with all the debugging code out of it, nor can it be said whether Apple will change their position on the concept of skins/themes being a supported part of MacOS X. (Remember how much Themes showed up during the early developer releases of MacOS 8.5, only to be basically shunned by the time of final release).

Joel
Mar 21, 2000, 11:21 AM
The new core of the OS will make it worthwhile alone.

There will be plenty of ways to alter your appearance - sanctioned by Apple or not. Performance will be good; all those spiffy animations and such take advantage of Quartz which is a very different way of rendering a page, not the memory/CPU hog you might think.

Expect some tweaking, but a big factor for me between getting OS X when it's released and wiating for an x.01 update iswhetehr the shipping version has the software update feature of OS 9. That'll make the kinks and wrinkles iron out more easily.

markhers
Mar 21, 2000, 01:01 PM
actually after i read through some of the past post i still have the basic question, "how fast, how WELL will OS X run on my G4 400?

Will it be faster than OS 9? Will it be slower? Will it offer advantages that will warrent an upgrade right away?

(Hello all, I was gone for a week, but I'm back now. Not that y'all missed me... http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/smile.gif)

Will it be faster? Probably, but no one really knows right now. The problem with saying "faster" is which parts do you want to go faster? Carbonized apps, Classic apps? System responsiveness? Boot-up time? These are all really different questions.

I've gotten to play with a DP3 box, so I'll share my own experience:

Carbonized apps launch slower, but past that, work as fast or faster than OS9 non-Carbonized apps on the same machine. If you take that same Carbonized app, and run it in MacOS 9 with Carbon, it launches about as fast as in MacOS X, but is somewhat sluggish in comparison.

Classic apps run faster in MacOS.app than they do in MacOS X Server's Blue Box, and it's a much more complete environment than the Blue Box. Classic.app really is unusable right now, and has a number of rendering problems. A work in progress to be sure, but MacOS.app impressed me in that it didn't seem to cripple the rest of the system while it was running. It also didn't appear to to suffer from the odd gamma problem that MXS' Blue Box has.

Boot time - depends on your system, but I would say it will likely the same of a little slowler, but that of course depends on how many service you run. If you run a base system, probably the same as a fairly laden MacOS 9. However, if you start getting into adding services, like MySQL and others, they will add startup time.

However, these are simply my posed questions. As for yours:

MacOS 9 will be your best friend if all you want to use right now are the apps which work for you and you feel comfortable with. BUT...if you are looking to get used to OSX (the future of your Mac platform), and you would like to tinker with all of the layers underneath the hood and their apps, like BSD and Cocoa, you should go for it.

It will likely be faster on a G4, but which areas and why are as yet still mostly a mystery to us all. Apple hasn't announced which areas are being optimized for AltiVec. But file sharing is one, I think. And you'll probably be able to use applications which take advantage of some automatic vectorizer compiler, like VAST/C, which will make other apps run faster.

It will also be much more tuned to the actual hardware you are running, and Mach is very fast and stable. You gain mem protectinon and other very cool features.

The disadvantages could be that you don't like Aqua, or lack of widespread and rich drivers for all your fave devices, or that the value-add for the MacOS X features doesn't equal what you want it to.

Basically, at this stage, it should be a toss up for you. It is for nearly anyone else. And I fully agree with the post mentioning OSX 1.01 (or 1.1 or whatever it is) as being a better indication of the platform. That was true for MacOS X Server and OS9!

Hope that answered some of your questions.

TimmyDee51
Mar 22, 2000, 02:45 AM
With all the talk of the UNIX underpinnings of OS X, will the new OS benefit from the speed of the kernel? I know that using Linux on a PPC makes them fly, but their GUI or compatibility is not what the Mac OS is. Will all the additional app strings in the new OS bog down the kernel so that the performance is on par with OS 9 for one app?

gotterdamm
Mar 22, 2000, 05:39 PM
With all the talk of the UNIX underpinnings of OS X, will the new OS benefit from the speed of the kernel?
Of course, that's the whole purpose of using it. The design goal of OS X was to combine the speed/power/stability of Unix, with those user-friendly Apple aesthetics we all love. Expect the final release of OS X to run apps considerable faster than OS 9.

sy
Mar 22, 2000, 07:13 PM
Of course, that's the whole purpose of using it. The design goal of OS X was to combine the speed/power/stability of Unix, with those user-friendly Apple aesthetics we all love. Expect the final release of OS X to run apps considerable faster than OS 9.[/B]
The stability, definitely. I think this is the biggest benefit we'll have with the OS. But the speed, may be yes, may be not. The application's speed comparison is tricky. In general, the speed of application is app specific and not necessarily depend on OSes.

There is a binary format that runs on both environments, but the format might not run at full speed on X and might end up running slower than OS 9. However, the speed of background app should run efficiently and faster.

markhers
Mar 23, 2000, 12:31 AM
Of course, that's the whole purpose of using it. The design goal of OS X was to combine the speed/power/stability of Unix, with those user-friendly Apple aesthetics we all love. Expect the final release of OS X to run apps considerable faster than OS 9.

I don't know...this seems to kind of miss the progression of this OS. OPENSTEP has the Mach kernel, MacOS X Server has the Mach kernel, and it would take an exceptional(!) amount of effort to unbind Cocoa from Mach/BSD, much less unbind the BSD from the Mach kernel.

The fact is, no matter the pretty diagrams, and easy to digest morsels like "it's easy to port *fill in the blank* layer to another OS," it's not ever ever ever that easy. Consider all of the differences between the Mach/BSD combo and the Linux combo. The differences in implementation and returns and such as so so so numerous as to make the imcomparable. Linux is a macrokernel, Mach a microkernel. The Linux APIs and Linux kernel APIs are totally different than the BSD and Mach APIs.

If any of you want to hear any more of the numerous technical reasons for this particular set of facts, please search for it in the macosx-talk listserv at www.omnigroup.com. (http://www.omnigroup.com.)

Secondly, as I posted already, Carbon apps launch slower, and they work as fast or slower. Yes, this is pre-release back-end for the Carbon libs, but I still don't think you're going to see true optimization until MacOS X 1.01 or 1.1. We'll see...

I don't want to sound like I'm bashing any of you. I'm not. You just have to take into account that I've written the same thing over and over again for the past two years, and once in a while, it seems to me that the "ease of" doing this, or the "shouldn't be too hard" to do that, just ends up being an uneducated discussion based on half understandings. I respect the discussion, and I suppose it would be nice to have Linux compatibility with MacOS X, but that isn't going to happen for as many reasons as you can think of plus 2038 (scientifically calculated number, by the way).