*This Reply from / Antwort von / Antwoord van:* LLLActive@GMX.Net - 2011-06-12 - 13:53:59 -0700 Hi Linda, I am very tempted to respond to your ideas, because I as engineer in broadcasting and since 1980 using information technology, constantly came up against the purists and the belief that the engineer knows what the user needs. That is also what a user gets from the bad engineer. As you say, apps are made or are left by the wayside, depending on usability. Only a few users and specialists can and prefer to use command line environments, me too on servers, but most users prefer a good simple effective GUI. I used a lot of scripts for backups with tar and dar, but enjoyed the ease of scanning backups and restore files with a GUI like KDar, and as the thread started, Mac's TimeMachine. This is also the success of Macs. My son is a media designer. He and all his friends have Mac's just because of the successful Mac OSX GUI's. (The reason I got a Mac was that one of them got herself a new Macbook Pro, and they all bought the old Macbook and gave it to me for my 55th). Let most Mac apps be propriety if Apple pleases (which I also find nausiating); but I can dig behind it into the Darwin kernel Linux world and do 95% of the stuff I have on opensource Linux with the development environment and MacPorts. I also have Sun's VirtualBox (now Oracle :-(( ) with openSuSE 11.4 and Win7 on the upgraded old white Macbook with 4GB memory and 500GB HDD; all nicely backed up by TimeMachine on an external USB 500GB 2,5" drive. The reason that most media specialists go for Mac, is it's usability, and the loss for Linux apps that can do all the stuff a Mac does, but only if you are a geek. In the end I think we should not become too religious about the pro and cons of GUI's - just making the power of Linux available also to non-geeks will help Linux to become the most powerful tool in modern telecom/information systems. Mac's file system is for instance a serious drawback, and its incompatibility with modern Linux (*nix) file systems frustrates me often when my data is on a ext4 file system for example. I hate using fat32 just for compatibility reasons between all OS's. Another reason is data security on M$ file system (attempts) and encrypted volumes I now use for data on mobile systems (I never mix data and OS volumes). All this, and much more I can get excited about, is what draws me to a Mac, and strangely enough to Gnome, in stead of the eye candy of KDE 4. It is the slight, tendency to the minimalistic, that is effective. Even Win7 is catching on to the Gnome like desktop layout. I used to use KDE 3 & 4 exclusively. Now I find Mac, Gnome and Win7 are closer to one another; I even convinced totally Windows users to use Gnome and openSuSE 11.x. The latest was a girl friend who now got a MacBook Pro, because it was so similar to her Ubuntu she got from me 3 years ago. As these desktops seem to become more and more similar, I believe the most efficient GUI will survive on the desktop - Linux will keep expanding in the server rooms with slight Gnome Gui's (like SLES and others) or without Gui altogether - and not the best technology. Remember the X86 - 6800 (Intel- Motorola CPU) case, the Windows - DESQview/TopView case, and many best technologies that lost to the best marketers. Pardon for my passionate response, but I have experienced such issues for such a long time now. As you say, and I used to be as direct and a little harsh as you say: **PLEASE** don't thin(k) that a good GUI can't be a make-or-break deal. So much in this life is about ***perceptions*** -- not facts. Most engineers don't get this, which is there is the stereotype of engineers being socially clueless. I support your plea. However, good engineers today also realise the importance of usability of technology by non-geek users, the reason of the success of Mac and Ubuntu the last 5 years. The persistence of the 'engineer knows what users want' mentality is perhaps the single most important reason that M$ still exists, and that all other Linux distros besides Ubuntu still struggle to enter the broad desktop market. I found that after an initial use of Ubuntu for a year or so, I can successfully update my friends' Ubuntu to the superior new openSuSE 11.X with Gnome distro. :-) Al *Original sent by / Original von / Oorspronklik van:* suse@tlinx.org - Sat, 11 Jun 2011 21:09:41 -0700
Anders Johansson wrote:
Out of interest (because I have no experience with Mac), could you explain what Time Machine does that is different from a normal backup program - not counting the 3D GUI for restoring backups, which is pretty nice looking but not necessary for functionality
Never used time machine, but your comment about a GUI not being necessary for restoring files is akin to saying there's no need for user's to have a 'desktop' on computers -- they can just use a console.
Any idiot knows that's complete crap.
The interface on something is what can make or break something all other things being equal. If you have a cumbersome awkward or difficult to use interface, it won't get used or be usable.
If you have one that makes it a breeze, it opens up **new paradigms** in usage. Can you imagine doing video processing if we still had an interface of punched cards?
Sure, a Video screen is nice, but punched cards would let you do it all.
As for "3D" -- I wasn't aware the MAC supported NVIDIA's 3-D goggles nor that it's time-machine required them. Though an appearance of 3D for browsing files (a file hierarchy is usually displayed as some type of tree -- a 2D diagram), then having the appearance of 3 dimensions could be useful for browsing forward or backward in time.
I have complete backups on linux using the standard 'xfsdump' utils and a modified tower of hanoi dump schedule, BUT browsing those backups, or pulling files out randomly, or being able to see all the versions of a file...that would be nice.
I even let Windows-Backup have extra space, so it can keep copies of the files it will keep copies of (but it won't keep copies of anything on my linux box, as it is 'remote')....But for the files it does, I can see multiple copies in the file props...which is nice for single files, but unusable for backup sets.
So **PLEASE** don't thing that a good GUI can't be a make-or-break deal. So much in this life is about ***perceptions*** -- not facts. Most engineers don't get this, which is there is the stereotype of engineers being socially clueless.
Normal backup programs are plentiful on linux though, so if you just need a backup, they are available
Not any good ones with a GUI that are also 'fast', and that backup all the ACL's, extended attrs, etc. of modern file systems.
'star' (a tar like prog) has good backup functionality (supports ACLS's XATTRS, all the 'tar' versions, compression, but it's command line only. xfsdump could be alot better if it kept full file inventories ... but backup progs that are "plentiful", that support modern file system semantics? Not my experience.
Linda
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