Shutdown or reboot, you choose.
I recently started working for a company that is, what I am calling, an “apple cart”. Almost all but two machines are Macs. I used an iBook about five years ago shortly after the release of 10.0. I hated Apple up to that time, but OS X was a whole new animal. Being a lover of everything Linux, the FreeBSD (yes, I know, its Unix) backend was, in IMHO a step up. I was in love. With much regret I had to give back the iBook when I moved to another company. Since then all my development has been on Windows (hey, it was where the money was), while using Linux for my personal stuff.
Shoot forward in time to the present. I can say with a certain amount of conviction that I am a bit saddened by what I see. Granted, we are using Tiger on our server and I am sure Leopard makes a ton of improvements, but still, one must have to be extremely dedicated to continue using OS X and PAYING FOR IT!
What I mean is this: I use Linux a lot, including at my current job. I have been using Linux for quite a few years (the kernel version had just turned a whole number when I started). Linux can be temperamental, and that is putting it mildly. It still is a power user’s operating system. But it has one thing going for it that other OS’s don’t: it’s free. That is a big plus for many of us who are financially challenged.
So finding Apple crashing or not booting or doing stupid things that no OS should ever do is nothing new or daunting for me. What really has got me flummoxed is that people actually go out and pay good, hard earned money for the thing. And a lot of it. Gobs of it when you compare it to Linux (O.k., that’s unfair, but it’s still a lot of money).
One of the weirdest things I have ever seen (which is saying a lot considering I have six kids) occurred when I, being new to the server OS, told it to run through and do the updates. Hey, I update Linux all the time. I thought, “This is really FreeBSD underneath. I’ll just do updates and then get on with the rest of my day.” Wasn’t I surprised when, after the updates had been downloaded and installed, I was presented with a message box that asked me to reboot or shut down. At first I thought “shut down” meant shut down the updater. Yeah, right. It’s a server for Pete’s sake! I couldn’t shut it down! At least not at the time I did the updates.
In all fairness I hear it rumoured that Vista has pulled the same stunt, but that sure doesn’t make it right. Why would a sysad want to be forced into rebooting? Who wrote the code for that thing anyway? Obviously not someone who has ever administered a server in a production environment.
The interesting part is I googled for this issue and it would appear to me that most Apple users don’t find this much of a problem. Maybe they don’t even know this isn’t normal.
Of course, when I rebooted, the machine froze and I had to actually press the no-no button, and then had to reboot when the server kept disconnecting all the network shares every two minutes. And then there was the problem with the sshd locking up…but I digress.
I am not saying the OS X is bad or that it has any more problems then, say, Linux. But if the only thing that Apple has to show for all its hard work is a fancy GUI then I might as well stick with Windows (which is almost always less expensive when it come preinstalled on the machine) or Linux.
Now that Apple has switched to Intel for its hardware and Free (as in beer AND freedom) BSD for its OS, I have to ask the question everyone seems afraid to ask: Why switch? Both Windows and Linux are less expensive and, as far as I can tell, at least just as stable (or lack thereof). Yes, I know, I am an infidel. But as a programmer in an extremely competitive market I have little room for cultic devotion. I have to work.