[LAU] A year of Linux Audio revisited - would like to know your oppinion

[Paul Davis]

On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 07:28 -0500, drew Roberts wrote:

> > Another thought is "why is the almost equally closed OSX more accepted
> > than Windows?"
> 
> Here's some jet fuel to throw in on top of the petrol...
> 
> Because peole see apple as cool and the underdog and because darwin did the 
> work apple intended?

There's a much simpler reason from a developer's perspective. OS X is a
unix operating system. There are plenty of business&marketing&freedom
reasons to be upset with Microsoft, but first and foremost for a lot of
coders is the simple truth that their software technology is just really
really awful in almost every way. OS X is not perfect (nothing is), but
assuming you picked a GUI toolkit that runs well on OS X, porting a *nix
program to OS X is generally less than a day's work, sometimes just an
hour or so, and typically without any source code changes at all. This
is hard to accomplish with a Windows port (not impossible, just harder),
and even then the semantic differences in the way some of the underlying
Windows OS services actually work can cause issues for finickety
software.

In addition, for me personally there is the fact that Apple just seems
to get user interface design right the vast majority of the time, and
its inspiring to work on such a platform, despite its proprietariness
and occasional crappiness.

--p