When Apple postponed releasing Leopard, otherwise known as OS X 10.5, from April of this year until October it was rumoured to be because of the rollout of the iPhone, as well as some last second technical glitches in the revolutionary new iteration of its OS.
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's Apple, and everything they do is revolutionary, but it was still an odd move from a company that plans its hype and reality-distortion field with the greatest of care. And anyway, what does this have to with Linux, and open source?
Well, I got to thinking about something I had written in yesterday's diary, and then it hit me; the delay wasn't about the iPhone at all, but about something entirely different--a threat from Apple's non-evil protected flank.
I mean, why delay Leopard at all? It'll have Boot Camp, which allows for double (or triple) booting off of the same hard drive, with Leopard, Vista/XP, and Linux; a feature called (if I recall correctly) 'time machine', that lets you restore your machine to a previous state, as well a host of other new improvements, notably the long overdue revamp of the Finder.
It was all about the threat coming from a newly GUI-ified/prettified Linux, in the form of the recent merger of Compiz and Beryl, as well as the massive lovely that will be KDE 4. You can bet that the Apple devs saw early hacks that had KDE 4 alpha running on top of Mac OS X, and if there is anything they are protective of, it's the look and feel of the OS X experience.
Coming in October, definitions of da purty will have to be re-written, all because of core animation. It'll first be released on the iPhone, and then rolled out fully in Leopard. Naturally, all this eye candy will require a powerful engine, and that is why Leopard will be a fully Unix 03 compliant system (or maybe that's just a feature). Hey! This sounds like an Apple commercial!
Well, not quite; I may have one bit of Apple hardware that will possibly run this, albeit slowly, with several options turned off (an Intel iMac, 2nd gen), but for those who don't have the $$$, you can just drool fanboyishly (or girlishly) from afar.
I mentioned in passing that I was tempted to get a Macbook on sale, then saw another computer for half the price, and I got to wondering if I could put together a pre-Leopard fully open-source box, running FreeBSD as its base with KDE 4 as the desktop environment. All the security, much of the eye candy, but at half the price.
After a look at this nifty how-to on setting up FreeBSD as a multimedia desktop (yeah, I'd have to give up my claim to being 100% pure libre open source), it's just a matter of using the current KDE, until 4 is released in October of this year. Fools errand? Possibly. But the reality is that most converts these days to open source come because of the looks, and stay because of the price.
Oddly enough, this will mean that Vista, OS X and Linux will all trade places by October; Apple will be the system winning converts because of the stunning visuals, Linux will be the stable, easy to use platform, and Vista will be...scratch that--come October, Apple and Linux will switch places, and Vista will still be Vista.
Oh, and I'm downloading the ISOs as I type. I'll report on how it went soon. Update: disc1.ISO downloaded and burning to disc. Will install momentarily. Update2: created /, swap, var, tmp, and /usr partitions, now finishing install of disc 1. Update3: ugh. Took a shortcut, and am left in the console, with no X server. Bad, bad shortcut! Always follow how-to's to the letter! Wimping out in three, two....