maybe its an overstatement but if you see this short demo, the UI graphics in this OS is nothing like any Sci-Fi movie have ever dreamed. If you've seen any VISTA demos and you think you're blown away by the new UI then Novell's LINUX will make your jaw drop..

Believe me, see this demo and you will NOT believe what you will see??

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-199899523054020719&q=linux

You clearly haven't looked at Mac OS X

With Xgl, the problem is that it's suffering from a big problem: 2 different gui frameworks: gnome and kde. A gnome app will work on kde, though the fonts are BIG as they use a different DPI standard. No matter what you do, it's hard if not impossible to get that right.

The video shows some nice gimicks, but does it really bring more functionality which lets you do your work faster and more productive? I have my doubts. For starters: I don't want window gimmicks, when I click the minimize button, the window has to go immediately, no animation or anything. Any resource eating goo has to go, every cycle in my PC has to be utilized by the apps I'm using, not the OS. The OS should be there to make running the apps possible, that's it.

You know what Apple will do soon? Offer real virtualization on a single apple box: real time MacOS X AND Windows XP running at the same time, next to eachother, not via virtual PC slowness, but truly virtualized, so the performance degration is minimal, if at all. That'll be the real future, vista killing material: have 3 or more OS-installations, each tailored precisely for your task you want to use the OS for.

While both look great I have to applaud MS for shifting to vector based graphics for display rendering. Not sure about their implementation though as I think my little Creative 3D graphics card is gonna have a stroke.

I do agree with Otis though. As soon as I heard about the possibility of using virtualisation on the Mac, I started thinking about which color I wanted

Pete

I've been making good use of my VMWare Workstation; if Apple really does that, I may get in line to buy one, too. But aren't they switching to Intel chip? So this will be just a software thing? If so, what is to stop MS (or anybody else, for that matter) from doing same thing on Intel boxes?

JimFoye wrote:

I've been making good use of my VMWare Workstation; if Apple really does that, I may get in line to buy one, too. But aren't they switching to Intel chip? So this will be just a software thing? If so, what is to stop MS (or anybody else, for that matter) from doing same thing on Intel boxes?

It's based on a couple of new instructions build into the intel dual core and newer chips (and also in newer / upcoming AMD chips). It's therefore not a software emulator based thing, like vmware, the OS-es run side by side.

MS will do the same in vista, I'm told, but they have one disadvantage: you won't be able to run MacOS X next to it on a PC