A Perfect OS?

Hey guys, this is Matt from Kids101 with a video you may or may not have seen in other places many times. This video is going to be on what, in my opinion, the perfect operating system would be.

And it's kind of funny how I thought about this idea. I was in the car, and my dad said, "You know, Alex, what do you think if you were a computer? What operating system would you want to run?" I didn't know what to tell him because there's no real perfect operating system out there. So, you know, if you're watching, my kids, you might think Mac OS X is the closest to perfect, if not perfect. But it's not really that perfect.

If you've ever gotten mad at your computer, if you've ever gotten frustrated at it in any way, then the OS is probably not considerably perfect. So the idea is that I'm going to go over what I think the perfect operating system is, and then you're going to go over in the comments and personal messages, if that works for you, what in your mind the perfect OS is.

So first of all, let's get started with the Mac. The Mac has something called Cocoa, which is the application framework. It has all the UI controls, like the user interface stuff and the GUI. So the Mac GUI, really, in my opinion, is the best. Here's an application I made that just takes advantage of some of the Mac GUI stuff. It doesn't have any code whatsoever, and I just threw it together in like two minutes.

But it really will show you that the Mac GUI is not bad at all. First of all, I like the sleek look of the windows. I do not want a bunch of wobbly windows, where the windows wobble around if you shake them. It's part of Compiz Fusion. I would love if I could do that, but fail. I'm taking a little stretch there. But the idea with this is it shows you all these different controls. Here's like a tokenizer, like text into your password. You can drag a file into one of these file picker things, automatically it'll just tell you the path of the file, and you can go back.

Hold on, um, you have a tab bar, a loading bar, stuff like that. So this is just a very basic example of what you can do with Cocoa. Same with the iPhone; there's a very great user interface framework right there. And with the Mac, I find the applications look more dreamy and wonderful and beautiful, and I just want to look at this application.

I find that Mac has that quality more than any other operating system. Windows is ugly to me, but I mean, just because I'm bored of Windows, but it's just ugly to me in the long run. Ultimately, I'm sick of Windows. It just feels dark and depressing at this point.

If you look at Windows, with the Mac, you generate something called the .app, which is really a folder that can have images in it. So, say I use an image in this application called Cocoa Example, it will go into resources. Here's an image example, and then whenever I use that image in the application, it just looks at the file. Unfortunately, though, CocoaExample.app is now officially a folder, so you can't download it over the Internet unless you download it as a zip or you download it file by file.

So I have to make it so normally I can zip it. It's not really a pain, but with Windows, you can just download a .exe and run it right away, so I like that about Windows much more. Another thing about Mac, though, is that there are fewer applications. Most of the applications that come with your Mac are, in fact, Mac applications. And as you can see, Apple works very much harder on those applications that come with your Mac than Microsoft works on those that come with your PC.

These are, you know, this is the Mac OS X Leopard pager, in this case, Snow Leopard pager. And let me just go over applications that come with your Mac or your operating system in general. They are not perfect, and they'll never be perfect. They're not part of your operating system; keep that in mind too. But the Mac really does come with so many great applications that do everything that say my grandma or my friend or my music teacher might want to use.

iLife is much better. Microsoft has Windows Movie Maker, for instance, but that's bad. It's, or it's not bad, I'm not, you know, insulting it, but it's bad compared to, say, iMovie. Like it's not good. I prefer iMovie to any editing software I've ever used on Windows, even though iMovie sometimes doesn't give you as much freedom, but it's totally worth it.

But with Mac OS X, it comes with so many applications, and it's just sleeker all over. And it's Unix. But the thing with Mac OS X is I feel like it's Unix, and they kind of took apart most of it and kind of ruined some of the Unix authenticity. But really, the Mac also, it doesn't act—it doesn't look like Unix. There's no, something if you're a geek, you might know about inetd. There's no inetd. It's interesting what they've done. But overall, it's not the end of the world that they've changed Unix around a little bit.

I like Linux more personally, but you know, you might like Unix more. Speaking of the devil, here's, say, Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a sleek OS itself, but its application suite that comes with isn't very good. OpenOffice is nice, but it doesn't have the best GUI. Linux, there's no uniform way to make an app that has a GUI. You have to use something like GCC. There, you might end up using a text editor to edit all your code, like VI or Nano or KEdit or GEdit or something like that.

You might end up having to use something called Xorg, which is very hard to make a GUI. You have to type out your GUI, and unless you know like the way to do it, you have to make your own button from scratch and stuff like that. It's very painful. You have to do codes when they press down on the button; the image changes a little bit.

And that is why a bunch of Linux applications just look unfinished and very, you know, just not good in general. Like there's a video player app that comes with Ubuntu, and when I play a video that's not in the right proportion to it, it's too big—the video goes off the edge of the application, like onto my desktop. It's hard to do a GUI on Ubuntu or on any version of Linux unless you really know what you're doing. It's much harder than a Mac because there's no Cocoa.

So that's what I don't like about Linux. Linux is the nice Linux kernel from the command line, but I'd prefer that it had a more uniform way of making apps. Now, there is something open source on the next called Compiz, which is an effects type of thing, and it takes advantage of your graphics card to do things like wobbly windows, where when you drag a window around, you know, it jiggles around a little bit. That's just a very satisfying effect.

Like when you switch spaces on the Mac, like, for instance, I forget what the keystroke is—no, I don't have a keystroke on this to do that. But when you do, it has a very plain effect. But if you use Compiz Fusion on Ubuntu, you can make it like a desktop cube, for instance. That's cool. So both of those have great window management, but the applications are worse than Ubuntu.

And then Windows—you always have one desktop. You can't really change where Windows go. It's totally, in my opinion, um, the way things are done—the registry is so messy; you have no idea where any of the files are. You have .exes, so let's just say an application has an image on it. There's no place where that image is going to be, unless you use some kind of installer. It has to be encoded in the .exe, and when you open it, it has to decode the image.

But it's also more lightweight and convenient to move this small .exe around. On Linux, more things are just one-file executables because they don't have xives and images right in them. So that's that. Then, um, there's Chrome OS, which in no way, in my opinion, is a good operating system at all. It's just, in my opinion, it's Google's way of getting people to use their browser.

Because someone at Google must have sat down and thought, "Well, the reason Internet Explorer has so much traction is because really it comes with Windows, and the reason Safari has so much traction is because it comes with Mac." So they decided, "We're going to make an OS that Google Chrome comes with." And now, in my opinion, I also use Safari, because it has a nicer GUI than anything else I've ever used.

The thing is that the people who would be using Chrome are geeks; the people who are probably going to have the Chrome OS are also the same range of geeks. So it's not like they're getting a lot more people on board with this. Now, if they can get netbooks to start running this Chrome OS instead of, like, Windows, which I would like—I don't like Windows on them—then that would be wonderful, and people at least wouldn't be using IE.

So that's Google Chrome OS. Chrome OS just isn't really that much of a multi-purpose big operating system that you want to replace Windows on your computer with. So there's Windows again, and I'll just say that Windows is a very nice OS. Like, it has good memory management; it has a bunch of good OS qualities.

But it doesn't have the look and feel that people are looking for. That's why many people right now are making the transition to Mac, and that's why Apple had such a good year, because people are transitioning, even though there's not that much money left. Then, in my opinion, Mac OS X is the closest to perfect, and I would really, if my brain can run an OS, I don't think my mind would really like—I don't understand enough about the actual brain science to think that it's possible to run an OS.

But if I was a robot and I ran an OS, I would want to run Mac OS X. No, of course, if I was a robot, I couldn't want to run Mac OS X. But, you know, the deal is that I would like—I wish I ran Mac OS X if I had to choose. So Mac OS X really is a good operating system; it's well-rounded, it's tuned, it's nice.

So now it's your turn. Comment on this video or personal message anything and say what the perfect OS for you would be. If you could tell the Apple programmers what to do, what would you tell them to do? Anyway, so thanks for watching, my kids; and the one, subscribe, and goodbye.