27th September 2003, 10:02 PM
Crap, I did know that SUSE was for Macintosh. I read that just the other day. Doh.
Well, anything Unix will run on Linux, but not back the other way (just like PSX games play on a PS2 or DOS programs work on Windows, but not the other way). And I don't think it would be too easy to port stuff from x86 machines to Apple machines. They are very different in architecture (RISC vs CISC, to begin with) and that's a big deal. It might not matter for very high end stuff like word processors, but there are good word processors for every OS so nobody would really care about porting that. Stuff like games, on the other hand, are very hardware dependent.
Now honestly, I don't know if this is a big deal or not. I've only written graphics stuff for Windows, and that was all high level. I think it's very likely that OpenGL games can be ported pretty easy, because if I remember right OpenGL was designed to be very platform independent. The OpenGL code the programmer writes is pretty standard, and the implementations of OpenGL for the specific machine take care of the details. For example, you tell OpenGL to make a window, and then it figures out how to talk to the OS and make the machine actually do that. In theory, Java is like that, but it doesn't quite work, but that's another story... :)
On the other hand, DirectX is Microsoft, and they make anything easily portable. But, by that same token, I don't think you'd be making games for Linux with DirectX, and that's what we were talking about, so I'm getting off topic again...
Quote:Well Linux and Unix aren't exactly compatible, even though they have a common heritage... but I would think it'd make it easier to bring Linux stuff to OSX since its a Unix-based OS...
Well, anything Unix will run on Linux, but not back the other way (just like PSX games play on a PS2 or DOS programs work on Windows, but not the other way). And I don't think it would be too easy to port stuff from x86 machines to Apple machines. They are very different in architecture (RISC vs CISC, to begin with) and that's a big deal. It might not matter for very high end stuff like word processors, but there are good word processors for every OS so nobody would really care about porting that. Stuff like games, on the other hand, are very hardware dependent.
Now honestly, I don't know if this is a big deal or not. I've only written graphics stuff for Windows, and that was all high level. I think it's very likely that OpenGL games can be ported pretty easy, because if I remember right OpenGL was designed to be very platform independent. The OpenGL code the programmer writes is pretty standard, and the implementations of OpenGL for the specific machine take care of the details. For example, you tell OpenGL to make a window, and then it figures out how to talk to the OS and make the machine actually do that. In theory, Java is like that, but it doesn't quite work, but that's another story... :)
On the other hand, DirectX is Microsoft, and they make anything easily portable. But, by that same token, I don't think you'd be making games for Linux with DirectX, and that's what we were talking about, so I'm getting off topic again...