Wake-up call: Apple won’t port iTunes to Linux

Apple negates the existence of desktop Linux, although in many countries Linux has a much bigger market share on the desktop than Mac OS (but Apple also often negates the existence/importance of other countries than the US). So it is no surprise that Apple does not port iTunes to Linux.

Either you are misunderstanding the meaning of negates, or you are giving Apple credit for much more power than they have.

I think s/negates/ignores would make the comment both accurate and a reflection of what Questioner meant.

No, Apple does not only ignore desktop Linux but claims that it does not exist. That's what I meant.

I'm sorry if "negate" is not the right word for this but English is not my first language.

In that case the word you really wanted is "denies", as in "denial" pretending something does not exist.

Itunes has one of the worst UI's I've ever used. So, this is good news.

Methinks questioner's first language is either Spanish or Portuguese.

questioner: You may edit your first comment on this thread, better to present your intended meaning.

>Some Ubuntu-ites are deluded about the idea of Apple porting iTunes to Linux:

You mean the same way that linux users were deluded about a port of oracle for linux in 1998? Admittedly, I don't put anything past apple, as they may be even more self destructively stupid than I thought.

All the same, taking the statement of some jaded pr hack as an eternal verity is a misguided philosophy IMHO.

Huge difference between Oracle and iTunes.

Oracle is a server app, and Linux is much more widely accepted as a server platform than desktop.

> Oracle is a server app, and Linux is much more widely accepted as a server platform than desktop.

How short our memories are... the idea of linux in the server room was scoffed at by all the big boys in the 90s - in much the same way some folks scoff at the idea of linux on the desktop now.

It's funny that O'Reilly has all these great books on how to tap into the Unix/BSD side of OS X, going as far as adding the apt-like Fink to bring in a full GNOME or KDE environment, but Apple won't throw the fanboys a bone by porting iTunes to Linux.

Not that I agree with all the power concentrated in the hands of Apple vis a vis the iPod platform, the world of digital music and all that, but at least give everybody the choice whether or not to run iTunes

I simply advise people not to buy the iPod, that advice seems to work about 50% of the time, as those willing to spend the money ignore me and those not willing to spend the money buy a generic MP3 player.

> I simply advise people not to buy the iPod, that advice seems to work about 50% of the time

That's another good point. I've used itunes on my mac, and to be honest I'm not that impressed with it anyway, amarok has it beat in most respects. The key feature of itunes, really, is the access to the music store. But with more and more big players e.g. amazon offering linux friendly, drm-free mp3 downloads, that's becoming less and less of a selling point.

I confess, I fell for the supposed cool factor, and have a couple of ipods. But they are basically sitting on the shelf, these days, becase they are basically a pain to use.

OTOH, the refurbished sandisk portable player I got for $25 is great - I can plug it into my computer, it appears as a usb drive, and I can drag and drop mp3s onto it, and they play, no muss, no fuss. You can also drag and drop mp3s from the sandisk player to your hard drive.

That is of course in sharp contrast to the hoops you have to jump through to get songs onto an ipod, which is is very fussy and has to be done through itunes, or devices which have reverse engineered the protocols used by itunes to encode songs onto the ipod.

Free and open is cheaper, and better IMHO

My wife was given an ipod, so I found gtkpod and it works fine.

No iTunes, I'm not going to worry about it. Between the two of us we have enough CDs to keep us in music for a good long time.

Besides, the anti-competitive behaviour beating the EU will give them if they don't might make them think twice.