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"OS X gives you plenty of control, it just hides most of it in the terminal. For almost every use case, this is great, because for the 1 or 2 things you actuall

"OS X gives you plenty of control, it just hides most of it in the terminal. For almost every use case, this is great, because for the 1 or 2 things you actually want to do, Apple has made it drop dead simple. The rest of the time, if you really need to do something complex, there's usually a way to do it via the terminal." I agree that for some tasks, OS X is drop dead simple. The problem is that the other complex tasks don't involve just using the terminal. I have no problem using the terminal, and in fact usually prefer it to the GUI. It isn't that OS X is different from Linux, but that it's different from the Unix way. Program configuration files aren't in the places they're supposed to be, and in some cases the programs don't respect what's in those configuration files. The example I can think of off the top of my head is TFTP. I first learned Unix on OS X. In the earlier versions, it was great. Panther was very much like a traditional Unix but with a nice GUI. Tiger went a little further away, but was still OK. Leopard, however, is where I really started having problems, and is what caused me to move to Linux.

mrsteveman1 19y ago
You should clarify what you mean when you say leopard moved away from the unix way moreso than tiger, it is apparently UNIX 03 compliant. What is quite clear is that Apple isn't trying to make just another Unix, it is clearly their own operating system, it just happens to conform to the Unix 03 spec. It's also quite clear they are willing to break from the Unix way to accomplish something they want to do.
- boucher 19y ago
  You could argue that in many cases they have actively tried to improve the UNIX way of doing things, which hasn't really taken hold with anyone outside of Apple (for example, launchd).
  - thwarted 19y ago
    You could also argue that launchd, specifically, is a divorce from the UNIX way of doing things. init starts processes based on system events, xinetd starts processes based on network requests and cron starts processes based on time. launchd is a monolithic solution that is decidedly unUNIXy, however cool and attractive a centralized solution may be. It would be nice if these different programs had a common file format, but their file formats are reasonably optimized for the kinds of things they handling. One could stick a unified "edit process starting/stopping" GUI on top of init, cron, xinetd, etc and you'd end up with some of that attractiveness.

mrsteveman1 19y ago

You should clarify what you mean when you say leopard moved away from the unix way moreso than tiger, it is apparently UNIX 03 compliant. What is quite clear is that Apple isn't trying to make just another Unix, it is clearly their own operating system, it just happens to conform to the Unix 03 spec. It's also quite clear they are willing to break from the Unix way to accomplish something they want to do.

boucher 19y ago
You could argue that in many cases they have actively tried to improve the UNIX way of doing things, which hasn't really taken hold with anyone outside of Apple (for example, launchd).
- thwarted 19y ago
  You could also argue that launchd, specifically, is a divorce from the UNIX way of doing things. init starts processes based on system events, xinetd starts processes based on network requests and cron starts processes based on time. launchd is a monolithic solution that is decidedly unUNIXy, however cool and attractive a centralized solution may be. It would be nice if these different programs had a common file format, but their file formats are reasonably optimized for the kinds of things they handling. One could stick a unified "edit process starting/stopping" GUI on top of init, cron, xinetd, etc and you'd end up with some of that attractiveness.