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That's what confuses me a lot. What is the reason to get Mac with Darwin and purchase a secondary laptop with any type of Linux on it? Come on, you are shreddi

by white 18y ago

That's what confuses me a lot. What is the reason to get Mac with Darwin and purchase a secondary laptop with any type of Linux on it? Come on, you are shredding your money away. ;) But this is a pretty common behavior and frequently asked question over here. Is it a try to look more "geeky"? A lot of people motivate that Linux has got an apt and this makes it a hacker friendly platform. I've started using FreeBSD from 2-RELEASE (sorry, don't remember the numbers). The ports sucked there so much, that you can't even imagine now. But it still was a great platform to develop and to use. The Darwin' port system is a very nice tool. They're really similar to BSD ports and they are powerful enough. You just never learned how to use it. Do you still miss apt? Get Fink (http://www.finkproject.org http://www.finkproject.org). What can be easier? People, don't get me wrong, I'm not about a holy war. But I'm really confused why guys over here want to have two laptops running Unix at the same time. ;)

apu 18y ago
It's not to look more 'geeky.' The difference between apt on ubuntu and fink on mac is not in their interface -- it's the number of packages that are available. I find that just about every package I need is available in ubuntu's repositories, whereas only the very major packages are available on Mac. As mentioned in the original comment by tx, the process of installing a set of libraries/programs on Mac often involves a lot of googling and getting other help, whereas just about everything I've tried on Ubuntu "just works." This is true even for programs that are not in either repository; compiling by hand also usually "just works" on Ubuntu, and I've never had it be that easy on Mac (some weird compile or link error always comes up, which then requires extensive google-fu to fix). Another problem I find is that there seems to be a 'Mac' way of doing things which is different from both linux and unix/bsd methods (e.g. binaries often go into /Library/Framework/... instead of the usual /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, etc.) which causes problems when interfacing with other *nix tools. Finally, an unrelated thing (but one that affects me a lot) is the complete lack of the /proc filesystem. I think BSD/Unix doesn't have this either, so perhaps with your background you won't miss this in any case -- but I grew up on Linux and find /proc to be invaluable. It allows for easy programmatic access to processes using only file I/O, as well as allowing for awesome helper programs like htop.
- white 18y ago
  Well, you are particularly right and if you do such an extensive development for Linux platform, you should use it. As for the things, you can always do it in the way like you want to. ;)

by white 18y ago

apu 18y ago

It's not to look more 'geeky.' The difference between apt on ubuntu and fink on mac is not in their interface -- it's the number of packages that are available. I find that just about every package I need is available in ubuntu's repositories, whereas only the very major packages are available on Mac. As mentioned in the original comment by tx, the process of installing a set of libraries/programs on Mac often involves a lot of googling and getting other help, whereas just about everything I've tried on Ubuntu "just works." This is true even for programs that are not in either repository; compiling by hand also usually "just works" on Ubuntu, and I've never had it be that easy on Mac (some weird compile or link error always comes up, which then requires extensive google-fu to fix). Another problem I find is that there seems to be a 'Mac' way of doing things which is different from both linux and unix/bsd methods (e.g. binaries often go into /Library/Framework/... instead of the usual /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, etc.) which causes problems when interfacing with other *nix tools. Finally, an unrelated thing (but one that affects me a lot) is the complete lack of the /proc filesystem. I think BSD/Unix doesn't have this either, so perhaps with your background you won't miss this in any case -- but I grew up on Linux and find /proc to be invaluable. It allows for easy programmatic access to processes using only file I/O, as well as allowing for awesome helper programs like htop.

white 18y ago
Well, you are particularly right and if you do such an extensive development for Linux platform, you should use it. As for the things, you can always do it in the way like you want to. ;)