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.

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.