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Once I've got homebrew or macports installed, I miss very little. What features do you find it lacking?

chimeracoder 14y ago
Without extreme modifications to the operating system and/or expensive third-party solutions: Disabling the nauseating window-switching animations in Lion (not Snow Leopard), the ability to implement proper tiling window management (think wmii, not Divvy/Shift), focus-follows-mouse, arbitrary remappings of keys, mapping keyboard shortcuts involving the return/enter key, disabling the hardcoded built-in delay in the Caps Lock key, unified package management (homebrew != portage), unified binary package management (pacman != homebrew != portage), launching of 'applications' from a terminal without hunting down the location of the binary[1], renaming Documents/ and Downloads/ to their lowercase equivalents without breaking tab completion (seriously??), getting GNU screen/readline working in Terminal.app without really awkward line wrapping problems, the ability to access basic utilities (like system temperature) from the command line, upgrading system versions of things like the python interpreter (this may have been fixed), changing the resolution and font-size system-wide, scripting arbitrary window behavior in any language (again, think plan9/wmii), mounting /tmp in RAM the way tmpfs in Linux provides... ...that was just off the top of my head, but clearly there's quite a bit. Some of that is because it ships with a version of bash that's on the order of a decade old... but that's a problem in and of itself! [1] Yet another example of how the concept of applications is broken on OSX - installing an application from a .dmg file is a completely different process from installing something via make install on a traditional (*)NIX.
- AlisdairO 14y ago
  Thanks for the response - honestly, though, aside from the inability to switch WM I'm not sure most of those things constitute the killer features of linux, so much as issues that will bug a relatively small number of people (with the caveat that for most people's purposes, I think homebrew or macports are good enough). You might group them under a larger heading of 'configurability'. Other bugbears are solved by third party applications (different terminal app, command line temperature app, etc). It's fair to say that you might reasonably class such configurability as the defining killer feature of linux - and different people will be more or less willing to trade it off in favour of a lower-hassle experience.

Without extreme modifications to the operating system and/or expensive third-party solutions: Disabling the nauseating window-switching animations in Lion (not Snow Leopard), the ability to implement proper tiling window management (think wmii, not Divvy/Shift), focus-follows-mouse, arbitrary remappings of keys, mapping keyboard shortcuts involving the return/enter key, disabling the hardcoded built-in delay in the Caps Lock key, unified package management (homebrew != portage), unified binary package management (pacman != homebrew != portage), launching of 'applications' from a terminal without hunting down the location of the binary[1], renaming Documents/ and Downloads/ to their lowercase equivalents without breaking tab completion (seriously??), getting GNU screen/readline working in Terminal.app without really awkward line wrapping problems, the ability to access basic utilities (like system temperature) from the command line, upgrading system versions of things like the python interpreter (this may have been fixed), changing the resolution and font-size system-wide, scripting arbitrary window behavior in any language (again, think plan9/wmii), mounting /tmp in RAM the way tmpfs in Linux provides... ...that was just off the top of my head, but clearly there's quite a bit. Some of that is because it ships with a version of bash that's on the order of a decade old... but that's a problem in and of itself! [1] Yet another example of how the concept of applications is broken on OSX - installing an application from a .dmg file is a completely different process from installing something via make install on a traditional (*)NIX.

AlisdairO 14y ago
Thanks for the response - honestly, though, aside from the inability to switch WM I'm not sure most of those things constitute the killer features of linux, so much as issues that will bug a relatively small number of people (with the caveat that for most people's purposes, I think homebrew or macports are good enough). You might group them under a larger heading of 'configurability'. Other bugbears are solved by third party applications (different terminal app, command line temperature app, etc). It's fair to say that you might reasonably class such configurability as the defining killer feature of linux - and different people will be more or less willing to trade it off in favour of a lower-hassle experience.