8 ms·

From Linux to OSX - 1 Year Later

62 points by bozhidar 14y ago

Create 14y ago
perhaps macports is better, but AAPL will f* you over with time, after the honeymoon. And this applies to OSX updates too, even if you fork over the money http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433082 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433082 back to linux. (it has ruby too.)
- ghshephard 14y ago
  The App Store is where you send your not-so-sophisticated computer relative to. In theory, applications there, are less likely to hose your operating system. In practice - lots of stuff that you have to get off of the App Store such as LittleSnitch, Arq, SuperDuper, QuickSilver, Carbon Copy Cloner - basically, anything that needs to plumb into the internals of the OS, or break outside the sandbox, will have to be purchased from a third party - and run the (greater) risk, of course, of doing damage to your OS.
jsolson 14y ago
Interesting. I actually love the Command key. I see it as a Control key for GUI operations, leaving my actual Control key free for doing things in my Terminal. This is actually a big sticking point when it comes to trying to work on Linux workstations like we have at work -- GUI and console stuff end up munged under the same modifier key (and this is harder to change than you'd think, even with a lot of xmodmap work). That said, I've also ditched my Caps Lock key entirely and turned it into a second Control key. Control-A has never seemed difficult to me, at least with this arrangement, but I'm not a home row typist (or an Emacs user -- I just use the Emacs bindings in text boxes and terminals). Otherwise this more or less mirrors my experience, although mine was ~7 years ago (so the Linux desktop environment was even less mature at the time). I haven't found a need to shop around for as many alternative applications. In particular, you can have Terminal.app when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  I never forget that time when I was ssh-ed on some machine and was doing something very urgent, and wanted to copy some text from the terminal to text editor (it was an Ubuntu machine) and accidentally pressed control-c and killed the session. I could've killed someone. IMO, the Command key is one of the best features of a Mac.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    Another vote for "the Command key" (specifically, a modifier key distinct from the Control key on which to put the "more modern" shortcuts like copy, paste, kill window). But then I was on text-mode Linux (and before that, text-mode Unix) for many years. I would understand if someone used to Windows did not like it.
  - jeltz 14y ago
    I agree with your general point. I dislike most things about mac but their extra keys do make sense. But control-c should not kill your session, only the currently running process. Control-d is what kills sessions. If you have no current foreground process the shell just starts a new input line. Still could be real bad obviously if a process is killed.
    - pooriaazimi 14y ago
      You're right. It didn't kill the session, it killed the process (Nutch (a search engine) was at its last stages of computing PageRank for tens of thousands of pages, which takes quite a while).
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - emehrkay 14y ago
    I watch co-workers struggle all day with their windows-based terminals logged into Linux machines. Copy is something like shift+insert or they have to go to edit > copy. So painful
binarycrusader 14y ago
You need to install a giant lame IDE just to get a bunch of command line development tools? That hasn't been true since earlier this year. If you login to developer.apple.com, you can download the "Command Line Tools for XCode" from here: https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action No "lame" IDE required. But you might think that IDE is not so lame the first time you use Instruments...
- visionscaper 14y ago
  To add to that: I think XCode is the most powerfull IDE I've ever used when it comes to coding c/c++/objective-c.
  - dagw 14y ago
    I have a macbook air and have some projects where I write cross platform C and C++ libraries (Linux/OS X/Windows via mingw), currently using Makefiles and a text editor. I use and like IDEs when programming python, C++ on Windows and javascript and certainly wouldn't mind a powerful C IDE. Can XCode help in this case or do you have to basically be writing Mac/iOS apps to access that power? Also can XCode work nicely with Makefiles or do I have to buy into a special platform specific build system (again a problem with the whole cross platform thing)?
    - niclupien 14y ago
      "Can XCode help in this case or do you have to basically be writing Mac/iOS apps to access that power?" I'm also very interested to get the answer of this.
fsniper 14y ago
I'm a hardcore Linux user, a sysadmin, developer of some kinds and an humble desktop user. For some IOS projects I have to use an hackintosh. The experience is - in one word - disgusting. It lacks common denominator keyboard shortcuts and keyboard bindings. It lacks sane default simple applications like a decent terminal emulator. ( Yes Windows lacks is too). unavailability of a great package manager - all of us knows it, homebrew or macports doesn't cut it - makes me vomit. Unfamiliar key bindings makes me think twice or thrice before typing , "Which key should I use for this? Apple or Option? How can I skip to end of line? Why I'm at end of file now?" Also some desktop choices are not ok for my liking; switching to full height windows instead of full screen windows with the maximize button? Why on earth I would opt-in for loosing screen real estate? So many details. Most of the time I can't help myself to stop restarting into Linux. I get slower and distracted. I have to install Mozilla Stack (Thunderbird and Firefox). This may be only me but, I hate OsX. And I'm not starting on the "wanna be walled garden-ness."
- seiji 14y ago
  decent terminal emulator. -- lie. makes me vomit. -- visit your local physician. Unfamiliar key bindings -- "Unfamiliar" by definition = "I don't know it" which isn't the OS's problem. You've gotta admit Command-C for copy being different than Control-C is brilliant. switching to full height windows -- it's not a maximize button, it's an "optimal size" button. If your content is 500px wide, you don't need a 1000px wide window full of white space. may be only me -- I'm pretty sure it is (check their stock).
  - fsniper 14y ago
    Terminal as a decent terminal emulator? I believe you are referring to iTerm2 but that's not the default. unfamiliar key bindings, look for any other keyboard except OsX ones and show me the apple or the option or the command keys then I will back. For the "Optimal Size button", the underlying operation does not account for the contents width, it only accounts for the desktop height. The world is not running on OsX or Apple hardware. They have a decent userbase but not the whole computer users are using one.
doktrin 14y ago
>> iTerm2 is the ultimate terminal emulator. It alone warrants the purchase of a Mac. This is quite a strong statement and caught me a little off guard. What particular features does iterm2 offer that make it so stellar? I'm genuinely curious, as I haven't ever felt the burning need for a "better" terminal emulator on OSX (or Linux for that matter).
- ghshephard 14y ago
  I'd love to see the run down on that as well. I spend 8-10 hours a day in Terminal.app, usually with 15-20 console tabs open, and I've certainly used iTerm2 for a few weeks, just to get a sense of what I'm missing - but I've always come back to Terminal.app. I will agree, though, that the Terminal environment on the Macintosh singlehandedly causes me to use the OS X environment instead of windows - and this is after using SecureCRT/Putty for 6-7 years - so it's clearly not a case of "You love what you are used to."
- tiziano88 14y ago
  From what I remember, the default terminal emulator on OSX does not even allow customising the color palette! I was able to only change the foreground and background color, and forced to stick to one of the predefined themes for the rest. On the other hand, I doubt iterm2 can achieve the flexibility and customisability of urxvt, which for me is still the #1 terminal emulator. Just my two cents to add to the discussion :)
  - jsolson 14y ago
    > From what I remember, the default terminal emulator on OSX does not even allow customising the color palette! For what it's worth, at least in Mountain Lion you can change the ANSI palette in Terminal.app. That said, it would never have occurred to me that this is something someone might want to do :).
    - pooriaazimi 14y ago
      Come on. The default "blue" color is ridiculously ugly. I always thought of it as a punishment for those who want to mess with OS X. Compare that disgusting color palette with a sane one: https://github.com/pstadler/optometrist https://github.com/pstadler/optometrist
zobzu 14y ago
What annoys me about OSX is the whole "copy app to install" "please wait while 500 megs are being copied". Oh hi non-shared libraries. I also don't see what's so great about iTerm2, some lights would be interesting. Otherwise I'll claim Konsole is the best termminal emulator in the world, bare none just like that too :) Finally I do agree that OSX gets Spotlight right. The Linux look alikes for this feature plain sucks. But that's probably the only thing I can see.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  > What annoys me about OSX is the whole "copy app to install" As opposed to "press a button (or 30) to copy/install"?
  - djacobs 14y ago
    No -- as opposed to pacman -S package (or whatever his former distro used). Having come to Linux from OS X, I agree that OS X installations are pretty inferior to Linux's.
    - ricardobeat 14y ago
      OSX does have homebrew (or macports if you're so inclined), which IMO is better than the usual package manager in a linux distro; it doesn't litter the disk with init scripts or config files, you always know where things are being installed to. Copy to install is only for GUI apps.
      - chimeracoder 14y ago
        > Copy to install is only for GUI apps. That's the problem - you have two completely different installation methods, neither one of which is particularly UNIX-y, and neither of which is capable of talking to the other in a reliable manner. > IMO is better than the usual package manager in a linux distro It's incapable of handling binary installations, which is remarkable considering the hardware variation is far less than there is for Linux, it installs to /usr/local, it doesn't integrate well with language-specific package management tools, and it can't update system files. > it doesn't litter the disk with init scripts or config files I've never once had this problem with Linux; the man pages for any Linux package manager should provide a straightforward way of figuring out which package own which files. > you always know where things are being installed to. Because they're not installed to the right place. I can't count the number of times an OS X package has told me that I need to add such-and-such folder to my $PATH. Hint: if you're requiring me to change my $PATH so that your installed file works, you're not installing it properly.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
Regarding the Control key - you can swap that with the absolutely useless "Caps Lock" key: http://thehelpfulhacker.net/2012/02/15/killing-caps-lock/ http://thehelpfulhacker.net/2012/02/15/killing-caps-lock/ Now you can do CapsLock-a, CapsLock-e, etc. all day, which is much easier.
16s 14y ago
I value free, open source software more than convenience. For this reason, I will not use OSX or any other non-free operating system no matter how convenient they may be to use. That convenience comes at a great cost that I am not willing to pay.
- hollerith 14y ago
  A noble, socially-responsible choice. Kudos!
  - jshen 14y ago
    Sorry, I just don't see it that way. Don't get me wrong, I prefer open source, all else being equal, but software is a tool for me to achieve some other goal. If paying someone for proprietary software allows me to more quickly or cheaply achieve my real goal, then that's great. What exactly is irresponsible about that? What exactly is ignoble about that?
    - prawks 14y ago
      I think this mostly comes down to things like vendor lock-in. Yes, the tool enables you to more effectively do something, but at the cost of certain freedoms to you. For instance, I can buy a hammer because it will make it much easier to drive nails than without one, but the handle is too long. So I can saw the end off to suit my purposes. You can't with proprietary software. Also, don't make the mistake that free == libre. It's the fact that you're paying for proprietary software, not that your paying for it.
    - vacri 14y ago
      You're trading short-term convenience for long-term flexibility.
    - hollerith 14y ago
      Although only about 1 percent of the computer-using population chooses to run Linux, the competition provided by Linux has had a positive effect on proprietary OSes, which benefits computer users who will never run Linux. One example of this beneficial effect is the appearance of the netbook. Only after netbooks running Linux gained significant market share did Microsoft consent to license Windows to netbook makers at a price that made any sort of sense given the low retail price of the netbook. If Linux has not been an option for the early netbook makers, it is likely that hardware makers would never have been able to persuade Microsoft or Apple to consent to allow the product category to be created in the first place. An argument can also be made that without at least a small fraction of computer users running Linux on their desktops, Linux would not have been able to capture the hearts and minds of corporate decision-makers with the result that Linux use on corporate servers might not have exploded the way it did in the late 1990s and first years of the 2000s. Certainly, Linux activists claiming to understand the thinking processes of corporate execs were saying at the time (late 1990s) that Linux needs desktop users in order to be taken seriously by mostly-Windows-desktop-using corporate execs and IT managers. I will concede that at least some people (particularly, perfectionistic people like me or people who are easily annoyed) by will waste less time learning how to admin their machine if they run OS X than if they run Linux. And I will concede that the time and effort of these people would probably result in more social good if it were spent earning money and donating that money to a philanthropy than if it were spend learning how to adminning a Linux box. But that does not detract from the fact that if all you know about a person is that they run Linux, they're doing more "expected good" (a statistical term) for the world than someone who all you know about them is that they are a computer user or an OS X user.
blinkingled 14y ago
Within the last year I have moved my work desktop (iMac) to Windows - RDP(actually Remmina/FreeRDP are looking good on Linux recently), VPN etc. just works better there - and development laptop (MBP) to Linux. More and more as Linux matures and OS X gets buggier/fancier, I don't see the need to use OS X. I am running KUbuntu 12.10 beta on my 2010 MBP and it is pretty pleasant to work with - boots fast, nothing crashes, wi-fi connects and stays so, suspend resume works, no proprietary drivers needed. I did have to do some little hackery to do an EFI install and disable the Nvidia crap and that gives me very good battery life. To get me to stick to OS X - Apple needs to do significantly better. Each release gives me new headaches and no features I need - bad battery life, Wi-Fi issues, graphics glitches - I can at least try to fix those with Linux.
ConstantineXVI 14y ago
Alfred[0] has to be one of the most valuable (as far as $/usefulness) pieces of software I've ever bought. Besides the Spotlight-style file/app search, can also manipulate files/dirs, does pasteboard history[1], and one-shot terminal commands; without having to drop whatever I'm doing for another window. [0] http://www.alfredapp.com/ http://www.alfredapp.com/ [1] not part of Alfred, but pbcopy/pbpaste in the terminal are your friends.
- prophetjohn 14y ago
  You can also use it for math expressions, type in URLs to quickly open them, search Google and Wikipedia. It's completely changed the way I compute. The only time I see the app tray anymore is when I accidentally make it spring up from the bottom with my mouse.
hollerith 14y ago
I turned Spotlight indexing off on my Lion install to stop regular bouts of unresponsiveness on my 2011 Mac mini (with hard drive, not SSD).
- adlpz 14y ago
  Is your hard drive almost full? I've found that when drive space is running very low, OSX deletes some of Spotlight's cache, probably to make sure there's space for hibernation and swap. When it gets back enough space, it rebuilds the cache again. The problem is that if you are constantly orbiting a certain point of fullness, it goes crazy and keeps deleting and rebuilding all the time, causing slowdowns.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    47% of capacity with 248 gigs free.
azakai 14y ago
..and you've swapped from using an open OS to buying an OS from a company that fires patent lawsuits left and right. You've also bought that company's hardware. I grant you it's convenient in many ways to use OS X, but supporting companies that commit patent mayhem is not good for our industry. (Yes, yes, I know the competition isn't clean either, blah blah. But you switched from Linux.)
sjtrny 14y ago
Sorry, how did this get so many points? Most of it is rubbish. All I hear is "Wah wah wah I like the control key, I don't understand the command key wah wah". And some of it is factually incorrect.
taylodl 14y ago
OSX is good for developers with families. The wife and kids are happy and you're pretty happy too. Win-win all the way around.
conradev 14y ago
> Programs like launchctl (for instance) are not exactly fun to work with, but they do get the job done. One thing I like about launchd is that on OS X, there is one standard way to launch daemons. On Linux, there are a thousand ways to launch daemons. launchd also has a bunch of features, one of which is to start services on demand, upon connection to a socket, something Ubuntu hasn't had until the latest 12.04 (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man8/upstart-socket-bridge.8.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man8/upstart-socke...). I do agree, however, that OS X shouldn't be used for anything more than a desktop workstation.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  > On Linux, there are a thousand ways to launch daemons. Depends on your distro, really - Arch keep things fairly centralized and simple. I never really got the hang of Ubuntu, though, by comparison.
  - donniezazen 14y ago
    I really liked BSD style rc.d and now Arch and other distros are moving to systemd but Ubuntu won't ship it in 12.10.
- lucian1900 14y ago
  launchd isn't bad, but it lacks good admin tools. Even upstart has better admin tools than launchd, and systemd has the best you could ask for.
lorenzfx 14y ago
What is so great about the OS X Desktop? (Honest question; As a long term Mac OS (X) user who switched to Linux about a year ago I am really wondering...) Also, has a heavy computer user I mainly switched to Linux/FreeBSD because of the much improved customization possibilities. While the default OS X experience might be superior to GNOME/KDE, I now get a lot of things done a lot faster since I could make my machine exactly fit my needs. I really cannot imagine why any (not platform depending) programmer would ditch Linux for OS X just because the defaults work better.

62 points by bozhidar 14y ago

perhaps macports is better, but AAPL will f* you over with time, after the honeymoon. And this applies to OSX updates too, even if you fork over the money http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433082 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433082 back to linux. (it has ruby too.)

ghshephard 14y ago
The App Store is where you send your not-so-sophisticated computer relative to. In theory, applications there, are less likely to hose your operating system. In practice - lots of stuff that you have to get off of the App Store such as LittleSnitch, Arq, SuperDuper, QuickSilver, Carbon Copy Cloner - basically, anything that needs to plumb into the internals of the OS, or break outside the sandbox, will have to be purchased from a third party - and run the (greater) risk, of course, of doing damage to your OS.

jsolson 14y ago

Interesting. I actually love the Command key. I see it as a Control key for GUI operations, leaving my actual Control key free for doing things in my Terminal. This is actually a big sticking point when it comes to trying to work on Linux workstations like we have at work -- GUI and console stuff end up munged under the same modifier key (and this is harder to change than you'd think, even with a lot of xmodmap work). That said, I've also ditched my Caps Lock key entirely and turned it into a second Control key. Control-A has never seemed difficult to me, at least with this arrangement, but I'm not a home row typist (or an Emacs user -- I just use the Emacs bindings in text boxes and terminals). Otherwise this more or less mirrors my experience, although mine was ~7 years ago (so the Linux desktop environment was even less mature at the time). I haven't found a need to shop around for as many alternative applications. In particular, you can have Terminal.app when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

pooriaazimi 14y ago
I never forget that time when I was ssh-ed on some machine and was doing something very urgent, and wanted to copy some text from the terminal to text editor (it was an Ubuntu machine) and accidentally pressed control-c and killed the session. I could've killed someone. IMO, the Command key is one of the best features of a Mac.
- hollerith 14y ago
  Another vote for "the Command key" (specifically, a modifier key distinct from the Control key on which to put the "more modern" shortcuts like copy, paste, kill window). But then I was on text-mode Linux (and before that, text-mode Unix) for many years. I would understand if someone used to Windows did not like it.
- jeltz 14y ago
  I agree with your general point. I dislike most things about mac but their extra keys do make sense. But control-c should not kill your session, only the currently running process. Control-d is what kills sessions. If you have no current foreground process the shell just starts a new input line. Still could be real bad obviously if a process is killed.
  - pooriaazimi 14y ago
    You're right. It didn't kill the session, it killed the process (Nutch (a search engine) was at its last stages of computing PageRank for tens of thousands of pages, which takes quite a while).
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- emehrkay 14y ago
  I watch co-workers struggle all day with their windows-based terminals logged into Linux machines. Copy is something like shift+insert or they have to go to edit > copy. So painful

binarycrusader 14y ago

You need to install a giant lame IDE just to get a bunch of command line development tools? That hasn't been true since earlier this year. If you login to developer.apple.com, you can download the "Command Line Tools for XCode" from here: https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action No "lame" IDE required. But you might think that IDE is not so lame the first time you use Instruments...

visionscaper 14y ago
To add to that: I think XCode is the most powerfull IDE I've ever used when it comes to coding c/c++/objective-c.
- dagw 14y ago
  I have a macbook air and have some projects where I write cross platform C and C++ libraries (Linux/OS X/Windows via mingw), currently using Makefiles and a text editor. I use and like IDEs when programming python, C++ on Windows and javascript and certainly wouldn't mind a powerful C IDE. Can XCode help in this case or do you have to basically be writing Mac/iOS apps to access that power? Also can XCode work nicely with Makefiles or do I have to buy into a special platform specific build system (again a problem with the whole cross platform thing)?
  - niclupien 14y ago
    "Can XCode help in this case or do you have to basically be writing Mac/iOS apps to access that power?" I'm also very interested to get the answer of this.

fsniper 14y ago

I'm a hardcore Linux user, a sysadmin, developer of some kinds and an humble desktop user. For some IOS projects I have to use an hackintosh. The experience is - in one word - disgusting. It lacks common denominator keyboard shortcuts and keyboard bindings. It lacks sane default simple applications like a decent terminal emulator. ( Yes Windows lacks is too). unavailability of a great package manager - all of us knows it, homebrew or macports doesn't cut it - makes me vomit. Unfamiliar key bindings makes me think twice or thrice before typing , "Which key should I use for this? Apple or Option? How can I skip to end of line? Why I'm at end of file now?" Also some desktop choices are not ok for my liking; switching to full height windows instead of full screen windows with the maximize button? Why on earth I would opt-in for loosing screen real estate? So many details. Most of the time I can't help myself to stop restarting into Linux. I get slower and distracted. I have to install Mozilla Stack (Thunderbird and Firefox). This may be only me but, I hate OsX. And I'm not starting on the "wanna be walled garden-ness."

seiji 14y ago
decent terminal emulator. -- lie. makes me vomit. -- visit your local physician. Unfamiliar key bindings -- "Unfamiliar" by definition = "I don't know it" which isn't the OS's problem. You've gotta admit Command-C for copy being different than Control-C is brilliant. switching to full height windows -- it's not a maximize button, it's an "optimal size" button. If your content is 500px wide, you don't need a 1000px wide window full of white space. may be only me -- I'm pretty sure it is (check their stock).
- fsniper 14y ago
  Terminal as a decent terminal emulator? I believe you are referring to iTerm2 but that's not the default. unfamiliar key bindings, look for any other keyboard except OsX ones and show me the apple or the option or the command keys then I will back. For the "Optimal Size button", the underlying operation does not account for the contents width, it only accounts for the desktop height. The world is not running on OsX or Apple hardware. They have a decent userbase but not the whole computer users are using one.

doktrin 14y ago

>> iTerm2 is the ultimate terminal emulator. It alone warrants the purchase of a Mac. This is quite a strong statement and caught me a little off guard. What particular features does iterm2 offer that make it so stellar? I'm genuinely curious, as I haven't ever felt the burning need for a "better" terminal emulator on OSX (or Linux for that matter).

ghshephard 14y ago
I'd love to see the run down on that as well. I spend 8-10 hours a day in Terminal.app, usually with 15-20 console tabs open, and I've certainly used iTerm2 for a few weeks, just to get a sense of what I'm missing - but I've always come back to Terminal.app. I will agree, though, that the Terminal environment on the Macintosh singlehandedly causes me to use the OS X environment instead of windows - and this is after using SecureCRT/Putty for 6-7 years - so it's clearly not a case of "You love what you are used to."
tiziano88 14y ago
From what I remember, the default terminal emulator on OSX does not even allow customising the color palette! I was able to only change the foreground and background color, and forced to stick to one of the predefined themes for the rest. On the other hand, I doubt iterm2 can achieve the flexibility and customisability of urxvt, which for me is still the #1 terminal emulator. Just my two cents to add to the discussion :)
- jsolson 14y ago
  > From what I remember, the default terminal emulator on OSX does not even allow customising the color palette! For what it's worth, at least in Mountain Lion you can change the ANSI palette in Terminal.app. That said, it would never have occurred to me that this is something someone might want to do :).
  - pooriaazimi 14y ago
    Come on. The default "blue" color is ridiculously ugly. I always thought of it as a punishment for those who want to mess with OS X. Compare that disgusting color palette with a sane one: https://github.com/pstadler/optometrist https://github.com/pstadler/optometrist

zobzu 14y ago

What annoys me about OSX is the whole "copy app to install" "please wait while 500 megs are being copied". Oh hi non-shared libraries. I also don't see what's so great about iTerm2, some lights would be interesting. Otherwise I'll claim Konsole is the best termminal emulator in the world, bare none just like that too :) Finally I do agree that OSX gets Spotlight right. The Linux look alikes for this feature plain sucks. But that's probably the only thing I can see.

ricardobeat 14y ago
> What annoys me about OSX is the whole "copy app to install" As opposed to "press a button (or 30) to copy/install"?
- djacobs 14y ago
  No -- as opposed to pacman -S package (or whatever his former distro used). Having come to Linux from OS X, I agree that OS X installations are pretty inferior to Linux's.
  - ricardobeat 14y ago
    OSX does have homebrew (or macports if you're so inclined), which IMO is better than the usual package manager in a linux distro; it doesn't litter the disk with init scripts or config files, you always know where things are being installed to. Copy to install is only for GUI apps.
    - chimeracoder 14y ago
      > Copy to install is only for GUI apps. That's the problem - you have two completely different installation methods, neither one of which is particularly UNIX-y, and neither of which is capable of talking to the other in a reliable manner. > IMO is better than the usual package manager in a linux distro It's incapable of handling binary installations, which is remarkable considering the hardware variation is far less than there is for Linux, it installs to /usr/local, it doesn't integrate well with language-specific package management tools, and it can't update system files. > it doesn't litter the disk with init scripts or config files I've never once had this problem with Linux; the man pages for any Linux package manager should provide a straightforward way of figuring out which package own which files. > you always know where things are being installed to. Because they're not installed to the right place. I can't count the number of times an OS X package has told me that I need to add such-and-such folder to my $PATH. Hint: if you're requiring me to change my $PATH so that your installed file works, you're not installing it properly.

pooriaazimi 14y ago

Regarding the Control key - you can swap that with the absolutely useless "Caps Lock" key: http://thehelpfulhacker.net/2012/02/15/killing-caps-lock/ http://thehelpfulhacker.net/2012/02/15/killing-caps-lock/ Now you can do CapsLock-a, CapsLock-e, etc. all day, which is much easier.

16s 14y ago

I value free, open source software more than convenience. For this reason, I will not use OSX or any other non-free operating system no matter how convenient they may be to use. That convenience comes at a great cost that I am not willing to pay.

hollerith 14y ago
A noble, socially-responsible choice. Kudos!
- jshen 14y ago
  Sorry, I just don't see it that way. Don't get me wrong, I prefer open source, all else being equal, but software is a tool for me to achieve some other goal. If paying someone for proprietary software allows me to more quickly or cheaply achieve my real goal, then that's great. What exactly is irresponsible about that? What exactly is ignoble about that?
  - prawks 14y ago
    I think this mostly comes down to things like vendor lock-in. Yes, the tool enables you to more effectively do something, but at the cost of certain freedoms to you. For instance, I can buy a hammer because it will make it much easier to drive nails than without one, but the handle is too long. So I can saw the end off to suit my purposes. You can't with proprietary software. Also, don't make the mistake that free == libre. It's the fact that you're paying for proprietary software, not that your paying for it.
  - vacri 14y ago
    You're trading short-term convenience for long-term flexibility.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    Although only about 1 percent of the computer-using population chooses to run Linux, the competition provided by Linux has had a positive effect on proprietary OSes, which benefits computer users who will never run Linux. One example of this beneficial effect is the appearance of the netbook. Only after netbooks running Linux gained significant market share did Microsoft consent to license Windows to netbook makers at a price that made any sort of sense given the low retail price of the netbook. If Linux has not been an option for the early netbook makers, it is likely that hardware makers would never have been able to persuade Microsoft or Apple to consent to allow the product category to be created in the first place. An argument can also be made that without at least a small fraction of computer users running Linux on their desktops, Linux would not have been able to capture the hearts and minds of corporate decision-makers with the result that Linux use on corporate servers might not have exploded the way it did in the late 1990s and first years of the 2000s. Certainly, Linux activists claiming to understand the thinking processes of corporate execs were saying at the time (late 1990s) that Linux needs desktop users in order to be taken seriously by mostly-Windows-desktop-using corporate execs and IT managers. I will concede that at least some people (particularly, perfectionistic people like me or people who are easily annoyed) by will waste less time learning how to admin their machine if they run OS X than if they run Linux. And I will concede that the time and effort of these people would probably result in more social good if it were spent earning money and donating that money to a philanthropy than if it were spend learning how to adminning a Linux box. But that does not detract from the fact that if all you know about a person is that they run Linux, they're doing more "expected good" (a statistical term) for the world than someone who all you know about them is that they are a computer user or an OS X user.

blinkingled 14y ago

Within the last year I have moved my work desktop (iMac) to Windows - RDP(actually Remmina/FreeRDP are looking good on Linux recently), VPN etc. just works better there - and development laptop (MBP) to Linux. More and more as Linux matures and OS X gets buggier/fancier, I don't see the need to use OS X. I am running KUbuntu 12.10 beta on my 2010 MBP and it is pretty pleasant to work with - boots fast, nothing crashes, wi-fi connects and stays so, suspend resume works, no proprietary drivers needed. I did have to do some little hackery to do an EFI install and disable the Nvidia crap and that gives me very good battery life. To get me to stick to OS X - Apple needs to do significantly better. Each release gives me new headaches and no features I need - bad battery life, Wi-Fi issues, graphics glitches - I can at least try to fix those with Linux.

ConstantineXVI 14y ago

Alfred[0] has to be one of the most valuable (as far as $/usefulness) pieces of software I've ever bought. Besides the Spotlight-style file/app search, can also manipulate files/dirs, does pasteboard history[1], and one-shot terminal commands; without having to drop whatever I'm doing for another window. [0] http://www.alfredapp.com/ http://www.alfredapp.com/ [1] not part of Alfred, but pbcopy/pbpaste in the terminal are your friends.

prophetjohn 14y ago
You can also use it for math expressions, type in URLs to quickly open them, search Google and Wikipedia. It's completely changed the way I compute. The only time I see the app tray anymore is when I accidentally make it spring up from the bottom with my mouse.

hollerith 14y ago

I turned Spotlight indexing off on my Lion install to stop regular bouts of unresponsiveness on my 2011 Mac mini (with hard drive, not SSD).

adlpz 14y ago
Is your hard drive almost full? I've found that when drive space is running very low, OSX deletes some of Spotlight's cache, probably to make sure there's space for hibernation and swap. When it gets back enough space, it rebuilds the cache again. The problem is that if you are constantly orbiting a certain point of fullness, it goes crazy and keeps deleting and rebuilding all the time, causing slowdowns.
- hollerith 14y ago
  47% of capacity with 248 gigs free.

azakai 14y ago

..and you've swapped from using an open OS to buying an OS from a company that fires patent lawsuits left and right. You've also bought that company's hardware. I grant you it's convenient in many ways to use OS X, but supporting companies that commit patent mayhem is not good for our industry. (Yes, yes, I know the competition isn't clean either, blah blah. But you switched from Linux.)

sjtrny 14y ago

Sorry, how did this get so many points? Most of it is rubbish. All I hear is "Wah wah wah I like the control key, I don't understand the command key wah wah". And some of it is factually incorrect.

taylodl 14y ago

OSX is good for developers with families. The wife and kids are happy and you're pretty happy too. Win-win all the way around.

conradev 14y ago

> Programs like launchctl (for instance) are not exactly fun to work with, but they do get the job done. One thing I like about launchd is that on OS X, there is one standard way to launch daemons. On Linux, there are a thousand ways to launch daemons. launchd also has a bunch of features, one of which is to start services on demand, upon connection to a socket, something Ubuntu hasn't had until the latest 12.04 (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man8/upstart-socket-bridge.8.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man8/upstart-socke...). I do agree, however, that OS X shouldn't be used for anything more than a desktop workstation.

chimeracoder 14y ago
> On Linux, there are a thousand ways to launch daemons. Depends on your distro, really - Arch keep things fairly centralized and simple. I never really got the hang of Ubuntu, though, by comparison.
- donniezazen 14y ago
  I really liked BSD style rc.d and now Arch and other distros are moving to systemd but Ubuntu won't ship it in 12.10.
lucian1900 14y ago
launchd isn't bad, but it lacks good admin tools. Even upstart has better admin tools than launchd, and systemd has the best you could ask for.

lorenzfx 14y ago

What is so great about the OS X Desktop? (Honest question; As a long term Mac OS (X) user who switched to Linux about a year ago I am really wondering...) Also, has a heavy computer user I mainly switched to Linux/FreeBSD because of the much improved customization possibilities. While the default OS X experience might be superior to GNOME/KDE, I now get a lot of things done a lot faster since I could make my machine exactly fit my needs. I really cannot imagine why any (not platform depending) programmer would ditch Linux for OS X just because the defaults work better.