5 ms·

something i'm curious about - for linux fans who have made the switch, is osx an "acceptable unix"? people keep trumpeting the fact that it combines the best of

by zem 14y ago

something i'm curious about - for linux fans who have made the switch, is osx an "acceptable unix"? people keep trumpeting the fact that it combines the best of both worlds, a seamless gui experience atop a full-fledged posix core complete with a bash prompt you can drop down to as easily as you can in linux, but philosophically it seems that for the little things like package management, command line utilities, etc., the experience is closer to cygwin than it is to linux proper - you can do it, sure, but it will involve falling back to a third-party ecosystem.

iwejfweoifjweif 14y ago
Its not close to GNU tools but its very true to Unix tools. Many of the tools have the same options (if not the same man pages) as their Free/Open/NetBSD versions.
- zem 14y ago
  ah - that's an interesting distinction. i guess linux has gotten me subconsciously used to thinking of the gnu tools as the current unix standard.
  - tingletech 14y ago
    but (by recursive definition) GNU is Not Unix
dguaraglia 14y ago
Oh, no, the experience is way better than Cygwin. Cygwin feels exactly like what it is a: bolt-on trying to emulate features and filesystem structures of a completely alien OS. It feels clunky, what you see when you do 'ls' at the 'root' of your filesystem is completely different to what you see when you 'dir' (or use the Windows Explorer.) OS X is a completely different story. If you ever used BSD before, you know how it feels 'almost' like linux, barring a few differences. It's the same with OS X. Besides package management (which is greatly alleviated by Homebrew) and so-so integration of X applications, I can't say I miss my Ubuntu laptop at all.
- smosher 14y ago
  My Cygwin experience has been quite authentic actually. But I was cheating, I'd use it for SSH and rxvt in combination with xming to establish a forwarded X session. (And x-mouse and alt-drag for that nearly authentic mouse behaviour.) Desperate times, desperate measures.
tomwalsham 14y ago
These sorts of issues (primarily related to auxiliary functions in grep, sed, etc) can cause portability issues when developing locally for linux systems, but no worse thanks, say, writing for fedora on an Ubuntu box. Brew is okay but a bit sparse. For me I mostly miss Gnome
- lukeschlather 14y ago
  I think it's clear it's going to get a lot worse with Apple purging GNU utils.
- Evbn 14y ago
  It is worse. Fedora is Linux. OS X is BSD.
ishbits 14y ago
I write a lot if code targeting Linux on OSX. Mostly Java (with some JNI) and C. Sure there are some bits that have to be different. Perhaps 5%? But once that is abstracted away I can do almost all work in OSX then build on Linux. Of course a decade of writing portable C across BSD and Linux systems might make this a bit easier for me than others. And it's worth it to me to avoid the Linux desktop experience (which I did use as my primary desktop from 1996 til about 2 years ago).
mynegation 14y ago
I may be a Linux fan, but there you go: Mac OS X as Unix is inferior to Linux. Package management in Ubuntu is second to none, I have newer version of everything, sane terminal colors and fonts out of the box, I don't have to download monstrosity that is Xcode just to get a damn compiler, compiling some non-mainstream sources may not work out of the box.
- dfc 14y ago
  Package management in Ubuntu is not second to none, it is second to Debian. Dont get me wrong Ubuntu has done a lot of wonderful things, but lets give credit where credit is due...
  - mcpherrinm 14y ago
    I'd actually disagree on this point. Ubuntu has introduced a number of refinements to the dpkg world that have been pretty good. Most useful, in my mind, is their set of tools for working with PPAs. They're much simpler to run than setting up an entire new repository of packages.
    - dfc 14y ago
      Seriously? You think that PPAs and your other unnamed improvements tower over the apt package management system? Without PPAs apt-get would be yet another kludgy package management system? Sure apt-add-repository is a nice time saver but how hard is: echo deb http://repo.net/ unstable main >> /etc/apt/sources.list I think we might be miscommunicating because I can't imagine anyone making this argument. I'm not sure how old you are but I can remember what package management was like on slackware and redhat a decade ago when I switched. Moving to debian was like a scene in a movie when it goes from black and white to full color.
      - philh 14y ago
        Doesn't Ubuntu have apt as well though? Ubuntu's package management may have come from Debian, but that doesn't make it inferior. It sounds to me like you're trying to make a different argument: that Debian's package management was a bigger deal, in some sense, than Ubuntu's incremental improvements on it.

by zem 14y ago

iwejfweoifjweif 14y ago

Its not close to GNU tools but its very true to Unix tools. Many of the tools have the same options (if not the same man pages) as their Free/Open/NetBSD versions.

zem 14y ago
ah - that's an interesting distinction. i guess linux has gotten me subconsciously used to thinking of the gnu tools as the current unix standard.
- tingletech 14y ago
  but (by recursive definition) GNU is Not Unix

dguaraglia 14y ago

Oh, no, the experience is way better than Cygwin. Cygwin feels exactly like what it is a: bolt-on trying to emulate features and filesystem structures of a completely alien OS. It feels clunky, what you see when you do 'ls' at the 'root' of your filesystem is completely different to what you see when you 'dir' (or use the Windows Explorer.) OS X is a completely different story. If you ever used BSD before, you know how it feels 'almost' like linux, barring a few differences. It's the same with OS X. Besides package management (which is greatly alleviated by Homebrew) and so-so integration of X applications, I can't say I miss my Ubuntu laptop at all.

smosher 14y ago
My Cygwin experience has been quite authentic actually. But I was cheating, I'd use it for SSH and rxvt in combination with xming to establish a forwarded X session. (And x-mouse and alt-drag for that nearly authentic mouse behaviour.) Desperate times, desperate measures.

tomwalsham 14y ago

These sorts of issues (primarily related to auxiliary functions in grep, sed, etc) can cause portability issues when developing locally for linux systems, but no worse thanks, say, writing for fedora on an Ubuntu box. Brew is okay but a bit sparse. For me I mostly miss Gnome

lukeschlather 14y ago
I think it's clear it's going to get a lot worse with Apple purging GNU utils.
Evbn 14y ago
It is worse. Fedora is Linux. OS X is BSD.

ishbits 14y ago

I write a lot if code targeting Linux on OSX. Mostly Java (with some JNI) and C. Sure there are some bits that have to be different. Perhaps 5%? But once that is abstracted away I can do almost all work in OSX then build on Linux. Of course a decade of writing portable C across BSD and Linux systems might make this a bit easier for me than others. And it's worth it to me to avoid the Linux desktop experience (which I did use as my primary desktop from 1996 til about 2 years ago).

mynegation 14y ago

I may be a Linux fan, but there you go: Mac OS X as Unix is inferior to Linux. Package management in Ubuntu is second to none, I have newer version of everything, sane terminal colors and fonts out of the box, I don't have to download monstrosity that is Xcode just to get a damn compiler, compiling some non-mainstream sources may not work out of the box.

dfc 14y ago
Package management in Ubuntu is not second to none, it is second to Debian. Dont get me wrong Ubuntu has done a lot of wonderful things, but lets give credit where credit is due...
- mcpherrinm 14y ago
  I'd actually disagree on this point. Ubuntu has introduced a number of refinements to the dpkg world that have been pretty good. Most useful, in my mind, is their set of tools for working with PPAs. They're much simpler to run than setting up an entire new repository of packages.
  - dfc 14y ago
    Seriously? You think that PPAs and your other unnamed improvements tower over the apt package management system? Without PPAs apt-get would be yet another kludgy package management system? Sure apt-add-repository is a nice time saver but how hard is: echo deb http://repo.net/ unstable main >> /etc/apt/sources.list I think we might be miscommunicating because I can't imagine anyone making this argument. I'm not sure how old you are but I can remember what package management was like on slackware and redhat a decade ago when I switched. Moving to debian was like a scene in a movie when it goes from black and white to full color.
    - philh 14y ago
      Doesn't Ubuntu have apt as well though? Ubuntu's package management may have come from Debian, but that doesn't make it inferior. It sounds to me like you're trying to make a different argument: that Debian's package management was a bigger deal, in some sense, than Ubuntu's incremental improvements on it.