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"it's just all boringly functional and uneventful these days." As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now. OSX, m

"it's just all boringly functional and uneventful these days." As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now. OSX, meanwhile, is still Unix under the hood. I'm frankly stunned that someone coming from a straight FreeBSD background wouldn't value that highly. But your experiences with hardware, while I'm sure legitimate, do not mirror my own. I've owned two MacBook Pros (starting with the first Unibody model) for the last 6 years and both have been rock solid daily drivers, and "functional and uneventful," but also very nice to use—not really boring. To each their own, is the moral of all these stories. If Windows is gaining stability and OSX continues to be high quality, it just gives everyone more options and lowers the barrier-to-entry of computing. Twenty years ago you had to invest in your desktop and build it yourself, and laptops were rare. Ten years ago only nerds knew how to maintain Windows. Now you carry an always-connected computer in your pocket and a 4.9 pound supercomputer on your back. No part of this is bad.

meaty 14y ago
As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now. Yes this is it. But I wasn't getting that with OSX. In '06, it was pretty good compared to say Windows XP but since '08 it's been declining rapidly into whack-a-mole problems. OSX is a bastardised version of UNIX under the hood which is "even worse than HP-UX when you haven't paid for the compilers" to deal with I found. Getting a reliable toolchain up that worked properly was a PITA.
- cgh 14y ago
  You click a button marked "Install" in XCode and it installs the tools into /usr/bin. That sure is tough. OS X userland is pretty stock BSD. It may be unfamiliar if you are used to Linux.
  - eropple 14y ago
    Putting the GNU tools on is pretty easy with Homebrew or MacPorts, though. Getting those is first thing I do when I set up a new Mac: grab Xcode, install the command line tools, get Homebrew, brew install coreutils, findutils, and gnu-sed.
  - meaty 14y ago
    That's an installed toolchain, not a properly working one.

meaty 14y ago

As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now. Yes this is it. But I wasn't getting that with OSX. In '06, it was pretty good compared to say Windows XP but since '08 it's been declining rapidly into whack-a-mole problems. OSX is a bastardised version of UNIX under the hood which is "even worse than HP-UX when you haven't paid for the compilers" to deal with I found. Getting a reliable toolchain up that worked properly was a PITA.

cgh 14y ago
You click a button marked "Install" in XCode and it installs the tools into /usr/bin. That sure is tough. OS X userland is pretty stock BSD. It may be unfamiliar if you are used to Linux.
- eropple 14y ago
  Putting the GNU tools on is pretty easy with Homebrew or MacPorts, though. Getting those is first thing I do when I set up a new Mac: grab Xcode, install the command line tools, get Homebrew, brew install coreutils, findutils, and gnu-sed.
- meaty 14y ago
  That's an installed toolchain, not a properly working one.