6 ms·

I get the joke, and it was the first thing that popped in my head too. But in all seriousness, OS X is Unix as well, and can do pretty much any Unix based task

I get the joke, and it was the first thing that popped in my head too. But in all seriousness, OS X is Unix as well, and can do pretty much any Unix based task that GNU/Linux can. Sometimes the best tool for the job is the one you already own.

moron4hire 12y ago
Maybe it's less about Unix and more about FOSS for jug5.
snotrockets 12y ago
BSD differs from Linux in some important ways. If one of those differences affect your works, than Mac OS X is useless, even if it is Unix (and Linux, some would say, isn't)
- recursive 12y ago
  So if operating system Z is different from linux in some way, then linux is better in that way? What if the differences positively affect your work?
- chc 12y ago
  "Useless" a strong word for a simple difference between two Unices that affects your work. You could just as well say Linux is useless because sysvinit and upstart aren't the same as launchd.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  I get that, and I wasn't trying to say that GNU/Linux is Unix, either. In fact, what with systemd on most major distros these days, GNU/Linux is less Unix-y than ever (I'm not saying that's good or bad; I have my reservations about systemd but they are irrelevant to this discussion and I'm not being biased either way about it here). That said, for just about any project I've ever worked on within a GNU/Linux ecosystem, I could have easily adapted it to Mac if that was my chosen platform. HTML is HTML, JavaScript is JavaScript, so for today's web-centric projects the OS you're running doesn't matter as much. Even languages like Python don't really care what's under the hood. Of course, if you're doing Linux kernel development, or targeting a GNU/Linux deployment, then a Mac isn't the best idea. :)
davidw 12y ago
Have the Mac folks got focus-follows-mouse yet? http://steve-yegge.blogspot.it/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-follows-mouse-debate.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.it/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-fo... In general, I don't think I'd ever give up Linux. It's a hacker's OS, by and for hackers. Being able to pick apart and fiddle with any portion of, from the kernel on up, is a wonderful, empowering feeling, and something that has proved useful both personally and professionally over the years.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  Indeed, when I'm on GNU/Linux I always set the WM to focus-follows-mouse, click-to-raise. But strictly speaking, that's an X11 thing, not a Mac/BSD/Unix/Linux thing. I didn't mean any slight against GNU/Linux; I use it every day (and I don't mean on a phone or tablet either). But I also have used Macs for stuff that works better on a Mac, and Windows for stuff that works better on Windows. There isn't a "Best OS" period, because every use case is different. There's only "best for the job at hand".
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  You can enable it for the Terminal only. As the other commenter stated, it's an X11 thing. Despite the prevalence of applications that run under X11 and the XQuartz availability, the native UI under OSX is Quartz which handles everything under OpenGL I believe....?
- the_gipsy 12y ago
  iOS may be Unix underneath, but on the top it has a terrible WM that simply cannot be changed to behave like anyhting else. I'm using xmonad and while I may come off as pretentious, I do see that my colleagues that use mac constantly fight against the WM, searching for windows, moving them around, resizing etc.
codemac 12y ago
The biggest problem I had with Mac OS X was it's user space unix tools. Everything GNU is ancient from before GPL3, everything BSD is crazy ancient from FreeBSD 5.. it's pretty awful. Thus why macports for me was king. HomeBrew tried to hard to not replace your user space, though I haven't looked at it in a long while. I'm on Linux everywhere now.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
walshemj 12y ago
Try using cpan to install basic modules like MySQL
- nknighthb 12y ago
  I've never gotten CPAN to work reliably with any OS's included copy of Perl. As with Python and Ruby, if you want to use things not available via the OS's package manager, you're best off installing a separate copy.
  - marcusramberg 12y ago
    Use cpanm - Easy bootstrapping documentation here http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/App-cpanminus-1.7012/lib/App/cpanminus.pm http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/App-cpanminus-1.7012/lib/Ap...
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Works out of the box on Ubuntu LTS, Raspberry pi hell it even worked back in 2000 on Cygwin out of the box on win2k.
    - nknighthb 12y ago
      > Works out of the box on Ubuntu LTS Well, that's one I can personally tell you I've had problems with in the past. > even worked back in 2000 on Cygwin out of the box on win2k And also this one. That's even back around the timeframe I was actively doing Perl development while using win2k.
      - walshemj 12y ago
        Well I never had problems and the problems I had with mac where with basic stuff like the Perl MySQL DBI. In the end after seeing the complex work arounds and all the warnings about buggering up your mac OS install I gave up and run a VM. After all the nice people that employ me want me to do some nifty Machine learning tools to save a week a month running single adwords account.
aftbit 12y ago
Unfortunately, it has terrible filesystem support. How do I read/write ext4 volumes!?
- nknighthb 12y ago
  Have you tried "brew install ext4fuse" ? Edit: Seems it's still read-only. If you need write support that badly (why?), there's always Paragon: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ http://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/
  - aftbit 12y ago
    That's a larger problem I have with the Mac (and Windows, although less so) platform as a developer environment: all the cool tools are closed-source and paid. That's a serious barrier to innovation.
    - nknighthb 12y ago
      "Cool tools"? Needing ext#fs write support on OS X is a pretty niche application and I'm honestly surprised it's continued to be a viable business for Paragon all these years, especially with the rise of mainstream virtualization. I wasn't expecting to find them still selling it at all. It probably wouldn't be there except I'm sure most of the expertise and code had to be developed for their imaging and partitioning products. I think the only things I run frequently for development that don't come with OS X and aren't free or open source are Sublime Text and Paw. You can certainly use vim/emacs/TM2 and curl scripts if you want. Were I using Linux, I'd be using Sublime Text, and, well, curl scripts again. I'd also be jumping off a cliff after about two days of dealing with desktop Linux's horrific regressions over the past decade. OS X's native development tools (Xcode, llvm/clang) are free, and most of the tools you use in Linux are either already there, or a "brew install" away.

moron4hire 12y ago

Maybe it's less about Unix and more about FOSS for jug5.

snotrockets 12y ago

BSD differs from Linux in some important ways. If one of those differences affect your works, than Mac OS X is useless, even if it is Unix (and Linux, some would say, isn't)

recursive 12y ago
So if operating system Z is different from linux in some way, then linux is better in that way? What if the differences positively affect your work?
chc 12y ago
"Useless" a strong word for a simple difference between two Unices that affects your work. You could just as well say Linux is useless because sysvinit and upstart aren't the same as launchd.
morganvachon 12y ago
I get that, and I wasn't trying to say that GNU/Linux is Unix, either. In fact, what with systemd on most major distros these days, GNU/Linux is less Unix-y than ever (I'm not saying that's good or bad; I have my reservations about systemd but they are irrelevant to this discussion and I'm not being biased either way about it here). That said, for just about any project I've ever worked on within a GNU/Linux ecosystem, I could have easily adapted it to Mac if that was my chosen platform. HTML is HTML, JavaScript is JavaScript, so for today's web-centric projects the OS you're running doesn't matter as much. Even languages like Python don't really care what's under the hood. Of course, if you're doing Linux kernel development, or targeting a GNU/Linux deployment, then a Mac isn't the best idea. :)

davidw 12y ago

Have the Mac folks got focus-follows-mouse yet? http://steve-yegge.blogspot.it/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-follows-mouse-debate.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.it/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-fo... In general, I don't think I'd ever give up Linux. It's a hacker's OS, by and for hackers. Being able to pick apart and fiddle with any portion of, from the kernel on up, is a wonderful, empowering feeling, and something that has proved useful both personally and professionally over the years.

morganvachon 12y ago
Indeed, when I'm on GNU/Linux I always set the WM to focus-follows-mouse, click-to-raise. But strictly speaking, that's an X11 thing, not a Mac/BSD/Unix/Linux thing. I didn't mean any slight against GNU/Linux; I use it every day (and I don't mean on a phone or tablet either). But I also have used Macs for stuff that works better on a Mac, and Windows for stuff that works better on Windows. There isn't a "Best OS" period, because every use case is different. There's only "best for the job at hand".
72deluxe 12y ago
You can enable it for the Terminal only. As the other commenter stated, it's an X11 thing. Despite the prevalence of applications that run under X11 and the XQuartz availability, the native UI under OSX is Quartz which handles everything under OpenGL I believe....?
the_gipsy 12y ago
iOS may be Unix underneath, but on the top it has a terrible WM that simply cannot be changed to behave like anyhting else. I'm using xmonad and while I may come off as pretentious, I do see that my colleagues that use mac constantly fight against the WM, searching for windows, moving them around, resizing etc.

codemac 12y ago

The biggest problem I had with Mac OS X was it's user space unix tools. Everything GNU is ancient from before GPL3, everything BSD is crazy ancient from FreeBSD 5.. it's pretty awful. Thus why macports for me was king. HomeBrew tried to hard to not replace your user space, though I haven't looked at it in a long while. I'm on Linux everywhere now.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

walshemj 12y ago

Try using cpan to install basic modules like MySQL

nknighthb 12y ago
I've never gotten CPAN to work reliably with any OS's included copy of Perl. As with Python and Ruby, if you want to use things not available via the OS's package manager, you're best off installing a separate copy.
- marcusramberg 12y ago
  Use cpanm - Easy bootstrapping documentation here http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/App-cpanminus-1.7012/lib/App/cpanminus.pm http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/App-cpanminus-1.7012/lib/Ap...
- walshemj 12y ago
  Works out of the box on Ubuntu LTS, Raspberry pi hell it even worked back in 2000 on Cygwin out of the box on win2k.
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    > Works out of the box on Ubuntu LTS Well, that's one I can personally tell you I've had problems with in the past. > even worked back in 2000 on Cygwin out of the box on win2k And also this one. That's even back around the timeframe I was actively doing Perl development while using win2k.
    - walshemj 12y ago
      Well I never had problems and the problems I had with mac where with basic stuff like the Perl MySQL DBI. In the end after seeing the complex work arounds and all the warnings about buggering up your mac OS install I gave up and run a VM. After all the nice people that employ me want me to do some nifty Machine learning tools to save a week a month running single adwords account.

aftbit 12y ago

Unfortunately, it has terrible filesystem support. How do I read/write ext4 volumes!?

nknighthb 12y ago
Have you tried "brew install ext4fuse" ? Edit: Seems it's still read-only. If you need write support that badly (why?), there's always Paragon: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ http://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/
- aftbit 12y ago
  That's a larger problem I have with the Mac (and Windows, although less so) platform as a developer environment: all the cool tools are closed-source and paid. That's a serious barrier to innovation.
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    "Cool tools"? Needing ext#fs write support on OS X is a pretty niche application and I'm honestly surprised it's continued to be a viable business for Paragon all these years, especially with the rise of mainstream virtualization. I wasn't expecting to find them still selling it at all. It probably wouldn't be there except I'm sure most of the expertise and code had to be developed for their imaging and partitioning products. I think the only things I run frequently for development that don't come with OS X and aren't free or open source are Sublime Text and Paw. You can certainly use vim/emacs/TM2 and curl scripts if you want. Were I using Linux, I'd be using Sublime Text, and, well, curl scripts again. I'd also be jumping off a cliff after about two days of dealing with desktop Linux's horrific regressions over the past decade. OS X's native development tools (Xcode, llvm/clang) are free, and most of the tools you use in Linux are either already there, or a "brew install" away.