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The OP's biggest problem is his unfamiliarity with the OS. I'm sure if he spent some more time with the Mac, he could easily get used to it. If it helps, I'm go

The OP's biggest problem is his unfamiliarity with the OS. I'm sure if he spent some more time with the Mac, he could easily get used to it. If it helps, I'm going to post the solutions to some of his problems here. About the XCode problem: there is something wrong with Apple's servers. I never had problems downloading XCode, but one of my friends had to retry several times before his XCode download succeeded. His downloads failed in exactly the same way as the OP's. (BTW, OSX also comes with wget.) Mouse: Contrary to popular belief, you can right click on a stock OSX install. If you have tap-to-click enabled, just tap the trackpad with two fingers. Otherwise, put two fingers on the trackpad and press the button. If you're using an Apple mouse, you can enable right-clicking in the mouse preferences. Torrent client: I have never heard of or used Tomato Torrent. The most popular torrent client on the Mac is Transmission, and it sports a beautiful UI. BTW, if you're looking for apps, the best place would be http://osx.iusethis.com http://osx.iusethis.com Package management: Use MacPorts, which is something like Gentoo's portage. The trouble with MacPorts is that it doesn't use OSX's default packages, so you have two versions of Perl, two versions of Python, etc. The good thing about MacPorts is that it installs everything in /opt/local/, which means you can just rm -rf the directory to get rid of everything. I don't use MacPorts. I prefer to compile all my packages from source and install them in /opt/. Under the hood, OS X is a good ol' UNIX distribution. It took me about a week to get used to OS X when I purchased my first Mac last year (this was after 4 years of using Linux a PC). The only problem with OS X is that once you get used to it, going back to a hardcore Linux distro like Debian is not easy :)

duskwuff 17y ago
OS X doesn't come with wget, but it does come with curl, which is almost as good.
bad_user 17y ago
> The OP's biggest problem is his unfamiliarity with the OS. Isn't that true for both Linux and Windows? I personally didn't like Mac OS X, and I've used it for a whole year. MacPorts is not as properly maintained as the Debian repository, many packages having old versions, and manually compiling packages is just silly. After a while I discovered that I don't depend on any OS X specific software at all. I used Textmate, but it couldn't make me as happy as Emacs is :) I used Firefox instead of Safary, iTunes was making me cry (I'll never purchase an iPod again), and MacPorts was inferior. So the 2K price-tag wasn't justified for a new laptop when my old one broke. Ubuntu is doing just fine. The only problem I have is the lack of Adobe Photoshop, but I workaround it with Gimp and Inkscape.
- GeneralMaximus 17y ago
  I know MacPorts is not very well maintained. That is the reason I prefer to build everything from source. I, too, use MacVim instead of TextMate and Firefox instead of Safari. I decided to get a Mac for two reasons. One, I like the aesthetics and cannot stand the plastic monstrosities other laptop manufacturers build. Also, OS X looks 10 times better out of the box than my heavily customized Ubuntu desktop (IMO, of course). Secondly, I don't like fighting with my OS. I prefer point-and-click UIs for menial tasks like setting up SSH or an FTP server or even an Apache test environment. Even though I spend most of my time in a shell, wrestling with configuration files is not my piece of cake. I guess all this boils down to the fact that I love OS X :) <SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION>As for iTunes, me and a friend are working on a replacement. It's going to take us a couple of months to arrive at something usable, but we're getting there. Link: http://github.com/goonj/goonj/ http://github.com/goonj/goonj/ </SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION>
  - bad_user 17y ago
    > Secondly, I don't like fighting with my OS. I hear your pain. That's why I purchased one in the first place.
Spakman 17y ago
"Package management: Use MacPorts, which is something like Gentoo's portage." I don't use OS X, but believe that Gentoo Prefix is portage, running on other systems, like OS X.

duskwuff 17y ago

OS X doesn't come with wget, but it does come with curl, which is almost as good.

bad_user 17y ago

> The OP's biggest problem is his unfamiliarity with the OS. Isn't that true for both Linux and Windows? I personally didn't like Mac OS X, and I've used it for a whole year. MacPorts is not as properly maintained as the Debian repository, many packages having old versions, and manually compiling packages is just silly. After a while I discovered that I don't depend on any OS X specific software at all. I used Textmate, but it couldn't make me as happy as Emacs is :) I used Firefox instead of Safary, iTunes was making me cry (I'll never purchase an iPod again), and MacPorts was inferior. So the 2K price-tag wasn't justified for a new laptop when my old one broke. Ubuntu is doing just fine. The only problem I have is the lack of Adobe Photoshop, but I workaround it with Gimp and Inkscape.

GeneralMaximus 17y ago
I know MacPorts is not very well maintained. That is the reason I prefer to build everything from source. I, too, use MacVim instead of TextMate and Firefox instead of Safari. I decided to get a Mac for two reasons. One, I like the aesthetics and cannot stand the plastic monstrosities other laptop manufacturers build. Also, OS X looks 10 times better out of the box than my heavily customized Ubuntu desktop (IMO, of course). Secondly, I don't like fighting with my OS. I prefer point-and-click UIs for menial tasks like setting up SSH or an FTP server or even an Apache test environment. Even though I spend most of my time in a shell, wrestling with configuration files is not my piece of cake. I guess all this boils down to the fact that I love OS X :) <SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION>As for iTunes, me and a friend are working on a replacement. It's going to take us a couple of months to arrive at something usable, but we're getting there. Link: http://github.com/goonj/goonj/ http://github.com/goonj/goonj/ </SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION>
- bad_user 17y ago
  > Secondly, I don't like fighting with my OS. I hear your pain. That's why I purchased one in the first place.

Spakman 17y ago

"Package management: Use MacPorts, which is something like Gentoo's portage." I don't use OS X, but believe that Gentoo Prefix is portage, running on other systems, like OS X.