[PLUG] Mac OSX contrasted with Linux and Win2000?

[Eric Shore Baur]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Greg Long wrote:

> Would welcome any input from those experienced in Linux and MacOSX - My
> experience with all Win32 is considerable (except Me which I considered
[snip]

	I've been using Linux for about 5-6 years (mostly on Apple
hardware, actually) but my desktop systems at home have been classic Mac
OS and OS X since March a year ago.
	First impressions: GUI is very different from anything else I'd
used.  "Cleaner" than X (which has always felt a little klunky to me) and
a little more intuative than Windows.  There seemed to be a lot "missing"
that I wanted, but I was able to adjust very quickly and I can get around
very efficently now.  Even my wife (a Windows sysadmin) doesn't get mad at
it, like she did MacOS 9.
	Stability: similar to Linux.  My OS X machine has crashed probably
5 times in the last year.  Once because I was doing something naughtly
(running a program that I knew was a resource hog on old/slow hardware -
maybe it didn't crash, but I was sick of waiting), the other times it hung
on shutdown (no good idea why).  My Win2K box at work is fairly stable as
well (probably the same number of crashes in the past year), but it seems
to be "worse" when it does crash (like blowing out its video drivers for
no apparent reason).

	As a Mac / Linux user, the system over all was a major blessing.
I had been programming with perl (and now PHP) on top of apache and
postgres all installed on a Linux backend while using the Mac as a front
end - since that's where I had all the tools I liked and the OS I prefered
to interface with directly.  Now I have a single machine that I can do the
same things on without the division of labor.  I currently have all those
server-type things installed as well as XFree86 (XDarwin) so I can run
things like ethereal or rdesktop when I need to.
	With fink (on sourceforge), many unix packages have been ported
over to the OS X / Darwin platform.  I'm not a good enough programmer to
know exactly how difficult it is, but my understanding is that there
really isn't much to do for most things.  Quite often I can download
source code from the internet and compile directly.  (Note: basic install
will not allow this, but you can get Apple's Developer Tools for free
(again, with registration) and get all the necessary command line tools
and a rather nice IDE, if you want to get into Mac OS X programming.)

	From others I've talked to:  If you know BSD, open the Terminal
and you'll be right at home in the shell, if not the directory structure.
If you've used NeXT, a *lot* will look familiar (directory structure and
some elements of the GUI - like the column views).  If you're used to Mac
OS Classic, you might have a lot of adjusting to do.  Same with Windows
users.  For Linux people, it will look and feel a lot different, but
you'll be able to do a lot of the same things.

	Hopefully, this didn't wander too much (or sound too much like a
commercial for Apple's Switch campaign <grin>).  I'm just not really busy
at work right now...

Eric