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Comment by bmj | Hacker News Reader

It's worth looking at the entire thread. Both Cox and Pike point out that life is just easier at work running a well-maintained, supported system (OSX) that can play nicely with other machines.

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I think it's about time that "well-maintained" and "supported" stop being used as some kind of differentiating point against Linux. There are just as many, if not more, regular updates, both in terms of packages and new distribution releases, to the popular Linux distributions as there are for OSX and Windows. This is even more impressive when you take into account that any random Linux distribution comes with more software out of the box than either OSX or Windows. Both Ubuntu and Redhat provide significant lead time on their release schedules and give you access to the next release before it is official, allowing you to plan your upgrade path better. Even when a distribution is EOLed, you can find people who still offer packages and upgrades for it, and to top it off you can maintain your own upgrades if the vendor EOLs a release and your environment requires not upgrading. Linux distribution releases are not as marketing based as OSX or Windows releases and release schedules, and you don't need to wait until the official day, or be some kind of partner, to find out what's going to be in the newer versions before it is released.

I think they meant it against Plan 9, not against Linux.

Cox also points out that most Google engineers are on Linux, too.

When I first read this, I interpreted the parenthetical as editorial, since I didn't really see anything in the OP that called out OSX specifically in this regard. The original thread is mostly lumping all non-Plan9 stuff together as being more supported than Plan9, agreed.

I can understand going with a Mac if you want better support for the latest hardware or you need to run some commercial software like Photoshop. But if you're running a text editor and a compiler and developing unix software, what advantage is there to using a Mac over a unix box like Linux?

You may want to run more than a text editor and a compiler, on occasion.

I am quite sure not all packages available for download on my Ubuntu box are compilers or text-editors.

A Mac is a Unix box. Actually, to be picky it’s more of a Unix box than a linux machine as of those two only OS X has Unix certification: http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/certificates/1190p.pdf

But of course, OS X implements many Unix constructs wrong. Renaming a file is not atomic on OS X / HFS+, for example. (UNIX certification is "did they give us money", not "does it actually work".)

Also, of course GNU/Linux is not Unix. GNU is Not Unix! (I like GNU a lot better than Unix, personally. Much more sugary. "rm foo -rf" actually works, for example.)

What's that do? Unless you change the order, I'd expect it to delete two files: foo and -rf. How does the Mac get it wrong? I don't have a Mac at hand.

GNU tools generally allow you to put your options anywhere you please, even after regular arguments. Whether or not this is a good thing is of course up for debate, but it certainly can add convenience.

Confusion can occur with some applications (possibly non-GNU ones) for which option/argument order does matter, or with those where options have different affects on later/earlier arguments depending on where they are placed.

Note that the parent didn't say the Mac gets it "wrong," just that GNU "rm foo -rf" works in the sense that it will do what he intends it to do.

No it's not. A certification like this is just an expensive piece of paper, the kind of thing that floss developpers don't judge necessary.

Yes, my original point, which I didn't make quite clear, was that a Mac is an expensive unix box - for the price of one, you could get a higher-end machine running an OS like Linux. However since Google is probably paying for their hardware, I can see how that would be a non-issue.

The only latest hardware OSX supports is the hardware Apple sells. Even Plan 9 has better harware support than OSX.

The latest version can't even run on non-x86 boxes! My OS of choice runs on just about everything from an ARM-based smartphone all the way to a zSeries mainframe.

That is hardware support.

NetBSD?

I love my IBM Thinkpad Z50 precisely for its ability to run NetBSD.

But no. My OS of choice is Ubuntu's Linux. To be honest, my choice of OS was dictated by the availability of decent package management and recent packages. This is subject to change (as I moved from Red Hat to Debian to Ubuntu).

But I won't move to a BSD until it plays well with APT.

So what? Mac OS supports a limited range of hardware by choice, not because of any lack of software engineering skill on the part of its development team.

Not saying I agree with Apple's choice, but it is indeed their choice to make, and it appears to be working out decently well for them.

Do you think Linux developers lack software engineering skills and that's why they don't support the latest 3D card or wireless dongle while, at the same time, they support an astonishing range of devices running on all kinds of machines, from handhelds to building-sized boxes, on about a dozen processor and machine architectures?

Apple's choice is marketing-driven. There is no point in porting OSX for machines Apple won't make. It also saves them a lot of money. I never claimed Apple engineers don't know what they are doing. I only said that, as far as hardware support is concerned, OSX is no leader.

Neither is Windows, BTW.

Not sure how you got that from what I said. I'm merely pointing out that hardware support and number of supported architectures isn't necessarily what everyone cares about most when deciding if an OS is "good" or not (whatever that means).

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