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Comment by satysin | Hacker News Reader

Does OS X have something like update-alternatives on Debian?

No, the dev tool binaries are magic binaries that check if the "Command Line Tools" package is installed, and if not, asks you if you want to download it. They're protected by System Integrity Protection, so you have to temporarily boot with that disabled to remove or modify them.

I think it's a fairly common measure to download a lot of what OS X comes with over homebrew, simply because OS X's versions tend to be annoyingly outdated (Like bash 3.2.57, vs. 4.3.42 from homebrew).

That sounds annoying.

A little, but you have enough to get started. Rather an old bash than no bash. First task on OS X is usually to use the bundled curl and ruby to get homebrew. :)

Will be interesting when Windows comes (well via an update) with a later version of bash than OS X!

Hah, and that might not even take that long at the current rate! But we still got a better terminal emulator by default over here! Terminal.app is a pretty darn good terminal emulator, although iTerm2.app is better. That is actually one of the things I like about OS X - I have not found a terminal emulator for Linux (and certainly not for Windows) that compares with iTerm2. Not in speed, nor in interface.

I am pretty sure we will see a better terminal come out thanks to this new Linux sub-system or whatever they decide to call it.

WSL is only a CLI layer. The GUI is still cmd.exe.

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