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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I might quibble with the "Linux's command line offers no benefits" line. It's true that the shell is identical. But OS X, out of the box, is lacking huge chunks of what you expect to find out-of-the-box on a typical Linux distribution. That's a problem for anyone who wants to be able to portable scripts, etc... Add that to the fact that the existing package managers for the command line tools are kinda lacking, and I'd honestly put OS X behind even cygwin as a good example of a OS command line environment.

The bit about Gnome vs. KDE is a sore point, alas. Canonical itself is clearly a Gnome shop, and that's what they ship on their core Ubuntu Desktop distribution. But KDE has a huge user base of near-fanatic volunteers, who insist (how dare they!) on maintaining the Kubuntu distribution in parallel. Both desktops work very well, and at this point neither is likely to disappear.

FWIW, I use Gnome and prefer the architecture and API.

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The stock OS X box comes with enough of the standard command-line toolbox that if you are actually writing a "portable" script you are not going to have a problem running that script on OS X. The biggest differentiator is probably that OS X is a part of the *BSD lineage and so you will need to do more tweaking of a Linux script to get it bsd-ready than you will need to tweak a standard bsd script to move it from FreeBSD to OS X. While macports is closer to the freebsd port system, it is close enough to apt-get that you should really have no problems switching from one to the other.

It's been a few versions since I paid close attention, but as I remember OS X ships with only the bare POSIX tools, plus a few extras from the FreeBSD userspace. It lacks stuff like perl, python, curl, wget, ssh (maybe: not sure about that one), tcpdump, etc... That's all stuff the poor user is going to have to figure out how to get.

And as mentioned, the existing package systems for OSS software are really primitive. There's just no equivalent for, say, the Ubuntu synaptic tool for new users.

I'm not trying to make this into a flame war: clearly you can achieve a pretty solid command line experience in OS X if you know what you're doing. But you're never going to learn it there without a bunch of headaches if you don't already have that expertise.

I'm running Leopard right now, and I have python, perl, curl, ssh, and tcpdump. I have no idea why wget is left out of the default install, but I just get it with macports, which is just a download and double click install away. Anyone who would be using these tools wouldn't have any problem setting it up. A few revisions of OS X ago things did seem relatively odd to the average Bash user. The shell was tcsh, and being based on BSD everything felt a bit off to someone switching from Linux, but these days it's pretty much all there. You should give it another look if you get a chance.

wget is left out simply for licensing reasons. curl is an MIT license, wget is GPL.

edit: I second guess this now that I think about it. bash is GPL...

That is simply not true. Python is in /System/Library/Frameworks for example. OS X doesn't usually bother to imitate SysV, that's all.

Don't forget the lightweight xubuntu distribution, which uses the xfce window manager. It is nice and fast. It works nicely on older machines with less resources.

I like fluxbuntu better than xubuntu. It's not an official canonical distro, but i have a pretty old pc with only 64 mb of ram and fluxbox runs far better than xfce on it. I think xubuntu is a waste of time anyway, but i can't i8magine using gnome either, im kubuntu till death(mine, or theirs) Viva KDE.

Anyway, a friend of mine can get me a cheap mac(prices are unbearable outside of the us because of shipping and resellers adding up to the price) so I'm going to get pretty close to OS X and i know that its good, but like that guy i might choose to dual boot and have the OS X just there if i need it.

I've been using Fluxbuntu for quite a while now, I second your recommendation, it's pretty impressive and worth a shot for ubuntu linux users interested in an alternative to xubuntu.

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