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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

something i'm curious about - for linux fans who have made the switch, is osx an "acceptable unix"? people keep trumpeting the fact that it combines the best of both worlds, a seamless gui experience atop a full-fledged posix core complete with a bash prompt you can drop down to as easily as you can in linux, but philosophically it seems that for the little things like package management, command line utilities, etc., the experience is closer to cygwin than it is to linux proper - you can do it, sure, but it will involve falling back to a third-party ecosystem.

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Oh, no, the experience is way better than Cygwin. Cygwin feels exactly like what it is a: bolt-on trying to emulate features and filesystem structures of a completely alien OS. It feels clunky, what you see when you do 'ls' at the 'root' of your filesystem is completely different to what you see when you 'dir' (or use the Windows Explorer.)

OS X is a completely different story. If you ever used BSD before, you know how it feels 'almost' like linux, barring a few differences. It's the same with OS X. Besides package management (which is greatly alleviated by Homebrew) and so-so integration of X applications, I can't say I miss my Ubuntu laptop at all.

My Cygwin experience has been quite authentic actually.

But I was cheating, I'd use it for SSH and rxvt in combination with xming to establish a forwarded X session. (And x-mouse and alt-drag for that nearly authentic mouse behaviour.) Desperate times, desperate measures.

I may be a Linux fan, but there you go: Mac OS X as Unix is inferior to Linux. Package management in Ubuntu is second to none, I have newer version of everything, sane terminal colors and fonts out of the box, I don't have to download monstrosity that is Xcode just to get a damn compiler, compiling some non-mainstream sources may not work out of the box.

Package management in Ubuntu is not second to none, it is second to Debian. Dont get me wrong Ubuntu has done a lot of wonderful things, but lets give credit where credit is due...

I'd actually disagree on this point.

Ubuntu has introduced a number of refinements to the dpkg world that have been pretty good.

Most useful, in my mind, is their set of tools for working with PPAs. They're much simpler to run than setting up an entire new repository of packages.

Seriously? You think that PPAs and your other unnamed improvements tower over the apt package management system? Without PPAs apt-get would be yet another kludgy package management system? Sure apt-add-repository is a nice time saver but how hard is:

  echo deb http://repo.net/ unstable main >> /etc/apt/sources.list

I think we might be miscommunicating because I can't imagine anyone making this argument. I'm not sure how old you are but I can remember what package management was like on slackware and redhat a decade ago when I switched. Moving to debian was like a scene in a movie when it goes from black and white to full color.

Doesn't Ubuntu have apt as well though? Ubuntu's package management may have come from Debian, but that doesn't make it inferior.

It sounds to me like you're trying to make a different argument: that Debian's package management was a bigger deal, in some sense, than Ubuntu's incremental improvements on it.

Ubuntu's package management system is apt and dpkg. Apt and dpkg were Debian projects long before ubuntu was even a whisper. Ubuntu uses Debian's pakage management system, it does not have it's own system.

Yes, that's what I thought. Ubuntu uses Debian's system with minor changes. If you want to say Ubuntu's package management is second (inferior) to Debian's, you need to show the changes are bad, not minor.

Ubuntu does not have a package manager of its own. It uses Debian's. Ubuntu was the second guest to arrive at the apt party.

So what? Ubuntu has package management. It is a superior experience to the package management in Debian. (Or so I assume, since you have not disputed it.) Therefore it is not true that package management in Ubuntu is second to Debian.

I'm probably going to tap out here, because this doesn't seem like it's going to become productive.

With respect to PPAs, I'm not speaking from a user perspective, but from that of a sysadmin having to maintain mirrors. PPAs are just easier than setting up all the key signing and mirror infrastructure.

Yeah, apt and dpkg are great compared to what else was available a decade ago. But that doesn't mean that Ubuntu's additions, however incremental, are worthless or somehow inferior to Debian. Incremental gains are still gains.

I'm confused about PPAs and setting up a mirror infrastructure. What mirror infrastructure? What key signing is involved in a mirror that is not involved in signing packages for a PPA?

Ubuntu's additions are nice. But they are minor improvements to apt/dpkg. Without them apt and dpkg would still be phenomenal.

I administer a small number of systems and deploy custom packages to all of those.

Running a custom mirror, signing packages, managing keyrings on the mirror, and getting them on all systems is nontrivially harder than using a PPA and associated scripts.

Now, I run a mix of Ubuntu and Debian systems. I don't use PPAs that much, but when I do they're just plain easier.

Yes, it's an incremental gain, but that's a gain. It makes them better. They weren't first, but they're innovating. Sometimes, the "innovations" aren't fantastic especially some of the more harebrained stuff on desktop (PulseAudio, avahi). But no longer is Ubuntu just a Debian rip-off: They're producing new and useful additions.

The relative merits are debatable, and so I'm not going to continue that thread. In the end, it boils down to X + epsilon > X, for any epsilon > 0.

Well, second to none of the operating systems I am using (also includes Mac OS X and couple of Windows versions). The point being is that package management on OS X is not on the level of Ubuntu (or Debian for that matter).

> I don't have to download monstrosity that is Xcode just to get a damn compiler.

They fixed that. On newer OS X versions you can download the Command Line Tools (just 110mb) from Apple's website. You just need a free account: https://developer.apple.com/downloads

Why do I need a free account? What is the purpose of that?

I get a compiler from BSD, which is the source of Apple's code, without needing any account. Apple didn't need an account to get that code from BSD. Apple seems to do a disservice to the notion of the BSD license, which is not to impose restrictions on people (e.g. making them get a developer "account").

Haven't you heard? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from a surveillance state in which even your use of a compiler is closely monitored and tagged.

Apple's current C compiler, clang, did not originate in the BSD project, but is primarily developed by Apple itself.

This is a good point. Although that word "primarily" is interesting.

Is Clang BSD-licensed?

It's UIUC's license, which looks similar to BSD to me. They also have some MIT licensed code. http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#license

Essentially, yes. It's NCSA-OSL which is based on MIT, which is based on BSD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

Many projects use Clang/LLVM for their OpenCL implementations.

"primarily", because the LLVM / clang project had its origins in academia (before the project and its team got acqui-hired by Apple), and because the project is open source, and thus still gets some amount of community contributions (probably not a huge proportion of the overall effort, though).

It sounds like you need a reminder that OS X is not based on BSD, it's a different operating system that had a lot of BSD stuff grafted on to the side of it - like Windows, but moreso. Also, BSD doesn't provide a compiler - they use GNU's compiler, and are switching to Apple's compiler.

Yes, I did need that reminder. Memory is failing today. But... does it change my question? GNU gives me a compiler without making me sign up for an "account".

OSX is not BSD, but there's no way it could even think about calling itself "UNIX" and getting certified as such without all the BSD code they took.

What else is OS X? It's a kernel from CMU. And whiz bang graphics. And lots of annoyances.

> GNU gives me a compiler without making me sign up for an "account".

What an outrageous thing... They force you to create a free account that wastes quite literally 6 minutes of your time... It's unacceptable, how dare they??!!1 (<-- sarcasm)

And if I may add, I hate the fact that I have to put credit card information on this free account.

Its not close to GNU tools but its very true to Unix tools. Many of the tools have the same options (if not the same man pages) as their Free/Open/NetBSD versions.

ah - that's an interesting distinction. i guess linux has gotten me subconsciously used to thinking of the gnu tools as the current unix standard.

but (by recursive definition) GNU is Not Unix

I write a lot if code targeting Linux on OSX. Mostly Java (with some JNI) and C. Sure there are some bits that have to be different. Perhaps 5%? But once that is abstracted away I can do almost all work in OSX then build on Linux.

Of course a decade of writing portable C across BSD and Linux systems might make this a bit easier for me than others. And it's worth it to me to avoid the Linux desktop experience (which I did use as my primary desktop from 1996 til about 2 years ago).

These sorts of issues (primarily related to auxiliary functions in grep, sed, etc) can cause portability issues when developing locally for linux systems, but no worse thanks, say, writing for fedora on an Ubuntu box. Brew is okay but a bit sparse. For me I mostly miss Gnome

I think it's clear it's going to get a lot worse with Apple purging GNU utils.

It is worse. Fedora is Linux. OS X is BSD.

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