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Comment by homosaur | Hacker News Reader

It's not really about Macs per se, it's about the Unix toolchain and unlike Linux, Macs have Photoshop, etc.

I think you hit the spot. The reason why so many devs go for mac nowadays, is to have a good laptop that you don't have to babysit / configure much yourself and that's well integrated with a unix toolchain. On a desktop, many of these advantages go away when you compare to a linux workstation, therefore many go for that.

I had to babysit OS X a lot more than I had to babysit Linux. Ubuntu might take one or two tweaks when installing on a MacBook, but twenty minutes later it runs perfectly for ever (or six month, whichever comes first).

I had to babysit OS X all the time, due to its lack of a good package manager. This was years ago, I don't know if it has improved, but it grated me greatly.

Agreed, which is why when it comes to testing a legit setup, I usually do it on a virtual machine. Or of course one of those $5 Digital Ocean VPSes.

> This was years ago, I don't know if it has improved, but it grated me greatly.

Well of course, OS X has heavily improved since the early days (I'd call 'early' everything below 10.4). The surge of developers wanting to use OS X has also increased the demand for package managers, and so they came. First fink, then macports and nowadays most use homebrew. You install them once using the standard OS X pkg installation facility and then you're good to go - the range of 'backend software' packages in brew is comparable to apt-get I'd say. For everything from linux that needs a GUI I have a VM, for everything Windows-only I have another VM. There's never even a question whether I can run something locally - once you have that it's hard to give it up again really.

That being said, the best OS X release is probably 10.6, since then I don't like the direction very much - but on macs you're basically forced to use the newest OS (XCode compatibility, hardware compatibility once you upgrade your macbook). The iOSification hasn't been a dealbreaker to me so far, it's IMO still a better all round experience than any other notebook, especially considering the service quality, which is bar none where I live. Friend of mine bought a $2.5k lenovo - the board went dead after 1 month, they picked it up and he hasn't seen it since the last six weeks, no replacement. I had a similar issue with my rMBP - got it back, fixed, after 2 days. Similar stories about Dell. HP might be better, but their hardware is crap IMO. I just can't trust any other laptop manufacturer at the moment, which makes me sad.

I somewhat disagree with homebrew being thrown in with Fink and Macports. The benefit to homebrew is that it doesn't require having package maintainers to babysit packages and make sure the binaries work and are updated. You basically just take the raw source and someone throws a patch on it. It's actually a thousand times better because you don't have to worry about compiling binaries that work on everyone else's systems no matter what crazy config they have.

Well I didn't say it's the same kind of architecture. For the end user it serves the same purpose however.

What I was trying to get at is that those systems were unsustainable and I can see homebrew developing into a legitimate "default" package manager that is infinitely maintainable rather than Fink/Macports which were simply shims that were doomed to fail by their architecture.

My main gripe with Macs supposed 'toolchain' is that clones are nowhere comparable to 'apt-get'.

Well for one, you probably don't want them to be apt-get in terms of installing binaries. We had that with Fink, etc. and it sucked and was outdated quickly. Homebrew is pretty solid though, probably better than what Apple would come up with. They actually helped make what you would like a reality partially by releasing the Command Line Tools so you don't have to bother with Xcode.

Why not? Binaries are so much better for a platform like the Mac (basically just 32 bit and 64 bit Intel architectures at this point, with fairly homogenous OS versions across the installed base). Why on earth make everybody waste their local machine cycles compiling something that should end up the same for everyone anyway?

Fink was only out of date because they weren't keeping it up-to-date (perhaps their builds weren't automated? That's pure speculation, I have no idea). Debian manages to keep things more or less up-to-date with more packages (and architectures) than Fink ever had.

Incidentally, if you put your Homebrew in /usr/local then it will often install using the "pour" technique which is pure binary distribution.

I loved Fink until it started languishing, and I love homebrew now: its "everything in git" philosophy and very-open-to-pull-request attitude of the maintainer make me optimistic that it won't slow down and become irrelevant like Fink did. I think that's the real difference between the projects.

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