Thursday, August 16, 2007
Mac - Don't believe the hype
Don't get me wrong I love my Mac but it hasn't lived up to the hype and my expectations.
Firstly, it would have to be the LEAST stable operating system I have used in the last 5 years. Yep thats right, this titanium covered baby crashes several times a week. No BSOD just total system lockup. I haven't seen flakiness in an OS like this since NT4.0 (R.I.P.). I am not alone in this, some colleagues got Macs at the same time I did and our experiences are identical.
Secondly, the whole "BSD roots" thing, its hype, BSD is a very distant ancestor. The Mac has a Unix command line and some of the basic command line tools you would expect but thats where it ends. I have found more Windows ports of popular *nix command line tools than Mac ones. Also, there is no native package management to speak of.
In terms of package management I tried Fink (lack of packages for what I do), Gentoo for Mac (unsupported, lack of packages), Portage Pre-fix for Mac (works beautifully, great idea, very few packages) and MacPorts (the old DarwinPorts). I have settled on MacPorts has it was the best of a bad lot. MacPorts is full of broken ports - hydra being a classic, the version of SSH libs needed isn't even in the ports tree, and so it never compiles. If you are a glutton for punishment you can compile from source which works fine as long as your package doesn't need any external libraries, then the fun begins.
Also there is not a great deal of quality freeware out there, especially compared to Windows and Linux. There does seems to be a fair amount of quality commercial or shareware software.
After the first few days of I was ready to trade in my home PC, which I use mainly for coding, ripping, photos & email, for a Mac Pro. But I have decided to throw another gig of memory into the PC and stick with crappy old XP for another 12 months (I am still sticking with Sabayon for my second desktop though).
Firstly, it would have to be the LEAST stable operating system I have used in the last 5 years. Yep thats right, this titanium covered baby crashes several times a week. No BSOD just total system lockup. I haven't seen flakiness in an OS like this since NT4.0 (R.I.P.). I am not alone in this, some colleagues got Macs at the same time I did and our experiences are identical.
Secondly, the whole "BSD roots" thing, its hype, BSD is a very distant ancestor. The Mac has a Unix command line and some of the basic command line tools you would expect but thats where it ends. I have found more Windows ports of popular *nix command line tools than Mac ones. Also, there is no native package management to speak of.
In terms of package management I tried Fink (lack of packages for what I do), Gentoo for Mac (unsupported, lack of packages), Portage Pre-fix for Mac (works beautifully, great idea, very few packages) and MacPorts (the old DarwinPorts). I have settled on MacPorts has it was the best of a bad lot. MacPorts is full of broken ports - hydra being a classic, the version of SSH libs needed isn't even in the ports tree, and so it never compiles. If you are a glutton for punishment you can compile from source which works fine as long as your package doesn't need any external libraries, then the fun begins.
Also there is not a great deal of quality freeware out there, especially compared to Windows and Linux. There does seems to be a fair amount of quality commercial or shareware software.
After the first few days of I was ready to trade in my home PC, which I use mainly for coding, ripping, photos & email, for a Mac Pro. But I have decided to throw another gig of memory into the PC and stick with crappy old XP for another 12 months (I am still sticking with Sabayon for my second desktop though).
