On 2011-04-01 22:05, Adam wrote:
[email protected] wrote:
So I'm looking for prior experience on:
> It's already running a "nix" - why bother?
I'm told that OSX comes from BSD Unix, not the AT&T Unix we as Linux
users are used to.
Yes. Specifically, it's Darwin BSD running under a Mach microkernel.
This means that when using the command line under Mac
OSX, the commands are familiar, but frequently the options for them are
not.
Adam
I could make a case for or against putting Ubuntu on a Mac, but I'm
assuming that you're looking specifically for the advantages of Ubuntu
as well as the drawbacks of leaving OS X on the Mac, so that's what I'll
focus on here.
Advantages of Ubuntu over OS X:
- wealth of free software available
- ease of installing free software from repositories
- Free OSS Virtualization choices like KVM and VirtualBox
- OS upgrades come at no cost, nor cost to your freedom
- case-sensitive filesystem by default
- choice of window managers
- the normal command line options you've likely gotten familiar with
- good UTF-8 support (thus good handling of international characters)
- better security (Ubuntu comes with AppArmor enabled by default)
- Linux kernel, with all of its flexibility and driver support
Disadvantages of OS X:
- free software more difficult to install; there are three
different open-source package managers: Fink, MacPorts, Homebrew.
I've helped others use the first two; of the three I liked Fink
the most, but usually to get all of the packages you want you end
up needing more than one of them, and each has their ugliness too.
The link below mentions these and gives some other good arguments
against sticking with OS X:
http://teddziuba.com/2011/03/osx-unsuitable-web-development.html
- Textmate has some interesting limitations.
http://blog.peteonrails.com/?p=217
- HFS+ is case-insensitive by default, last I heard. Yet it WILL
allow you to make files with duplicate names but different case,
after which you'll only have access to one of the files.
- Extremely limited filesystem choice (HFS+ or... ?)
- A friend of mine is having an awful time trying to get decent
Unicode/UTF-8 support on OS X with command line tools like 'tr',
grep, sed, awk, etc. Because of this, even though he's a Python
person he's decided to resort to using Perl.
- Apple is dropping GCC and Samba due to GPL v3 -- the issue is
likely the "signing key" provisions.
Disclaimer: these are just thoughts, not personal experience. I'm not
personally running any Macs, nor have I put Linux on a Mac lately. I've
only helped install Ubuntu on a couple of PowerPC machines, and never
used them myself. What little experience I've had with OS X was mainly
in compiling and testing Qt 3 and Qt 4 applications.
--
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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