Your Honest opinion

[Tim Seufert]

On Jan 16, 2004, at 2:14 PM, Harvey Ussery wrote:

> (Yeah I know, there's Darwin; but whenever I got into it I got pretty 
> frustrated--admittedly, probably because I was used to bash.)

You do know you can use bash on just about any UNIX, don't you?  I'm 
fairly sure bash has shipped with every release version of OS X, and as 
of Panther, new user accounts are configured to use bash instead of 
tcsh as before.

(Personally, after using OS X for a while, I've gotten addicted to the 
better command completion of tcsh.  With the right setup -- 
/usr/share/tcsh/examples/rc on OS X is a great start -- tcsh can be a 
lot smarter than bash command completion.  Maybe there's some similar 
capability in bash, but I've never found it.  Fortunately, just as you 
can use bash on OS X, you can use tcsh on Linux if you like.)

> OSX is like Windows in that it is designed for, and is probably the 
> right solution for, someone with a plug&play approach to use of his 
> computer.

This doesn't exclude non plug & play approaches to OS X.  The thing is, 
if you expect the non-GUI stuff to behave just the same as Linux, 
you'll be disappointed.  NeXT did a lot of things differently from 
other UNIXen, even the BSDs it was based on, and a lot of that survives 
into OS X.  They seem to be moving many things closer to modern BSDs 
and Linux (for example it appears that NetInfo is now considered legacy 
and will be removed some time in the future, possibly as soon as the 
next major release) but there will always be some differences.

Some of the differences are frustrating -- like the poor quality of the 
man pages.  Many of them are hopelessly out of date, or not even 
present.