This is the item to discuss OS X, the native operating system of current 
Apple Macintosh computers, and its underlying Unix base, Darwin.

28 responses total.

I haven't used MacOS X recently, but I did try two instances of Darwin
OpenDarwin and FreeDarwin and found neither of useable.

There's a big difference between using Darwin and running an OS in Darwin.

Well yes, obviously.

Darwin road leads to Hell.  (From the east, anyway.)

I'm a pretty sophisticated user of Mac OS X, including enough of its
underlying Mach BSD system to have done some shell scripting --
including a simplified interface for the fs_usage utility -- and
combining of shell- and apple-scripting into functional tools like a
clickable app that takes a partial app name as an input and pauses or
unpauses the matching processes (using kill -STOP and kill -CONT) and a
script in a FileMaker database that automatically uploads a compressed
copy of itself to a webserver upon closing (using curl, in the
background, and only if the file has been modified).

I don't have a lot of experience using other modern OSs except Windows,
so I haven't a lot of basis for comparison except to say that I have had
very little difficulty figuring out a way to make my Mac do just about
anything I want, and I have had extensive difficulty making Windows
machines not do any particular thing I don't want them to do.  

I recently used an Ubuntu machine and was very impressed with the LAMPP
set of tools and the easy interface of the VNC system.  I downloaded an
ISO for my older G3 laptop, but haven't been sufficiently motivated to
install it.

I'm using a VNC viewer on Linux on the old iBook, to connect to an X
session running on my usual NetBSD box.  This is partly because the
monitor crapped out on the NetBSD box.

I use Mac OS X as my primary environment these days.  I hope never to have
to go back to the days of sitting in front of a "standard" Unix workstation,
or one of the monstrosities that is a typical X11-based environment (KDE,
GNOME, etc).  I just dont like those interfaces (I realize that's partly my
own bias; I consider them bloated and they feel constricting.  If you can use
them and get your work done, then more power to you...).

I haven't used a Mac in ages, but i remember it had some features that I
thought were particularly stupid; I like the idea of software eject, for
example, but Apple's implementation of it (at least in System 6, and, as I
understand, all the way up to Mac OS 9 if not X) is just brain-damaged: you
drag a disk icon to the trash to eject it. Common sense not only suggests that
if you drag an icon of a disk to the trash, it's because you either want to
empty its contents, or format it, but that the "Eject Disk" button on the
Special Menu should do "what it says on the tin" (as the saying goes here in
the UK), and furthermore without asking you to replace the disk for apparently
no reason.

My main problem with Macs, though, is that they come from one supplier. I have
been sufficiently burned in the past, both by products limited to one supplier
(Commodore Amigas), and crap-but-locked-in products in a supposedly free
market, that I simply can't bring myself to put myself in a
reliant-on-one-supplier position again.

I don't know if they have since changed this, but i understand that in Mac
OS X, Apple changed the Finder so that it only displayed one window, with the
contents of the directory you're in, at one time, instead of opening the
contents of each directory you've gone through; thus you have to use a special
mode of the finder to find another directory into which, say, you want a drag
a file. Nasty.

That, and the presence of the Dock, also presumably mean the death of a really
cool feature - tabs for open windows at the bottom of the screen. What a
shame.

Regarding #7; I don't think that's true.  Yes, you can still drag a CD or
floppy (floppy?  Wow; I'm not sure I even own a floppy drive anymore...) image
to the trash can to eject it, or you can hit the eject button on the keyboard,
or use another interface.  I agree that it's strange at first.

You can certainly open multiple finder windows, and in some ways, it's nice
that you don't have a bunch of open windows cluttering up your screen and
representing each of the intermediate folders you went through to get
somewhere.

The functionality of the dock supercedes that of tabbed windows; running
applications appear in the dock.

I agree that the single vendor aspect is troubling.

Re resp:4: I've heard that Windows 2000 and up can be scripted quite 
powerfully using Visual Basic -- apparently they can run VB scripts 
just like they can run batch files.  Documentation on this feature 
seems to be hard to come by, though.


Re resp:7: They changed the Finder to act more like Windows Explorer, 
which doesn't open a window each time you open a new folder, either.  
You can certainly still open multiple Finder windows.  There's also a 
feature where, if you're dragging a file and hover the mouse over a 
folder, that folder opens.  This makes it pretty easy to drill down 
when copying files.

As far as asking for the disk back, at least the Mac knows what it 
wants in that situation.  I've seen Windows silently fail in baffling 
ways when it needed data off a disk I'd just ejected.  (For 
example...save a Word file to floppy, take out the floppy, then try to 
print.  The floppy drive runs for a second, then nothing happens.)

My criticisms of the Mac are most certainly not predicated on the idea of
Windows being the better system!

Heh!

In case nobody has seen it:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-773770276749807883

Further to #8: any apps you want there appear in the dock. Running apps are
indicated with a pointer. The dock is both a menu of frequently used apps and
tabs for running apps. 

Regarding #12; Hmm; I've never had those problems.  I think most of them
applied to classic Mac OS; Mac OS X is a bit better.

I haven't had those problems either.  I've been using a Powerbook 
running OS X as my principal computer for 2.5 years now.

Re #7:  Another way to eject something in OS X is to control-click (or 
middle-click, if you have a 3-button mouse) on its desktop icon and 
select "Eject" from the context menu that pops up.  Very Windows-ish.

You can now set a preference for whether directories open in new finder 
windows or an existing window.

I've become very fond of the dock and use it heavily, not just for 
applications but for frequently accessed files and folders.  If you drag 
a folder to the dock, you can open a menu of its contents by control-
clicking with the mouse; then select an item with the mouse or the arrow 
keys.  Very handy for navigating the system; saves me having to grapple 
with finder windows, which I find to be rather tedious.

One surprise that I didn't run across for a while - despite the 
underlying Darwin Unix system, file names in OS X are case-independent, 
so that e.g. you can't have two files named 'mail' and 'Mail' in the 
same directory.  I haven't run into a problem with this, but I can 
envision circumstances where it *could* be a problem.

That sure  helps with Find!

Does that depend on the underlying filesystem?  Is MacOS X case-
sensitive on ffs or e2fs?

I don't think MacOS can use ext2fs. UFS filesystems on MacOS are
case-sensitive, yup.

I don't know about ext2.  I UFS on Mac OS X is, as Jeff says, case sensitive.
But the default filesystem is HFS+, which is case preserving but case
insensitive.  That is, if I name a file, "Foo", it will be named "Foo" (as
opposed to "foo" or "FOO"), but I can access it by any name in the set
{[Ff][Oo][Oo]}.

I think early on they had some problems with Finder and case-sensitive
filesystems.  They may have been corrected, though.

 re #15, 17:  It *does* depend on the filesystem.  If you create an HFS+
 filesystem on a partition the Apple Disk Utility will ask you if you want
 filenames to be case-sensitive or not.  Because practically every other
 MacOS X machine in existence came pre-formatted from Apple without case
 sensitivity turned on it's usually a bad idea to choose it unless you've
 got an overpowering reason for doing so.

Re #21: pkgsrc might be one reason.  I'd do it with a spare disk or
  partition though, not the one that MacOS lives on.

The new mac OS (Tiger is the most recent, Leopard scheduled for release in
spring of 07) is more customizable than any of the apple OS's to date.  If
you have a mac, I strongly suggest subscribing to a magazine called macaddict
(you can subscribe at www.macaddict.com).  Occasionally you will find
different "easter eggs" that simply need to be turned on using the terminal.
And these hidden features are usually VERY helpful (dock like egg from 10.3).
On top of that, I've been using UNIX or the freeware LINUX releases (most
recently, Yellow Dog Linux) on my macs for many years, and since the release
of the first developer preview of mac os x, I've found myself using linux less
and less and the terminal in x more.  In fact, that's what I'm using now. 
I for one happen to enjoy the command line interface of the terminal, and it
kind of reminds me of college.  I can write the programs that I need to in
C++, and they run perfectly.  Not to mention, apple's developer tools that
are included free offer a very easy to use programming environment.  When
neither of those suit what I want to do, there's always REALbasic.  I'm sorry,
but the best move apple made was switching from the classic OS that had gotten
stale to X.  The power granted to knowledgable users is simply unheard of.
However, the classic OS has it's major up points too.  For one, security. 
I'm not sure if anyone remembers when WebDAV ran a contest offering $100,000
to anyone who could hack their mac web server.  Guess what, the mac won.  That
was running mac OS 8.5.  Again, you have to look at what each system offers,
and then make that decision based on your greatest need.  I still have an
older mac that I use for my home automation server for that reason alone. 
When I leave work I can hop online before I walk out the door, and change the
heat, have a pot of coffee waiting, have the dogs let out to go to the
bathroom on a schedule, or check my alarm system status.  I use it because
it's secure, no one else can log in without my security key and change any
settings or disarm the alarm.  And yes, it requires a hardware key that is
plugged into a USB port, the program on there then runs, and tells my server
that it's actually me.  It's just easier.  But for all the video and design
work that I do at home, I use X.  The other big bonus to the new OS is all
of the open source software that's available.  Just my opinion.

As far as the case-sensitivity on the file system, it most assuredly depends
on the format of the drive.  Look at unix file systems (UFS), they very highly
depend on the case.

Whilst there are certainly cases in which people have grumbled about the new
(OS X) way of doing things vs the old, (e.g. the default single-window view
in the Finder), I don't think anyone seriously contends that OS <=9 is
superior to OS X. As for security, surely that is also better now? (If there
were less viruses for earlier versions, for example, was that not due to a
certain obscurity?)

With the BSD base system, apple has opened itself to numerous security holes.
For that reason, when we run the software update, many times, there are
security patches that have to be downloaded and installed.  BSD base gives
us both the good and sadly, the bad.  As far as viruses are concerned, when
it comes to any mac os, they are quite lucky, as there are almost none in
existance.  But on the topic of security, I have an app installed called
NetBarrier by Intego.  Thankfully I've installed it, or I would have been
hacked quite a few times.  With the programming work I do, I have a handful
of traps that I've built into the kernal of the system just to be safe. 
Again, with the BSD base system, hackers are able to hack the MacOS more
easily, where with >OS9, they had to be using a mac, and have a great deal
of knowledge, or installed a back door program from the computer itself.

Sorry, I meant <OS9  It's been a long day..

Point.

Don't use X as an abbreviation for MacOS X, because it's too
easily confused with the X Window System, which has been
abbreviated to X for many years before MacOS X came along.

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