Two all beef patties special sauce, lettuce, cheese pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.
Mack is cool. Macs are okay as long as you don't get the ones with the one-button mouse, or the silly size-of-a-silver-dollar one-button mouse. I really just hate their mice.
Posts: 1423 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
saxon -- OS X is quite capable of being an excellent development platform. open source developers all over are taking to the mac in droves (not an exaggeration; take a look at a picture of any recent open source conference where people have their computers out). Code is essentially 100% portable (so long as you aren't using linux kernel APIs, and even some of those are present in OS X).
Though I must make one minor point about what twinky said -- you still need to recompile, its a completely different processor architecture. Its just that for almost all apps, all you need is a recompile.
And of course, OS X comes with apache out of the box, BDB out of the box, python out of the box, perl out of the box, ruby out of the box, and numerous other unix programs -- out of the box. And it takes advantage of them; the system "registry" so to speak is an LDAP server, for instance.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
fugu, interesting. Is it as configurable as Linux? If so, I think the only remaining advantage Linux would have is price. I'm relatively certain that the cheapest development system you could get would still be either an Athlon- or x86-based system running Linux.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
It is not as configurable as linux, gui wise. Well, actually in some ways of thinking of it, its more configurable gui wise.
OS X's native gui is optional (though not if you run apps which use it), and can be used simultaneously with an X Windows server (apple even includes one for you). That X Windows server can be used in "rootless" mode, or in rooted mode, and is just as configurable as on linux (before Panther and its integrated windows manager that made X apps behave like OS X apps, I used a rooted fluxbox setup with lots of customization; it was a nifty place to keep a browser opened to hatrack all the time).
However, most likely you are going to be using the native Aqua GUI. Other than the gui, OS X is very configurable. Partly because many of the apps you run are *nix apps. Its a bit more integrated than linux typically is, more in the line of a BSD (not surprising).
You may have seen the link I posted in the other thread, its a link to a screenshot of the desktop of one of the main FreeBSD developers. He's running OS X (last I heard, most of the FreeBSD team was). Macs are also highly popular among perl hackers and many other open source people.
Yes, its not going to be as cheap (though for a laptop, its going to be pretty close). However, the reason a lot of these developers are going for it is not price -- its *nix plus convenience. They get with OS X a lot of utilities many people have found very useful, and that in particular have one feature not really available on other platforms. Rendezvous.
Rendezvous has been a killer app among geeks for a while now; the ability to completely effortlessly share music, notes (there's a very cool collaborative editing app that's being used to take group notes at conferences), photos, webservers (safari automatically discovers rendezvous enabled servers (mod_rendezvous), such as the one on OS X), AIM names (ichat is rendezvous aware, so you have the SN of anybody at the conference without needing to find it out and add them to your buddy list), and much more has been a boon to people who need stuff to work, well, seamlessly.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
