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Comment by 1gor | Hacker News Reader

If you develop web based applications, Mac OS X has many limitations, strangely enough.

Mac OS X is UNIX alright, but to pull most of libraries from MacPorts is the only sane way to manage dependencies.

If you run Tiger (and see no reasons to upgrade) - then you are stuck with old Java release for ever. There is no way to upgrade Java other than buying Leopard, and then you are still at Apple's mercy for future upgrades.

A simple task like doing 'sudo emacs' requires some custom shell scripting, since emacs that came with the operating system is old and useless.

My initial excitement about Mac hardware is also dented after battery and graphic card both failed only after a year on my MacBook Pro.

A web developer would be much more happy on Linux if he/she could live without eye candy.

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"Mac OS X is UNIX alright, but to pull most of libraries from MacPorts is the only sane way to manage dependencies."

The only time this is the case is ImageMagik. Everything else is easily manageable by hand unless you insist of mixing it with the normal mac stuff. MacPorts is hardly necessary.

It's unfortunate too, because Apple has one of the best non-package solutions for managing software installs in their .bundle and .app and .framework scheme. It's exquisitely simple and elegant, but everyone seems hesitant to adopt it because, well, because the UNIX way is to use a byzantine and barely functional package system and not incur manifest parsing penalties when apps are loaded.

Last time I tried to pull ImageMagik from MacPorts it tried to install X. Huh?

same thing happened to me. imagemagick has an image viewer app that requires x11.

worse, i did indeed already have x11 installed, but imagemagick didn't like it for some reason, and failed to install. so i pulled down one of the binary distributions instead.

My point exactly.

If I have to fiddle with macports, install my own emacs and live with the Java Apple wants me to have, I would rather just buy a cheap core 2 duo notebook or a netbook and put Linux on it. The only reason to buy a Mac is if you need iTunes, Adobe stuff and Office and don't want to run Linux.

Or if you are developing for Mac (in which case it would be rather dumb to use anything else)

It makes more sense to put an exact duplicate of your server platform (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris) in a VM on the Mac and develop on the machine headless. Same applies to developing on Linux.

And then what is the point of using a Mac? You can do exactly that even from Windows.

For the same reasons it would be nicer to ssh into a real, not virtual, unix server machine from Mac OS X. It's a real unix underneath with a proper terminal built in. I'm temporarily doing similar at work on a Windows machine and Putty just doesn't cut it. I could look into cygwin or whatever but sod that, Ubuntu will be replacing it shortly.

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