Comment by pothibo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pothibo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I agree with you 100%. I bought a new mac book pro 2 weeks ago and it took me about 2 hours to get up and running.

Because OS X is linux based (BSD but the difference is not relevant here), a lot already exists to make these kind of things work out of the box.

Personally, I need two things to have my setup working:

  - Homebrew (OS X only but it's a given to anyone used to ruby)

  - dotfiles

My dotfiles are on github and git can be installed via homebrew. I am using vim so my setup depend on both homebrew (git) & dotfiles (settings/plugins).

I have no idea why I would need anything more than that to get started. But this is personal, your company needs may be different. But don't think you need some kind of automation, linux has powerful tools. Use them.

> Because OS X is linux based

Wait... what?

> (BSD but the difference is not relevant here)

Still, "Linux-based" is a funny way of saying "Unix-like". Is HP-UX also "Linux-based (System V but the difference is not relevant here)"? ;)

Oh dear... Its not even BSD-based... Its Mach based(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)) with a BSD userland. (Read BSD-API). So its "BSD-based" in the same way as Windows is Posix-based (as it too can have a Posix userland API).

Linux != UNIX. BSD != OSX

The kernel is actually a hybrid of Mach and FreeBSD. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU for details.

The word you are looking for is "unix".

I always got the feeling that installing Homebrew and running the associated apps that run under X but not natively under Quartz was a broken way to get apps on Mac OSX (unless it runs under Quartz now...?)

It feels like the "dirtying" of the native system in the same way that installing cygwin and a mingw and GNUWin32 on Windows does, just in order to get it more like Windows. Rather, I'd use the native utilities on the system and native compilers.

Is it just me who feels this way? Does any Linux user feel compelled to install Linux and then run software ONLY under Wine?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com