Thursday 20 September 2012

[rant] Does no one care that OS X is unix?

And, don't get pedantic. 

UNIX or unix, BSD, Linux or OS X, Solaris - we're probably all using a lot of GNU software (because it is free and we can use it for production without fees and it works incredibly well). I for one used the GNU compiler on Solaris (8 and 9 if you care) for what I had to do in a production environment - mainly for compiling Perl modules but also bespoke C and C++ imaging applications. Nothing clever, mind,  but why does no one ever document anything about OS X properly online?

I had to look up some vaguely (although not very) esoteric options for the unix find command tonight - why can I only find the answers on a Linux site? Does anyone actually use the *nix side of OS X apart from developers? 

Does anyone know that OS X is basically a BSD unix?

OK, I am not an ObjC programmer and I find C / C++ difficult but... OS X runs pretty fast. I do a lot of music on it and I can have 20+ tracks of audio, with realtime effects (a lot) processing on them running on a dual core 2GHz machine with 2GB RAM - this is pretty impressive (and very important) to me - this is a flaky old Mac... why is it working better for this than a Windows box with 2 or 3 times the power?

Not being an Apple fanboi I do like the OS... try and look up bash scripting on OS X and how limp the advice is. I friggin hate Apple's silly little gadgets but I think the computers are pretty good - ok their servers do have a tendency to fall over (generally when you're asleep) but hell, they're cheap.

If I had to work, professionally on an OS of choice it would be Solaris but OS X is not the end of the world. Linux really before Apple though.

And, no, I don't really like Java. And, no, it does not work properly on OS X.

PS vaguely esoteric was simply this:

find -E ~/ -regex “\.*c|.*\.o” -exec rm -f {} \; 2>/dev/null

Not the end of the world is it?

Nothing on an Apple forum though.

</rant>

PS - Duncan and Kathryn - great news - so pleased for you!