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So I picked up a MacBook yesterday, for various reasons but mostly because
my 12" powerbook feels really slow these days. After getting my accounts
moved over, which took a while (mostly because I have 45GB of music), I went
about making it resemble the *nix workstation I know and love.
These days, that mostly involves getting X11 installed and then getting RXVT
working. I tried Apple's Terminal for a while, but I can't change the ANSI
colors and the defaults suck when having a dark background, and it's
difficult to automatically tile them, which I always do.
So, I install X11 and DarwinPorts. Hmm, nothing works. Ah, DarwinPorts
can't find a compiler. Ok, go into XCode and install the compiler. Or,
well, install both of them. Nope, still doesn't work. Ok, link gcc-4.0 to
gcc. Nope, still doesn't work. Look at the build log, realize it's missing
"as". Do some searching, realize that I need another package.
This is where I realize, OS X is an embarrassment.
See, the DarwinPorts package was a normal OS X package. If OS X had a real
packaging system, then the DarwinPorts package would have been able to say,
hey, this won't work, you're going to need these 7 packages.
Instead, because OS X's packaging is basically a glorified tarball, you just
have to try it, and then figure out the failures yourself.
Of course, it's not just in the Unix world where OS X's packaging falls flat
on its face. "Just drag it into the applications folder" is a nice install
method, but it sucks from then on. What packages do I have installed? Have
they changed? Are there updates available? No idea, no way to find out,
unless maybe it's an Apple package directly.
And, of course, even though my motivation for buying this machine was
because my 12" feels really slow, this machine feels just about as slow.
Particularly, if I am doing more than one thing at a time -- say, Firefox is
loading a tab, and I switch workspaces -- then the whole machine bogs down
just as badly as my 12" did. I/O seems to just kill OS X.
I'd love to think that OS X could be free of software hate, but I don't see
it happening any time soon. Give me apt and a decent package manager, and
then a kernel that doesn't somehow manage to make a dual-proc 2ghz machine
feel dog-slow, and then we'll talk.
--
I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When
people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.
-- Ray Bradbury
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com
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