Subject: RE: OSX vs. YDL
From: Christopher Murtagh (christopher.murtagh@mcgill.ca)
Date: Sun Dec 02 2001 - 11:17:14 MST
On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Paul J. Lucas wrote:
>> First off, Darwin is *not* a UNIX, it is 'UNIX based'. To be come a true
>> 'UNIX' Apple would have to submit Darwin to standards compliancy tests and
>> pay a fee.
>
>Pedant. Who really cares?
I don't, as Linux isn't a UNIX either, but the author of the original
message seemed to emphasize UNIX as a selling feature of Darwin. Also,
speaking of standards, try finding out where things like default shell,
etc. are stored in Darwin. One would think /etc/passwd, but this is not
the case. This is the same for a *lot* in Darwin. Apple totally fucked
around with where things are, so they are not were you would expect them
to be in a real BSD/Unix/Linux. If you are the 'click and drool' kind of
user as mentioned by someone in an earlier email, then this isn't a
problem, but if you want to run your machine like a 'Real Programmer(tm)',
then it is a *big* problem. Personally, I like to write Perl scripts to
fix/maintain/configure my machines. This becomes nearly impossible with
the current OS X setup, and anything I do manage to get working in OS X
will most definitely not work elsewhere. However, many things I do on my
Linux boxes (on both Intel and PPC hardware) will also work right out of
the box on my Solaris machines.
>> This statement 'because you can't beat the support darwin has for the mac
>> platform' doesn't make any sense. Linux runs on *more* Apple hardware than
>> Darwin does,
>
>He did specifically say for the "mac platform" so the fact that
>Linux runs on other platforms is irrelevant.
Read what I said above closely. I'm assuming that *Apple* hardware is
still considered 'mac platform' or does 'mac platform' only mean G3s or
better these days? Linux will run on PPC601, PPC603, PPC604 machines as
well as the current hardware. Hell, I can get linux running on my
Quadra840 if I really wanted to. Darwin doesn't.
>> and on the hardware that they both run on, Linux runs faster.
>
>No... X11 + a window manager (pick one) runs faster than the
>Aqua UI. Unix processes run just as fast.
Like there are so many people running OS X without a GUI. And,
actullally, I would disagree that they run just as fast under OS X as they
do in Linux. OS X/Darwin still have to deal with perfomance issues due to
the Mach kernel. Linux's monolithic kernel does better at process swapping
etc. and on a heavily loaded machine would probably have a significant
performance advantage over OS X.
Cheers,
Chris
--Christopher Murtagh Webmaster / Sysadmin Web Communications Group McGill University Montreal, Quebec Canada
Tel.: (514) 398-3122 Fax: (514) 398-2017
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Sun Dec 02 2001 - 11:29:54 MST