Clara ([info]anotherthink) wrote,
@ 2007-11-20 23:12:00
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Mark Pilgrim is my hero!
On Mac OS X:
"Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time."

I don't know how anyone lives without package management. (And yeah, [info]sbisaac, I know, back in the day you used slackware and had to make build install everything by hand!)

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[info]thetathx1138
2007-11-21 05:41 am UTC (link)
This guy is a wimp and when his system goes horribly wrong, he's not going to be able to fix it. Yeah, doing shit work in any sort of system, be it a computer OS or just how a company files things, is no fun. But it also teaches you how a system actually works.

Of course, I don't do any coding or high-level computer work. I just make fun of Unix nerds trying to tell me Celluloid is anything other than a folk-code clusterf**k.

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[info]anotherthink
2007-11-21 02:33 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, doing shit work in any sort of system, be it a computer OS or just how a company files things, is no fun. But it also teaches you how a system actually works.

True! And in my personal computing, I deliberately use a harder-to-maintain distribution on my desktop so I'll be forced to dig into things every now and then.

But there's also the kind of computer user who doesn't know or want to know how it works. My peeve is with people who say Linux can't be for that kind of user because it's "too hard to configure stuff" -- not only have people who say that not tried plugging a camera into an Ubuntu laptop lately, but they apparently don't realize that a good package management system makes both system upgrades and installing/removing software literally one-click (no searching the internet for the software, no EULAs, not even clicking through a graphical installer), which is ease-of-use way beyond Windows/Mac.

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[info]thetathx1138
2007-11-21 03:06 pm UTC (link)
I'm actually one of those "don't want to think about it" users, and my problem with Linux is that essentially the software for it is designed by a volunteer committee, and as such it's going to be subject to its own quirks. It might be missing useful features, features might be hard to implement, and generally the programs aren't really designed with a non-computer-literate person in mind, which is the main reason GIMP remains what amounts to a powerful toy and Photoshop still reigns o'er the land.

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[info]ataralas
2007-11-21 12:29 pm UTC (link)
...or there's fink. You know, package management for OSX?

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[info]anotherthink
2007-11-21 02:02 pm UTC (link)
Yeah... but that's never going to have a repository as complete as a Linux one (for one, you can't use it to update your OS and system tools).
I could never get fink to work smoothly, but it's probably improved since I last tried.

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[info]thetathx1138
2007-11-21 03:12 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, but that's Apple all the way: secretive as humanly possible.

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[info]ataralas
2007-11-21 05:07 pm UTC (link)
It's true. On the other hand, I think it's pretty disingenuous to say that if you use OSX, you have to be CL all the time to get Serious Things done—though reading that linked article about CL installing MYSQL was a WTF experience. Why anyone would do that is beyond me, there are much easier ways!

I do some pretty heavy lifting with my laptop, and the only time I spend serious time on the CL is when I'm working with not-general-public programs. (i.e. things I, or my research group, have written ourselves. And root*. But root sucks**.) I also don't maintain it as a server—if I were to run server software or maintain large databases, I'd probably run some form of Linux or BSD.

I work on both Linux (CERN Scientific) and OS X machines every day, and I have to say, I generally prefer OS X—though I certainly have my moments of pissiness at Apple. And I recognize that's a personal thing based on my user habits and preferences. It just irks me that there's a "one true way" of having the "easiest" system to use.

*The program, not the superuser.
**This sentence, however, applies to both. The wheel is where it's at.

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