Maher Gamal :
@Matt
Emacs, tightly integrated ? Isn’t the aquamacs project the *tightly integrated* one ?

Aquamacs is tightly integrated into MacOS, yes…. but at the expense of the emacs experience. Try adding an internet protocol that invokes emacsclient in OSX and you’ll see what I mean.

Vanilla emacs is tighly integrated into X11… period.

Shouldn’t “whatever-foo” be “whatever-fu”? (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/suffix-fu.html)

Cheers

I’m happy blog posts like this that compare MacOS and Linux as *nix systems. Often, criticism of Linux distros assume that the point of an OS is to big a big GUI, cpu-guzzling desktop like OS X or Windows. If it’s not all point-and-click, then it is thought to fail…

But what if we look at things from the other side. If you primarily use *nix and command-line tools, a good Linux distro is much easier to install and maintain than MacOS X, since it has been built from the ground up to ensure that all the necessary dependencies and libraries are compatible and up-to-date.

An example: I’ve been using Emacs 23 on Linux for well over a year now and it’s really powerful and slick. The Mac Emacs 23 (cocoa), on the other hand, still lacks a lot of functionality and doesn’t interact well with the rest of the system. I’ve spent hours trying to get it to work well but it’s still very buggy. (Then there’s X11 on OS X, but don’t get me started on that one!) On linux, on the other hand, I can download a working Emacs 23 binary or use an automated build system to compile it and immediately enjoy an Emacs that is tightly integrated into my system.

Mac Ports and Fink, alas, simply do not get as much love as the repos of the Linux distros and BSDs.

One of the earlier comments mention OpenSuse. OpenSuse is not the best point of comparison since its package management system is just not very good and the whole point of the blog post was to compare ease of installing *nix tools on Mac OS vs. Linux. If someone can find a faster and easier way to install a reliable, up-to-date, and interlocking set of *unix tools than either apt-get (Debian) or pacman (Arch), I would very much be interested to learn about it.

An example: I suppose I could learn resize, move, tile, and tag windows with the keyboard in OS X. But I don’t really have the energy to learn Apple Script or download a bunch of random hacks. In Linux, I can download and learn a beautiful window manager like Openbox or awesome and have really great functionality out of the box.

I’d have to disagree with some of the earlier comments. Mac Ports is just not as comprehensive or up to date as the repositories of the major Linux and BSD distros — and the community surrounding MacPorts (at least for the average user) is pretty small. The Linux community, by contrast, is very vocal; this is one of the huge selling points of Linux. There are lots of people ready to help you learn

I think a lot of folks who had been using Linux since the 90s got a bit burnt out by all the tinkering and jumped the Apple bandwagon with OS X but may not realize just how slick distros like Arch and Ubuntu have gotten in the last couple of years. Fonts are great, configuration is increasingly simple, etc. There’s also been lot of convergence in the Linux desktop with hal, fontsconfig, etc.

The best linux distros (Arch, Debian) also have the advantage of offering superb binary packagement and elegant build systems.

Linux is the future. We just need graphics and games improved for Linux and it’s a done deal. I know graphics programs like inkscape and the gimp are pretty good, but illustrator is just AMAZING to me…