Neal Reid wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Neal Reid wrote:
In article ,

I content that Mac OS X is the nicest front end to a linux box
available.
Well it s NOT a front end to a linux box, is it? Its a whole OS and GUI
based on FreeBSD running (officially) only on macintosh hardware.
Um - see my reply to Michelle
As a long time UNIX admin, I find a number of things
added and nothing missing ... (And before I get flamed, let me
emphasize I'm talking function, not form. It took me a while, for
example to get it clear where /etc files were still needed and
where Netinfo files had replaced them)

What's missing is third party software and hardware support.

That's where the Mac is sadly lacking: Programs that run on it.
Expensive and not enough OF them....you CAN get a lot of Linux stuff
ported across to run under X11,
I have not found ANYTHING I needed to do that I couldn't do on a
Mac.

Shows how narrow your application field is then ;-)

And what does X11 have to do with anything. It's a network
protocol over which one can run process control and a windowing
system (pretty much) platform independently. For e.g., you CAN run
X11 on Mac OS - but I never have.

Er.thats what I was saying.You can rapidly port Linux apps to X11,
because its on the mac, but the look and feel is completely different.

Thats the salient thing that came through to me. By breaking away from
X, and making a radical statement of difference in terms of the API to
the MAC GUI, Apple have left 3rd party developers in a curious
position. Its a BIG job to port an app to a Mac, not the least because
its not JUST a different set of calls into the graphics: There are a
whole new set of ways in which things are to be done to make them
conform to the OS-X look and feel.
Um - have you ever DONE it? What you claim was true pre-OS X days,
but now it's fairly trivial to develop an app that will run on Mac
OS, other Linuxs or Windows (Think QuickTime, iTunes...)

I suspect they are Mac apps that got ported to PCs, not the other way
round.
Now if they had made OS-X run on generic Intel hardware, then it would
have been worth the pain to port stuff, but Apple chose to keep the
whole thing in the family.
What did I miss? Last I looked, OS X has run on Intel hardware

Intel hardware made by Apple is NOT *generic* Intel hardware. To run
OS-X on non apple hardware required a hack. Its probably a violation of
the license of OS-X. You cannot by a PC down the locals store and shove
an OS-X disk in is CDROM and juts install OS-X. If you could, sales of
OS-X would rocket.


for
quite a while. Agreed, not on BIOS dependent Intel hardware, but
certainly on EFI compliant Intel hardware.Or you could just tell
XCode
So a potential developer will look at PC's -
which is a must have, look at Linux, and think 'not that hard a port'
and look at Mac OS-X and say 'Ee bai gum lad, that bain't worth the
effort for 5% of the desktop market'
Or you code just set you target(s) appropriately in XCode and make
your stuff available to anyone (including the approaching 14%
share of Apple users)

Xcode is apple specific.