On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Derek Glidden wrote:
> On the flip side, gentoo is getting more popular
Gentoo seems to work well enough, although I'm not sure the "compile
everything from source" approach is all that great an idea. The
optimizations gained by using PPro/PII/PIII-specific code generation flags
are negligible at best, and there are still perfectly good machines out
there with slow enough processors that compiling the whole system might
take days. Seems like a solution looking for a problem, when binary
packages are perfectly useable.
I'm no Gentoo expert, perhaps there are workarounds and alternative
methods of installation, etc.
> I will happily admit: I got my hands on a new Apple 15" Powerbook about
> three/four months ago and so far, I'm really enjoying it.
12" PB G4 here -- OS X is the best desktop environment I've used since,
well, the older releases of MacOS. ;) And now that they've adopted the
guts of NeXTSTEP it's a tough combination to beat. I still do some work
in X11 on my SPARCstation, but for the most part the Mac is my daily
workstation.
> [...] it's refreshing to have a UNIX-based system where everything
> pretty much really does "just work" even if you do "have to" do it "the
> apple way" which considering the options, isn't all that bad.
Actually, you'd be surprised how much functionality provided by the GUI
tools is also exposed through the CLI. Software Update, for example.
Apple certainly doesn't go out of their way to tell you about that stuff,
and the manpages are scanty or nonexistent, but if you poke around and/or
ask the right folks, there's a lot going on behind the scenes you can
twiddle with yourself.
And then there's AppleScript, which gives you direct access to an IPC
mechanism used by applications to do all sorts of things (AppleScript and
Apple Events are carryovers from older versions of MacOS, dating back at
least a few years).
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