[indiana-discuss] Indiana Wish List

[Eric Boutilier]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Tim Bray wrote:
> On Jul 11, 2007, at 1:00 AM, Milan Jurik wrote:
>
>> Did somebody ask why there are two (or three) the most growing user's
>> bases (ignoring MS Windows, as there is another reason):
>> 
>> a) (X|K)Ubuntu (or PCLinuxOS)
>> 
>> b) Mac OS X
>> 
>> Eric, I think you can easily find some of your colleagues who are using
>> Macbooks or Ubuntu... Ask them why.
>> 
>> It is not in command line utilities. These are not the barrier for users
>> to switch from other OSes.
>
> No, but command-line utilities are important for *developers*.

And system egineer/admins too.

> I'm a longtime Linux guy, and when I'm in a terminal window on OS X, I
> basically can't tell the difference from Linux.  If I want to do
> system-oriented stuff, there are some issues, but you'd expect that.
> But all my usual commands for moving around, looking at things, seeing
> what's running, etc etc etc, are 100% the same...

I totally agree. And that's speaking, not as a longtime Linux guy, but
a longtime 80% SunOS/Solaris, 20% Linux guy.

I like the OS X comparison. Almost daily on Solaris Express I do
something like grep -A etc instead of ggrep -A etc; or tar -j etc
instead of gtar -j etc[1]. (I admit to even feeling a mini-thrill the
day I realized, totally by accident, that ls -S worked out-of-the-box
on Solaris Express :) )

Anyway, by contrast, also almost daily, I ssh to our family Mac for
some reason or another, and (figuratively speaking) it's as if my
shoulders relax just a little bit knowing that that kind of thing will
almost never happen.

--Eric

[1] Of course I'm aware I could employ one of the tricks (e.g.
directory of symlinks) to fix things up so I always get ggrep when I
type grep, but then I wouldn't be getting the experience that
new-comers to SX get, and that's important to me.