All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Macs and Perl

ambs on 2004-07-17T19:56:22

For some time I've been observing that most Perl hackers use Mac (Leon Brocard and Simon Cozens, at least, which I can remember).

I, on the other hand, have been working with Linux (Slackware). What can I gain buying a Mac?

My experience

melo on 2004-07-17T20:30:53

I used linux for 8 years I think. two years ago I bough a TiBook. I don't think I'll ever go back.

I got tired of compiling modules and software and fixing little things to make the basic environment work. Granted: linux is more efficient than Mac OS X, but my Mac *always* works. I never had to fix nothing serious in 2 years of everyday use.

Sleep and hibernation just work. Since 10.3 (Panther release) you can compile most opensource software if you really want to. There are at least 3 distributions of open source software, and at least fink (http://fink.sf.net) has binary packages. And the bundled Mac software is very good (things like iTunes, iChat, Mail.app) although you have to give them a chance. Lots of things in the Mac world work better if you allow yourself to try to do things the way Apple thinks its best.

In the end, switching made more productive because I didn't had to fight everyday with the machine to get some work done.

Re:My experience

Juerd on 2004-07-19T12:08:09

I got tired of compiling modules and software and fixing little things to make the basic environment work.

So did I, so I switched to Debian.

Slackware is, like Windows, Gentoo and FreeBSD, for people who like to spend time getting things to work. Lazy people use Debian, rich lazy people buy a Mac. :)

Re:My experience

melo on 2004-07-19T12:14:47

Slackware is, like Windows, Gentoo and FreeBSD, for people who like to spend time getting things to work. Lazy people use Debian, rich lazy people buy a Mac. :)

:) the price has gone down. I'm writing this in a 2 years old machine. You can buy a iBook with the same power under euro 1000. That's not terrible expensive, if you compare features with PC's.

Best regards,

Simple

Matts on 2004-07-18T09:41:22

It's Unix with a friendly face. That's all I need.

Re:Simple

bart on 2004-07-18T10:50:26

You must be rebooting a lot, then.

n.b. I'm assuming the "friendly Mac" is still the first thing you see when booting...

Re:Simple

Matts on 2004-07-18T15:46:41

The friendly Mac doesn't come with OS X I don't believe. And OS 9 wasn't unix, and it was therefore useless to me.