Mac OS from a Unix Point of View

I've used some form of "unix" most of my life. Recently, my finance bought me a little black MacBook laptop. It is far from flawless, but very impressive. I do not consider myself a convert, I would be just as happy running a laptop with FreeBSD or Linux. So hopefully I will give a fairly unbiased view of what it means to be a Mac user. I use this laptop as my main computer, and I've never really used windows for anything for anything, so this has forced me to find alternatives to all of my beloved Linux apps. Later I plan on documenting the specific details about how I deal with using OS X.

Hardware:
The best thing about owning a Mac is the amazing hardware that goes with it. The simple, elegant, black laptop is why I decided to get a Mac. I figured if I didn't like OS X I could always throw Linux on it. I will probably never exclusively use OS X (I am dual booting at the moment), but I don't think I will ever buy a laptop from any other company. It is solid, beautiful, and fast. And as a safety net it runs Ubuntu very well.

GUI:
The main difference between OS X and any other unix-like operating system is the GUI. You probably know that Mac OS doesn't use X11, it uses something called Aqua. The differences between Aqua and any other window manager cannot be explained, they must be experienced. You cannot make Aqua behave how you want it to, you must learn to like how Aqua behaves. You can run X11 applications in aqua, but X11 does not integrate well, and is very buggy at times. Do not buy a Mac under the assumption that you can have a fully featured KDE/Gnome/FVWM desktop and Aqua at the same time, and I would even say that you shouldn't count on your graphical linux/bsd apps working well either. They will stick out like a sore thumb, not only in the visual sense but in terms of how they are used.

Another thing worth mentioning is font rendering. I eventually got used to Mac OS's font rendering, but at first I thought it was hideous. The problem seems to be that Apple values the parameters specified by the font designer more than they value aligning fonts to the pixels. So the same letter might appear slightly different based on where it appears on the screen. I guess this is good for documents that will eventually be printed, but less desirable for code or a terminal.

APPS:
The program's that ship with OS X are mostly just amusing. They are fun, but eventually you have to do something other than take pictures of yourself and make comic books with them. One thing I really miss when using OS X is having a good selection of free applications that work well. Here is a breakdown of some of the apps that I've messed with, most of the ones I've listed are free:

• Fan Control
• the app is called Fan Control. It lets you adjust the fan speed. Macbooks run to hot for my lap without cranking the default speed up to 3500 rpm ( I don't know why it imposes this limit, in linux it can go up to 6000). There is no /sys, /dev, or /proc entry to let you do this yourself, so this app is a must if you want to crank up the fan.
  
• Browsing
• I use a combination of Safari and Firefox. There are some features of Firefox that I just cannot live without, but the Mac version of Firefox just plain sucks. It is slow, unstable, and many of the extensions don't play nice.
  
• Editing: I mostly edit Python and C source code, so take my opinions for what they are worth. If you like to edit files over ssh or ftp, there are no good free options. Your best bet is to use the port of SSHFS from Google labs, and pretend its a local file.
  
• TextWrangler: The best free (as in beer) gui based option for editing. There is nothing particularly amazing about this editor. I suppose it looks nice, for whatever its worth.
  
• TextMate: this is by far the best graphical editor on Mac OS. You have to pay for it. It isn't really that much better than Gedit or Kate with a couple of extensions enabled, but given the competition it is easy to see why people pay for this.
• Emacs, Vim, Pico, Nano, etc: They are all there, and they all work. If you edit from a terminal Mac OS should not be a problem for you.
  
• Bittorrent:
• Azureus: if you like this client, you'll feel at home. I don't like it, but many do so I thought I would mention it
• Transmission: This is the best BT client I could find. I actually started using the Linux version after trying the OS X version. It is like Ktorrent, only not as powerful, but it meets my needs.
• File Sharing:
• Limewire/Frostwire: This is the client I use in Linux, the Mac version is alsmost the same, I don't really see a need to look any further.
  
• Hex Editing:
• 0xED: hands down best hex editor for Mac OS. It is pretty much the same thing as ghex2 or khexedit. You have to highlight something before it will give you the integer/long/float/double value of it, which I found confusing and pointless since those things are all of a set size.
• FTP/SFTP Transfers: if you use Konqueror or Nautilus, you take these things for granted. Any computer on the network is just as transparent to you as the one you are sitting at. Sadly Finder (The OS X File Manager) is a worthless piece of crap. There are only two decent options that you don't have to pay for:
• SSHFS/MacFuse: the ssh filesystem from Google. It allows you to mount remote machines over ssh. This is no where near as stable as the Virtual filesystems offered by both KDE and Gnome.
• ftp/sftp: yep, the command line utilities. I use these because there is no other sane choice for basic file transfers. This doesn't work out all that well for running a local editor and doing remote development tho.
  
• Movies: I am sad to say that all of the video playing/editing software that comes with a mac sucks. I still reboot into linux to use Devede to make video DVDs. iDVD and iMovie have nice interfaces, but they are always crashing on me, and don't give you much control. They only seem to be good for editing a short home video, not ripping a DVD or encoding a full length movie into a DVD.
  
• VLC: Pretty much the same thing as its Linux and Windows versions. I use this because it is the only thing that plays everything I throw at it.
• Mplayer: The linux version compiles on OS X just fine. I use this for mencoder, which is nice for re-encoding videos.
• Music:
• iTunes: It plays music. It is nowhere near as cool as Amarok, and it doesn't sync up with my Sanyo mp3 player like Rythmbox. I have no desire to buy an iPod, so I guess I'll have to reboot into linux to use my mp3 player.

Thats it for now. Stay tuned for more specific hints and tips about using a Mac.