MacOS X.
I'm a believer. First Unix that manages to avoid looking like Unix
(except if you want it to). I've never seen an X windows manager that did
any good other than making the Unix metaphor just pretty, not less
complicated. OS X, on the other hand, does an excellent job at hiding it away
from the casual user, but not making it ridiculously difficult for people to
get their hands dirty if they want.
Personally, I think there's too much UNIX in OSX. They not only took the
kernel, but the entire environment as well.
You have in fact used it? Or did you just see it in a shop and pass judgement
on it at long range?
When you start up OS X, you aren't confronted with arcane pathnames or
/dev/thisnthat, or anything like what you'd get from X. You don't start off
with an Xterm, a spartan file manager and a shell prompt; you get the dock
and desktop icons. It looks like a futuristic, glitzy Mac, not like a window
manager. That's what it's supposed to do.
The environment is there, yes, but it's well hidden. If you go to Terminal,
you get a real live tcsh, and then the Unix pedigree becomes apparent when
you start digging around in the filesystem with the usual suspects. But
you don't need to do any of this because the Finder keeps the old MacOS
conventions as a veneer. You need no Unix experience to use it, and there are
people around here who have none, but still love it. This is not true of
Red Hat, or Mandrake, or any of the other "Unix for dummies" dists despite
what they trumpet. The environment and the fact it's Unix is thrown in your
face with those -- but not here. You get the Unix environment in OS X when
you ask for it, but not before.
--
----------------------------- personal page:
http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu
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