Distro Inspirations-Mac OS X

From openSUSE

Mac OS X - Distro Inspiration

Basic Work with the System

OS X has a consistent system of keyboard shortcuts - you may choose any native program and be sure to open new file with Command+O and so on. Although the particular shortcuts are not chosen as well as they could be, they are the same for every program. Work with the GUI from the keyboard is very fast and convenient.

The Dock with its icons and arrows is a very pleasant to use: there is exactly as much well-arranged items as neccesary and in one sight you get a list of menu applications and list of running applications.

OS X has also some interesting diagnostic tools with GUI. In fact, when you are in heavy troubles, you usually end up with no tool as usable as on Linux (it is no surprise, when even for porting of lspci you have to write a kernel driver), but for user being afraid of the command-line, tools like graphical alternative of lsusb can be very convenient.

The offer of basic software in a freshly installed system is quite poor but for a basic user tasks quite sufficient, except of nearly unusable image viewer. Maybe we are dedicating unneccesarily much effort to deliver loads of tools for solving the very same task in openSUSE.

System Settings

The basic setup can be done in the System Preferences panel, which hides as much of system complexity as possible, thus being much simpler than our YaST while offering nearly the same functions. While it can be frustrating for an experienced user, it is very pleasant for anyone not really interested in system tweaking. All the dialogs (user accounts, internet settings, bluetooth, security... and many more) are kind of a one-way street and they do most of the things automagically (and also well). Maybe it would be nice to have two flavours of yast, basic and advanced one and let the user choose.

The more advanced tasks can be accomplished with Utilities hidden in Applications folder and when even they fail, we still have a shell and most of utilities we are used to from the Linux world.

Packaging Systems and Third Party Software

There are two basic ways, how to install a new software on OS X - first is to obtain Mac OS X package (.dmg) and install - typically it means just to move the appdir from the package to /Applications folder. (In any case, installer shows us what exactly we are supposed to do.)

The second way is suitable mostly for software ported from Linux: more advanced users may install the software via fink (http://www.finkproject.org), kind of port of Debian packaging tools for OS X. The repository of packages is vast and contains probably even more packages than openSUSE. OS X can run not only native graphical programs, but also X applications (either with any window manager, or integrated into the Aqua environment). Fink packages are installed into special directory /sw and they are not supposed to interfere with the rest of the system.

The only drawback of using packages from both the worlds is a fact, that when we are trying to mix both worlds on our system (ie. use some library from one world to satisfy some dependency from the other world), our system is likely to end in a horrible mess. In any case, we are condemned to install most of the commonly used libraries at least twice.

Anyway, OS X shows that it is possible to have not only classical packaging system, but also a way to install self-contained applications as appdirs pretty easily. It is a way convenient for inexperienced users and also for ISVs not willing to show the sources to the world.