for MAC users

[hsn]

hello everyone
i have been trying for a while to use linux, for a certain personal reason, i am not able to use linux.
i want the opinion of programmers and users of mac. is mac the same as linux regarding the command line? is its programming features as powerful and freely accessable as linux "comparing to windows"?
i am planning on buying mac. but i need your opinion on it.

best regards
hsn

[drhowarddrfine]

I don't own a Mac but Macs are based on Unix, specifically FreeBSD and Mach. Linux is a Unix workalike. I read of people doing Unix-y work from the command line so I assume Apple does not cripple or limit the command line like Windows does.

[pronerd]

@hsn
They are similar, but not the same. As already mentioned MacOS is acutally FreeBSD with a really slick GUI. FreeBSD and Linux are both flavors of Unix. So while they use many of the same commands the syntax for their use will differ slightly from Linux to MacOS. Also if you need extra commands like say nmap that are not always included with Unix OS's they can be a lot harder to find for the Mac.


@hsn
This largely depends on what you want to do. Windows or .Net programing for instance would be very hard to do on a Mac since Microsoft does not release visual studio for the Mac. Linux comes with a much large wealth of extra and add on development libraries that would be difficult to find for the Mac, but mostly they are only useful for writing programs for other Unix PCs. So if you do not need to write those apps it will not matter. Mac is also WAY behind on updates for Java. So you can not do Java development on the Mac if you need to use libraries that require the Java 6 (1.6) runtime. On the flip side the coca visual development tools that run on the MacOS are supposed to be really nice, but of course only produce apps for the Mac. So depending on what type of development you want to do a Mac may or may not work.