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Old 29th June 2008
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Oliver_H Oliver_H is offline
Real Name: Oliver Herold
UNIX lover
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Germany
Posts: 427
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>Mac OS X actually performs quite well, even on older computers.

That's rather 'nonsense', trying Leopard on my G4 will blow it away (to some extent).

>install pkgsrc on Mac OS X

Use fink or macports - made with Mac OS X in mind.

>according to microbenchmarks, but that's because the developers don't want to "waste" time implementing features that may not translate into a real-world performance increase.

Another nice marketing saying of Apple. You want to learn something about FreeBSD (as mentioned in another posting), try Mac OS X first. We have some 8-way core machines at our institute because of some Apple-maniac (it's in fact a good friend of mine). It doesn't scale well with two cores (compared to other operating systems) and it is at its limit while using more than two cores. You cannot even use more than 4G of RAM because the kernel _is_ 32 bit. So in fact you can, but it's something similar like PAE - in the end another performance hog. But using this machine together with Linux ... speed, just pure speed :-) We will get more of 64 bit with snow leopard and someday they will even implement a proper scheduler.

By the way we're using this machines as render slaves. So if you want something for the Desktop and you do like blackboxes and don't want to bother with configuration etc. well get some Apple. But if you want something similar to UNIX or you do like the console, then get some proper hardware and something similar to the original UNIX spirit, not the trademark and some UNIX03 paper.

That said, I like some technologies of Apple, like Webkit or the iPod (touch), even the 8-way core is some real nice hardware if you're using this power-horse together with some proper 'power-horse operating system'.
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