At my job I am now working to some extent with Mac OS X. My overall impression: Looks good but like Windows it is built on the assumption that “the user should not know how things work”. Some things are done quite elegantly but others are just too dumbed down for my taste.
On the command line the first thing that I noticed was that all the standard folder names start with a capital letter and are more verbose than on Unix. The default shell is bash which is nice for me since I am used to it and know it quite well from Linux.
The version of the Vim editor that comes with OS X is outdated and not very convenient to use. I installed a Vim 7.x build from macvim.org.
I learned about DMG images and that it’s not easy or sometimes even impossible to mount them on Linux. Otherwise mounting was pretty straightforward, for example the SMB share that I use to export my Linux home directory. I could have tried to do the same with NFS but SMB was just easier and I didn’t want to go into the details of uid and guid mapping. Plus, the SMB share is also accessible from the Windows that runs inside a Virtualbox.
One small thing that I don’t like on the Mac is the lack of a “Maximize window” function that maximizes the current window as much as possible. I guess I am not the only one.
Oleander Donovan's IT blog 