Unix guru gives thumbs up to Mac OS X

Unix guru Moshe Bar is in love with Mac OS X running on a Titanium PowerBook, according to a glowing article at Byte.com .

Bar notes that most readers of his column know he has little love for graphical user interfaces, preferring to work from the regular console with a variety of special tools. However, he says the “Unix is for servers and Windows is for desktops” is no longer true.

“Turns out nowadays you don’t need to use that ugly ‘W’ word to have a decent desktop and office environment,” Bar writes. “Enter Mac OS X. Many see it has the cool new kid on the Unix block, while others feel that their Linux machines are in some way threatened by the new Mac OS.”

The columnist says he’s very pleased with Mac OS X 10.2 (“Jaguar”) running on a Titanium PowerBook G4/800MHz system. Under the surface it runs a 4.4 BSD kernel derived from FreeBSD 3.2, which, in turn, runs on top of a Mach 3.0 message-passing microkernel, he explains.

“It took only 24 hours from the moment my review PowerBook arrived to the moment I felt comfortably at home with all my various development and productivity tools,” Bar says.