You had to reinstall you entire OS because Ruby is broken? Couldn't you just uninstall Ruby, and install a properly functioning version? I thought that Macs were supposed to be easy to use.

Well, I could have put Ruby and all the other tools in /usr/local on the original install but then I'd have three copies of Ruby and two of everything else. :)

I just decided to wipe it to make things easier. It ended up only taking half a day, so it was worth it.

BTW, the BSD underpinnings of Mac OS X are just as complicated as any other *nix variant and don't fall under the "easy to use" part of the Mac. :P

Most Mac users don't even bother to use the command line.

So, why does everybody say that Mac OS is so easy to use then? What makes it any different from any other unix variant?

Oh, and I'm still confused. Why would you have 3 copies of ruby, unless it was impossible to remove it?

I said "the BSD underpinnings of Mac OS X are just as complicated..." but the easy to use part is the nice GUI of Mac OS X, which is built on top of the BSD base. Many people believe that Linux and Unix windows managers (like GNOME or KDE) don't have anything on Mac OS X's GUI usability.

The three copies of Ruby: One copy of Ruby came with the Mac and is broken. The second was installed by me with DarwinPorts. The third would be installed from source installed into /usr/local.

I can't remove the copy of Ruby that came with the system as far as I know. But I could remove the one I installed with DarwinPorts (I think).

What I was afraid of was the DarwinPorts version leaving behind garbage or settings when I removed it and causing weirdness (perhaps with paths). With a complete reformat, I can be sure the DarwinPorts version of Ruby is completely gone.

It didn't take that long to reformat the machine so it ended up being worth it anyway.

Yeah, reinstalling isn't usually much of a problem on Unix variants. Just back up your home directory and reinstall. No lost settings or anything. Much better than in the windows world, where tons of settings are hidden away in the registry, causing you to lose your settings every time you reinstall. Also, I have a Mac at work, and don't really see any difference in usability between that and my Linux installation. The command line tools take quite a bit of time to learn, but the GUI tools, included for just about everything make it almost unnecessary to use the command line.

I agree ... and that's why *nix developers like the Mac: it's a lot like the Linux experience.

The usability argument is usually reserved for the Mac UI, so yeah -- the Mac is not more 'usable' at the command line than any other *nix.

What I was saying was that I don't really find it any easier at the GUI level either. The command line is hard on windows, mac, or unix, at least until you actually understand it, then it makes everything easier. The UI of Linux has come a long way in the past couple of years. Take a look at a couple of the SUSE screenshots I posted on my recent blog post, if you want to know what i'm talking about. It uses Gnome, which I find is very close to the whole Mac experience, especially in the past year.

Well I guess the difference is that the Mac looked like that four years ago and Linux didn't. :)

It's true that Linux has caught up, they are good copiers ... that doesn't mean that can actually beat Mac OS X's GUI. But if they can, great.

Yeah, maybe Apple can make a good UI, but their OS sucked so much that they had to copy the Unix OS. I think that Mac OSX is just catching up in terms of reliability to where Unix was 17 years ago.

Haha, how did this turn into a pissing contest? :)

Apple using BSD as the basis for OS X was ballsy because they had to a) junk their old OS completely and b) admit that *nix was better at the same time. They didn't copy Unix, their OS was built on top of an existing BSD.

The real feat was building a world-class GUI on top of it and constantly improving the GUI performance and rendering over the last 4 major iterations. It took patience but now they have something really great.

Macs also have a great suite of easy-to-use apps included like iTunes, Mail, iCal and on and on. That's where most of the easy-to-use accolades come from, along with how well they integrate together.

Linux developers will always be playing catchup, I don't think anyone will argue that. Apple doesn't care because they'll always be on the bleeding edge ahead of Linux.

But both Apple and Linux developers should be commended for their efforts.

Yeah, a big pile of zealotry going on here. Anyway, So Linux is playing catch up trying to reimplement the OSX GUI. Meanwhile, OSX just up and takes an entire Unix OS. They didn't have to reimplement anything on their own. Granted this is entirely within the license for BSD, so I don't really blame them. However saying that Unix/Linux was the one playing catch up when Apple decided they couldn't catch up to where Unix was, so they just took the existing code base and placed a nice GUI on top. It's a lot easier to build a dependable and good looking OS when you get someone else to do the dependable OS part for you.

Oh, and on a completely weird note. Why does Val (my fiance) complain about iTunes and how hard it is to use, yet has never complained about the usability of The GIMP. Yeah, I know, it doesn't make any sense to me either, but that's my quick anecdote about the usability of Apple software.

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.