Avoid Darwin the Darkworld in Mac OS X!

I spent a good part of my wasted day yesterday trying to understand them and get them right. They still aren't.

The problem with avoiding Darwin is that it becomes impossible almost the moment you dip your toe into the waters of doing anything other than being a predictable, well-behaved user who stays in his or her own space and minds his or her own business. Even curiosity about the Darkworld can be fatal as it destroys hours of your life.

There are, for example, entire directories that you can see in Finder but that don't show up in applications. There are more that don't show up in Finder at all but that you can see if you have the temerity to open a terminal window and poke about at the beast (a practice I highly discourage for those who are Mac-only thinkers).

In fact, my experience of the past few days has tempered my enthusiasm for OS X for the typical Mac user. My wife will wait a while longer before enjoying it because I'm not of a mind to learn it well enough to help her when Darwin pokes his grotesque hands through the Aqua skin of OS X and grabs her by the throat.

Let me be clear, though: Darwin is powerful. If you're comfortable in *nix-land or if you are willing to endure the pain and pay the dues that comes with a decision to learn the magic incantations, you'll be rewarded with vistas of great power and wealth. But, like Ulysses, you will first have to traverse travails the likes of which your computing life has never even imagined.

If you insist on making this attempt, I suggest you prepare by:

• Finding and becoming very good friends with a *nix sysadmin.
• Reading before you leap so that you get at least some basic idea how to get in and out of the Darkworld.
• Keeping a good reference handy. I can't find any books that are just Darwin references, but I found Mac OS X Unleashed by J. and W. Ray to be quite helpful.

Share your scary stories...and your successes...with me on my discussion board if you like.

Last update: 11/13/02; 2:12:38 PM.