Mac Osx

Apple's new Macintosh operating system. It's all new, and old software still mostly runs fine.

It really is Unix underneath, an open-source license for Darwin (the command-line stuff), based on FreeBsd? and NextStep?. Darwin is available separately from the full Mac OS X, and contributed to by people in and outside of Apple.

Because of all this it's been fairly straightforward for tons of Unix software, graphical and non-graphical to be modified to run in OS X.

Installing the necessities and doing updates for graphical (and shell/command line) software is now doable by those who do not enjoy command line interfaces. See http://www.ourpla.net/guiunix/GettingXGoing.html#installx

Much thanks go to everyone who makes this possible.

Yes, it's still a little slow on some things (but you can almost always switch to another application and it's speedy). Folders with hundreds+ items are slow. Probably there will be incremental improvements for a while.

Indeed, there have been since that was written.

See GettingOsxGoing; and this wiki all about OS X: http://diveintoosx.org/ (there's other Mac wikis now)