I'm not sure I follow your suggestion of "package it into your app/lib yourself". Are you suggesting manually installing stuff that isn't available from Macports or Fink? Or something else? For the record I'm pretty green when it comes to Unix sysadmin stuff so go easy...

I'm genuinely interested - I'm a new Mac user who came from Linux and my biggest issue on the Mac so far is that package management isn't as good as apt. There was a discussion on HN and I was disappointed to find a lot of other people have had the same feeling.

You should check out Homebrew for Mac. I've found it a little bit more reliable than Macports, and it's actually reasonably easy to create your own packages. To create a new package you can just `brew create http://foo.org/crufty-package.tar.gz` and 90% of the time the generated recipe just works and the other 10% it requires you to tweak the (quite readable) ruby file.

Also, while Homebrew has an official repo, it's managed through git and hosted on Github. So for any given piece of software, chances are pretty good that someone out there has packaged it.

For what it's worth, I'm an ex-Mac user who went back to Linux because I missed apt. Of course, I do a lot of hobby programming and general messing around with open-source software; if your use-cases tend more towards pre-packaged software, you might get on perfectly well.

I do sort of both by running Debian inside Virtualbox on my Macbook as a dev environment. I especially like being able to install -dev packages to get header files/libraries into the right places, whereas on OSX, if you want to compile software that depends on anything that didn't come with XCode, it's a mess of manually extracting things and passing pathnames.

I don't go the whole way and just install Debian on the machine mostly because having OSX handle things like the touchpad driver, hibernation, wifi, etc., is less hassle, and I also like OSX as a desktop environment (e.g. being able to use multitouch gestures in the browser). But Linux in a VM is definitely a nicer experience imo than fink was, as a way of getting a parallel Unix CLI userland onto OSX.

> I don't go the whole way and just install Debian on the machine mostly because having OSX handle things like the touchpad driver, hibernation, wifi, etc., is less hassle

Have you tried this recently, or do you just say that because it's the stereotype? Because it's been over three years since I had any hardware trouble with Ubuntu. These days I have more issues on my friend's OS X Macbook (no drivers for 3G modems out of the box) than I do on Ubuntu where everything just works.

I definitely haven't written off switching back to Linux - if I ever do it will probably be because of apt (and maybe xmonad). For now, installing the vanilla versions of stuff like ruby 1.9, SBCL, mit-scheme from Macports, and pre-packaged versions of MacVim and emacs are working for me but that may not always be the case...

Homebrew is the best, but I always end up building everything I need from scratch, because I'm paranoid that some idiot package maintainer will require some tiny library that will necessitate building and installing X11, which software is largely the reason I use a goddamn Macintosh in the first place.

Also, Interface Builder.

MacPorts can be hard to grep if you haven't used a BSD before (not that it's great anyway), and Fink is a bit more painful than apt et al.

If you're on OSX, the ace up it's sleeve is Homebrew[1]. Definitely the easiest package management system anywhere.

[1]: http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

I'd forgotten about Homebrew but found it again when I went hunting for the earlier discussion on HN... I'll definitely be checking it out soon, thanks.

fedora- are you talking about rpm? Yes, this is a nightmare- package conflicts are common-place, and generally a real b*tch to fix. RPM was the main reason I ditched Fedora and switched to Ubuntu. In 3 years I don't think I've ever had an install failure or conflict or any problem with apt-get. It's always worked flawlessly.