"After citing my confusion as to why OSX doesn't have a decent package manager, doesn't ship with apropos, doesn't come with gcc, etc."
wrong: macports or fink.
wrong: apropos apropos: apropos(1) - search the whatis database for strings
wrong: gcc -v: gcc version 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)
Maybe you could actually TRY things before you make completely false claims that you haven't bothered to test... There is nothing "fussy" about it... I don't even really know what that means. 10.5 ships with xcode just like (pretty much) all the iterations before it. I think 10.0 was the only one to not include it.
Both macports and fink are poor compared to recent linux package managers, which is no surprise since they follow an approach (bsd ports) Apple doesn't use for it's own software. What is really irritating is that macports-installed shared libraries occasionally cause linking problems.
Also it's important to keep in mind although you get XCode when you buy OSX, it requires a separate installation step that's both time consuming and easy to overlook and if you're getting OSX with a new computer you'll probably want to ignore the one that comes with it and download the most recent version from ADC which is clumsy compared to apt, yum, conary, etc.
Sorry, I was merely given an OSX machine at work. Apparently 10.5 didn't refresh xcode, or something. I don't know the details -- this particular layer isn't something I focus my efforts on.
I also recall that several piece of software just failed to install completely. Twisted web and the Divmod stack, for example. And multicore usage wasn't really very good compared with Ubuntu. And the macbook kept seizing up at random, a few times a week.
My overall impression was 'this isn't better than Ubuntu.' Maybe I just got a bad start? I wouldn't mind trying it again, but if I had to install something from scratch, I'd use Ubuntu.
