Be careful, though: Once you start digging, you'll find yourself falling for some projects that reach beyond what Darwin provides and therefore won't work on anything but a Mac.

With that knowledge, you're ready to knock around Fink and Darwin Ports for those thousands of open source apps you just can't live without. It's presumed that you know Darwin is OS X. If nothing else, you should be aware of Darwin because open source projects are often tagged with Darwin as a target, and not OS X. Having a Darwin partition also creates a rescue shell that takes up a lot less disk space than a spare instance of OS X, and Darwin is more forthcoming about and forgiving of boot-time problems than full-blown OS X. That's most of the design and coding work I do. I do find Aqua a distraction when I'm working on non-GUI apps. I've got Darwin partitions stashed away on some of my machines so that I can build and road-test open source projects before deploying them to OS X. The tree is small and I find it easy to digest.ĭarwin does boot on a Mac as a standalone OS, and there might be occasions where you find that useful. You can scour Apple's developer site day and night looking for details of OS X's internals, but you'll never find any reference as concise as the Darwin sources. And where IP is concerned, Apple has kicked an awful lot of its potential proprietary goodies (just consider Bonjour, QuickTime Streaming Server and Open Directory for starters) into the open source domain. Darwin is OS X, fire-tested and validated, minus Apple's protected intellectual property. And unlike some commercial Linux outfits, Apple hasn't constructed Darwin as a low-priority charity/PR project. Darwin does not have a lengthy roll of committers who wander in and out of projects on which the distribution depends. Apple is extremely conservative about merging new features into the core source tree. Darwin is designed to target only two CPU architectures (PowerPC and x86). By simple, I mean that Darwin is not Linux.

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