I'm not really trying to defend OS X here, other than pointing out that if you cut out the proprietary GUI stuff, it's basically just your run-of-the-mill custom UNIX dist. (OS X does have a path management system for shells in the form of path-helper and /etc/path.d/, but that's run through the profile, which won't affect GUI applications.) bashrc if you started the application from bash. This is not unlike a Linux setup, where you only inherit environment variables written in. bashrc is just a file that bash executes itself that might set additional environment variables. It might inherit /etc/profile, if you're lucky.įor OS X, launchd handles the environment by simply being the one responsible for starting the applications that you inherit your environment from (such as Finder, Dock and Spotlight), and. to set up your environment variables in GUI applications certainly won't be fixed with a.

Everything sucks.Īs for the environment, that's the same for any UNIX, though.bashrc is run only if you start bash. There's a different between having control (which I have, including on my OS X machine), and actually practicing it.Īs, yeah, stupid applications is hard to guard against, but stupid applications might/will have their own share of code execution bugs, which you also have to control. It takes me 5 minutes to set a new one up, including my local own work environment. Most of my servers are completely stock Alpine, Arch or Ubuntu systems, only running static binaries I provided.Īll this saves me from dependency hell, and means that I do not need to hesitate to wipe a machine for whatever reason. Nothing else that counts as a system-wide modification. ) and 3 kernel extensions (including one of my own) installed. On my laptop, I have 3 'full' applications, 15 convenience tools from homebrew (bash, git, nmap.

I do not install anything I don't need, and do not touch something that is not necessary. More creative modifications could also sometimes cause conflicts on larger upgrades. If you wanted to change something that you had configured on system level a year before, or even just wanted to replicate it, it became a major overhead. The reason I stopped was that the result was unmanageable systems. I understand this point of view, and this was also my usual approach.

Current version of git for mac os x