[Nizumzen]

While I appreciate the sentiment this obviously comes from an author who has very little Unix experience in general. For instance he claims that Darwin is an odd duck and that "Things which build & run clean­ly on other *nixes won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly build & run that eas­i­ly on Dar­win."

Really? Ever tried to compile anything on HP/UX or IBM AIX? Darwin is a bed of roses compared to that. Even Solaris has its problems when compiling things. The author obviously thinks that Linux = Unix even though the heritage of Darwin / OS X is that of the BSD branch of the Unix family whilst Linux takes a lot of inspiration from the System V family.

I kind of agree with the article in general I just think it was so badly written and some of the claims so down right ignorant it masks a decent point.

Oh and as for managing daemons, launchd is a significant improvement over the standard Linux initd and cron scripts. At least launchd will restart crashed / stopped daemons when needed. Plus you don't even need to run the daemon at all times on OS X. It will be automatically started when an incomming request for it is made. To do that on Linux you need to move over to daemontools (which actually also works on OS X as well so that nullifies that advantage).