No -- as opposed to pacman -S package (or whatever his former distro used). Having come to Linux from OS X, I agree that OS X installations are pretty inferior to Linux's.

OSX does have homebrew (or macports if you're so inclined), which IMO is better than the usual package manager in a linux distro; it doesn't litter the disk with init scripts or config files, you always know where things are being installed to. Copy to install is only for GUI apps.

> Copy to install is only for GUI apps.

That's the problem - you have two completely different installation methods, neither one of which is particularly UNIX-y, and neither of which is capable of talking to the other in a reliable manner.

> IMO is better than the usual package manager in a linux distro

It's incapable of handling binary installations, which is remarkable considering the hardware variation is far less than there is for Linux, it installs to /usr/local, it doesn't integrate well with language-specific package management tools, and it can't update system files.

> it doesn't litter the disk with init scripts or config files

I've never once had this problem with Linux; the man pages for any Linux package manager should provide a straightforward way of figuring out which package own which files.

> you always know where things are being installed to.

Because they're not installed to the right place.

I can't count the number of times an OS X package has told me that I need to add such-and-such folder to my $PATH. Hint: if you're requiring me to change my $PATH so that your installed file works, you're not installing it properly.

While there are other arguable issues, the whole point for me as that it's copying the 500 megs for the app because of all the static lib versions 'n stuff.

Then again we're comparing OSX to Linux, not Windows (Linux installs are ONE click, which is also less than OSX in fact)