“Darwin 1.0 is a bootable version of the OS X kernel and BSD
layer. No Quartz, no Carbon, no Cocoa, no Aqua. Darwin has no
windowing system of its own and is therefore limited to just a
single, text-based console.”
“Darwin ships with a full suite of tools necessary to start
development. A gcc 2.7/egcs hybrid compiler is part of the
distribution, as are Perl — 5.6.0 no less! — and pico (we all
have our biases). Also of note is that Darwin’s standard packaging
scheme is Debian’s, which, not unlike the BSDs in general, seems to
be well-liked and underpublicized….”
“Darwin 1.0 is not a rip-roaring, ready to go,
high-availability Unix system ready to out-Linux Linux or
out-FreeBSD FreeBSD. Darwin isn’t useful for newbies, or those
interested in getting their feet wet with Unix. (Installing
one of the PowerPC-flavored Linuxes is much more suitable for that
task, despite the differences between Linux and the BSDs.)”