Printer drivers: yeah this is bad. I never install any. Once I did by mistake. When I removed the directory it took ages and then I had a lot of free space.
Monolingual: it's good but there is more you can do. See this guy for scripts you can run to do all this and more.
http://rixstep.com/clix
I get you have all these language files. You're supposed to have the option on install to not take them but not all programs obey that.
Also look for a program called Trimmit to further get rid of stuff you don't need. But watch running it on Leopard as those apps are signed and they even sign their bloat!
Firefox: it doesn't take longer to load because it's non-native: it takes longer because it uses the Gecko engine and that sucker is h-e-a-v-y! Camino is more native and still uses Gecko but both suffer more from not being as visually appealing. OTOH Safari has serious rendering issues from time to time. Safari 3 is like rocket science with all its doodads but it still does dumb things like crashing for the silliest reasons.
Packages: there's no difference here as in comparison to Windows. Windows has everything baked and indexed in the same file; here it's broken down. And that may be a security concern. You don't get rid of everything by removing a bundle: there can be other stuff left lying around. But yes most of it is gone.
Dependencies: they work differently on this platform. You can only use frameworks you're specifically linked to. As in specifying the complete path. And as this isn't Windows you don't run the risk of important files being overwritten. No one but no one packages important system files for you -just in case-.
Installers: they're used when you need more than one click or when a password is needed. But I shy away from those apps because as always you can't see what they're going to do. But you can look inside those install packages (as they're directories too) and there should be configuration files which explain what they're going to do etc.
To the background: cmd-H.
.Mac: forget it. Better elsewhere for free. This was iTools once and Apple promised it would always be free. And it was. They changed the name and it wasn't free anymore. Bait and switch. It's definitely not worth it. Even if is was free. Except for the e-mail address.
Disk maze: not really. /System is - can you guess? Your system. Finder isn't going to be your file manager anyway. It's OK if you never do anything or don't know Unix but you can't do almost anything with it except browse through files very slowly.
Character sets: yes Mac OS Roman is default. But the entire system is Unicode and much more so than any other system. Your terminal is based on UTF-8. All your files and paths are UTF-8. And so forth. Integration of Unicode is more substantial here than anywhere. Just try TextEdit and put some Chinese in there. Put anything - Greek, Russian - and go from upper case to lower case. The system handles it smoothly. Now try some Arabic and watch the caret go in the other direction. The text system here - based on NextStep - is head and shoulders above anyone else's.
Fink et al: screw it. Don't go that way. Just get the source and build it in Xcode and bend and twist it until it works. Troublesome yes but you get to put things where you want them and so forth.
P.S: BPF is -Berkeley Packet Filter-. It's for sniffing traffic.
Stuff
Printer drivers: yeah this is bad. I never install any. Once I did by mistake. When I removed the directory it took ages and then I had a lot of free space.
Monolingual: it's good but there is more you can do. See this guy for scripts you can run to do all this and more.
http://rixstep.com/clix
I get you have all these language files. You're supposed to have the option on install to not take them but not all programs obey that.
Also look for a program called Trimmit to further get rid of stuff you don't need. But watch running it on Leopard as those apps are signed and they even sign their bloat!
Firefox: it doesn't take longer to load because it's non-native: it takes longer because it uses the Gecko engine and that sucker is h-e-a-v-y! Camino is more native and still uses Gecko but both suffer more from not being as visually appealing. OTOH Safari has serious rendering issues from time to time. Safari 3 is like rocket science with all its doodads but it still does dumb things like crashing for the silliest reasons.
Packages: there's no difference here as in comparison to Windows. Windows has everything baked and indexed in the same file; here it's broken down. And that may be a security concern. You don't get rid of everything by removing a bundle: there can be other stuff left lying around. But yes most of it is gone.
Dependencies: they work differently on this platform. You can only use frameworks you're specifically linked to. As in specifying the complete path. And as this isn't Windows you don't run the risk of important files being overwritten. No one but no one packages important system files for you -just in case-.
Installers: they're used when you need more than one click or when a password is needed. But I shy away from those apps because as always you can't see what they're going to do. But you can look inside those install packages (as they're directories too) and there should be configuration files which explain what they're going to do etc.
To the background: cmd-H.
.Mac: forget it. Better elsewhere for free. This was iTools once and Apple promised it would always be free. And it was. They changed the name and it wasn't free anymore. Bait and switch. It's definitely not worth it. Even if is was free. Except for the e-mail address.
Disk maze: not really. /System is - can you guess? Your system. Finder isn't going to be your file manager anyway. It's OK if you never do anything or don't know Unix but you can't do almost anything with it except browse through files very slowly.
Character sets: yes Mac OS Roman is default. But the entire system is Unicode and much more so than any other system. Your terminal is based on UTF-8. All your files and paths are UTF-8. And so forth. Integration of Unicode is more substantial here than anywhere. Just try TextEdit and put some Chinese in there. Put anything - Greek, Russian - and go from upper case to lower case. The system handles it smoothly. Now try some Arabic and watch the caret go in the other direction. The text system here - based on NextStep - is head and shoulders above anyone else's.
Fink et al: screw it. Don't go that way. Just get the source and build it in Xcode and bend and twist it until it works. Troublesome yes but you get to put things where you want them and so forth.
P.S: BPF is -Berkeley Packet Filter-. It's for sniffing traffic.
P.P.S: The captchas really suck.