6 ms·

The problem here is MacOS. The amount of work around and hacker I've had to do on Mac far exceeds anything on Linux and more surprisingly Windows. Let that sink

The problem here is MacOS. The amount of work around and hacker I've had to do on Mac far exceeds anything on Linux and more surprisingly Windows. Let that sink in, it's easier to get things to work on Windows than Mac.

madelinecameron 10y ago
Windows is a nightmare when it comes to nodejs and pip. I ended up abandoning Windows when I was playing on my Mac and basically got things working instantly while I struggled to get the right incantations / pile of dev tools to do what I want. Ubuntu saves me so much time. (Also for some reason, Windows hates my graphics card and produces terrible sound in my BT headphones. Somehow a multi-billion company can't figure out BT while an open-source project can)
- blendo 10y ago
  Next month Windows 10 will ship Ubuntu as part of what they're calling "Windows Subsystem for Linux" -- bash, apt-get, etc. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/faq https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/faq It's actually kind of revolutionary.
  - madelinecameron 10y ago
    I still probably will stick with Ubuntu as my main system. I have Windows 10 installed on a separate drive for when I want to play games but even then, I have to cater to Windows. Make sure to save constantly because sometimes Windows decides it is too much and causes my graphics card to flip. And I also have to plug my headphones in or else I get static-y mono sound. Admittedly I could probably go buy "For Windows" headphones and figure out what is going wrong with the graphics card... but I shouldn't have to. We are talking about the latest operating system whose ancestors have been dominant across the world for decades, developed by one of the largest companies in the world. How are they getting it wrong?
    - shawnz 10y ago
      > We are talking about the latest operating system whose ancestors have been dominant across the world for decades, developed by one of the largest companies in the world. How are they getting it wrong? You're also talking about them being able to perfectly support every modern piece of USB/PCI-e/etc connected hardware, which is no small feat even for the market leader. For comparison, I've never had these problems you describe since installing Windows 10. How can you be sure your success with Ubuntu isn't just good luck?
  - shawnz 10y ago
    It's available today if you are willing to upgrade to a preview build of Windows. I use it often and I must say, it works pretty much exactly the way you'd expect a native Ubuntu system to work. Some notable issues are a lack of pty support and no X server (although it's possible to use a third-party one.)
  - XzetaU8 10y ago
    Nothing revolutionary to want to lure people on your proprietary ecosystem while at the same time you exploit open-source. Clever marketing strategy? definitely yes.
__jal 10y ago
Not my experience at all. Aside from some expected path issues (builds too stupid to actually look rather than assuming a disk layout, etc) and some BSD <-> Linux issues (builds that assume all the world runs linux), I've had very little problem getting most things working on OS X. It does help to learn what Apple has, uh, improved. This point is related to what an awful time I have getting anything to work on Windows - I hate it and don't want to learn about it. At least in the article, there are hints that the author hasn't taken the time to learn about the platform they want to run code on. Which is fine - I feel that way about Windows[1]. But it is also a good idea to understand why you're having the problems you're having. [1] Which is why I don't touch Win at work and the VM I run at home is a hacky mess that works for what it does, but only after a few aircraft carriers-worth of cursing and slash-and-burn hacking that I know can't be the 'right' windows-land way to do things. (The abomination is completely firewalled off from the outside world - I try not to be a disease vector.)
- marmaduke 10y ago
  Aren't you just expressing the same opinion about Windows as the parent about Mac? You are unfamiliar with it and so it takes more effort than you would like. Isn't this a tautology? Having built applications for all three platforms I find they all require a certain amount of patience but once you understand the motions, it's relatively painless.
- douche 10y ago
  It's really not that hard to setup a Windows workstation...
  - weberc2 10y ago
    I can vouch that it was at least as of Windows 7. But I hear the Windows folks now have a proper shell and some scriptable package management!
- fchopin 10y ago
  > Not my experience at all. Totally agree. We had developers recently join our team, which primarily uses OS X and Linux. They were excited about using Windows since they had previously been developing in .Net. They now appreciate that development in Windows is not as easy as Microsoft wants you to believe. The problem that won't go away anytime soon is that Microsoft spent years not making it easy on developers to develop in anything that isn't typical to develop in Visual Studio. They will not overcome that overnight. When a development team has focused on Windows, all is fine, but don't expect things to work without problems otherwise.
nickbauman 10y ago
The problem with a mac as a developer machine is native libraries. The stars have to align for your F/OSS to work properly. Even brew punches itself in the throat regularly. On linux it just works. That said I use my mac more often than Linux, mostly because I spent so much money for it, go figure.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Why you'd setup your desktop machine as a dev environment? Use vagrant or Docker on the Mac -- you get reproducibility, snapshots, an environment fully compliant with any server you want to deploy to, etc, and you still get to code for it (editing source etc) from the Mac.
djsumdog 10y ago
I gave up on MacOS back in 2012. Linux + package management for the win. Maybe if Apple maintained their own ports tree, but they don't. There's no UNIX under there. There is a BSD kernel, a bastardized UNIX-ish base on top of an ancient file system (yes HFS+ has finally been replaced, but just this year) with a proprietary display system and yaks fucking turtles all the way down. MacOS is a terrible developer OS. 10.6 and Expose and work spaces. 10.7 took this wonderful thing and replaces it with Mission Control; which only allowed one row of workspaces, no columns and windows were now grouped together so you couldn't see shit. No way to revert to the old behavior either. Then Apple destroyed Final Cut. Goodbye video editing. I switched back to Gentoo + i3 and never looked back. I know there are now tiling window managers for MacOS. That's cool. I might try them one day. If I'm forced to.
- coldtea 10y ago
  As I wrote elsewhere, why you'd you setup your desktop machine as a dev environment? Use vagrant or Docker or similar on the Mac -- this way you get reproducibility, snapshots, etc. I'd do that even if I used Linux (in fact I used to use Linux and did just that). Why would I want to setup my Desktop Linux box as my deployment/developer environment and have to change it and mess with it anytime I work on a new project / another deployment target? >Then Apple destroyed Final Cut. Goodbye video editing. As a professional video editor, I have to disagree with this too. They cut some features from FCP7 for the first FCPX release, but they brought them back, with more features and better implementations in subsequent releases. And all that with a codebase that's not some 2000's relic, but built for today's challenges. Besides, I don't see what's much better to use for video editing on Linux.
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    I agree that isolation is good, but spinning up a VM while developing each project is massively overkill. A modern package manager, such as Nix or even most language-specific package managers, will allow you to set up some sort of sandbox for the project without having to take the performance hit of full-blown virtualization while developing. Of course, you'll probably want to spin up a VM while testing, just to be sure. And Nix can handle that for you too! All while staying completely reproducible from your config files, all without having to bother with your virtualization program's snapshot system.
ldehaan 10y ago
it's interesting to me now when I see people saying these types of things about X operating system. growing up at with a dad from DEC I actually learned how to use systems I've never used since :D but my dad ran Windows and hated macs (he worked at Xerox before DEC). so I grew up with dos and Windows for many years, then I switched to Linux when I was a teen. I hated on macs and Windows (mostly macs) then, it was a shit show to my eyes and Linux was the ultimate (even though back then with my current pov Linux was the actual shit show, things broke and had to be fixed relentlessly) I worked in more corporate type jobs for a while and used my Linux and Windows skills when needed, and then started in the OSS startup world and saw that everyone had a Mac, writing free software on a Mac, my head nearly exploded! but I was given a shiny new MacBook Pro and so I had to give it a go. I was determined to hate it but once I found tools that let me use the command line I was fine with it. it was pretty slick, minus all the crap I had to do to get it working. in the end I found they all have individual uses that the others aren't as good at and I use all 3 operating systems daily. the Windows boxes are good for some applications that just suck in wine, the Mac is good for applications that are written exclusively for macs but are very useful and I love that it turns on and is usable right when I open the lid (probably the only reason I bring it out with me when I leave my command center) technology has gotten to an amazing point, especially if you're proficient enough to use and understand it (which admittedly isn't easy to do, but worth it if you can) some of this stuff is just amazing, I run X11 on everything and I have a few very beefy servers that I use to just run my software on and display it on my main workstation. using some newer tools I am able to use the video cards on my headless machines, I can run wine server on a dedicated wine box and run rdm or xencenter and when I decide to go mobile I just switch those sessions over to my Mac and use them there. I have a IDE server that I run IntelliJ and all my other coding projects off of throug X11, it's got super redundancy and is more securely protected than my other boxes. using automation tools like Jenkins, tasker, pythonista, auto input, auto remote, and Pagerduty I can get notified of any incident and automatically have the servers connected through dbus and yakuake send output to my phone with stalled processes etc.. its all good IMO
mikekchar 10y ago
As much as I'd like to hate on MacOS (take a perfectly good Unix implementation and break it ;-) ), in this case I've shaved almost the exact same yaks on Linux. At least a while ago (and it seems now) setting up google-cloud-engine was black magic. If you happened to do it exactly right it will take you about 15 seconds. One misstep and you fall into the volcano. Now that it is working for me I try not to touch it...
coldtea 10y ago
Haven't had that ever. And I've run from Java and DB2 to Rails, Django, PHP, Python, Postgres, Go and Node. Plus all kinds of unix userland via Brew (and, once upon a time, Fink -- I've also compiled some stuff from scratch, again not difficult). Nowadays, though, I run them on Vagrant (again on the mac) -- mainly to have snapshots and easy copying/reproduction of any target system. And even if I run Linux, I'd still run Vagrant on top of it for development too.
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  For anyone else wondering, I'm guessing coldtea is referring to this: http://www.finkproject.org/ http://www.finkproject.org/. At first I was confused and thought they were talking about Frink, another very interesting but entirely unrelated tool: https://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/ https://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/
- saidajigumi 10y ago
  Motions re: Vagrant and an earlier post on nix absolutely seconded. If you practice good "environmental hygiene", you can run dev setups on "bare metal" OS X just fine. This can be a but of a hassle to make 100% repeatable, but it can be done. In my experience, it's far preferable to work with an isolated and repeatable process whenever possible. I really love Vagrant for this, since it scales from simple inline shell scripts to setup a VM, up to integration with your favorite flavor of provisioning software (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc.). I've setup environments that ran common provisioning toolchains that scaled from individual dev setups straight to production clusters. Similar motives drive a number of other approaches, esp. container-based systems like Docker. Once you're fluent in these kinds of tools, you never really want to go back...
johncolanduoni 10y ago
I've had some things that were easier on Linux than a Mac, but I've never had (or even heard of someone having) anywhere near the amount of trouble Windows gives you if you want to do any coding outside of Microsoft's tools. What did you set up that was easier to get running on Windows?
js2 10y ago
The problem here is MacOS I've been doing sysadmin, programming, devops, etc professionally since 1995 and I've had to shave SunOS yaks, HP/UX yaks, Solaris yaks, Windows yaks, MacOS yaks, MacOS X yaks, Python yaks, Ruby yaks, Java yaks, Make yaks, C++ yaks, git yaks, cvs yaks, rcs yaks, ext2,3,4 yaks, Netapp yaks, Fibrechannel yaks, Cisco yaks, F5 yaks, nfs yaks, smb yaks, frame relay yaks (!), tcp yaks, rpm yaks, deb yaks, homebrew yaks, npm yaks, pip yaks, yum yaks, apache yaks, http yaks, xml yaks, tia568a no wait b yaks, serial crossover cable yaks, who the hell thought they could use 75 ohm as thicknet cable yaks, ... you get the idea. We deal with a complex ecosystem with even more complex interactions that is often poorly documented at best. We're lucky when we can treat it as a black box and it all works. But often something breaks and suddenly we're hoisted by our own petard and there's yak hair friggen everywhere. I consider it a modern miracle that I don't have to pin ethernet duplex anymore! Glad we finally figured that one out. Converse to your assertion, I switched to OS X back in 10.2 days because I got tired of shaving the hairball that was Linux desktop at the time. Oh, you want to print something? Here's an lpd yak for you... have fun! Oh you have a new monitor, here's some scanline settings to put in your xconfig that may work. Mac OS X is amazingly smooth as a desktop OS. [1] But since you mention OS X, I'm reminded of of my favorite Apple technical note ever which began: ”As if it were a swarm of bees, you should stay away from the SyncServices folder in Mac OS X.” And that should apply to our whole industry, really... a swarm of bees. Anywho, shaving yaks, story of my life, at least it pays well. Pro-tip: when shaving yaks, take notes. I guarantee you you'll shave this yak again and it's handy to have your own reference to refer back to... even in these days of google, stack overflow, and quickly moving technologies. At worst, maybe it will be inspiration for a fun blog post some day. :-) [1] So here's a fun story. Back in 2003 or so, I wrote a perl script which would forward emails to my phone via SMS. It did so by POSTing to a web form on a Verizon server. Worked fine when I was developing it on my OS X desktop, but failed to work on my Linux server. Yak shaving time. Eventually I'd broken out tcpdump after diagnosing that the Linux server, sitting on the network right next to the Mac, couldn't even connect to the Verizon server. Turned out the Linux server had ECN enabled, which being new at the time, Verizon's firewall was rejecting. Only had to peel about 5 layers of the onion on that one.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  Maybe I'm showing my age (or rather, lack of), but what on earth is a 'yak' and why would you shave one?
khattam 10y ago
Exactly my experience. OS X sucks donkey balls for developers. Windows is SO MUCH better... but then nothing beats Linux... a proper one that is... which is called Ubuntu LTS.

madelinecameron 10y ago

Windows is a nightmare when it comes to nodejs and pip. I ended up abandoning Windows when I was playing on my Mac and basically got things working instantly while I struggled to get the right incantations / pile of dev tools to do what I want. Ubuntu saves me so much time. (Also for some reason, Windows hates my graphics card and produces terrible sound in my BT headphones. Somehow a multi-billion company can't figure out BT while an open-source project can)

blendo 10y ago
Next month Windows 10 will ship Ubuntu as part of what they're calling "Windows Subsystem for Linux" -- bash, apt-get, etc. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/faq https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/faq It's actually kind of revolutionary.
- madelinecameron 10y ago
  I still probably will stick with Ubuntu as my main system. I have Windows 10 installed on a separate drive for when I want to play games but even then, I have to cater to Windows. Make sure to save constantly because sometimes Windows decides it is too much and causes my graphics card to flip. And I also have to plug my headphones in or else I get static-y mono sound. Admittedly I could probably go buy "For Windows" headphones and figure out what is going wrong with the graphics card... but I shouldn't have to. We are talking about the latest operating system whose ancestors have been dominant across the world for decades, developed by one of the largest companies in the world. How are they getting it wrong?
  - shawnz 10y ago
    > We are talking about the latest operating system whose ancestors have been dominant across the world for decades, developed by one of the largest companies in the world. How are they getting it wrong? You're also talking about them being able to perfectly support every modern piece of USB/PCI-e/etc connected hardware, which is no small feat even for the market leader. For comparison, I've never had these problems you describe since installing Windows 10. How can you be sure your success with Ubuntu isn't just good luck?
- shawnz 10y ago
  It's available today if you are willing to upgrade to a preview build of Windows. I use it often and I must say, it works pretty much exactly the way you'd expect a native Ubuntu system to work. Some notable issues are a lack of pty support and no X server (although it's possible to use a third-party one.)
- XzetaU8 10y ago
  Nothing revolutionary to want to lure people on your proprietary ecosystem while at the same time you exploit open-source. Clever marketing strategy? definitely yes.

__jal 10y ago

Not my experience at all. Aside from some expected path issues (builds too stupid to actually look rather than assuming a disk layout, etc) and some BSD <-> Linux issues (builds that assume all the world runs linux), I've had very little problem getting most things working on OS X. It does help to learn what Apple has, uh, improved. This point is related to what an awful time I have getting anything to work on Windows - I hate it and don't want to learn about it. At least in the article, there are hints that the author hasn't taken the time to learn about the platform they want to run code on. Which is fine - I feel that way about Windows[1]. But it is also a good idea to understand why you're having the problems you're having. [1] Which is why I don't touch Win at work and the VM I run at home is a hacky mess that works for what it does, but only after a few aircraft carriers-worth of cursing and slash-and-burn hacking that I know can't be the 'right' windows-land way to do things. (The abomination is completely firewalled off from the outside world - I try not to be a disease vector.)

marmaduke 10y ago
Aren't you just expressing the same opinion about Windows as the parent about Mac? You are unfamiliar with it and so it takes more effort than you would like. Isn't this a tautology? Having built applications for all three platforms I find they all require a certain amount of patience but once you understand the motions, it's relatively painless.
douche 10y ago
It's really not that hard to setup a Windows workstation...
- weberc2 10y ago
  I can vouch that it was at least as of Windows 7. But I hear the Windows folks now have a proper shell and some scriptable package management!
fchopin 10y ago
> Not my experience at all. Totally agree. We had developers recently join our team, which primarily uses OS X and Linux. They were excited about using Windows since they had previously been developing in .Net. They now appreciate that development in Windows is not as easy as Microsoft wants you to believe. The problem that won't go away anytime soon is that Microsoft spent years not making it easy on developers to develop in anything that isn't typical to develop in Visual Studio. They will not overcome that overnight. When a development team has focused on Windows, all is fine, but don't expect things to work without problems otherwise.

nickbauman 10y ago

The problem with a mac as a developer machine is native libraries. The stars have to align for your F/OSS to work properly. Even brew punches itself in the throat regularly. On linux it just works. That said I use my mac more often than Linux, mostly because I spent so much money for it, go figure.

coldtea 10y ago
Why you'd setup your desktop machine as a dev environment? Use vagrant or Docker on the Mac -- you get reproducibility, snapshots, an environment fully compliant with any server you want to deploy to, etc, and you still get to code for it (editing source etc) from the Mac.

djsumdog 10y ago

I gave up on MacOS back in 2012. Linux + package management for the win. Maybe if Apple maintained their own ports tree, but they don't. There's no UNIX under there. There is a BSD kernel, a bastardized UNIX-ish base on top of an ancient file system (yes HFS+ has finally been replaced, but just this year) with a proprietary display system and yaks fucking turtles all the way down. MacOS is a terrible developer OS. 10.6 and Expose and work spaces. 10.7 took this wonderful thing and replaces it with Mission Control; which only allowed one row of workspaces, no columns and windows were now grouped together so you couldn't see shit. No way to revert to the old behavior either. Then Apple destroyed Final Cut. Goodbye video editing. I switched back to Gentoo + i3 and never looked back. I know there are now tiling window managers for MacOS. That's cool. I might try them one day. If I'm forced to.

coldtea 10y ago
As I wrote elsewhere, why you'd you setup your desktop machine as a dev environment? Use vagrant or Docker or similar on the Mac -- this way you get reproducibility, snapshots, etc. I'd do that even if I used Linux (in fact I used to use Linux and did just that). Why would I want to setup my Desktop Linux box as my deployment/developer environment and have to change it and mess with it anytime I work on a new project / another deployment target? >Then Apple destroyed Final Cut. Goodbye video editing. As a professional video editor, I have to disagree with this too. They cut some features from FCP7 for the first FCPX release, but they brought them back, with more features and better implementations in subsequent releases. And all that with a codebase that's not some 2000's relic, but built for today's challenges. Besides, I don't see what's much better to use for video editing on Linux.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  I agree that isolation is good, but spinning up a VM while developing each project is massively overkill. A modern package manager, such as Nix or even most language-specific package managers, will allow you to set up some sort of sandbox for the project without having to take the performance hit of full-blown virtualization while developing. Of course, you'll probably want to spin up a VM while testing, just to be sure. And Nix can handle that for you too! All while staying completely reproducible from your config files, all without having to bother with your virtualization program's snapshot system.

ldehaan 10y ago

it's interesting to me now when I see people saying these types of things about X operating system. growing up at with a dad from DEC I actually learned how to use systems I've never used since :D but my dad ran Windows and hated macs (he worked at Xerox before DEC). so I grew up with dos and Windows for many years, then I switched to Linux when I was a teen. I hated on macs and Windows (mostly macs) then, it was a shit show to my eyes and Linux was the ultimate (even though back then with my current pov Linux was the actual shit show, things broke and had to be fixed relentlessly) I worked in more corporate type jobs for a while and used my Linux and Windows skills when needed, and then started in the OSS startup world and saw that everyone had a Mac, writing free software on a Mac, my head nearly exploded! but I was given a shiny new MacBook Pro and so I had to give it a go. I was determined to hate it but once I found tools that let me use the command line I was fine with it. it was pretty slick, minus all the crap I had to do to get it working. in the end I found they all have individual uses that the others aren't as good at and I use all 3 operating systems daily. the Windows boxes are good for some applications that just suck in wine, the Mac is good for applications that are written exclusively for macs but are very useful and I love that it turns on and is usable right when I open the lid (probably the only reason I bring it out with me when I leave my command center) technology has gotten to an amazing point, especially if you're proficient enough to use and understand it (which admittedly isn't easy to do, but worth it if you can) some of this stuff is just amazing, I run X11 on everything and I have a few very beefy servers that I use to just run my software on and display it on my main workstation. using some newer tools I am able to use the video cards on my headless machines, I can run wine server on a dedicated wine box and run rdm or xencenter and when I decide to go mobile I just switch those sessions over to my Mac and use them there. I have a IDE server that I run IntelliJ and all my other coding projects off of throug X11, it's got super redundancy and is more securely protected than my other boxes. using automation tools like Jenkins, tasker, pythonista, auto input, auto remote, and Pagerduty I can get notified of any incident and automatically have the servers connected through dbus and yakuake send output to my phone with stalled processes etc.. its all good IMO

mikekchar 10y ago

As much as I'd like to hate on MacOS (take a perfectly good Unix implementation and break it ;-) ), in this case I've shaved almost the exact same yaks on Linux. At least a while ago (and it seems now) setting up google-cloud-engine was black magic. If you happened to do it exactly right it will take you about 15 seconds. One misstep and you fall into the volcano. Now that it is working for me I try not to touch it...

coldtea 10y ago

Haven't had that ever. And I've run from Java and DB2 to Rails, Django, PHP, Python, Postgres, Go and Node. Plus all kinds of unix userland via Brew (and, once upon a time, Fink -- I've also compiled some stuff from scratch, again not difficult). Nowadays, though, I run them on Vagrant (again on the mac) -- mainly to have snapshots and easy copying/reproduction of any target system. And even if I run Linux, I'd still run Vagrant on top of it for development too.

andrewflnr 10y ago
For anyone else wondering, I'm guessing coldtea is referring to this: http://www.finkproject.org/ http://www.finkproject.org/. At first I was confused and thought they were talking about Frink, another very interesting but entirely unrelated tool: https://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/ https://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/
saidajigumi 10y ago
Motions re: Vagrant and an earlier post on nix absolutely seconded. If you practice good "environmental hygiene", you can run dev setups on "bare metal" OS X just fine. This can be a but of a hassle to make 100% repeatable, but it can be done. In my experience, it's far preferable to work with an isolated and repeatable process whenever possible. I really love Vagrant for this, since it scales from simple inline shell scripts to setup a VM, up to integration with your favorite flavor of provisioning software (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc.). I've setup environments that ran common provisioning toolchains that scaled from individual dev setups straight to production clusters. Similar motives drive a number of other approaches, esp. container-based systems like Docker. Once you're fluent in these kinds of tools, you never really want to go back...

johncolanduoni 10y ago

I've had some things that were easier on Linux than a Mac, but I've never had (or even heard of someone having) anywhere near the amount of trouble Windows gives you if you want to do any coding outside of Microsoft's tools. What did you set up that was easier to get running on Windows?

js2 10y ago

The problem here is MacOS I've been doing sysadmin, programming, devops, etc professionally since 1995 and I've had to shave SunOS yaks, HP/UX yaks, Solaris yaks, Windows yaks, MacOS yaks, MacOS X yaks, Python yaks, Ruby yaks, Java yaks, Make yaks, C++ yaks, git yaks, cvs yaks, rcs yaks, ext2,3,4 yaks, Netapp yaks, Fibrechannel yaks, Cisco yaks, F5 yaks, nfs yaks, smb yaks, frame relay yaks (!), tcp yaks, rpm yaks, deb yaks, homebrew yaks, npm yaks, pip yaks, yum yaks, apache yaks, http yaks, xml yaks, tia568a no wait b yaks, serial crossover cable yaks, who the hell thought they could use 75 ohm as thicknet cable yaks, ... you get the idea. We deal with a complex ecosystem with even more complex interactions that is often poorly documented at best. We're lucky when we can treat it as a black box and it all works. But often something breaks and suddenly we're hoisted by our own petard and there's yak hair friggen everywhere. I consider it a modern miracle that I don't have to pin ethernet duplex anymore! Glad we finally figured that one out. Converse to your assertion, I switched to OS X back in 10.2 days because I got tired of shaving the hairball that was Linux desktop at the time. Oh, you want to print something? Here's an lpd yak for you... have fun! Oh you have a new monitor, here's some scanline settings to put in your xconfig that may work. Mac OS X is amazingly smooth as a desktop OS. [1] But since you mention OS X, I'm reminded of of my favorite Apple technical note ever which began: ”As if it were a swarm of bees, you should stay away from the SyncServices folder in Mac OS X.” And that should apply to our whole industry, really... a swarm of bees. Anywho, shaving yaks, story of my life, at least it pays well. Pro-tip: when shaving yaks, take notes. I guarantee you you'll shave this yak again and it's handy to have your own reference to refer back to... even in these days of google, stack overflow, and quickly moving technologies. At worst, maybe it will be inspiration for a fun blog post some day. :-) [1] So here's a fun story. Back in 2003 or so, I wrote a perl script which would forward emails to my phone via SMS. It did so by POSTing to a web form on a Verizon server. Worked fine when I was developing it on my OS X desktop, but failed to work on my Linux server. Yak shaving time. Eventually I'd broken out tcpdump after diagnosing that the Linux server, sitting on the network right next to the Mac, couldn't even connect to the Verizon server. Turned out the Linux server had ECN enabled, which being new at the time, Verizon's firewall was rejecting. Only had to peel about 5 layers of the onion on that one.

madeofpalk 10y ago
Maybe I'm showing my age (or rather, lack of), but what on earth is a 'yak' and why would you shave one?

khattam 10y ago

Exactly my experience. OS X sucks donkey balls for developers. Windows is SO MUCH better... but then nothing beats Linux... a proper one that is... which is called Ubuntu LTS.