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Could you elaborate on its impact on how you do development? One reason I still have a mac is because it's so developer friendly. Linux is very time-consuming t

Could you elaborate on its impact on how you do development? One reason I still have a mac is because it's so developer friendly. Linux is very time-consuming to make things work with and is incompatible with various hardware. Also some mac software is great.

BoorishBears 10y ago
I have a Zenbook. Windows for development isn't nearly as convinent as OSX. Yes there's lots of customization you can do to make it bearable. Powershell isn't as awful as CMD, but projects aren't supporting Powershell as much as bash any time this decade AFAIK. The Linux subsystem works, but the flow between Windows and Linux is lacking. I tried Linux. Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (every month I'm told Wayland is going to support it "soon") so I can't use it. I know that sounds silly, but my monitors are a huge part of how I work. Not supporting my workspace is pretty much a non-starter. But to seal the deal it also crashed going to sleep a few times. So I installed OSX... on my Zenbook. Because somehow OS X managed to handle my hardware better than Ubuntu had (bar the stock wireless card), and it was developer friendly. I prefer brew to apt-get. Yes, apt-get is vastly more powerful, but I never had brew fail on me because a previous install had messed up. OS X also has a lot of mindshare. Tooling tends tend to progress from Linux and OS X in ease of use before entering a gulf and reaching Windows eventually. I got my copy of OSX legitimately, but to me it's telling I essentially had to go to "bootleg OSX" to get my hardware and software experiences in sync. OS X even supports the touchscreen as a mouse, not that I ever used the touchscreen on a laptop that only supports the laptop form factor and no others...
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Hackintosh works really well if you have the compatible hardware. It's also my platform of choice.
  - TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
    Couldn't recommend this enough, though I do wish I had portability
- taigeair 10y ago
  Thanks for the details! Interesting the touchscreen still works.
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    Yeah, I sometimes joke that Asus put out a touchscreen MacBook before Apple did
- dboreham 10y ago
  Cygwin
- mkesper 10y ago
  The only times when apt-get fails is when your disk is full (!) or when you're including foreign repositories. (Debian has a LOT more in official repos than Ubuntu).
- Fnoord 10y ago
  Problem is that each software upgrade from Apple contains important security and reliability fixes. You get those even on old Mac hardware (my MBP is 6 years old now). On a Hackintosh, you don't know whether those software upgrades are going to work, or if they will break or brick your system. On top of that, when I looked around, I couldn't find some kind of good guide advising me which ultrabook to buy as Hackintosh. There's no clear comparisons and just a lot of homebrew mentality. I'm not interested in that; I want something which works well, and stays working well. > OS X also has a lot of mindshare. Sure, but I expect that to go down now. IMNSHO, YMMV.
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    I didn't get the Zenbook ever dreaming I'd Hackintosh it, it was more a move of desperation than anything. And I definitely wouldn't recommend buying a laptop just to Hackintosh it, its more of a fun hack than anything with a few specific exceptions where there's strong overlap between an Apple product and an existing PCs hardware (and at that point you might as well just buy the official product if you're only going to Hackintosh it, bar cost) I'd have just gotten another MBP if I wanted OS X for the start for the reasons you list (and the fact that while in many areas OSX was handling the hardware better, it still didn't support the stock wifi or the Optimus setup). I think the MBP issues are overblown. The 2015 is still around and still fully capable. I find it strange that people are complaining about the 2016, but then comparing it to laptops that were out for months, and in some cases years, when the 2015 was out, but weren't being chosen over the 2015 by the same users. There's some backlash because people wanted a MBP refresh and it isn't want they wanted, but I don't see OSX losing that much developer mindshare in the long term. I don't agree with the fear lingering about it being the "end of days" for "Pro MBPs", I think this MBP was an interesting experiment that came at a very poor time (when people were already anxious for a progression of the MBP 2015-2011 in a new form factor, with a bigger battery most likely)
    - lmm 10y ago
      > I find it strange that people are complaining about the 2016, but then comparing it to laptops that were out for months, and in some cases years, when the 2015 was out, but weren't being chosen over the 2015 by the same users. Well given that the 2016 is more expensive, has shorter battery life, and is missing a bunch of ports, one could argue that it's worse (at least for some use cases) than the 2015.
- matwood 10y ago
  > Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (every month I'm told Wayland is going to support it "soon") so I can't use it. This, this, this. I have been trying off and on for a couple years to move from MacOS to Linux and the HiDPI situation is a mess. Apparently it's not much better in Windows, so maybe if someone is coming from Windows they are used to problems. But, coming from MacOS where I have a rMBP and a mix of HiDPI and HD monitors and they all 'just work' I had assumed that was the state of the industry for a long time. Once I started reading up on the issue it became apparent in the HiDPI world it is MacOS >>>>>>> Windows > Linux. The last time I brought this up on HN, someone responded saying I didn't need HiDPI :/
  - crummy 10y ago
    I had similar experiences with Windows hiDPI support but they've all been resolved in the last year with recent software updates.
    - darrylb42 10y ago
      Windows support it pretty well. Some/Most applications don't. I am running windows on a MBP at 150% and a second monitor at 100% somethings are zoomed on the second, some are very small.
enjo 10y ago
Windows 10 have built a very impressive Linux compatibility layer. It's not a VM, they are executing native ELF binaries using the windows kernel. They run a version of Ubuntu 14.04 on top of it that most notably includes package management. It's currently missing upstart, so some things don't work nicely, but MOST things work just fine. I believe upstart is available on some preview versions now. Everything on our development stack (largely python) worked straight out of the box. So on windows I have a real bash shell. I have dpkg. I effectively have Ubuntu. I can provision my machine using the ansible scripts we use to provision our production machines (took only minor updates to make them work). There are some missing pieces. Docker doesn't work from within the linux subsystem. Upstart doesn't work. There is some weirdness related to how you interact with the windows environment from the linux subsystem. For instance I had to install a hack to allow me to open files in sublime from within the linux subsystem. It's a mixed bag. You have a real Ubuntu environment with real package management, which is awesome (as opposed to homebrew). Yet some things that work on OS X don't work quite as seamlessly on Windows. I think for most developers, it's probably going to work pretty damn nicely tho.
- morecoffee 10y ago
  One painfully missing thing is FUSE support. My workflow involves coding on an sftp-mounted directory, which doesn't work in the Windows version. Alas, it seems the only remote mounting Windows will ever have is WebDAV.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Last time I used Windows, there were several commercial (but cheap) products that supported mounting remote file systems, including SFTP. Tried any of them? Quick Google gives me NetDrive (free) and ExpanDrive.
  - jodrellblank 10y ago
    I don't thiiiink this is WebDAV behind the scenes: https://www.petri.com/vsphere-powercli-psdrives https://www.petri.com/vsphere-powercli-psdrives
  - 10y ago
obstinate 10y ago
When I develop on Windows, I use a full-screen Ubuntu VM. It's not meaningfully different from having a Linux machine at the scale of work I'm doing.
- hiram112 10y ago
  Same, though I used to use Fedora. The Win 10 Linux subsystem is still a mess, though it is improving in beta versions.
chendry 10y ago
I'm a developer and spend most of my time in a terminal, usually in vim. I recently switched from OSX to Linux and have not looked back. OSX/macOS has been getting too goofy for my tastes. I spent roughly $300 (reusing my current Apple Cinema LED monitor) to build a desktop replacement for my mac pro. Can't be happier. Then I spent about $600 on a laptop (Thinkpad T460) to replace my Macbook Pro Retina. Also fantastic. Everything's been great. The keyboard on the T460 is awesome. The battery life thus far is about 16 hours. I don't see myself ever going back to macOS again. I'm running Arch, using i3 as a window manager, and feel right at home. Basically this feels like a computer again.
- toothbrush 10y ago
  I'm curious about that keyboard, because i'm considering getting a Thinkpad T420 or T460, but the T460 keyboard looks like one of those horrible mushy and wholly unacceptable laptop keyboards to me, whereas the T420 at least seems reminiscent of the old revered Thinkpad keyboards. Can you comment?
  - izacus 10y ago
    Hmm, I have the new 2016 MBP, 2014 MBP and T460s and the keyboard on T460s beats the other two by a significant margin. I don't think it has the same feel of the older thinkpads, but it still gives a very clear feedback and give in comparison to even the 2014 MacBook one. The 2016 MacBook keyboard is just downright horrible. You kinda get used to it but returning to others keeps reminding me that it's just worse in every regard.
    - toothbrush 10y ago
      After researching a bit more i might end up getting the T420. Solid keyboard, and with an i5 and a fancy SSD it'll be fine for my needs (plus a cd-bay battery, yay!). Blazing even, considering that i'm still on a C2D as my daily driver. Frustratingly my first-gen unibody (2008?) MacBook with Arch Linux just won't die, which would give me an excuse to drop a few hundred on a 2nd-hand Thinkpad.

BoorishBears 10y ago

I have a Zenbook. Windows for development isn't nearly as convinent as OSX. Yes there's lots of customization you can do to make it bearable. Powershell isn't as awful as CMD, but projects aren't supporting Powershell as much as bash any time this decade AFAIK. The Linux subsystem works, but the flow between Windows and Linux is lacking. I tried Linux. Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (every month I'm told Wayland is going to support it "soon") so I can't use it. I know that sounds silly, but my monitors are a huge part of how I work. Not supporting my workspace is pretty much a non-starter. But to seal the deal it also crashed going to sleep a few times. So I installed OSX... on my Zenbook. Because somehow OS X managed to handle my hardware better than Ubuntu had (bar the stock wireless card), and it was developer friendly. I prefer brew to apt-get. Yes, apt-get is vastly more powerful, but I never had brew fail on me because a previous install had messed up. OS X also has a lot of mindshare. Tooling tends tend to progress from Linux and OS X in ease of use before entering a gulf and reaching Windows eventually. I got my copy of OSX legitimately, but to me it's telling I essentially had to go to "bootleg OSX" to get my hardware and software experiences in sync. OS X even supports the touchscreen as a mouse, not that I ever used the touchscreen on a laptop that only supports the laptop form factor and no others...

Synaesthesia 10y ago
Hackintosh works really well if you have the compatible hardware. It's also my platform of choice.
- TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
  Couldn't recommend this enough, though I do wish I had portability
taigeair 10y ago
Thanks for the details! Interesting the touchscreen still works.
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  Yeah, I sometimes joke that Asus put out a touchscreen MacBook before Apple did
dboreham 10y ago
Cygwin
mkesper 10y ago
The only times when apt-get fails is when your disk is full (!) or when you're including foreign repositories. (Debian has a LOT more in official repos than Ubuntu).
Fnoord 10y ago
Problem is that each software upgrade from Apple contains important security and reliability fixes. You get those even on old Mac hardware (my MBP is 6 years old now). On a Hackintosh, you don't know whether those software upgrades are going to work, or if they will break or brick your system. On top of that, when I looked around, I couldn't find some kind of good guide advising me which ultrabook to buy as Hackintosh. There's no clear comparisons and just a lot of homebrew mentality. I'm not interested in that; I want something which works well, and stays working well. > OS X also has a lot of mindshare. Sure, but I expect that to go down now. IMNSHO, YMMV.
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  I didn't get the Zenbook ever dreaming I'd Hackintosh it, it was more a move of desperation than anything. And I definitely wouldn't recommend buying a laptop just to Hackintosh it, its more of a fun hack than anything with a few specific exceptions where there's strong overlap between an Apple product and an existing PCs hardware (and at that point you might as well just buy the official product if you're only going to Hackintosh it, bar cost) I'd have just gotten another MBP if I wanted OS X for the start for the reasons you list (and the fact that while in many areas OSX was handling the hardware better, it still didn't support the stock wifi or the Optimus setup). I think the MBP issues are overblown. The 2015 is still around and still fully capable. I find it strange that people are complaining about the 2016, but then comparing it to laptops that were out for months, and in some cases years, when the 2015 was out, but weren't being chosen over the 2015 by the same users. There's some backlash because people wanted a MBP refresh and it isn't want they wanted, but I don't see OSX losing that much developer mindshare in the long term. I don't agree with the fear lingering about it being the "end of days" for "Pro MBPs", I think this MBP was an interesting experiment that came at a very poor time (when people were already anxious for a progression of the MBP 2015-2011 in a new form factor, with a bigger battery most likely)
  - lmm 10y ago
    > I find it strange that people are complaining about the 2016, but then comparing it to laptops that were out for months, and in some cases years, when the 2015 was out, but weren't being chosen over the 2015 by the same users. Well given that the 2016 is more expensive, has shorter battery life, and is missing a bunch of ports, one could argue that it's worse (at least for some use cases) than the 2015.
matwood 10y ago
> Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (every month I'm told Wayland is going to support it "soon") so I can't use it. This, this, this. I have been trying off and on for a couple years to move from MacOS to Linux and the HiDPI situation is a mess. Apparently it's not much better in Windows, so maybe if someone is coming from Windows they are used to problems. But, coming from MacOS where I have a rMBP and a mix of HiDPI and HD monitors and they all 'just work' I had assumed that was the state of the industry for a long time. Once I started reading up on the issue it became apparent in the HiDPI world it is MacOS >>>>>>> Windows > Linux. The last time I brought this up on HN, someone responded saying I didn't need HiDPI :/
- crummy 10y ago
  I had similar experiences with Windows hiDPI support but they've all been resolved in the last year with recent software updates.
  - darrylb42 10y ago
    Windows support it pretty well. Some/Most applications don't. I am running windows on a MBP at 150% and a second monitor at 100% somethings are zoomed on the second, some are very small.

enjo 10y ago

Windows 10 have built a very impressive Linux compatibility layer. It's not a VM, they are executing native ELF binaries using the windows kernel. They run a version of Ubuntu 14.04 on top of it that most notably includes package management. It's currently missing upstart, so some things don't work nicely, but MOST things work just fine. I believe upstart is available on some preview versions now. Everything on our development stack (largely python) worked straight out of the box. So on windows I have a real bash shell. I have dpkg. I effectively have Ubuntu. I can provision my machine using the ansible scripts we use to provision our production machines (took only minor updates to make them work). There are some missing pieces. Docker doesn't work from within the linux subsystem. Upstart doesn't work. There is some weirdness related to how you interact with the windows environment from the linux subsystem. For instance I had to install a hack to allow me to open files in sublime from within the linux subsystem. It's a mixed bag. You have a real Ubuntu environment with real package management, which is awesome (as opposed to homebrew). Yet some things that work on OS X don't work quite as seamlessly on Windows. I think for most developers, it's probably going to work pretty damn nicely tho.

morecoffee 10y ago
One painfully missing thing is FUSE support. My workflow involves coding on an sftp-mounted directory, which doesn't work in the Windows version. Alas, it seems the only remote mounting Windows will ever have is WebDAV.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Last time I used Windows, there were several commercial (but cheap) products that supported mounting remote file systems, including SFTP. Tried any of them? Quick Google gives me NetDrive (free) and ExpanDrive.
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  I don't thiiiink this is WebDAV behind the scenes: https://www.petri.com/vsphere-powercli-psdrives https://www.petri.com/vsphere-powercli-psdrives
- 10y ago

obstinate 10y ago

When I develop on Windows, I use a full-screen Ubuntu VM. It's not meaningfully different from having a Linux machine at the scale of work I'm doing.

hiram112 10y ago
Same, though I used to use Fedora. The Win 10 Linux subsystem is still a mess, though it is improving in beta versions.

chendry 10y ago

I'm a developer and spend most of my time in a terminal, usually in vim. I recently switched from OSX to Linux and have not looked back. OSX/macOS has been getting too goofy for my tastes. I spent roughly $300 (reusing my current Apple Cinema LED monitor) to build a desktop replacement for my mac pro. Can't be happier. Then I spent about $600 on a laptop (Thinkpad T460) to replace my Macbook Pro Retina. Also fantastic. Everything's been great. The keyboard on the T460 is awesome. The battery life thus far is about 16 hours. I don't see myself ever going back to macOS again. I'm running Arch, using i3 as a window manager, and feel right at home. Basically this feels like a computer again.

toothbrush 10y ago
I'm curious about that keyboard, because i'm considering getting a Thinkpad T420 or T460, but the T460 keyboard looks like one of those horrible mushy and wholly unacceptable laptop keyboards to me, whereas the T420 at least seems reminiscent of the old revered Thinkpad keyboards. Can you comment?
- izacus 10y ago
  Hmm, I have the new 2016 MBP, 2014 MBP and T460s and the keyboard on T460s beats the other two by a significant margin. I don't think it has the same feel of the older thinkpads, but it still gives a very clear feedback and give in comparison to even the 2014 MacBook one. The 2016 MacBook keyboard is just downright horrible. You kinda get used to it but returning to others keeps reminding me that it's just worse in every regard.
  - toothbrush 10y ago
    After researching a bit more i might end up getting the T420. Solid keyboard, and with an i5 and a fancy SSD it'll be fine for my needs (plus a cd-bay battery, yay!). Blazing even, considering that i'm still on a C2D as my daily driver. Frustratingly my first-gen unibody (2008?) MacBook with Arch Linux just won't die, which would give me an excuse to drop a few hundred on a 2nd-hand Thinkpad.