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Working at Acquia we had a bunch of devops who preferred Linux/thinkpads/things with docks. They never worked correctly, and these folks spent a non trivial am

Working at Acquia we had a bunch of devops who preferred Linux/thinkpads/things with docks. They never worked correctly, and these folks spent a non trivial amount of time diagnosing them, even taking up meeting time to explain the latest arcane fix that was needed so $whatever would come up properly after sleep. They would also complain that dev tooling wouldn’t work for them when they were maybe a handful out of hundreds with MacBooks. When the day came they were forced to migrate to Macs, they grumbled as expected, but their productivity went way up.

komali2 4y ago
Dev tooling is about what OS most of your devs use - if most of your devs are on linux, then, the tooling will work well there. I saw this happen to a dev that preferred osx when they came to the one dearly missed linux house I worked at. My point is that tooling working or not is not really a relevant criticism of an entire OS or platform. I will say that what happened to your linux people at Acquia has happened to me when I was forced to switch to OSX for some kind of vague security reasoning at a job once. My productivity plummeted, I can't believe the defaults in OSX people just... live with for the most part. Sure, a tiled window manager isn't for everyone, but truly, people just accept a new window opening and flying off to some apparently arbitrary portion of the screen, at a completely random seeming width and height? People truly just have a massive dock taking up a significant portion of the bottom of their screen? Eck. I know you can customize all that but that took me a long time to wrangle OSX into an acceptable dev environment, and that's before I get into all the issues I had with various packages. Lord forbid you want to use emacs. This as well is arbitrary, maybe I should "just be a vscode guy" cause that's what everyone uses, but they already spent the money on hiring me so it's like, consider the economics of "forcing" devs to switch just because you think they'll be more productive on the shiny aluminum slab you prefer to use. And... if people messing with their docks is actually causing a productivity issue, bring it up in performance review lol. Spend less time fiddling with your 2x4k monitor dock and more time just coding, on the laptop screen if necessary, oh woe. I'm guessing the true productivity issue is less that the hardware isn't working and more that the fiddling is fun! If I wasn't fiddling with my docks, I was fiddling with emacs, or, my personally built keyboard config, or, whatever else!
XorNot 4y ago
Conversely I've had the opposite experience with devs who wanted Macbooks: because they weren't Windows, they kept doing things which were "Unix-enough" in the Mac OS BSD environment, which then didn't work as expected on our fleets of RedHat and Ubuntu servers. Rather then get their brew/GNU environments in order, I was constantly having to modify build scripts to try and detect and account for yet another dev who would complain "it's broken" because they weren't in a GNU environment, or what worked with BSD tools didn't work in the GNU environment. Of course I simply ran a Linux desktop, so that worked great but it was very noticeable how much more reliable and how much quicker I could be interacting with our environment then the people living through multiple layers of indirection and abstraction or VMs. It would have been much easier if they'd been locked into the corporate Windows environment, since then they would've been forced to actually run VMs in the platform they were targeting (but of course that environment was much worse for everyone).
lucb1e 4y ago
Linux on Thinkpad with Lenovo dock working just fine for my colleagues. Not that I'm a fan of Lenovo's but I coincidentally happen to know multiple people with that setup and no dock/linux/thinkpad-related issues. Since you say they were since "forced" onto a nonfree platform, perhaps this was years ago?
- DJBunnies 4y ago
  3 years ago. Apparently I struck a nerve here? My daily driver is Linux and I’m by no means a Mac fanboy, but I do think consistency is good when the alternative is a distraction from real work.
  - lucb1e 4y ago
    > when the alternative is a distraction from real work When, then I certainly agree, presuming of course that the alternative is not worse in that regard

komali2 4y ago

Dev tooling is about what OS most of your devs use - if most of your devs are on linux, then, the tooling will work well there. I saw this happen to a dev that preferred osx when they came to the one dearly missed linux house I worked at. My point is that tooling working or not is not really a relevant criticism of an entire OS or platform. I will say that what happened to your linux people at Acquia has happened to me when I was forced to switch to OSX for some kind of vague security reasoning at a job once. My productivity plummeted, I can't believe the defaults in OSX people just... live with for the most part. Sure, a tiled window manager isn't for everyone, but truly, people just accept a new window opening and flying off to some apparently arbitrary portion of the screen, at a completely random seeming width and height? People truly just have a massive dock taking up a significant portion of the bottom of their screen? Eck. I know you can customize all that but that took me a long time to wrangle OSX into an acceptable dev environment, and that's before I get into all the issues I had with various packages. Lord forbid you want to use emacs. This as well is arbitrary, maybe I should "just be a vscode guy" cause that's what everyone uses, but they already spent the money on hiring me so it's like, consider the economics of "forcing" devs to switch just because you think they'll be more productive on the shiny aluminum slab you prefer to use. And... if people messing with their docks is actually causing a productivity issue, bring it up in performance review lol. Spend less time fiddling with your 2x4k monitor dock and more time just coding, on the laptop screen if necessary, oh woe. I'm guessing the true productivity issue is less that the hardware isn't working and more that the fiddling is fun! If I wasn't fiddling with my docks, I was fiddling with emacs, or, my personally built keyboard config, or, whatever else!

XorNot 4y ago

Conversely I've had the opposite experience with devs who wanted Macbooks: because they weren't Windows, they kept doing things which were "Unix-enough" in the Mac OS BSD environment, which then didn't work as expected on our fleets of RedHat and Ubuntu servers. Rather then get their brew/GNU environments in order, I was constantly having to modify build scripts to try and detect and account for yet another dev who would complain "it's broken" because they weren't in a GNU environment, or what worked with BSD tools didn't work in the GNU environment. Of course I simply ran a Linux desktop, so that worked great but it was very noticeable how much more reliable and how much quicker I could be interacting with our environment then the people living through multiple layers of indirection and abstraction or VMs. It would have been much easier if they'd been locked into the corporate Windows environment, since then they would've been forced to actually run VMs in the platform they were targeting (but of course that environment was much worse for everyone).

lucb1e 4y ago

Linux on Thinkpad with Lenovo dock working just fine for my colleagues. Not that I'm a fan of Lenovo's but I coincidentally happen to know multiple people with that setup and no dock/linux/thinkpad-related issues. Since you say they were since "forced" onto a nonfree platform, perhaps this was years ago?

DJBunnies 4y ago
3 years ago. Apparently I struck a nerve here? My daily driver is Linux and I’m by no means a Mac fanboy, but I do think consistency is good when the alternative is a distraction from real work.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > when the alternative is a distraction from real work When, then I certainly agree, presuming of course that the alternative is not worse in that regard