13 ms·

Windows to Mac to Windows to Mac to... Linux? It doesn't matter.

105 points by themcgruff 15y ago

stefanve 15y ago
I have used solely mac's in the last 4 years. At my new work they use windows I didn't like the idea at all. But actually I don't really care anymore vim, eclipse, chrome, spotify etc it all works. I need to buy a new laptop and it is not going to be a macbook pro 15" since I think its to expansive especially since I had this epiphany :)
- gldalmaso 15y ago
  I sure did mind when my employers changed from Ubuntu to Windows machines. But the things that really bugged me to no end were: - Mouse scroll only works in the active window; - No native way to pin a window in front; For both cases I had to download workarounds, but they don't work very well.
iamdave 15y ago
So... to summarize this post: Use whatever feels comfortable and enables you to get work done. Insightful post.
buro9 15y ago
Aside from keyboard shortcuts (Mac still trips me up), I am fine on any platform and notice no difference. I might occasionally find myself typing 'putty' in Spotlight, or 'dir' in linux, but largely it's all blurred together. With Sublime Text 2 I'm even more confused. When I'm not in a terminal my editor is consistent everywhere. Now the big question is more likely to be "What hardware?", not "What OS?", which is great as it gives me the whole world of products to choose from. The only thing I'll add is: This is all only possible if you didn't put your life in one of the vendor's walled garden.
- j_baker 15y ago
  I'm generally a Linux user, but I've grown to appreciate OS X's keyboard shortcuts. Cmd-C will copy text on just about any OS X app including the terminal and emacs. On the Linux terminal, you have to use Ctrl-Shift-C to copy (to avoid sending SIGINT to the current process), and God forbid you ever need to copy anything in the Windows terminal.
  - justsomedood 15y ago
    How is copying in the windows terminal hard? Highlight and press enter.
    - glhaynes 15y ago
      It's not that it's terribly hard, it's that it's annoyingly different from most other places in the system. Just one more thing to remember. Oh and it's a bit error prone too - I can't remember whether this is different on newer versions, but it at least used to be too easy to accidentally close your window if you misclicked while doing a copy or paste. On a laggy remote connection this can be particularly annoying.
    - spacemanaki 15y ago
      I just tried to do that on a Win7 machine sitting next to me and it didn't work... it doesn't seem to let me highlight anything at all? I normally wouldn't comment about something like this but I wanted to do this literally 10 minutes before I read your comment. Anyway I don't think it's controversial to suggest that the stock terminal on Windows kind of sucks, although I gather that PowerShell is pretty good.
      - Someone 15y ago
        Hit alt-space (?) or click in the top left corner to open the system menu (?). It has menu items for copy and paste; 'Properties' allows one to enable a more useful way of copy/paste (QuickEdit mode, IIRC). It isn't enabled by default in case people want to run DOS apps with mouse support. Someone should start a pool for people predicitng when this default will be changed.
bryanh 15y ago
Try going from Mac/Linux to Windows (or vice versa) and see if "getting [your] development environment running for [your] applications [is] just as easy"...
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I have used Cygwin for quite some time. Not great, but not bad either.
  - wollw 15y ago
    Not bad, but not what I'd really call good either. I was forced to use cygwin while working on a project last year and while it gave me some familiar ground for sure but it seemed like every which way something was just... off. I can't really think of much in the way of examples at this point but I don't have fond memories. One thing that did annoy me was a total lack of decent terminal emulators and I ended up using something based off PuTTY. Cygwin was certainly better than nothing but I'll take the real thing any day.
    - adam-a 15y ago
      I always go for mintty [1] on Cygwin and have generally found it pretty good. I agree Cygwin is not perfect though. [1] http://code.google.com/p/mintty/ http://code.google.com/p/mintty/
dangrossman 15y ago
DHH doesn't seem to agree. If you're running Windows 37Signals isn't going to hire you. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000433.html http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000433.html
- statictype 15y ago
  I wonder if he still stands by this rant? (Nothing has changed in the OS landscape but people tend to mature with time and their absolute stances tend to mellow with experience).
- exDM69 15y ago
  I can relate to them. Good hackers tend to gravitate towards Unix based OS'es for some reason. So out of personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I would say that the conditional probability of a voluntary Windows user being a great coder is less than, say, a Linux user. Many Windows users are also at a disadvantage because many of them have only/mostly used Windows. Pretty much any Linux or Mac user has probably had to (voluntarily or not) use Windows at some point. Also, I have yet to meet the Windows user who can rationally reason about their choice of using it and not another OS. If you've only used one operating system in your life, you are at a disadvantage compared to people who are proficient with two or more OS'es. edit: I know this is controversial. There might also be a regional bias, since I'm located in Helsinki, the hometown of Linux :)
  - dangrossman 15y ago
    > Also, I have yet to meet the Windows user who can rationally reason about their choice of using it and not another OS. Really? I can tab between games and my editor.
    - exDM69 15y ago
      > I can tab between games and my editor. As opposed to? Do you refer to the better availability of games on Windows? Are games good enough a reason for you to stick to that OS even when doing work? I can sort of relate to you. I have a dualboot Windows system, where the Windows part is for gaming only. It serves roughly the same purpose as many people's gaming consoles do, I don't even try to do work with it.
wulczer 15y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the final point All you need these days to build great things is a browser, a text editor, and the programming language or tool of your choice. Even when developing web apps there's sometimes need to use a network traffic analyzer, a debugger... Not to mention a plethora of tools for reading/analyzing/parsing log files, graphing benchmark results, generating test SSL certificates and a lot of other things that are not equally available on all platforms. And there's another consideration: if you're deploying your software on Linux it's just plain easier to develop it on Linux as well.
- jballanc 15y ago
  If you design chips, you might wonder how anyone gets by without an FPGA. If you develop a kernel, you might wonder how anyone gets by without remote debugging. If you develop drivers, you might wonder how anyone gets by without a C compiler or assembler. The problem with your critique is that you're thinking at the wrong level of abstraction. If (and, yes, this is a big if) you are developing a web app on a platform where all of the low-level concerns are taken care of for you, then the final point is completely valid. I'd even go so far as to strike the text editor from that list. Already today, you could (in theory) develop a Rails or Node app in Cloud9, store the code on Github, and deploy to Heroku with little more than a ChromeBook. Ok, we're not quite there yet, but I hope you get my point... That said, there are still chip designers, kernel programmers, and driver developers. And there will always be "backend engineers" (though I think we need a better term) who need debuggers, benchmark utilities, packet analyzers, etc.
  - wulczer 15y ago
    Your point is valid, of course - developing specialized software requires a specialized platform. But what I wanted to say is that even developing a web app (and that's what I do these days) I sometimes need to use Wireshark. Sure, there was that guy that used an iPad, a wireless keyboard and a Linode as his PC so it's viable. But I think that's an exceptional case and it's more common to need quite a lot of supporting tools to develop things. And of course, you know, our designer can work with just a notebook (as in: a paper notebook) :)
ecoffey 15y ago
What I've liked about switching fulltime to a mac laptop is the polish. It's a unix install that quickly sleeps when I close the lid :-P
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Package management is not a minor part of the "unix install". When I get a just works Mac equivalent of pacman -S whatever, I'll consider using OSX for more than testing.
  - tkrajcar 15y ago
    http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ See you in the Apple Store.
  - lucisferre 15y ago
    The homebrew comment (which I can't reply to for some reason) is good, but not totally fair. Homebrew has to compile everything, while this isn't a huge problem with todays machines it is still a bit of a time sink. Homebrew regularly has packages that fail to build. There are over 400 open pull requests for the project at the present time to illustrate this problem. Homebrew != apt-get or any other linux package manager.
    - awj 15y ago
      "compile everything" is an approach to package management. BSD Ports (as well as Gentoo's Portage) use it. It does a pretty decent job at helping packaged programs build off/work with unpackaged installs. You also get some marvelous compile environment debugging adventures. ;)
      - lucisferre 15y ago
        Not saying it isn't an approach, I'm just saying,it's apples and oranges. When someone suggests that OSX doesn't have a linux style package management, they are technically correct.
simonsarris 15y ago
Randall Munroe had a much more terse post on the subject: http://xkcd.com/934/ http://xkcd.com/934/ (Some of you may balk that a cartoon is not a blog post, but commentary is commentary.)
- michaelty 15y ago
  "Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension." (bursts into tears, runs out of room)
  - weaksauce 15y ago
    The state of memory leaks in firefox extensions is terrible even for trivial extensions... I can't imagine how bad it would be with something non trivial.
- dextorious 15y ago
  Well, "since we do most things on the web now" could also be translated as: "since we don't do much other than read emails, surf the web, do some IM/social stuff, and maybe exchange some documents". Because sure as hell, 99.9% percent of us doesn't: 1) Write code on the web. 2) Edits images on the web. 3) Write documents on the web. 4) Maintains systems (admin work) on the web. 5) Produces/edits video on the web. 6) Produces/edits music on the web. 7) Watches movies on the web. 8) Does spreadsheets on the web. 9) Plays heavy 3D games on the web. 10) Does DTP on the web. 11) Does 3D modelling on the web. Web stuff exists for all of these, but much much much fewer people use it than desktop apps. Last time I checked, programmers use Emacs, Vim, Visual Studio, XCode etc. Those are not web apps. It doesn't get much better for the general population, though. Tons more people use something like Paintshop Pro and Photoshop Elements than something like Photoshop Express (the online flash photo-edit tool). And, Google Docs, which is much more realistic a substitute than some online "photo editing" app is, for it's market, is used by a tiny percentage last time I saw the numbers. Maybe one day we'll do everything in the browser, but this is not that day, and limits in current web technologies (hell, even basic stuff like websockets are not universally available yet) and bandwidth will keep it that way for a while. There are things that can be done nicely on the web, and things that would be frustrating and a huge throwback to the olden days of slow CPUs and pain. Text editing is one such thing. Everything that needs the handling of large volumes of data (or not that large, anything larger than, say, 10MB) doesn't work that well in the browser. So, you, the one guy using Bespin for your programming work: good for you, but you are a tiny minority.
tomjen3 15y ago
Mostly I used to agree with this. But between a decent command-line, apt-get and gnome-do I don't like the idea of using another OS at all.
jiggy2011 15y ago
I find myself using VMs allot since I have a set of preferred applications for doing my work. The majority of them are platform agnostic but some are not and the ones that are not are all for different platforms.
kayoone 15y ago
Well it does matter if you do anything else than webdev..I develop games with Unity which is only available for Windows and Mac... Also building native iOS apps is only possible on one plattform...i would consider Linux otherwise, but no choice. So OSX is the way to go, and i love the tight hardware/software integration which makes the macbook sleep/wake-up etc without any issues, which is always a pain on Linux to get right.
funkah 15y ago
I boot into Windows for work since our whole stack is Windows-based and it's just easier that way. I agree that to a pretty large extent the OS doesn't matter when developing. This is especially true when everything is up and running fine. But there's the rub -- when things go south, that's when you find out what your preferred OS is. Troubleshooting a recent virus/malware problem on Windows turned into rebooting countless times, Windows Update incantations, several malware tools, and so forth until the OS was unbootable and I had to wipe it and install everything from scratch. Knowing what I know about Windows and Mac, I know how much easier it would have been to deal with this problem on the Mac, not to mention that it most likely would never have occurred in the first place. So, that's my two cents -- when everything is running the difference can be negligible. When you hit problems, the difference may not be so negligible anymore.
zerostar07 15y ago
I’m just as productive on Linux as I was on OS X I think Linux is far better for developers. GTK, QT, wxWindows and all the python/ruby/you-name-it you want. Lots of open source software doesn't even work on osx. Keyboard shortcuts are everywhere. Best window management (i just love alt-right click). I wish they 'd stop it with the unity/kde plasma eyesore madness, and focused on basic things that ruin my experience such as printer support, multiple monitors / docking station, sleep and hibernate, not breaking my setup every time it updates etc; i 'm content with xfce.
- edu 15y ago
  Not flaming, just plain curiosity, but what open source/free software have you found that doesn't work on osx? I switched to Mac several years ago and any piece of software I've needed has worked, first using macports and now homebrew.
  - zerostar07 15y ago
    python, for starters. scipy/matplotlib dont work with osx's shipped python
    - brisance 15y ago
      Lots of open source software doesn't even work on osx. Failing to work out of the box (for whatever legal reasons) is very different from "doesn't even work". Finality was implied in your original post. Enthought has binary distributions for the various platforms for a long time.
      - zerostar07 15y ago
        Sorry i meant "doesn't compile", which is the essence of open source programs anyway. If that wasn't an issue on OS X there wouldn't be so many porting projects (macports, fink etc). And if you work with non-popular (e.g. scientific) programs that's not even an option.
alexbell 15y ago
Unfortunately it matters if you do mobile development, iOS being one of the two must have platforms and requiring a Mac. I do use and like Ubuntu though, and could see myself switching over with minimal hassle.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I was developing for iOS on Arch linux last night. The platform being html/css/js.
gurkendoktor 15y ago
I love my GUI-ish setup of TextMate and CornerStone/Tower; I can only do iOS work because I have a Mac; I will buy a dedicated Windows box when I want to dabble with Windows Phone; I don't know what I'd do with my iPhone on Linux; I like Xcode4 a lot more than MSVC, in any case they are as different as day and night; mice and keyboards are similar, but can you say that about trackpads already? (Honest question - I don't know) There are a lot of differences between the major platforms. The article is true when all the moons align: You only do web (or Eclipse) work, your phone and all its apps are platform agnostic (OmniFocus locks me in), you have no games, you have no paid GUI apps, you don't care about iTunes ... I have a whole family of real, existing humans that I'd love to free from their virus-ridden Windows machines. It just isn't possible for what they do. Not sure what to take from this article. It sounds like indirect boasting about not being locked into anything. It would be more interesting to discuss if that is important.
andrewheins 15y ago
For a full-time developer, I agree with the OP insofar as Linux and Mac are largely interchangeable. I develop on Linux and love it. The biggest exception is for anyone involved in graphics, front-end development, or often works with graphic designers. The lack of native installation of Photoshop and Illustrator wrecks it. That's what largely spurred my decision to buy a Mac. There's only one OS that currently offers a Unix CLI with native Adobe Creative Suite installation. If Adobe ever offers native CS on Linux, I'll be Linux for life.
- cageface 15y ago
  Or anyone making music, or editing video. The commercial offerings in those areas still far outstrip anything available on Linux.
  - jebblue 15y ago
    Would that explain why Linux is used to develop so many special effects in Movies, not Windows?
    - cageface 15y ago
      Video editing and modeling/rendering effects are completely different toolchains. Tools for the former are still very crude compared to what's available on Mac/PC. Support for the latter is good on Linux, probably thanks in large part to the Unix legacy imparted to the effects industry by SGI. But a lot of the Linux machines you see in VFX shops are just headless render nodes. People doing the creative work often use Macs or PCs.
    - dextorious 15y ago
      Those Linux machines are mostly used as render-farms, i.e dumb boxes to crunch numbers. You'd have to get their Mac (or sometimes Windows) machine out of the special effects guys cold, dead, fingers. That said, there are a few commercial offerings for 3D modeling work on Linux, but shockingly less than in Windows/Mac land.
emehrkay 15y ago
I guess it depends on what you do and how you do it. Some business dependent software do not exist across platform. For example, we deploy to Linux servers so we want our dev environments to closely match that, kinda hard to do with Windows. We use Adobe products to visualize our applications, kinda hard to do on Linux. We need to test in IE, need virtualization software if we're running OS X. All OSes are not equal. Browsers may be, but I don't develop in a browser.
jlarocco 15y ago
Unfortunately switching the other way isn't as easy. Linux offers a LOT more customization than OSX or Windows, and after using it for a long time there's a lot of stuff I took for granted which isn't as easy to setup on OSX. I'm still using OSX as my primary OS, but every once in a while I still come across stuff I can't easily do and think, "Gees, this was 10x easier in Linux."
tjogin 15y ago
It matters a lot if you're using open source tools, I think. The people running windows and doing development on open source tools are a tiny minority, therefore whatever platform specific problems they run into aren't going to get as much love and care. It's different if you're using some proprietary soup-to-nuts toolchain, perhaps with support and all that jazz, then maybe it doesn't matter. But as long as your support is the open source community, and your tools are the stuff that they put together, and as long as they're all running some flavor of unix or linux (and therefore don't really care about your weirdo windows vista edge case), it'll matter.
wenbert 15y ago
Photoshop. It's what keeps going back to Windows/Mac OS. Make Photoshop install without headaches in Ubuntu and I'll switch tomorrow.
- coderdude 15y ago
  7 works like a charm with Wine under Ubuntu if you don't mind working with an old version. I personally find 7 to be sufficient for everything I do.
deleted 15y ago
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webjprgm 15y ago
For a dev machine this is mostly true. I haven't been able to be as conveniently productive on Windows, since I always end up installing Cygwin eventually, then decide I might as well be using Linux. However, for a relaxing machine, Linux doesn't have access to the same games as Windows or even Mac. Well, you can often do some clear hacking to get things running on Linux (Wine, etc.) but it's much easier on Mac or Windows. Thus I still defend Mac as the best mix of Unix development environment + reasonable access to quality games. I usually mention ease-of-use, but as the poster mentions, Linux is much better than last decade.
zyb09 15y ago
OSX is like a gateway drug for Linux. I used Windows for years, then had to work with OSX for iOS development. Didn't know a thing about it, hated it (at first). Time passed and now I ssh into vps to set up nodejs. Feels great =)
- jinushaun 15y ago
  More correctly, I think OS X is a gateway drug for Unix. With OS X, you get all the "1337 hax0r" command line goodness without sacrificing MS Office and Adobe CS as you would with Linux. Now... if I could only get a decent Mono set up on this thing. I could cut out Windows entirely.
nvk 15y ago
It is impossible for any serious Designer/Front end ppl in general to go to Linux, unfortunately, as much as i want to strangle Adobe (can't wait for Pixelmator to mature a bit more), we rely on Photoshop and Illustrator too munch. And GIMP is not a viable alternative.
- nvk 15y ago
  Just a note; Illustrator does have some alternatives... But Photoshop is still irreplaceable.
  - m3koval 15y ago
    Can you suggest a good Illustrator alternative for Linux? I've tried a few and was never satisfied largely because the GUIs were very difficult to use. Perhaps I tried the wrong ones!
    - nvk 15y ago
      There is Inkscape, but honestly... There isn't anything i like. Very few "front end" types in the Linux community.
  - jebblue 15y ago
    Tell the vendor that you want a Linux version and will walk away otherwise.
virmundi 15y ago
I find the terminal just horrible in OSX. I'm on snow leopard and it can't even wrap lines properly. Trying to get vim with colors to work is a major headache. I've also found that the uninstall mechanisms in Linux/OSX to be lacking compared to Windows. Perhaps this is a function of my lack of skill with the tools, but I have no idea how to uninstall the Tango library that the installer added. I'm worried about removing the dmd (D's compiler) since it installed in the /usr/bin. Linux is better that OS X in this regard. Sadly I'm stuck in Windows for most things, even Node development. I just haven't found a good editor for free that is like Notepad++. Fortunately for my Java/Scala development, Eclipse works everywhere.
- adabsurdo 15y ago
  if you can spare 59$ sublime text 2 is superb (ways better than notepad++) and works everywhere: linux, windows, osx. also you should try iTerm as terminal replacement for osx, it's great. your point about the lack of uninstall on osx is valid, though if you use homebrew this becomes largely moot.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  Notepad++ was one of the few bright spots of my erstwhile Windows days, and I still wish for it when I occasionally find myself using Gedit for quick note taking. It was sooo fast with just the right features and nothing supurfluous. But I could never go back to it from Vim now. As for uninstalling issues, if you can't use the package management tools to uninstall (you compiled from source and/or manually installed?), in the future try using GNU Stow or xStow to group all the pieces in a single directory and then symlinking them to the various system directories. It's brilliant. http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/ http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
- anykey 15y ago
  The built-in terminal is terrible (although at least in Lion it has 256 color support...). I'd hardly consider it a mark against OS X though considering that it is just a piece of software that is included by default. There are plenty of other options out there. I'd STRONGLY recommend checking out iTerm2 next time you're on OS X, it's the best terminal emulator I've had the pleasure of working with.
b2spirit 15y ago
Ryan said: "it’s not some political statement about free and open source software" Free and open source software is not motivated by politics, but by a development strategy to get as many people as possible to find and fix bugs. Free software is politically motivated, by the love for freedom and the hate for slavery. If freedom matters to a person, it will matter to him whether he uses Linux, Microsoft or Apple.
Craiggybear 15y ago
Have both Mac and Linux -- usually prefer Linux. The article is correct: I too find the experience generally on most levels between OS X and Linux indistinguishable, although Linux has far more easily accessible programming tools that are totally free (most Mac equivalents that do the same job come at an unreasonably high price) and I feel Linux is more comfortable to program with, generally. Installing certain tools under OS X BSD layer is generally more of a faff than just apt-get install or whatever. I also like the fact build-essentials is much faster and easier to set up in Linux than having to install the whole XCode stack and then say Brew or MacPorts to get the same level of functionality. I spend most of my time in OS X on the command line and use tools like mutt and cmus in preference to GUI mail and iTunes, so in that respect the difference between OS X and Linux are not really noticeable. But as someone else mentioned earlier, if Adobe did Linux ports of all their applications I'd never leave Linux again. I never use Windows nowadays. Just looking at it/thinking about it makes me feel ill, although I have in the past written a huge amount of software in Windows for other people. Bleargh ...
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  You mention Macs doing the same job being real pricey and I'm wondering how you figure that? I have a 4 year old iMac and a netbook running Xununtu. The tools I use on both machines are basically the same with the big difference Bering my text editor (Chocolat on Mac and SublimeText on Linux). Other than that all the tools are free for both platforms. I've got my AMP stack, RVM, PHP, Apache, SQLite, etc., etc., all free. Even Xcode 4 is free on Lion and 3.6 is free if you run anything less. The Mac itself is more expensive but doing any equivalent work as I would on Linux doesn't require a real powerful Mac anyway. I love them both equally but prefer my Mac. It may be a comfort issue as my Linux box is a netbook but I digress. I'm just wondering, besides the cost of a mid grade Mac to begin with, what makes you say Mac development is expensive?
  - Craiggybear 15y ago
    "You mention Macs doing the same job being real pricey" -- No, I never said any such thing. I said some software tools that are free on Linux (some programmer's editors for example, but a few other little things as well) have rather pricey equivalents on the Mac (unless you can find something on Macports or Brew that will compile on OS X. fdupes, mutt and cmus I must have for example). Also some things demand I use a specific version of OS X, Why should, say for example, an editor, demand I use 10.7? Which I've no intention of using. Why do I need XCode when all I want from out of that is gcc? Not that this is a major ordeal in any way. Mac hardware is slightly pricey but it is very good. I have no gripe whatsoever about that. I never said Mac development was expensive. I said it was slightly more of a faff to set everything up. You mention you've a Linux netbook -- so do I. And here's the thing: it also boots OS X as well and that runs really well on that limited hardware. Maybe even running better than Linux. I also have two proper, actual Macs as well as an AMD based Linux PC and that ended up costing slightly more in the end than a Mac would because of some of its hardware. Go back and read what I said. You're putting words in my mouth.
jebberjeb 15y ago
I'm a full-time linux user, but the touchpad + gestures support of Mac OS are truly superior and do affect my overall computing experience in a big way.
evandena 15y ago
I'd love to run Linux at home, but gaming keeps me on Windows. Sure I could dual boot, but it's such a pain for little gain. I tend to hang out voice chat programs while gaming, and interrupting conversations to reboot to Linux after a gaming session is an inconvenience. Same story for OS X.
axiom 15y ago
Wait a year. Ubuntu has a very powerful tendency to slowly develop crud and become unusable, until you just need to start from scratch and re-install the OS. Not sure if this has changed, but laptops tend to be a mess with Ubuntu. Things like closing the lid and going into sleep mode would fail seemingly at random.
csomar 15y ago
Perhaps surprisingly to some people, Linux hardware support has improved to the point that everything worked perfectly out of the box, just like on a Mac. I installed the latest version of Ubuntu on my Dell Laptop. After a few minutes, I heard some strange noise from the Hard Drive. I googled to see what's going wrong and I found out that Ubuntu have some problems with Hard Drive Power management. The risks are damaging my SATA drive. Unless you are using something supported by your Hardware provider, I really doubt Ubuntu will make it work out of the box, just like on a Mac
- akavlie 15y ago
  My experience with hardware support was not so hot either. On a ThinkPad X220 with latest Ubuntu, I would get random crashes when unplugging the DisplayPort adapter, or right in the middle of working. Also, lack of proper built in fan speed control. And panels doing stupid things when switching between signel & dual display setups. Switched to a MacBook Pro, and it's been rock solid.
NegativeOne 15y ago
He makes some good points, but Linux is still lacking in some areas. Hardware support is a big one and If you want to watch Netflix or do any kind of serious graphic design then you'll have to go with Mac or PC. I'm in the process of building a linux box, but it's just going to be a headless server with remote desktop capabilities as well as running a few local servers for web dev. I can't give up Mac & PC just quite yet...
billpatrianakos 15y ago
The main point is right but the post glosses over some critical details. Switching from Mac to Linux is pretty easy. Switching from Windows is trickier. The languages are the same but setting up your environment is a chore. Most instructions for setting up local development environments are focused on Unix like systems. If you learned on Windows and switch to Linux or Mac things can be strange for you but luckly there's no shortage of easy setup instructions and terminal one-liners to get you started. If you learned on Mac or Linux and switch to Windows then you'll have a harder time as you always have to make sure you're looking for the Windows instructions or tools. Want to set up an AMP stack (on your system not using Xampp) on Windows? You're jumping through hoops if you came from any other OS. Want to use multiple Ruby versions? RVM and RBENV don't run on Windows. Experienced programmers can make these switches easily with only some minor annoyances but someone in the first few years of their programming journey will have a much harder time. The way Windows does things isn't necessarily wrong and it's no one's fault that it doesn't have any sort of Unix heritage like every other popular OS these days. But the case can be made that switching to or from Windows can matter depending on the programmer while a Mac to any Linux distro switch has a negligible effect on workflow and productivity. This isn't about Windows being sucky. It isn't. It's just different enough to warrant a disclaimer, that disclaimer being "while it doesn't matter what platform you develop on for the most part, Windows does things differently enough that switching to or from it can matter if you're somewhat green". These days documentation for most popular tools assume a Unix-like development environment. Windows users need to Google for instructions. It's also worth noting, like one of the commenters on the original page said, that most Linux GUI tools aren't as good as they are on Mac and Windows so of you're not totally comfortable in the terminal youd better get there or use another OS. There's no shame in preferring a GUI tool and it isn't necessarily the mark of a noob or bad programmer. I'm an alright programmer myself, very comfortable in the terminal, know vi and nano well but prefer a GUI text editor. It's not bad, just different. So I guess what I'm saying is that the article's point stands but it's a bit of an oversimplification.
- steverb 15y ago
  Actually, Microsoft now makes it ridiculously easy to install an AMP stack on Windows. Just run the web platform installer and select the bits you want. http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx
dekz 15y ago
I have a Linux PC as my development work machine and a Macbook Pro as my home development machine. Agreeing with the author, yes they are almost indistinguishable when the main tools are Chrome, a termina, vim, tmux, and g++/javac. There are things which I believe are nicer on the linux development machine (xmonad/apt,yum), but the thing that keeps me coming back to my Mac is that not only is it an above-par development machine, but it is also an excellent freetime/browsing machine. The application ecosystem is far superior, just compare Pidgin and Adium; Settings dialogs (so much unused space). I guess you could sum it up as design aesthetics but it truly makes the difference. Would I reconsider windows again after a POSIX environment, I don't think I could, but I may try.
moreorless 15y ago
I find these articles to be silly. A lot of it depends on what you need to accomplish on your computer. The right tool for the right job.
jebblue 15y ago
Chrome, Eclipse and Java are all I need. Those are all on Linux, Mac and Windows too which works out quite well.
HalibetLector 15y ago
It does matter. I'd love to do my social game development in Linux (and I even tried it, for a while) but the technologies I use are Flash and Unity 3d. There is no effective way to develop with either of those technologies in Linux. So I settle for the one supported OS with a shell: OS X.

105 points by themcgruff 15y ago

I have used solely mac's in the last 4 years. At my new work they use windows I didn't like the idea at all. But actually I don't really care anymore vim, eclipse, chrome, spotify etc it all works. I need to buy a new laptop and it is not going to be a macbook pro 15" since I think its to expansive especially since I had this epiphany :)

gldalmaso 15y ago
I sure did mind when my employers changed from Ubuntu to Windows machines. But the things that really bugged me to no end were: - Mouse scroll only works in the active window; - No native way to pin a window in front; For both cases I had to download workarounds, but they don't work very well.

iamdave 15y ago

So... to summarize this post: Use whatever feels comfortable and enables you to get work done. Insightful post.

buro9 15y ago

Aside from keyboard shortcuts (Mac still trips me up), I am fine on any platform and notice no difference. I might occasionally find myself typing 'putty' in Spotlight, or 'dir' in linux, but largely it's all blurred together. With Sublime Text 2 I'm even more confused. When I'm not in a terminal my editor is consistent everywhere. Now the big question is more likely to be "What hardware?", not "What OS?", which is great as it gives me the whole world of products to choose from. The only thing I'll add is: This is all only possible if you didn't put your life in one of the vendor's walled garden.

j_baker 15y ago
I'm generally a Linux user, but I've grown to appreciate OS X's keyboard shortcuts. Cmd-C will copy text on just about any OS X app including the terminal and emacs. On the Linux terminal, you have to use Ctrl-Shift-C to copy (to avoid sending SIGINT to the current process), and God forbid you ever need to copy anything in the Windows terminal.
- justsomedood 15y ago
  How is copying in the windows terminal hard? Highlight and press enter.
  - glhaynes 15y ago
    It's not that it's terribly hard, it's that it's annoyingly different from most other places in the system. Just one more thing to remember. Oh and it's a bit error prone too - I can't remember whether this is different on newer versions, but it at least used to be too easy to accidentally close your window if you misclicked while doing a copy or paste. On a laggy remote connection this can be particularly annoying.
  - spacemanaki 15y ago
    I just tried to do that on a Win7 machine sitting next to me and it didn't work... it doesn't seem to let me highlight anything at all? I normally wouldn't comment about something like this but I wanted to do this literally 10 minutes before I read your comment. Anyway I don't think it's controversial to suggest that the stock terminal on Windows kind of sucks, although I gather that PowerShell is pretty good.
    - Someone 15y ago
      Hit alt-space (?) or click in the top left corner to open the system menu (?). It has menu items for copy and paste; 'Properties' allows one to enable a more useful way of copy/paste (QuickEdit mode, IIRC). It isn't enabled by default in case people want to run DOS apps with mouse support. Someone should start a pool for people predicitng when this default will be changed.

bryanh 15y ago

Try going from Mac/Linux to Windows (or vice versa) and see if "getting [your] development environment running for [your] applications [is] just as easy"...

rbanffy 15y ago
I have used Cygwin for quite some time. Not great, but not bad either.
- wollw 15y ago
  Not bad, but not what I'd really call good either. I was forced to use cygwin while working on a project last year and while it gave me some familiar ground for sure but it seemed like every which way something was just... off. I can't really think of much in the way of examples at this point but I don't have fond memories. One thing that did annoy me was a total lack of decent terminal emulators and I ended up using something based off PuTTY. Cygwin was certainly better than nothing but I'll take the real thing any day.
  - adam-a 15y ago
    I always go for mintty [1] on Cygwin and have generally found it pretty good. I agree Cygwin is not perfect though. [1] http://code.google.com/p/mintty/ http://code.google.com/p/mintty/

dangrossman 15y ago

DHH doesn't seem to agree. If you're running Windows 37Signals isn't going to hire you. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000433.html http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000433.html

statictype 15y ago
I wonder if he still stands by this rant? (Nothing has changed in the OS landscape but people tend to mature with time and their absolute stances tend to mellow with experience).
exDM69 15y ago
I can relate to them. Good hackers tend to gravitate towards Unix based OS'es for some reason. So out of personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I would say that the conditional probability of a voluntary Windows user being a great coder is less than, say, a Linux user. Many Windows users are also at a disadvantage because many of them have only/mostly used Windows. Pretty much any Linux or Mac user has probably had to (voluntarily or not) use Windows at some point. Also, I have yet to meet the Windows user who can rationally reason about their choice of using it and not another OS. If you've only used one operating system in your life, you are at a disadvantage compared to people who are proficient with two or more OS'es. edit: I know this is controversial. There might also be a regional bias, since I'm located in Helsinki, the hometown of Linux :)
- dangrossman 15y ago
  > Also, I have yet to meet the Windows user who can rationally reason about their choice of using it and not another OS. Really? I can tab between games and my editor.
  - exDM69 15y ago
    > I can tab between games and my editor. As opposed to? Do you refer to the better availability of games on Windows? Are games good enough a reason for you to stick to that OS even when doing work? I can sort of relate to you. I have a dualboot Windows system, where the Windows part is for gaming only. It serves roughly the same purpose as many people's gaming consoles do, I don't even try to do work with it.

wulczer 15y ago

I'm not sure I agree with the final point All you need these days to build great things is a browser, a text editor, and the programming language or tool of your choice. Even when developing web apps there's sometimes need to use a network traffic analyzer, a debugger... Not to mention a plethora of tools for reading/analyzing/parsing log files, graphing benchmark results, generating test SSL certificates and a lot of other things that are not equally available on all platforms. And there's another consideration: if you're deploying your software on Linux it's just plain easier to develop it on Linux as well.

jballanc 15y ago
If you design chips, you might wonder how anyone gets by without an FPGA. If you develop a kernel, you might wonder how anyone gets by without remote debugging. If you develop drivers, you might wonder how anyone gets by without a C compiler or assembler. The problem with your critique is that you're thinking at the wrong level of abstraction. If (and, yes, this is a big if) you are developing a web app on a platform where all of the low-level concerns are taken care of for you, then the final point is completely valid. I'd even go so far as to strike the text editor from that list. Already today, you could (in theory) develop a Rails or Node app in Cloud9, store the code on Github, and deploy to Heroku with little more than a ChromeBook. Ok, we're not quite there yet, but I hope you get my point... That said, there are still chip designers, kernel programmers, and driver developers. And there will always be "backend engineers" (though I think we need a better term) who need debuggers, benchmark utilities, packet analyzers, etc.
- wulczer 15y ago
  Your point is valid, of course - developing specialized software requires a specialized platform. But what I wanted to say is that even developing a web app (and that's what I do these days) I sometimes need to use Wireshark. Sure, there was that guy that used an iPad, a wireless keyboard and a Linode as his PC so it's viable. But I think that's an exceptional case and it's more common to need quite a lot of supporting tools to develop things. And of course, you know, our designer can work with just a notebook (as in: a paper notebook) :)

ecoffey 15y ago

What I've liked about switching fulltime to a mac laptop is the polish. It's a unix install that quickly sleeps when I close the lid :-P

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Package management is not a minor part of the "unix install". When I get a just works Mac equivalent of pacman -S whatever, I'll consider using OSX for more than testing.
- tkrajcar 15y ago
  http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ See you in the Apple Store.
- lucisferre 15y ago
  The homebrew comment (which I can't reply to for some reason) is good, but not totally fair. Homebrew has to compile everything, while this isn't a huge problem with todays machines it is still a bit of a time sink. Homebrew regularly has packages that fail to build. There are over 400 open pull requests for the project at the present time to illustrate this problem. Homebrew != apt-get or any other linux package manager.
  - awj 15y ago
    "compile everything" is an approach to package management. BSD Ports (as well as Gentoo's Portage) use it. It does a pretty decent job at helping packaged programs build off/work with unpackaged installs. You also get some marvelous compile environment debugging adventures. ;)
    - lucisferre 15y ago
      Not saying it isn't an approach, I'm just saying,it's apples and oranges. When someone suggests that OSX doesn't have a linux style package management, they are technically correct.

simonsarris 15y ago

Randall Munroe had a much more terse post on the subject: http://xkcd.com/934/ http://xkcd.com/934/ (Some of you may balk that a cartoon is not a blog post, but commentary is commentary.)

michaelty 15y ago
"Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension." (bursts into tears, runs out of room)
- weaksauce 15y ago
  The state of memory leaks in firefox extensions is terrible even for trivial extensions... I can't imagine how bad it would be with something non trivial.
dextorious 15y ago
Well, "since we do most things on the web now" could also be translated as: "since we don't do much other than read emails, surf the web, do some IM/social stuff, and maybe exchange some documents". Because sure as hell, 99.9% percent of us doesn't: 1) Write code on the web. 2) Edits images on the web. 3) Write documents on the web. 4) Maintains systems (admin work) on the web. 5) Produces/edits video on the web. 6) Produces/edits music on the web. 7) Watches movies on the web. 8) Does spreadsheets on the web. 9) Plays heavy 3D games on the web. 10) Does DTP on the web. 11) Does 3D modelling on the web. Web stuff exists for all of these, but much much much fewer people use it than desktop apps. Last time I checked, programmers use Emacs, Vim, Visual Studio, XCode etc. Those are not web apps. It doesn't get much better for the general population, though. Tons more people use something like Paintshop Pro and Photoshop Elements than something like Photoshop Express (the online flash photo-edit tool). And, Google Docs, which is much more realistic a substitute than some online "photo editing" app is, for it's market, is used by a tiny percentage last time I saw the numbers. Maybe one day we'll do everything in the browser, but this is not that day, and limits in current web technologies (hell, even basic stuff like websockets are not universally available yet) and bandwidth will keep it that way for a while. There are things that can be done nicely on the web, and things that would be frustrating and a huge throwback to the olden days of slow CPUs and pain. Text editing is one such thing. Everything that needs the handling of large volumes of data (or not that large, anything larger than, say, 10MB) doesn't work that well in the browser. So, you, the one guy using Bespin for your programming work: good for you, but you are a tiny minority.

tomjen3 15y ago

Mostly I used to agree with this. But between a decent command-line, apt-get and gnome-do I don't like the idea of using another OS at all.

jiggy2011 15y ago

I find myself using VMs allot since I have a set of preferred applications for doing my work. The majority of them are platform agnostic but some are not and the ones that are not are all for different platforms.

kayoone 15y ago

Well it does matter if you do anything else than webdev..I develop games with Unity which is only available for Windows and Mac... Also building native iOS apps is only possible on one plattform...i would consider Linux otherwise, but no choice. So OSX is the way to go, and i love the tight hardware/software integration which makes the macbook sleep/wake-up etc without any issues, which is always a pain on Linux to get right.

funkah 15y ago

I boot into Windows for work since our whole stack is Windows-based and it's just easier that way. I agree that to a pretty large extent the OS doesn't matter when developing. This is especially true when everything is up and running fine. But there's the rub -- when things go south, that's when you find out what your preferred OS is. Troubleshooting a recent virus/malware problem on Windows turned into rebooting countless times, Windows Update incantations, several malware tools, and so forth until the OS was unbootable and I had to wipe it and install everything from scratch. Knowing what I know about Windows and Mac, I know how much easier it would have been to deal with this problem on the Mac, not to mention that it most likely would never have occurred in the first place. So, that's my two cents -- when everything is running the difference can be negligible. When you hit problems, the difference may not be so negligible anymore.

zerostar07 15y ago

I’m just as productive on Linux as I was on OS X I think Linux is far better for developers. GTK, QT, wxWindows and all the python/ruby/you-name-it you want. Lots of open source software doesn't even work on osx. Keyboard shortcuts are everywhere. Best window management (i just love alt-right click). I wish they 'd stop it with the unity/kde plasma eyesore madness, and focused on basic things that ruin my experience such as printer support, multiple monitors / docking station, sleep and hibernate, not breaking my setup every time it updates etc; i 'm content with xfce.

edu 15y ago
Not flaming, just plain curiosity, but what open source/free software have you found that doesn't work on osx? I switched to Mac several years ago and any piece of software I've needed has worked, first using macports and now homebrew.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  python, for starters. scipy/matplotlib dont work with osx's shipped python
  - brisance 15y ago
    Lots of open source software doesn't even work on osx. Failing to work out of the box (for whatever legal reasons) is very different from "doesn't even work". Finality was implied in your original post. Enthought has binary distributions for the various platforms for a long time.
    - zerostar07 15y ago
      Sorry i meant "doesn't compile", which is the essence of open source programs anyway. If that wasn't an issue on OS X there wouldn't be so many porting projects (macports, fink etc). And if you work with non-popular (e.g. scientific) programs that's not even an option.

alexbell 15y ago

Unfortunately it matters if you do mobile development, iOS being one of the two must have platforms and requiring a Mac. I do use and like Ubuntu though, and could see myself switching over with minimal hassle.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
I was developing for iOS on Arch linux last night. The platform being html/css/js.

gurkendoktor 15y ago

I love my GUI-ish setup of TextMate and CornerStone/Tower; I can only do iOS work because I have a Mac; I will buy a dedicated Windows box when I want to dabble with Windows Phone; I don't know what I'd do with my iPhone on Linux; I like Xcode4 a lot more than MSVC, in any case they are as different as day and night; mice and keyboards are similar, but can you say that about trackpads already? (Honest question - I don't know) There are a lot of differences between the major platforms. The article is true when all the moons align: You only do web (or Eclipse) work, your phone and all its apps are platform agnostic (OmniFocus locks me in), you have no games, you have no paid GUI apps, you don't care about iTunes ... I have a whole family of real, existing humans that I'd love to free from their virus-ridden Windows machines. It just isn't possible for what they do. Not sure what to take from this article. It sounds like indirect boasting about not being locked into anything. It would be more interesting to discuss if that is important.

andrewheins 15y ago

For a full-time developer, I agree with the OP insofar as Linux and Mac are largely interchangeable. I develop on Linux and love it. The biggest exception is for anyone involved in graphics, front-end development, or often works with graphic designers. The lack of native installation of Photoshop and Illustrator wrecks it. That's what largely spurred my decision to buy a Mac. There's only one OS that currently offers a Unix CLI with native Adobe Creative Suite installation. If Adobe ever offers native CS on Linux, I'll be Linux for life.

cageface 15y ago
Or anyone making music, or editing video. The commercial offerings in those areas still far outstrip anything available on Linux.
- jebblue 15y ago
  Would that explain why Linux is used to develop so many special effects in Movies, not Windows?
  - cageface 15y ago
    Video editing and modeling/rendering effects are completely different toolchains. Tools for the former are still very crude compared to what's available on Mac/PC. Support for the latter is good on Linux, probably thanks in large part to the Unix legacy imparted to the effects industry by SGI. But a lot of the Linux machines you see in VFX shops are just headless render nodes. People doing the creative work often use Macs or PCs.
  - dextorious 15y ago
    Those Linux machines are mostly used as render-farms, i.e dumb boxes to crunch numbers. You'd have to get their Mac (or sometimes Windows) machine out of the special effects guys cold, dead, fingers. That said, there are a few commercial offerings for 3D modeling work on Linux, but shockingly less than in Windows/Mac land.

emehrkay 15y ago

I guess it depends on what you do and how you do it. Some business dependent software do not exist across platform. For example, we deploy to Linux servers so we want our dev environments to closely match that, kinda hard to do with Windows. We use Adobe products to visualize our applications, kinda hard to do on Linux. We need to test in IE, need virtualization software if we're running OS X. All OSes are not equal. Browsers may be, but I don't develop in a browser.

jlarocco 15y ago

Unfortunately switching the other way isn't as easy. Linux offers a LOT more customization than OSX or Windows, and after using it for a long time there's a lot of stuff I took for granted which isn't as easy to setup on OSX. I'm still using OSX as my primary OS, but every once in a while I still come across stuff I can't easily do and think, "Gees, this was 10x easier in Linux."

tjogin 15y ago

It matters a lot if you're using open source tools, I think. The people running windows and doing development on open source tools are a tiny minority, therefore whatever platform specific problems they run into aren't going to get as much love and care. It's different if you're using some proprietary soup-to-nuts toolchain, perhaps with support and all that jazz, then maybe it doesn't matter. But as long as your support is the open source community, and your tools are the stuff that they put together, and as long as they're all running some flavor of unix or linux (and therefore don't really care about your weirdo windows vista edge case), it'll matter.

wenbert 15y ago

Photoshop. It's what keeps going back to Windows/Mac OS. Make Photoshop install without headaches in Ubuntu and I'll switch tomorrow.

coderdude 15y ago
7 works like a charm with Wine under Ubuntu if you don't mind working with an old version. I personally find 7 to be sufficient for everything I do.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

webjprgm 15y ago

For a dev machine this is mostly true. I haven't been able to be as conveniently productive on Windows, since I always end up installing Cygwin eventually, then decide I might as well be using Linux. However, for a relaxing machine, Linux doesn't have access to the same games as Windows or even Mac. Well, you can often do some clear hacking to get things running on Linux (Wine, etc.) but it's much easier on Mac or Windows. Thus I still defend Mac as the best mix of Unix development environment + reasonable access to quality games. I usually mention ease-of-use, but as the poster mentions, Linux is much better than last decade.

zyb09 15y ago

OSX is like a gateway drug for Linux. I used Windows for years, then had to work with OSX for iOS development. Didn't know a thing about it, hated it (at first). Time passed and now I ssh into vps to set up nodejs. Feels great =)

jinushaun 15y ago
More correctly, I think OS X is a gateway drug for Unix. With OS X, you get all the "1337 hax0r" command line goodness without sacrificing MS Office and Adobe CS as you would with Linux. Now... if I could only get a decent Mono set up on this thing. I could cut out Windows entirely.

nvk 15y ago

It is impossible for any serious Designer/Front end ppl in general to go to Linux, unfortunately, as much as i want to strangle Adobe (can't wait for Pixelmator to mature a bit more), we rely on Photoshop and Illustrator too munch. And GIMP is not a viable alternative.

nvk 15y ago
Just a note; Illustrator does have some alternatives... But Photoshop is still irreplaceable.
- m3koval 15y ago
  Can you suggest a good Illustrator alternative for Linux? I've tried a few and was never satisfied largely because the GUIs were very difficult to use. Perhaps I tried the wrong ones!
  - nvk 15y ago
    There is Inkscape, but honestly... There isn't anything i like. Very few "front end" types in the Linux community.
- jebblue 15y ago
  Tell the vendor that you want a Linux version and will walk away otherwise.

virmundi 15y ago

I find the terminal just horrible in OSX. I'm on snow leopard and it can't even wrap lines properly. Trying to get vim with colors to work is a major headache. I've also found that the uninstall mechanisms in Linux/OSX to be lacking compared to Windows. Perhaps this is a function of my lack of skill with the tools, but I have no idea how to uninstall the Tango library that the installer added. I'm worried about removing the dmd (D's compiler) since it installed in the /usr/bin. Linux is better that OS X in this regard. Sadly I'm stuck in Windows for most things, even Node development. I just haven't found a good editor for free that is like Notepad++. Fortunately for my Java/Scala development, Eclipse works everywhere.

adabsurdo 15y ago
if you can spare 59$ sublime text 2 is superb (ways better than notepad++) and works everywhere: linux, windows, osx. also you should try iTerm as terminal replacement for osx, it's great. your point about the lack of uninstall on osx is valid, though if you use homebrew this becomes largely moot.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
Notepad++ was one of the few bright spots of my erstwhile Windows days, and I still wish for it when I occasionally find myself using Gedit for quick note taking. It was sooo fast with just the right features and nothing supurfluous. But I could never go back to it from Vim now. As for uninstalling issues, if you can't use the package management tools to uninstall (you compiled from source and/or manually installed?), in the future try using GNU Stow or xStow to group all the pieces in a single directory and then symlinking them to the various system directories. It's brilliant. http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/ http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
anykey 15y ago
The built-in terminal is terrible (although at least in Lion it has 256 color support...). I'd hardly consider it a mark against OS X though considering that it is just a piece of software that is included by default. There are plenty of other options out there. I'd STRONGLY recommend checking out iTerm2 next time you're on OS X, it's the best terminal emulator I've had the pleasure of working with.

b2spirit 15y ago

Ryan said: "it’s not some political statement about free and open source software" Free and open source software is not motivated by politics, but by a development strategy to get as many people as possible to find and fix bugs. Free software is politically motivated, by the love for freedom and the hate for slavery. If freedom matters to a person, it will matter to him whether he uses Linux, Microsoft or Apple.

Craiggybear 15y ago

Have both Mac and Linux -- usually prefer Linux. The article is correct: I too find the experience generally on most levels between OS X and Linux indistinguishable, although Linux has far more easily accessible programming tools that are totally free (most Mac equivalents that do the same job come at an unreasonably high price) and I feel Linux is more comfortable to program with, generally. Installing certain tools under OS X BSD layer is generally more of a faff than just apt-get install or whatever. I also like the fact build-essentials is much faster and easier to set up in Linux than having to install the whole XCode stack and then say Brew or MacPorts to get the same level of functionality. I spend most of my time in OS X on the command line and use tools like mutt and cmus in preference to GUI mail and iTunes, so in that respect the difference between OS X and Linux are not really noticeable. But as someone else mentioned earlier, if Adobe did Linux ports of all their applications I'd never leave Linux again. I never use Windows nowadays. Just looking at it/thinking about it makes me feel ill, although I have in the past written a huge amount of software in Windows for other people. Bleargh ...

billpatrianakos 15y ago
You mention Macs doing the same job being real pricey and I'm wondering how you figure that? I have a 4 year old iMac and a netbook running Xununtu. The tools I use on both machines are basically the same with the big difference Bering my text editor (Chocolat on Mac and SublimeText on Linux). Other than that all the tools are free for both platforms. I've got my AMP stack, RVM, PHP, Apache, SQLite, etc., etc., all free. Even Xcode 4 is free on Lion and 3.6 is free if you run anything less. The Mac itself is more expensive but doing any equivalent work as I would on Linux doesn't require a real powerful Mac anyway. I love them both equally but prefer my Mac. It may be a comfort issue as my Linux box is a netbook but I digress. I'm just wondering, besides the cost of a mid grade Mac to begin with, what makes you say Mac development is expensive?
- Craiggybear 15y ago
  "You mention Macs doing the same job being real pricey" -- No, I never said any such thing. I said some software tools that are free on Linux (some programmer's editors for example, but a few other little things as well) have rather pricey equivalents on the Mac (unless you can find something on Macports or Brew that will compile on OS X. fdupes, mutt and cmus I must have for example). Also some things demand I use a specific version of OS X, Why should, say for example, an editor, demand I use 10.7? Which I've no intention of using. Why do I need XCode when all I want from out of that is gcc? Not that this is a major ordeal in any way. Mac hardware is slightly pricey but it is very good. I have no gripe whatsoever about that. I never said Mac development was expensive. I said it was slightly more of a faff to set everything up. You mention you've a Linux netbook -- so do I. And here's the thing: it also boots OS X as well and that runs really well on that limited hardware. Maybe even running better than Linux. I also have two proper, actual Macs as well as an AMD based Linux PC and that ended up costing slightly more in the end than a Mac would because of some of its hardware. Go back and read what I said. You're putting words in my mouth.

jebberjeb 15y ago

I'm a full-time linux user, but the touchpad + gestures support of Mac OS are truly superior and do affect my overall computing experience in a big way.

evandena 15y ago

I'd love to run Linux at home, but gaming keeps me on Windows. Sure I could dual boot, but it's such a pain for little gain. I tend to hang out voice chat programs while gaming, and interrupting conversations to reboot to Linux after a gaming session is an inconvenience. Same story for OS X.

axiom 15y ago

Wait a year. Ubuntu has a very powerful tendency to slowly develop crud and become unusable, until you just need to start from scratch and re-install the OS. Not sure if this has changed, but laptops tend to be a mess with Ubuntu. Things like closing the lid and going into sleep mode would fail seemingly at random.

csomar 15y ago

Perhaps surprisingly to some people, Linux hardware support has improved to the point that everything worked perfectly out of the box, just like on a Mac. I installed the latest version of Ubuntu on my Dell Laptop. After a few minutes, I heard some strange noise from the Hard Drive. I googled to see what's going wrong and I found out that Ubuntu have some problems with Hard Drive Power management. The risks are damaging my SATA drive. Unless you are using something supported by your Hardware provider, I really doubt Ubuntu will make it work out of the box, just like on a Mac

akavlie 15y ago
My experience with hardware support was not so hot either. On a ThinkPad X220 with latest Ubuntu, I would get random crashes when unplugging the DisplayPort adapter, or right in the middle of working. Also, lack of proper built in fan speed control. And panels doing stupid things when switching between signel & dual display setups. Switched to a MacBook Pro, and it's been rock solid.

NegativeOne 15y ago

He makes some good points, but Linux is still lacking in some areas. Hardware support is a big one and If you want to watch Netflix or do any kind of serious graphic design then you'll have to go with Mac or PC. I'm in the process of building a linux box, but it's just going to be a headless server with remote desktop capabilities as well as running a few local servers for web dev. I can't give up Mac & PC just quite yet...

billpatrianakos 15y ago

The main point is right but the post glosses over some critical details. Switching from Mac to Linux is pretty easy. Switching from Windows is trickier. The languages are the same but setting up your environment is a chore. Most instructions for setting up local development environments are focused on Unix like systems. If you learned on Windows and switch to Linux or Mac things can be strange for you but luckly there's no shortage of easy setup instructions and terminal one-liners to get you started. If you learned on Mac or Linux and switch to Windows then you'll have a harder time as you always have to make sure you're looking for the Windows instructions or tools. Want to set up an AMP stack (on your system not using Xampp) on Windows? You're jumping through hoops if you came from any other OS. Want to use multiple Ruby versions? RVM and RBENV don't run on Windows. Experienced programmers can make these switches easily with only some minor annoyances but someone in the first few years of their programming journey will have a much harder time. The way Windows does things isn't necessarily wrong and it's no one's fault that it doesn't have any sort of Unix heritage like every other popular OS these days. But the case can be made that switching to or from Windows can matter depending on the programmer while a Mac to any Linux distro switch has a negligible effect on workflow and productivity. This isn't about Windows being sucky. It isn't. It's just different enough to warrant a disclaimer, that disclaimer being "while it doesn't matter what platform you develop on for the most part, Windows does things differently enough that switching to or from it can matter if you're somewhat green". These days documentation for most popular tools assume a Unix-like development environment. Windows users need to Google for instructions. It's also worth noting, like one of the commenters on the original page said, that most Linux GUI tools aren't as good as they are on Mac and Windows so of you're not totally comfortable in the terminal youd better get there or use another OS. There's no shame in preferring a GUI tool and it isn't necessarily the mark of a noob or bad programmer. I'm an alright programmer myself, very comfortable in the terminal, know vi and nano well but prefer a GUI text editor. It's not bad, just different. So I guess what I'm saying is that the article's point stands but it's a bit of an oversimplification.

steverb 15y ago
Actually, Microsoft now makes it ridiculously easy to install an AMP stack on Windows. Just run the web platform installer and select the bits you want. http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

dekz 15y ago

I have a Linux PC as my development work machine and a Macbook Pro as my home development machine. Agreeing with the author, yes they are almost indistinguishable when the main tools are Chrome, a termina, vim, tmux, and g++/javac. There are things which I believe are nicer on the linux development machine (xmonad/apt,yum), but the thing that keeps me coming back to my Mac is that not only is it an above-par development machine, but it is also an excellent freetime/browsing machine. The application ecosystem is far superior, just compare Pidgin and Adium; Settings dialogs (so much unused space). I guess you could sum it up as design aesthetics but it truly makes the difference. Would I reconsider windows again after a POSIX environment, I don't think I could, but I may try.

moreorless 15y ago

I find these articles to be silly. A lot of it depends on what you need to accomplish on your computer. The right tool for the right job.

jebblue 15y ago

Chrome, Eclipse and Java are all I need. Those are all on Linux, Mac and Windows too which works out quite well.

HalibetLector 15y ago

It does matter. I'd love to do my social game development in Linux (and I even tried it, for a while) but the technologies I use are Flash and Unity 3d. There is no effective way to develop with either of those technologies in Linux. So I settle for the one supported OS with a shell: OS X.