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My main gripe with Novel and now Xamarin is that they don't provide packages for Debian and Ubuntu, arguably the most popular Linux distributions. For instance

My main gripe with Novel and now Xamarin is that they don't provide packages for Debian and Ubuntu, arguably the most popular Linux distributions. For instance if you go to Mono's download page to checkout the options, the only Linux distribution supported by them is OpenSuse: http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html Of course one could argue that Debian (and Ubuntu that relies on Debian's repository) has a culture of packaging stuff by themselves and indeed in the case of Mono there are people that do just that. But those packages are always behind the current version and you can't blame the maintainers for that. And lots of software companies, including Google and Mozilla, are providing packages for Debian/Ubuntu for the latest versions by themselves. It's actually the norm with Ubuntu to setup third-party PPAs that provide packages for something missing from the main repository. So Miguel here complains about fragmentation on the Linux desktop. It's funny, because they ignore the largest distributions around. At least if instead of OpenSuse they supported Red Hat, I would understand. Also, my experience with OS X has not be so pleasant. Miguel is a damn good developer, but he must be using a really simple toolchain. When you are working day-in day-out with Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Casandra, MongoDB, Memcached and dozens of other technologies, installing that stuff and having it work on OS X is amongst the most frustrating experiences I ever had, no matter if you're doing it by hand or with MacPorts or with Homebrew. All available options on OS X suck. I couldn't give a fuck about binaries of commercial software packages working, as long as I can't manage the toolchain I depend on daily. Another thing with OS X is that it just works, until it doesn't. After that you're in Windows-land again, the preferred option being to just reset/reinstall everything. Linux can be painful sometimes, but for most problems you can find documented fixes. Also, he's a little out of date. Ubuntu has been rock solid for me on my Thinkpad for the last couple of months since I got my current laptop. Of course, I preferred a model with Intel HD 4000 instead of a Geforce, so a little research into hardware may be needed to ensure good compatibility, but on the other hand you can't run OS X on anything else other than a couple of Macbook models. Try building a Hackintosh sometimes and your appreciation for Linux will change.

vsync 14y ago
> When you are working day-in day-out with Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Casandra, MongoDB, Memcached and dozens of other technologies, installing that stuff and having it work on OS X is amongst the most frustrating experiences I ever had, no matter if you're doing it by hand or with MacPorts or with Homebrew. All available options on OS X suck. I couldn't give a fuck about binaries of commercial software packages working, as long as I can't manage the toolchain I depend on daily. As a non-Mac-user (and fellow ThinkPad user!) that occasionally gets roped in to that crazy land, I feel your pain. MacPorts seemed the most useful option before, simply because it seemed a direct port (heh) of the BSD ports system. Honestly the whole thing reminded me of trying to get stuff to work on Solaris 10-15 years ago.... if you can just get your compiler working it works great, just set up /my-usr over here and make sure nothing from the real system ends up in $PATH. Lately I heard that MacPorts isn't cool any more so I didn't use it for my most recent Mac-oriented client project that needed some installs. I am a stubborn goat, but if I've learned one thing it's that when the trendy open source crowd on Mac wanders off, good luck getting anything to work, especially because Apple loves to change things. So I looked around and it seems Fink is a really nice option. So far everything went great. If you are familiar with Debian it's like that, and it carefully segregates everything into /sw, so just make sure /sw/{bin,sbin} are first in $PATH and you'll be good. I was recently reminded of Gentoo Prefix and wish I'd tried that out. Now here is the thing that cracks me up. I am of all things a Gentoo partisan. My workstations? Gentoo. Servers for my business? Gentoo. Client systems? Gentoo. LAN server for a moderately technical friend? Gentoo. And I do get some gentle mockery from friends for how much of my CPU time is spent on compiling. Yet here are the Mac acolytes, with the most consistent hardware and OS platform one could ever hope for, and they always have a fetish for compiling things from source. Are they showing off that they know how to do "./configure && make && make install"? Well congratulations, you got my respect for that, now please make binary packages. I mean shit, the only reason I am into Gentoo is I got tired of that rigmarole and managing $CFLAGS manually on my precious Slackware boxen.
- jff 14y ago
  You got tired of manually managing CFLAGS, so you moved to... Gentoo? Home of "hope you didn't want to view a GIF in Firefox, because you forgot to build it with that USE flag"?

vsync 14y ago

> When you are working day-in day-out with Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Casandra, MongoDB, Memcached and dozens of other technologies, installing that stuff and having it work on OS X is amongst the most frustrating experiences I ever had, no matter if you're doing it by hand or with MacPorts or with Homebrew. All available options on OS X suck. I couldn't give a fuck about binaries of commercial software packages working, as long as I can't manage the toolchain I depend on daily. As a non-Mac-user (and fellow ThinkPad user!) that occasionally gets roped in to that crazy land, I feel your pain. MacPorts seemed the most useful option before, simply because it seemed a direct port (heh) of the BSD ports system. Honestly the whole thing reminded me of trying to get stuff to work on Solaris 10-15 years ago.... if you can just get your compiler working it works great, just set up /my-usr over here and make sure nothing from the real system ends up in $PATH. Lately I heard that MacPorts isn't cool any more so I didn't use it for my most recent Mac-oriented client project that needed some installs. I am a stubborn goat, but if I've learned one thing it's that when the trendy open source crowd on Mac wanders off, good luck getting anything to work, especially because Apple loves to change things. So I looked around and it seems Fink is a really nice option. So far everything went great. If you are familiar with Debian it's like that, and it carefully segregates everything into /sw, so just make sure /sw/{bin,sbin} are first in $PATH and you'll be good. I was recently reminded of Gentoo Prefix and wish I'd tried that out. Now here is the thing that cracks me up. I am of all things a Gentoo partisan. My workstations? Gentoo. Servers for my business? Gentoo. Client systems? Gentoo. LAN server for a moderately technical friend? Gentoo. And I do get some gentle mockery from friends for how much of my CPU time is spent on compiling. Yet here are the Mac acolytes, with the most consistent hardware and OS platform one could ever hope for, and they always have a fetish for compiling things from source. Are they showing off that they know how to do "./configure && make && make install"? Well congratulations, you got my respect for that, now please make binary packages. I mean shit, the only reason I am into Gentoo is I got tired of that rigmarole and managing $CFLAGS manually on my precious Slackware boxen.

jff 14y ago
You got tired of manually managing CFLAGS, so you moved to... Gentoo? Home of "hope you didn't want to view a GIF in Firefox, because you forgot to build it with that USE flag"?