11 ms·

The $80 web development workstation

89 points by Skoofoo 13y ago

danneu 13y ago
I had a low-end travel laptop that turned into my main laptop for three years when my previous laptop died. This $80 setup sounds cheap until you realize you're paying the real cost with your time. You'll pay the toll every time you: - Have more than a few browser tabs open, god forbid you plan on running Youtube in one of them. - Want to quickly open Firebug. - `rails server` or `rake test`. - Run out of 512mb after opening two apps. - Decide which tabs/apps to close to free up some resources. But those aren't even the best examples since the reality is that it's nickel and diming your time in a way you won't realize until you finally get a machine that liberates you from all the waiting.
- 6ren 13y ago
  I think this is very true for the consumer-web (and therefore also web development), but not if you're purely using ancient unix tools that were fast on ancient hardware. They are incredibly fast on modern "low-end" hardware. Git is of this school. But to undermine my own point... can you really escape the consumer-web? Sites like github are JS heavy and very slow on old hardware. And, in practice, you'll want to use a PC for consumer tasks, like buying stuff, researching it, reading news, watching videos etc. Maybe it's worthwhile buying a special-purpose consumer-web device - a tablet? It's optimised for the web; and the web is optimising for it.
  - danneu 13y ago
    Yeah, that's true. But at the end of the day your minimal ancient-unix hackerbook loses its luster when your computer chokes trying to open a Youtube link your friend sends you over your CLI jabber client stitched together with Awk no matter how much you hate the "consumer web". Sucks when you can't even take a moment to appreciate some Bruce Springsteen together with your IRC channel. Also, as a Rails and Clojure developer, I'm just trying to keep up with the boot time of my dev tools. ;)
rjbond3rd 13y ago
Replace the red "trackpoint" with the concave variety on eBay. It becomes incredibly ergonomic (the concave version let's you use a fraction of the pressure with greater accuracy).
morgante 13y ago
Really? Are we still talking about how OS X doesn't give you "full control over the system?" Given the popularity of Macs in the developer community, it's pretty clear that you have as much control as you desire—Unix has incredible power. And if you still somehow feel that OS X is actually constricting you (rather than just hiding advanced settings in the command line), you'd never be able to run Linux on a Mac. No, never... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook As for the price component, if you're making your living off a computer I surely how you can afford a decent one.
- lambdaloop 13y ago
  Last time I checked, OS X did not let you replace the main window system or the OS status bar. The theme of the interface is also not as easily changeable as a KDE or GTK+ theme. If there's a way to completely remove the graphical interface, it's definitely harder than in Linux, and not as usable afterwards. You might argue that these options are not needed for a typical OS X user, and perhaps you're right. But you cannot say it really gives you "full control of the system".
  - deleted 13y ago
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    - klibertp 13y ago
      Neither is paying $1000 (from the article) a prerequisite for it. If you like the experience of OS X then buying MacBook is completely justified choice. Buying one just to install another OS on it is pure stupidity - you could have the same hardware for much cheaper from other vendors.
    - philh 13y ago
      > Even if you can't swap out the entire windowing system, you can certainly go ahead and install Arch or any other distro. What's that got to do with > Are we still talking about how OS X doesn't give you "full control over the system?" ?
    - 13y ago
Matti 13y ago
I recently chose to setup my old Thinkpad X41t with something fairly similar: -- antiX 13 "base" with the Debian "stable" source list: http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page -- I3-WM as the window manager. Needs to be installed separately. http://i3wm.org/ http://i3wm.org/ -- Conkeror as the keyboard-driven browser: http://conkeror.org/FrontPage http://conkeror.org/FrontPage The reason for using antiX/Debian rather than Arch is that I have no need to live on the bleeding edge. Once I've set things up I don't want them to break. I3 is at least as good -- probably better -- than ratpoison that I used to use earlier. The ability to quickly switch between "stacked", tabbed and full screen windows works great. Whether Conkeror is superior to Firefox with Pentadactyl I'm not yet sure of -- subjectively everything seems to load faster, but you do need to do some extra customization if you are going with Conkeror. Of course, that is also one of its selling points.
jurassic 13y ago
The T42 was a really solid pre-Lenovo ThinkPad that had significant mindshare among tech nerds when I arrived at MIT. It was my machine in college and the keyboard was amazing. I'd probably still be using it if one of the fans hadn't died around year 4. Pretty as Macs are, and awesome as the glass touchpad is, I still miss that ThinkPad keyboard.
- DougWebb 13y ago
  Lenovo made the T42 too, they were just the silent manufacturer at the time with IBM putting on the branding. I'm not sure of the distribution between IBM and Lenovo for the design and QA aspects, but IBM definitely controlled much of that too.
  - mindslight 13y ago
    idk about the T42, but sometime between the T22 and the T60, things definitely went downhill. So between that and anything newer only having a shortscreen, I recently opted to upgrade to a T61 that I should be able to keep going for quite some time.
- light3 13y ago
  Its pretty silly how it doesn't boot if the fan fails, I turn the fan off because its making weird noises, but the laptop still runs fine, although I try to keep the temperature below 90 degrees C, I think it automatically declocks at higher temperatures anyway. Also you can buy replacement fans on ebay if you have time to tinker.
zdw 13y ago
I think the greater point here is the CLI first philosophy - it's faster, and more flexible, even on "lesser" hardware. For example, I treat my Mac nearly the same way with a few pertinent replacements - Vim for editing, Slate for window management, etc. You could likely do the same in Cygwin on a Windows box.
- davidhollander 13y ago
  To me the most important factor for developing on a laptop mentioned in the article is the use of a tiling window manager. For me an incredibly common task in web development is to have a web browser and 1 or more terminal windows tiled horizontally, side by side, in an [ A | B ] or [ A | [ B | C ]] configuration, where A is a web browser, and B and C are terminals. In order for this to work for me on a screen resolution <= 1920x1080, the ratio ( width of A ) / ( width of screen ) should be dynamically adjustable using a single key combo, without causing window overlapping. If this ratio is fixed, and cannot be dynamically adjusted by the window manager, I experience one or more of the following problems at any given moment: 1. the web browser window is too narrow, causing wide documents to be clipped and a horizontal scroll bar to appear. 2. A terminal window is wider than 80 characters, causing unnecessary screen area to be consumed which could be better allocated toward the web browser. 3. A terminal window is less than 80 characters in width, preventing the entire line of code from being displayed. To me Linux is the ideal laptop OS because it's the easiest OS to install a tiling window manager on, and a tiling window manager is what maximizes the platform's primary constraint: small screen area.
  - barrkel 13y ago
    Tiling window managers don't maximize the use of small screen area; they ensure you'll almost always be using a fraction of the screen instead of the full screen. Overlapping windows are the thing that maximized the use of a small screen, because they let you dedicate as much or as little of the screen to any given application when its window is on top. What you are after, rather, is an efficient way of having the entirety of the windows of multiple apps on screen simultaneously. That's a slightly different problem. I personally get by with a combination of cascaded windows[1] and maximized windows with quick keyboard window switching. [1] When you cascade windows such that the bottom left corner of each window forms a diagonal line across the bottom left edge of the screen, you can quickly select whatever window you want with a mouse, usually more efficiently than with a task bar, since the application identity is far more obvious when you can see a rectangle of its contents. And with choice of where each window is in the cascade order, you can get usable data out of multiple windows simultaneously.
jamesjguthrie 13y ago
I still use my ThinkPad T400 running Ubuntu when I don't want to be at the desk and need more power than the iPad. I love it!
TheRealDunkirk 13y ago
I ran Linux on the desktop for almost 20 years, till recently taking a Rails job where EVERYONE used Macs, and finally bought a MBP. This refrain, "OSX is Unix," seems to be very common, but I'm not feeling it. As I just tweeted today: "How much 'Unix' is in OS X when I can't use CTRL-s to freeze the terminal? Pfft." For something that's supposedly got all the power of Unix, it sure doesn't seem to expose much of it to me. Most things are pretty locked down. That's not Unix-y. Yes, most defaults are pretty descent, but if you want more flexibility in your environment, there MIGHT be a 3rd-party tool for it, and it may even work, but if it does, it'll cost $20. It's like the world of Windows about a dozen years ago. Maybe in a few more years, this situation will improve. I miss Linux. And, yeah, I know I can supposedly run it on a MBP, but I know that there will be nothing like the (nearly) flawless power management and screen switching capabilities of just running OS X, so I make do.
- tujv 13y ago
  > I can't use CTRL-s to freeze the terminal? This works just fine in Mountain Lion.
- Mordak 13y ago
  As someone who runs OS X day to day, but still loves a traditional unix desktop to get work done, I can see where you're coming from. In my experience you have a couple of options for getting the best of both: 1. You can run XQuartz full screen, and can even run a nice wm like xmonad. This isn't perfect, but isn't entirely bad. 2. If you have VMWare, you can just run your workhorse of choice in a convenient vm. Full screen VMs under 10.8 are actually pretty great when you're just on the laptop - you can just three finger swipe from OS X into bsd/linux/whatever and then back again. I personally like the VMWare option, since it means that OS X gets to do all the power management and all of that, and there's no fiddling to do in the virtual machine to make things work with the hardware. And you totally own the vm environment, so you can do whatever you like to it.
- duaneb 13y ago
  A) You can use CTRL-s just fine, and B) that's far more to do with legacy terminal cruft than anything related to UNIX. Mac OS X has all the UNIX that Linux has, albeit with much more non-UNIXy stuff on top of it. Or, to put it another way: Darwin and Linux today are far, far closer than either of them are to most UNIXes in existence.
leokun 13y ago
You shouldn't be looking for bargains for your developer hardware. You should pay for what you want, not just for what you need. You spend a lot of time using this for your daily tasks, and it's worth it.
- quaffapint 13y ago
  Why does everyone always have to get what they want and not just what they need? I might want a $50,000 car, but I don't need it - this is just sad that people feel they should just always get what they want every time. I applaud the guy for realizing he didn't need to spend $1000.
  - qq66 13y ago
    If you were a taxi driver, and cars lasted roughly the same amount of time regardless of how many miles they were driven, then you would splurge on a very nice car if you could afford it.
  - eddieroger 13y ago
    Unless you make money driving, then that's a false comparison. While I don't think "want" is completely necessary, there's merit to the point that if you are making money off the machine and use it daily, it's worth spending some extra money to get something you want. That may be an $80 Thinkpad, but it may also be a $1500 MacBook.
- mil 13y ago
  two kinds of mindsets can be distinguished: hacker mindest and consumer mindset. buying an old ibm thinkpad (to install linux) is hacker mindset. buying a windows laptop is consumer mindset. buying a macbook (in the case of an end-user) is consumer mindset. buying a macbook (in the case of a developer -- for the reason that is *nix based) is the consumeristic hacker mindset. i can see how someone buying a macbook sees themself as getting the best of both worlds. ofcourse macbooks are more popular than vintage thinkpads in our "developer" culture. a parallel: there is more pop than anti-pop in the music industry. consumers.
jonbaer 13y ago
The Thinkpad 701 series needs to be brought back somehow. It was ahead of it's time, including the butterfly keyboard. The T42 was my next step and probably most productive during it's time. The only thing we need to do is apply today's battery technology to those older laptops and call it a day ...
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  But then you might code up a cruise missle, or even worse a industry killing app. we cant have that. its best if you let all major corporations vet your content from now on. you can Trust them.
14113 13y ago
The author mentioned using "Chromium with Vimium". For someone wanting easy keyboard shortcuts (like Vim) for a browser, I'd recommend luakit. It's a webkit based browser, scriptable (or written with?) lua, along with vim style navigation (eg, ":open www.google.com" to go to google). afaik, it's also available in the arch core (or extra possibly) repositorys, which means no fiddling about with the aur! (good news)
- lambdaloop 13y ago
  Turns out it's in arch community. Note: AUR isn't really that bad, as long as you install a package manager that handles it (like yaourt).
  - jjsz 13y ago
    Or like packer.
  - 14113 13y ago
    ah, my mistake, I didn't check. mm, It's still (slightly) more effort, and more prone to breaking than pacman.
quaunaut 13y ago
Honest question here: Why would anyone ever think OS X has "world-class interface design"? It's missing basic interface features that have been bog standard in Ubuntu/Windows for years, like any sort of proper window management. Hell, the maximize button actually doesn't work- it has such inconsistent use that you have almost no hope of actually getting what you want out of it. To get even decent window management, you have to buy software off of the app store. Then, you have the fact taht you still functionally have a folder-based OS, which feels a greater need to present me with buttons to alter the view of a given folder, how icons are arranged, etc- all useful things no doubt, but things you don't change on a per-folder basis that often- while literally not having an "up one level" button. At all. You either have to know the keyboard shortcut, or you have to go to the Go menu. The back button isn't always dependable for this interaction(especially if the finder was just opened), so of course this just screws the whole pooch. Seriously, the most I can get anyone to offer as to what makes OS X such a great operating system, is that it's Unix with no driver problems. If that's the most we can claim, can we stop acting like the interface design is halfway decent? Windows Vista had better interface design than this. That's just sad.
- bulatb 13y ago
  The answer to this type of question is typically "because Apple said so."
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  I used to disagree with this assessment, but I have been using Linux and Windows these last few years (and trying to make them work and look as similar as possible), and nowadays I tend to agree. The worst thing I can say about Windows is that it lacks a Unix commandline and package manager, but on any decently powerful, modern machine, you can use (VirtualBox+Ubuntu|ElementaryOS)|Cygwin to remedy that for free. The iPhone is still my favorite phone. But I wouldn't take a Mac OS X box over a Linux box for professional development. That said, my opinion on these things changes constantly, so who knows how I'll feel in a year.
- tinco 13y ago
  It is Unix with no driver problems. It is unix with both all free software and all proprietary software (except games). It is unix with a consistent pretty unobtrusive desktop environment that is easy to use and has sane defaults. It is unix with an accelerated window compositor that's always responsive and has no bugs. Anyway, that was what it was in 10.6. Nowadays Ubuntu does all those things too to a certain extent, and it works without painful maintenance on a desktop machine. (I ran OSX on my desktop for a few years, it was very painful to upgrade, and apparently not in accordance with the EULA) Still a great laptop OS though. And it runs rather well on macbook pros, which are the superior hardware choice in the laptop market, in my opinion.
hurtmyknee 13y ago
> The T42’s touchpad is hardly usable for productivity. Disappointingly, so is the iconic red nub. I agree the touchpad leaves much to be desired, but I've found the nub to be fantastic. With one index finger on the nub, and two thumbs on the mouse buttons, my hands never leave the keyboard.
dmourati 13y ago
I agree with the price concern around Macs. That's why I let my employer buy one for me and take it home for night/weekend hacking. A $3000 investment by my employer pays for itself in terms of my productivity increase in what, two months? Win-win. One feature I'll never go without again? SSD.
- bulatb 13y ago
  Using an employer-issued laptop makes it murkier who owns the code you might hack up on nights and weekends.
  - welly 13y ago
    The answer to this is don't work for assholes.
mosselman 13y ago
Yes switching workspaces is such a pain on OSX... come on, you just swipe with your fingers. Sure you can do pretty much the same on any linux distro, but that doesn't mean it is not 'seamless' in OSX. We can all agree that windows is just not suited for Rails development, but whatever floats your boat is fine of course. I like crunchbang linux a lot, it is very fast and makes you feel smart. But when it comes to something I have to make my living on, I'd rather go with something that is 1. stable 2. has a solid support in terms of applications (photoshop, sketch, etc) actually begin built for it. And, for now, that means I'd rather work in OSX and on a Mac. Then again, nobody cares.
- zhemao 13y ago
  Workspaces? What workspaces? No, having a bunch of full screen apps does not count.
  - blairbeckwith 13y ago
    Am I getting whooshed here? You can definitely have multiple workspaces (with multiple windows in each - not just fullscreen apps) and switch between them by swiping...
    - zhemao 13y ago
      Oh, okay, I just figured it out. http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_use_spaces_mac_os_x_lion http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_use_spaces_mac_os_... That was completely non-discoverable though.
  - welly 13y ago
    The four workspaces that I switch to using Ctrl-1, 2, 3 or 4. Those workspaces.
justthetip 13y ago
I have one of these thinkpads and another t61p which I am using to serve my Exchange 2010 instance. You can't kill these things, they will probably out live me.
Jormundir 13y ago
This article leaves out a key factor of why I've never committed to Linux full time, and why I wouldn't buy an $80 laptop to run linux. I have 1 laptop, and I don't just use it for development. I've tried over and over to use Linux as my primary OS, but every time the sheer jaggedness of the GUI experience, when I'm doing non-development (I guess normal consumer) things, bugs me non-stop until I switch back. It's like switching from Ruby to C++. C++ is amazingly powerful and has great uses, but ultimately Ruby is a lot more enjoyable to use. I think it's just a personality difference. If you're comfortable in the nitty gritty of linux, more power to you! But you're not going to convince me linux is better because you're can change the window system or [insert some other component I wouldn't care to change]. And you're not even going to convince me you're much more efficient. The arguments of efficiency and customization are always about low level details that I don't need to care about, and that play no part in good software engineering. [This is about the scope of web development, I love linux in different fields such as embedded systems. Again though, it comes up frustratingly, excruciatingly short as a general use OS]
- Matti 13y ago
  Having a very affordable Linux laptop that only works well for development could be seen as an advantage: you use one machine for work, and the other one for play and personal stuff.
  - Jormundir 13y ago
    I had a big personal battle over this idea, but decided it would be silly to physically switch between two laptops based on what I was doing. Sometimes the activities are mixed together too: I'll finish a class and decide to check email or some other program for a couple minutes, then get back to development.
- kevincrane 13y ago
  It's popular to hate on Ubuntu, but I personally love it and its UI. I've used Ubuntu since 11.04 and run 13.04 on my personal laptop (for development and day-to-day stuff). I'm a sucker for pretty things like translucent title bars and snapping windows to full-screen, but I also love how easy it is to develop with Linux (as opposed to Windows). Everything is usually a single command away on the command line (sudo apt-get install blank) so it's easy to install new libraries or programs for development. It may not be for everyone, but it definitely is possible to use Linux without having to install and fiddle with new window managers or file explorers or all the nuts and bolts. I've never even really had driver issues on my laptop now that Ubuntu has become this mature.
icelancer 13y ago
I love it! Same approach I take, but even cheaper! I use a Lenovo T410, which you can readily acquire on Craigslist used/refurbished for ~$250. Comes with an i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, and the HD can easily be upgraded. (I threw a cheap SSD in there for local DB issues.) I'd love to use an even older Thinkpad, but since I do some local testing of machine learning / CPU-bound processes, an i5-series processor is probably the floor given the complexity of the models I run. Regardless, I still love a huge PC battlestation at home (incredibly cheap for the power) and a cheap laptop that is no-frills but gets plenty of processing power for 99.9% of applications. Never really caught on to the Mac craze, even when I got free Macbook Pro Retinas from my last employer when they were first out - a sticker price of ~$4,000! Jeez!
jjindev 13y ago
I feel like I did my best work when I got up from the keyboard and walked around the office, maybe got some cookies, and thought of the big simplifying idea. And sure, I have no problem banging good ideas into a commodity PC running Linux. That is my preference, actually. They are simple and easily replaceable. Addendum - adding it up, I think I spent about 15 or 20 thousand USD on various Macs from 1984 to 2000. Part of my experience might be "premium fatigue."
denysonique 13y ago
The trackpoint is like Vim. At first you find it inconvenient and you try to avoid it. Once you learn it and start being proficient in using the trackpoint you start noticing how efficient it becomes, no need to move you hands of the keyboard in order to quickly navigate the cursor, after which you quickly return to typing. Now you have gotten used to the trackpoint and using another machine without a trackpoint gives you that 'I want to navigate the red cap' feeling, which is the same as being in a non Vim text editor and stopping yourself from using the hjkl keys from navigating.
- epsylon 13y ago
  That's probably the reason why I could never get used to a non-Lenovo laptop. I'm just way to much accustomed to the trackpoint.
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
Come on, we can do better than that. This is not to besmirch Apple or any silliness like that, my comment here is about this view point. The "de facto standard?" This view is probably common among programming hipsters but its hard to take seriously. There is a world out there besides Apple and RoR that is not just enterprise slog ... As far as the $80 machine ... I mean ok ... If you are on a serious budget but ... If you are a technologist, I don't see the point. But it is cool to note that for those of us that need it, there are good machines at economical prices. But if we all want to be serious programmers, can we move on from this hipster phase? The funny thing is the Apple is 100% not in line with supposed precepts taken as "de facto" in the hipster community (open source, over preoccupation with github, standards, open, portable, etc)
- lampooned 13y ago
  Saying that if you use a Mac, you're obviously a hipster is just fucking stupid. MacBooks are good laptops. I like them. Using and liking a MacBook doesn't make you a hipster, nor does it make you any less of a "serious programmer".
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- cenhyperion 13y ago
  >The "de facto standard?" This view is probably common among programming hipsters but its hard to take seriously. I didn't realize the entire web developer community was comprised of only "hipsters", whatever that word even means now.
  - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
    Certainly not, but people that hold onto these kind of views are ... It's hard to deny the existence of this "culture" that has popped up that seems to dominate the conversations.
pteredactyl 13y ago
I've been using a T60 since 2006. Still runs like a champ, but I recently bought another one NOS for $99 on eBay. Love the look on people's face when I bust it out at SF coffee shops
at-fates-hands 13y ago
I would jump ship immediately to Linux full-time if someone developed a really good alternative to Photoshop. Something that's cross platform compatible. You have a PSD file? You can open it with GIMP (as an example). Oh you have a GIMP file? You can open that with Photoshop. Right now, I have way too many people who deal with Adobe and for some stupid reason, Adobe continues to think Linux users are freeloaders who won't pay for the software, so they don't develop a Linux version. I little development work I have done on Linux has been a breeze. I still hold out hope some company will start to compete with Adobe and give us an opportunity to get away from them and MS once and for all.
- zhemao 13y ago
  I don't think their reason for not developing a Linux version of Photoshop is "they're all freeloaders who won't buy the software". It's more likely "the number of people exclusively using Linux and want a version of Photoshop for their chosen OS is not high enough to justify the development costs."
xlayn 13y ago
Why oh why would "The de facto standard platform for web development is the Macbook"? Web is browser interpreted, last time I checked safari was not the most used browser (even it it has port for windows) http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp "especially among Ruby on Rails developers" why? is there any feature tied to the macosx that makes it worth to pay the mac tax??? or even to the hardware (that it's a wintel platform (and can be have for way less money) since apple decided to abandon IBM cpus?)
- xlayn 13y ago
  On the other hand I'm happy to discover I'm not the only one loving thinkpad hardware, even if I can't find a difference between the IBM and lenovo interpretations...
  - welly 13y ago
    Wouldn't that be because Lenovo actually built Thinkpads for IBM? :)
shawnreilly 13y ago
Sometimes it's fun to see what you can do with older hardware. I got an old HP Laptop for free (DV6409US) and decided to turn it into my 2nd Laptop for Startup Weekend / Hackathon events. I put in 4GB of Ram for $60 and installed Windows, Linux, and OSX just for the hell of it. The Windows Install is Windows 8 (ala Bizspark) and currently runs a BitNami DjangoStack with Aptana Studio 3 and Notepad++ (Web Dev), as well as the free Visual Studio 2013 Dev Suite (just messing with that for now). The Linux install is Ubuntu Desktop 12.0.4 LTS and I use it for Design with Gimp and Inkscape. The OSX install is an older osx86 release of 10.5.2 (Leopard) and that was just more for fun, not really used for Dev or any work because it's such an old version and will not run any recent versions of Xcode. The only real problems I had were with WIFI and USB Support on the Linux / OSX front (but I got those fixed). I use a ThumbDrive as my Code / Graphics Repository and just boot between OS's depending on what part of the project I'm on. With this $60 Frankenstien I can actually build some pretty good stuff.
tsm 13y ago
I wrote Rails for a startup this summer, and had access to my own T60 and a MBP they gave me (I also did iOS, so it was necessary). I worked on both, but definitely preferred the Thinkpad. I run Crunchbang, so everything ran perfectly fast (even Chrome), and there are a ton of things I preferred: * Using a 2D grid of workspaces (as described in the OP) * The 1400x1050 screen--my Vim fits much better in a 4:3 screen than a 16:10 one. * Sane package management (apt-get > brew) * The trackpoint, which for me works great. * Sane and configurable window management. * Various Linux niceties, such as middle-click paste. * A fantastic keyboard. * Etcetera etcetera etcetera.
- cgag 13y ago
  Tiling window managers (i3) and the trackpoint are two things I don't think I can ever give up. I think I'm basically going to be on thinkpads for life, or at least until other companies start adding trackpoints to their laptops.
programminggeek 13y ago
A Thinkpad T42 is not in the same realm as a Macbook Air. That being said, a working dev setup for $80 is pretty cool. Even still, I've gone from doing full gentoo installs from scratch to Ubuntu, Windows, Mac, and lots inbetween and for my time and my effort, I'd rather just use a Mac. I'll pay for a well designed, reliable computer, so that I can do my job and get paid very well for it. Not having to muck around with Linux settings, drivers, config, etc. means I spend more time writing code and billing time (if it's client work). If your time is worth anything, you probably aren't saving anything by going super cheap with your tools. That being said, to each their own.
- cgag 13y ago
  I haven't ever had to mess with drivers with Mint and my x230. I did spend time to set up i3 and configure it to suit my workflow. I view these as "sharpening the axe" types of activites, and don't really understand why I see so many people saying they don't want to spend any time at all customizing the device they regularly use for 10+ hours a day. The only thing to miss about osx over linux is the font rendering, but I'll trade that for a tiling window manager and a proper package manager any day.
  - darkstar999 13y ago
    +1 for mint. I had been using Ubuntu since ~2006. Got annoyed with the direction they are taking. Installed Linux Mint. Didn't even have to install or configure anything for my wireless mouse/keyboard. Literally zero configuration, except for setting my preferences. I don't really understand the prevalence of Macbooks in web development. It's awesome hardware, but it's expensive. As far as software, there is nothing I am missing.
- bluedino 13y ago
  $80 for a laptop and $5/month for a VPS all running a free OS is just amazing in the sense of how anyone can build and launch a website nowadays.
tammer 13y ago
This is very true - I just returned a new macbook air because its overall speed and display quality paled to my x31 running Arch. Not to say the same is true for the Macbook Pros, although again, you're looking at a pretty major price difference. Battery life is where the real improvement has been over the past few years.
FollowSteph3 13y ago
Has to be paid by the hour. The time to wait for things just does not make up the savings...
vinceguidry 13y ago
I had a T40 and used it for web development work. As soon as I could afford it, I bought an MBP. I love Linux, but OSX gives me everything great about Unix and none of the bad stuff. At first I hated that I couldn't use Scribes, but then I discovered Sublime Text. The MBP is a much better machine all around. If you're doing web work, you should be able to afford one. If not, you should probably re-examine your business practices.
neoyagami 13y ago
I started with a ububtu box (ubuntu 10) in a crappy laptop. And was very usable and fun. Loved vim and gnome 2. But some times the system went a little buggy and with a bit of effort i bought a MB unibody(the first model) since then i use osx. More than once i had to jump to linux and its fine. But every time i had to use eindows i cand stand it. A couple of years ago i was diagnosef with LHON and started to lost my sight .( not completely and now im recivering it) and ctrl+scroll with inertia zoom integrated into te system had keepeeng me still in the game of development. A similar tool also is integrated in the iphone.

89 points by Skoofoo 13y ago

I had a low-end travel laptop that turned into my main laptop for three years when my previous laptop died. This $80 setup sounds cheap until you realize you're paying the real cost with your time. You'll pay the toll every time you: - Have more than a few browser tabs open, god forbid you plan on running Youtube in one of them. - Want to quickly open Firebug. - `rails server` or `rake test`. - Run out of 512mb after opening two apps. - Decide which tabs/apps to close to free up some resources. But those aren't even the best examples since the reality is that it's nickel and diming your time in a way you won't realize until you finally get a machine that liberates you from all the waiting.

6ren 13y ago
I think this is very true for the consumer-web (and therefore also web development), but not if you're purely using ancient unix tools that were fast on ancient hardware. They are incredibly fast on modern "low-end" hardware. Git is of this school. But to undermine my own point... can you really escape the consumer-web? Sites like github are JS heavy and very slow on old hardware. And, in practice, you'll want to use a PC for consumer tasks, like buying stuff, researching it, reading news, watching videos etc. Maybe it's worthwhile buying a special-purpose consumer-web device - a tablet? It's optimised for the web; and the web is optimising for it.
- danneu 13y ago
  Yeah, that's true. But at the end of the day your minimal ancient-unix hackerbook loses its luster when your computer chokes trying to open a Youtube link your friend sends you over your CLI jabber client stitched together with Awk no matter how much you hate the "consumer web". Sucks when you can't even take a moment to appreciate some Bruce Springsteen together with your IRC channel. Also, as a Rails and Clojure developer, I'm just trying to keep up with the boot time of my dev tools. ;)

rjbond3rd 13y ago

Replace the red "trackpoint" with the concave variety on eBay. It becomes incredibly ergonomic (the concave version let's you use a fraction of the pressure with greater accuracy).

morgante 13y ago

Really? Are we still talking about how OS X doesn't give you "full control over the system?" Given the popularity of Macs in the developer community, it's pretty clear that you have as much control as you desire—Unix has incredible power. And if you still somehow feel that OS X is actually constricting you (rather than just hiding advanced settings in the command line), you'd never be able to run Linux on a Mac. No, never... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook As for the price component, if you're making your living off a computer I surely how you can afford a decent one.

lambdaloop 13y ago
Last time I checked, OS X did not let you replace the main window system or the OS status bar. The theme of the interface is also not as easily changeable as a KDE or GTK+ theme. If there's a way to completely remove the graphical interface, it's definitely harder than in Linux, and not as usable afterwards. You might argue that these options are not needed for a typical OS X user, and perhaps you're right. But you cannot say it really gives you "full control of the system".
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - klibertp 13y ago
    Neither is paying $1000 (from the article) a prerequisite for it. If you like the experience of OS X then buying MacBook is completely justified choice. Buying one just to install another OS on it is pure stupidity - you could have the same hardware for much cheaper from other vendors.
  - philh 13y ago
    > Even if you can't swap out the entire windowing system, you can certainly go ahead and install Arch or any other distro. What's that got to do with > Are we still talking about how OS X doesn't give you "full control over the system?" ?
  - 13y ago

Matti 13y ago

I recently chose to setup my old Thinkpad X41t with something fairly similar: -- antiX 13 "base" with the Debian "stable" source list: http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page -- I3-WM as the window manager. Needs to be installed separately. http://i3wm.org/ http://i3wm.org/ -- Conkeror as the keyboard-driven browser: http://conkeror.org/FrontPage http://conkeror.org/FrontPage The reason for using antiX/Debian rather than Arch is that I have no need to live on the bleeding edge. Once I've set things up I don't want them to break. I3 is at least as good -- probably better -- than ratpoison that I used to use earlier. The ability to quickly switch between "stacked", tabbed and full screen windows works great. Whether Conkeror is superior to Firefox with Pentadactyl I'm not yet sure of -- subjectively everything seems to load faster, but you do need to do some extra customization if you are going with Conkeror. Of course, that is also one of its selling points.

jurassic 13y ago

The T42 was a really solid pre-Lenovo ThinkPad that had significant mindshare among tech nerds when I arrived at MIT. It was my machine in college and the keyboard was amazing. I'd probably still be using it if one of the fans hadn't died around year 4. Pretty as Macs are, and awesome as the glass touchpad is, I still miss that ThinkPad keyboard.

DougWebb 13y ago
Lenovo made the T42 too, they were just the silent manufacturer at the time with IBM putting on the branding. I'm not sure of the distribution between IBM and Lenovo for the design and QA aspects, but IBM definitely controlled much of that too.
- mindslight 13y ago
  idk about the T42, but sometime between the T22 and the T60, things definitely went downhill. So between that and anything newer only having a shortscreen, I recently opted to upgrade to a T61 that I should be able to keep going for quite some time.
light3 13y ago
Its pretty silly how it doesn't boot if the fan fails, I turn the fan off because its making weird noises, but the laptop still runs fine, although I try to keep the temperature below 90 degrees C, I think it automatically declocks at higher temperatures anyway. Also you can buy replacement fans on ebay if you have time to tinker.

zdw 13y ago

I think the greater point here is the CLI first philosophy - it's faster, and more flexible, even on "lesser" hardware. For example, I treat my Mac nearly the same way with a few pertinent replacements - Vim for editing, Slate for window management, etc. You could likely do the same in Cygwin on a Windows box.

davidhollander 13y ago
To me the most important factor for developing on a laptop mentioned in the article is the use of a tiling window manager. For me an incredibly common task in web development is to have a web browser and 1 or more terminal windows tiled horizontally, side by side, in an [ A | B ] or [ A | [ B | C ]] configuration, where A is a web browser, and B and C are terminals. In order for this to work for me on a screen resolution <= 1920x1080, the ratio ( width of A ) / ( width of screen ) should be dynamically adjustable using a single key combo, without causing window overlapping. If this ratio is fixed, and cannot be dynamically adjusted by the window manager, I experience one or more of the following problems at any given moment: 1. the web browser window is too narrow, causing wide documents to be clipped and a horizontal scroll bar to appear. 2. A terminal window is wider than 80 characters, causing unnecessary screen area to be consumed which could be better allocated toward the web browser. 3. A terminal window is less than 80 characters in width, preventing the entire line of code from being displayed. To me Linux is the ideal laptop OS because it's the easiest OS to install a tiling window manager on, and a tiling window manager is what maximizes the platform's primary constraint: small screen area.
- barrkel 13y ago
  Tiling window managers don't maximize the use of small screen area; they ensure you'll almost always be using a fraction of the screen instead of the full screen. Overlapping windows are the thing that maximized the use of a small screen, because they let you dedicate as much or as little of the screen to any given application when its window is on top. What you are after, rather, is an efficient way of having the entirety of the windows of multiple apps on screen simultaneously. That's a slightly different problem. I personally get by with a combination of cascaded windows[1] and maximized windows with quick keyboard window switching. [1] When you cascade windows such that the bottom left corner of each window forms a diagonal line across the bottom left edge of the screen, you can quickly select whatever window you want with a mouse, usually more efficiently than with a task bar, since the application identity is far more obvious when you can see a rectangle of its contents. And with choice of where each window is in the cascade order, you can get usable data out of multiple windows simultaneously.

jamesjguthrie 13y ago

I still use my ThinkPad T400 running Ubuntu when I don't want to be at the desk and need more power than the iPad. I love it!

TheRealDunkirk 13y ago

I ran Linux on the desktop for almost 20 years, till recently taking a Rails job where EVERYONE used Macs, and finally bought a MBP. This refrain, "OSX is Unix," seems to be very common, but I'm not feeling it. As I just tweeted today: "How much 'Unix' is in OS X when I can't use CTRL-s to freeze the terminal? Pfft." For something that's supposedly got all the power of Unix, it sure doesn't seem to expose much of it to me. Most things are pretty locked down. That's not Unix-y. Yes, most defaults are pretty descent, but if you want more flexibility in your environment, there MIGHT be a 3rd-party tool for it, and it may even work, but if it does, it'll cost $20. It's like the world of Windows about a dozen years ago. Maybe in a few more years, this situation will improve. I miss Linux. And, yeah, I know I can supposedly run it on a MBP, but I know that there will be nothing like the (nearly) flawless power management and screen switching capabilities of just running OS X, so I make do.

tujv 13y ago
> I can't use CTRL-s to freeze the terminal? This works just fine in Mountain Lion.
Mordak 13y ago
As someone who runs OS X day to day, but still loves a traditional unix desktop to get work done, I can see where you're coming from. In my experience you have a couple of options for getting the best of both: 1. You can run XQuartz full screen, and can even run a nice wm like xmonad. This isn't perfect, but isn't entirely bad. 2. If you have VMWare, you can just run your workhorse of choice in a convenient vm. Full screen VMs under 10.8 are actually pretty great when you're just on the laptop - you can just three finger swipe from OS X into bsd/linux/whatever and then back again. I personally like the VMWare option, since it means that OS X gets to do all the power management and all of that, and there's no fiddling to do in the virtual machine to make things work with the hardware. And you totally own the vm environment, so you can do whatever you like to it.
duaneb 13y ago
A) You can use CTRL-s just fine, and B) that's far more to do with legacy terminal cruft than anything related to UNIX. Mac OS X has all the UNIX that Linux has, albeit with much more non-UNIXy stuff on top of it. Or, to put it another way: Darwin and Linux today are far, far closer than either of them are to most UNIXes in existence.

leokun 13y ago

You shouldn't be looking for bargains for your developer hardware. You should pay for what you want, not just for what you need. You spend a lot of time using this for your daily tasks, and it's worth it.

quaffapint 13y ago
Why does everyone always have to get what they want and not just what they need? I might want a $50,000 car, but I don't need it - this is just sad that people feel they should just always get what they want every time. I applaud the guy for realizing he didn't need to spend $1000.
- qq66 13y ago
  If you were a taxi driver, and cars lasted roughly the same amount of time regardless of how many miles they were driven, then you would splurge on a very nice car if you could afford it.
- eddieroger 13y ago
  Unless you make money driving, then that's a false comparison. While I don't think "want" is completely necessary, there's merit to the point that if you are making money off the machine and use it daily, it's worth spending some extra money to get something you want. That may be an $80 Thinkpad, but it may also be a $1500 MacBook.
mil 13y ago
two kinds of mindsets can be distinguished: hacker mindest and consumer mindset. buying an old ibm thinkpad (to install linux) is hacker mindset. buying a windows laptop is consumer mindset. buying a macbook (in the case of an end-user) is consumer mindset. buying a macbook (in the case of a developer -- for the reason that is *nix based) is the consumeristic hacker mindset. i can see how someone buying a macbook sees themself as getting the best of both worlds. ofcourse macbooks are more popular than vintage thinkpads in our "developer" culture. a parallel: there is more pop than anti-pop in the music industry. consumers.

jonbaer 13y ago

The Thinkpad 701 series needs to be brought back somehow. It was ahead of it's time, including the butterfly keyboard. The T42 was my next step and probably most productive during it's time. The only thing we need to do is apply today's battery technology to those older laptops and call it a day ...

AsymetricCom 13y ago
But then you might code up a cruise missle, or even worse a industry killing app. we cant have that. its best if you let all major corporations vet your content from now on. you can Trust them.

14113 13y ago

The author mentioned using "Chromium with Vimium". For someone wanting easy keyboard shortcuts (like Vim) for a browser, I'd recommend luakit. It's a webkit based browser, scriptable (or written with?) lua, along with vim style navigation (eg, ":open www.google.com" to go to google). afaik, it's also available in the arch core (or extra possibly) repositorys, which means no fiddling about with the aur! (good news)

lambdaloop 13y ago
Turns out it's in arch community. Note: AUR isn't really that bad, as long as you install a package manager that handles it (like yaourt).
- jjsz 13y ago
  Or like packer.
- 14113 13y ago
  ah, my mistake, I didn't check. mm, It's still (slightly) more effort, and more prone to breaking than pacman.

quaunaut 13y ago

Honest question here: Why would anyone ever think OS X has "world-class interface design"? It's missing basic interface features that have been bog standard in Ubuntu/Windows for years, like any sort of proper window management. Hell, the maximize button actually doesn't work- it has such inconsistent use that you have almost no hope of actually getting what you want out of it. To get even decent window management, you have to buy software off of the app store. Then, you have the fact taht you still functionally have a folder-based OS, which feels a greater need to present me with buttons to alter the view of a given folder, how icons are arranged, etc- all useful things no doubt, but things you don't change on a per-folder basis that often- while literally not having an "up one level" button. At all. You either have to know the keyboard shortcut, or you have to go to the Go menu. The back button isn't always dependable for this interaction(especially if the finder was just opened), so of course this just screws the whole pooch. Seriously, the most I can get anyone to offer as to what makes OS X such a great operating system, is that it's Unix with no driver problems. If that's the most we can claim, can we stop acting like the interface design is halfway decent? Windows Vista had better interface design than this. That's just sad.

bulatb 13y ago
The answer to this type of question is typically "because Apple said so."
jamesaguilar 13y ago
I used to disagree with this assessment, but I have been using Linux and Windows these last few years (and trying to make them work and look as similar as possible), and nowadays I tend to agree. The worst thing I can say about Windows is that it lacks a Unix commandline and package manager, but on any decently powerful, modern machine, you can use (VirtualBox+Ubuntu|ElementaryOS)|Cygwin to remedy that for free. The iPhone is still my favorite phone. But I wouldn't take a Mac OS X box over a Linux box for professional development. That said, my opinion on these things changes constantly, so who knows how I'll feel in a year.
tinco 13y ago
It is Unix with no driver problems. It is unix with both all free software and all proprietary software (except games). It is unix with a consistent pretty unobtrusive desktop environment that is easy to use and has sane defaults. It is unix with an accelerated window compositor that's always responsive and has no bugs. Anyway, that was what it was in 10.6. Nowadays Ubuntu does all those things too to a certain extent, and it works without painful maintenance on a desktop machine. (I ran OSX on my desktop for a few years, it was very painful to upgrade, and apparently not in accordance with the EULA) Still a great laptop OS though. And it runs rather well on macbook pros, which are the superior hardware choice in the laptop market, in my opinion.

hurtmyknee 13y ago

> The T42’s touchpad is hardly usable for productivity. Disappointingly, so is the iconic red nub. I agree the touchpad leaves much to be desired, but I've found the nub to be fantastic. With one index finger on the nub, and two thumbs on the mouse buttons, my hands never leave the keyboard.

dmourati 13y ago

I agree with the price concern around Macs. That's why I let my employer buy one for me and take it home for night/weekend hacking. A $3000 investment by my employer pays for itself in terms of my productivity increase in what, two months? Win-win. One feature I'll never go without again? SSD.

bulatb 13y ago
Using an employer-issued laptop makes it murkier who owns the code you might hack up on nights and weekends.
- welly 13y ago
  The answer to this is don't work for assholes.

mosselman 13y ago

Yes switching workspaces is such a pain on OSX... come on, you just swipe with your fingers. Sure you can do pretty much the same on any linux distro, but that doesn't mean it is not 'seamless' in OSX. We can all agree that windows is just not suited for Rails development, but whatever floats your boat is fine of course. I like crunchbang linux a lot, it is very fast and makes you feel smart. But when it comes to something I have to make my living on, I'd rather go with something that is 1. stable 2. has a solid support in terms of applications (photoshop, sketch, etc) actually begin built for it. And, for now, that means I'd rather work in OSX and on a Mac. Then again, nobody cares.

zhemao 13y ago
Workspaces? What workspaces? No, having a bunch of full screen apps does not count.
- blairbeckwith 13y ago
  Am I getting whooshed here? You can definitely have multiple workspaces (with multiple windows in each - not just fullscreen apps) and switch between them by swiping...
  - zhemao 13y ago
    Oh, okay, I just figured it out. http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_use_spaces_mac_os_x_lion http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_use_spaces_mac_os_... That was completely non-discoverable though.
- welly 13y ago
  The four workspaces that I switch to using Ctrl-1, 2, 3 or 4. Those workspaces.

justthetip 13y ago

I have one of these thinkpads and another t61p which I am using to serve my Exchange 2010 instance. You can't kill these things, they will probably out live me.

Jormundir 13y ago

This article leaves out a key factor of why I've never committed to Linux full time, and why I wouldn't buy an $80 laptop to run linux. I have 1 laptop, and I don't just use it for development. I've tried over and over to use Linux as my primary OS, but every time the sheer jaggedness of the GUI experience, when I'm doing non-development (I guess normal consumer) things, bugs me non-stop until I switch back. It's like switching from Ruby to C++. C++ is amazingly powerful and has great uses, but ultimately Ruby is a lot more enjoyable to use. I think it's just a personality difference. If you're comfortable in the nitty gritty of linux, more power to you! But you're not going to convince me linux is better because you're can change the window system or [insert some other component I wouldn't care to change]. And you're not even going to convince me you're much more efficient. The arguments of efficiency and customization are always about low level details that I don't need to care about, and that play no part in good software engineering. [This is about the scope of web development, I love linux in different fields such as embedded systems. Again though, it comes up frustratingly, excruciatingly short as a general use OS]

Matti 13y ago
Having a very affordable Linux laptop that only works well for development could be seen as an advantage: you use one machine for work, and the other one for play and personal stuff.
- Jormundir 13y ago
  I had a big personal battle over this idea, but decided it would be silly to physically switch between two laptops based on what I was doing. Sometimes the activities are mixed together too: I'll finish a class and decide to check email or some other program for a couple minutes, then get back to development.
kevincrane 13y ago
It's popular to hate on Ubuntu, but I personally love it and its UI. I've used Ubuntu since 11.04 and run 13.04 on my personal laptop (for development and day-to-day stuff). I'm a sucker for pretty things like translucent title bars and snapping windows to full-screen, but I also love how easy it is to develop with Linux (as opposed to Windows). Everything is usually a single command away on the command line (sudo apt-get install blank) so it's easy to install new libraries or programs for development. It may not be for everyone, but it definitely is possible to use Linux without having to install and fiddle with new window managers or file explorers or all the nuts and bolts. I've never even really had driver issues on my laptop now that Ubuntu has become this mature.

icelancer 13y ago

I love it! Same approach I take, but even cheaper! I use a Lenovo T410, which you can readily acquire on Craigslist used/refurbished for ~$250. Comes with an i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, and the HD can easily be upgraded. (I threw a cheap SSD in there for local DB issues.) I'd love to use an even older Thinkpad, but since I do some local testing of machine learning / CPU-bound processes, an i5-series processor is probably the floor given the complexity of the models I run. Regardless, I still love a huge PC battlestation at home (incredibly cheap for the power) and a cheap laptop that is no-frills but gets plenty of processing power for 99.9% of applications. Never really caught on to the Mac craze, even when I got free Macbook Pro Retinas from my last employer when they were first out - a sticker price of ~$4,000! Jeez!

jjindev 13y ago

I feel like I did my best work when I got up from the keyboard and walked around the office, maybe got some cookies, and thought of the big simplifying idea. And sure, I have no problem banging good ideas into a commodity PC running Linux. That is my preference, actually. They are simple and easily replaceable. Addendum - adding it up, I think I spent about 15 or 20 thousand USD on various Macs from 1984 to 2000. Part of my experience might be "premium fatigue."

denysonique 13y ago

The trackpoint is like Vim. At first you find it inconvenient and you try to avoid it. Once you learn it and start being proficient in using the trackpoint you start noticing how efficient it becomes, no need to move you hands of the keyboard in order to quickly navigate the cursor, after which you quickly return to typing. Now you have gotten used to the trackpoint and using another machine without a trackpoint gives you that 'I want to navigate the red cap' feeling, which is the same as being in a non Vim text editor and stopping yourself from using the hjkl keys from navigating.

epsylon 13y ago
That's probably the reason why I could never get used to a non-Lenovo laptop. I'm just way to much accustomed to the trackpoint.

dinkumthinkum 13y ago

Come on, we can do better than that. This is not to besmirch Apple or any silliness like that, my comment here is about this view point. The "de facto standard?" This view is probably common among programming hipsters but its hard to take seriously. There is a world out there besides Apple and RoR that is not just enterprise slog ... As far as the $80 machine ... I mean ok ... If you are on a serious budget but ... If you are a technologist, I don't see the point. But it is cool to note that for those of us that need it, there are good machines at economical prices. But if we all want to be serious programmers, can we move on from this hipster phase? The funny thing is the Apple is 100% not in line with supposed precepts taken as "de facto" in the hipster community (open source, over preoccupation with github, standards, open, portable, etc)

lampooned 13y ago
Saying that if you use a Mac, you're obviously a hipster is just fucking stupid. MacBooks are good laptops. I like them. Using and liking a MacBook doesn't make you a hipster, nor does it make you any less of a "serious programmer".
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
cenhyperion 13y ago
>The "de facto standard?" This view is probably common among programming hipsters but its hard to take seriously. I didn't realize the entire web developer community was comprised of only "hipsters", whatever that word even means now.
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  Certainly not, but people that hold onto these kind of views are ... It's hard to deny the existence of this "culture" that has popped up that seems to dominate the conversations.

pteredactyl 13y ago

I've been using a T60 since 2006. Still runs like a champ, but I recently bought another one NOS for $99 on eBay. Love the look on people's face when I bust it out at SF coffee shops

at-fates-hands 13y ago

I would jump ship immediately to Linux full-time if someone developed a really good alternative to Photoshop. Something that's cross platform compatible. You have a PSD file? You can open it with GIMP (as an example). Oh you have a GIMP file? You can open that with Photoshop. Right now, I have way too many people who deal with Adobe and for some stupid reason, Adobe continues to think Linux users are freeloaders who won't pay for the software, so they don't develop a Linux version. I little development work I have done on Linux has been a breeze. I still hold out hope some company will start to compete with Adobe and give us an opportunity to get away from them and MS once and for all.

zhemao 13y ago
I don't think their reason for not developing a Linux version of Photoshop is "they're all freeloaders who won't buy the software". It's more likely "the number of people exclusively using Linux and want a version of Photoshop for their chosen OS is not high enough to justify the development costs."

xlayn 13y ago

Why oh why would "The de facto standard platform for web development is the Macbook"? Web is browser interpreted, last time I checked safari was not the most used browser (even it it has port for windows) http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp "especially among Ruby on Rails developers" why? is there any feature tied to the macosx that makes it worth to pay the mac tax??? or even to the hardware (that it's a wintel platform (and can be have for way less money) since apple decided to abandon IBM cpus?)

xlayn 13y ago
On the other hand I'm happy to discover I'm not the only one loving thinkpad hardware, even if I can't find a difference between the IBM and lenovo interpretations...
- welly 13y ago
  Wouldn't that be because Lenovo actually built Thinkpads for IBM? :)

shawnreilly 13y ago

Sometimes it's fun to see what you can do with older hardware. I got an old HP Laptop for free (DV6409US) and decided to turn it into my 2nd Laptop for Startup Weekend / Hackathon events. I put in 4GB of Ram for $60 and installed Windows, Linux, and OSX just for the hell of it. The Windows Install is Windows 8 (ala Bizspark) and currently runs a BitNami DjangoStack with Aptana Studio 3 and Notepad++ (Web Dev), as well as the free Visual Studio 2013 Dev Suite (just messing with that for now). The Linux install is Ubuntu Desktop 12.0.4 LTS and I use it for Design with Gimp and Inkscape. The OSX install is an older osx86 release of 10.5.2 (Leopard) and that was just more for fun, not really used for Dev or any work because it's such an old version and will not run any recent versions of Xcode. The only real problems I had were with WIFI and USB Support on the Linux / OSX front (but I got those fixed). I use a ThumbDrive as my Code / Graphics Repository and just boot between OS's depending on what part of the project I'm on. With this $60 Frankenstien I can actually build some pretty good stuff.

tsm 13y ago

I wrote Rails for a startup this summer, and had access to my own T60 and a MBP they gave me (I also did iOS, so it was necessary). I worked on both, but definitely preferred the Thinkpad. I run Crunchbang, so everything ran perfectly fast (even Chrome), and there are a ton of things I preferred: * Using a 2D grid of workspaces (as described in the OP) * The 1400x1050 screen--my Vim fits much better in a 4:3 screen than a 16:10 one. * Sane package management (apt-get > brew) * The trackpoint, which for me works great. * Sane and configurable window management. * Various Linux niceties, such as middle-click paste. * A fantastic keyboard. * Etcetera etcetera etcetera.

cgag 13y ago
Tiling window managers (i3) and the trackpoint are two things I don't think I can ever give up. I think I'm basically going to be on thinkpads for life, or at least until other companies start adding trackpoints to their laptops.

programminggeek 13y ago

A Thinkpad T42 is not in the same realm as a Macbook Air. That being said, a working dev setup for $80 is pretty cool. Even still, I've gone from doing full gentoo installs from scratch to Ubuntu, Windows, Mac, and lots inbetween and for my time and my effort, I'd rather just use a Mac. I'll pay for a well designed, reliable computer, so that I can do my job and get paid very well for it. Not having to muck around with Linux settings, drivers, config, etc. means I spend more time writing code and billing time (if it's client work). If your time is worth anything, you probably aren't saving anything by going super cheap with your tools. That being said, to each their own.

cgag 13y ago
I haven't ever had to mess with drivers with Mint and my x230. I did spend time to set up i3 and configure it to suit my workflow. I view these as "sharpening the axe" types of activites, and don't really understand why I see so many people saying they don't want to spend any time at all customizing the device they regularly use for 10+ hours a day. The only thing to miss about osx over linux is the font rendering, but I'll trade that for a tiling window manager and a proper package manager any day.
- darkstar999 13y ago
  +1 for mint. I had been using Ubuntu since ~2006. Got annoyed with the direction they are taking. Installed Linux Mint. Didn't even have to install or configure anything for my wireless mouse/keyboard. Literally zero configuration, except for setting my preferences. I don't really understand the prevalence of Macbooks in web development. It's awesome hardware, but it's expensive. As far as software, there is nothing I am missing.
bluedino 13y ago
$80 for a laptop and $5/month for a VPS all running a free OS is just amazing in the sense of how anyone can build and launch a website nowadays.

tammer 13y ago

This is very true - I just returned a new macbook air because its overall speed and display quality paled to my x31 running Arch. Not to say the same is true for the Macbook Pros, although again, you're looking at a pretty major price difference. Battery life is where the real improvement has been over the past few years.

FollowSteph3 13y ago

Has to be paid by the hour. The time to wait for things just does not make up the savings...

vinceguidry 13y ago

I had a T40 and used it for web development work. As soon as I could afford it, I bought an MBP. I love Linux, but OSX gives me everything great about Unix and none of the bad stuff. At first I hated that I couldn't use Scribes, but then I discovered Sublime Text. The MBP is a much better machine all around. If you're doing web work, you should be able to afford one. If not, you should probably re-examine your business practices.

neoyagami 13y ago

I started with a ububtu box (ubuntu 10) in a crappy laptop. And was very usable and fun. Loved vim and gnome 2. But some times the system went a little buggy and with a bit of effort i bought a MB unibody(the first model) since then i use osx. More than once i had to jump to linux and its fine. But every time i had to use eindows i cand stand it. A couple of years ago i was diagnosef with LHON and started to lost my sight .( not completely and now im recivering it) and ctrl+scroll with inertia zoom integrated into te system had keepeeng me still in the game of development. A similar tool also is integrated in the iphone.