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Running linux on a Mac laptop is a bit of a pain, mostly because of the keyboard/touchpad. The control and alt keys are in strange places (at least on my power

by tsuraan 17y ago

Running linux on a Mac laptop is a bit of a pain, mostly because of the keyboard/touchpad. The control and alt keys are in strange places (at least on my powerbook), and having only one button on the mouse is pretty irritating when you're not in OSX. I actually replaced my powerbook with a Linux laptop primarily for those two reasons; I'm always working in a terminal, so not having reasonably placed control and alt keys pretty seriously slowed down my ability to navigate on the command line and in an editor. I'm not sure if this applies to the MacBooks, but on my Core2 Duo Mac Mini, the left audio channel frequently gets a lot of static when playing music; it seems to be a random thing on boot; either you will have static on this boot or you won't. It's a common problem of the Mini with Linux, but I have no idea if it ever happens on any other Mac. If you're a KDE user, then OSX's finder will drive you mad. They don't have IOSlaves, but they do now have Fuse, which can allow you to browse remote file systems over ssh. If the ssh connection goes down, every finder window (including the desktop) freezes until the fuse connection times out, and it never feels quite as nice as KDE's IOSlave system, but it does make browsing of remote systems possible. Spaces is a little flaky if you try to use it the way you use a normal multiple desktop implementation. With spaces, you can have either all windows of an application on the same virtual desktop, or you can allow them to be on multiple desktops. If you do multiple desktops, then alt-tabbing to a running application won't ever switch your current desktop. Since OSX generally only has one instance of each application running, this can make switching between windows of the same program on different desktops a bit of a pain. It's not terrible, but it isn't as smooth as it could be. To be honest, I'm not really sure why a developer would use a MacBook at this point. When I bought mine, Linux's wifi support was a sick joke, which made it pretty pointless for a laptop. OSX is very polished and clean, but their developer tools for python, php, etc are going to be the same tools you'd be using under any other OS, I would think. Is TextMate a killer app for OSX now? What does OSX offer that's really good for web development?

djehuty 17y ago
You'll find that with only a little practice using tap gesture for button press becomes second nature. From there it's only a 5 minute learning curve to double-tap equals right button. So if you're serious about putting Linux on there, and frankly I think that's just silly, don't let the touchpad put you off. I'm perfectly happy with Coda for web development, although I wish it had function collapsing.
- tsuraan 17y ago
  Is that tap gesture stuff in the hardware, or would Linux have to emulate it itself? My powerbook predates the multitouch stuff, so I've never played with it.
megaduck 17y ago
I do most of my web development using the terminal and emacs, so there's nothing intrinsic to OS X that's an advantage there. The real advantage of OS X is that the rest of the system gets the heck out of your way so that you can get work done. There's a million tiny little touches in the system that make life easier, so you spend more time doing actual development instead of wrestling with the email attachment that Aunt Edna sent you. It's also the most popular *NIX out there, outnumbering everything else by an order of magnitude (or two). That means that virtually all recent UNIX software has been either been tested on the Mac, or written on one. That's nice.
- moe 17y ago
  It's also the most popular NIX out there, outnumbering everything else by an order of magnitude (or two). That means that virtually all recent UNIX software has been either been tested on the Mac, or written on one. That's nice. Sorry to rain on your parade but both of these statements are wrong.

by tsuraan 17y ago

djehuty 17y ago

You'll find that with only a little practice using tap gesture for button press becomes second nature. From there it's only a 5 minute learning curve to double-tap equals right button. So if you're serious about putting Linux on there, and frankly I think that's just silly, don't let the touchpad put you off. I'm perfectly happy with Coda for web development, although I wish it had function collapsing.

tsuraan 17y ago
Is that tap gesture stuff in the hardware, or would Linux have to emulate it itself? My powerbook predates the multitouch stuff, so I've never played with it.

megaduck 17y ago

I do most of my web development using the terminal and emacs, so there's nothing intrinsic to OS X that's an advantage there. The real advantage of OS X is that the rest of the system gets the heck out of your way so that you can get work done. There's a million tiny little touches in the system that make life easier, so you spend more time doing actual development instead of wrestling with the email attachment that Aunt Edna sent you. It's also the most popular *NIX out there, outnumbering everything else by an order of magnitude (or two). That means that virtually all recent UNIX software has been either been tested on the Mac, or written on one. That's nice.

moe 17y ago
It's also the most popular NIX out there, outnumbering everything else by an order of magnitude (or two). That means that virtually all recent UNIX software has been either been tested on the Mac, or written on one. That's nice. Sorry to rain on your parade but both of these statements are wrong.