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However much fun it is to beat an unwilling commercial OS into submission, this is 2013. No need to mess around with homebrew and MAMP. Your new Mac is powerfu

However much fun it is to beat an unwilling commercial OS into submission, this is 2013. No need to mess around with homebrew and MAMP. Your new Mac is powerful enough to run multiple Vagrant boxes simultaneously, with all the tools you need and a near perfect simulation of your target platform. Use some good provisioning software (Ansible is awesome) to manage them, and you're set. All you have to do for OSX is pick your favorite IDE. Or alternatively, don't use OSX (or Windows), and get a machine that runs Linux so you can have everything just the way you want/need it. Everything else is just hobbyism, and as fun and educational as it may be, I'm wary of developers that waste time on their primary development tools. Sooner or later it becomes a horrible mess. I've always been in favor of letting devs use any tool they like, but developers wasting days on getting version X of package Y to run on their Windows / OSX box when everyone else just does "apt-get upgrade" on their (virtual) machine doesn't fill me with confidence in their ability to solve problems effectively.

swah 13y ago
In my experience, Linux graphics aren't smooth like OSX. I have the same problems you describe here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6545726 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6545726
altryne1 13y ago
I have had the same discussion with my team mates who use ubuntu. Me being a front end dev and needing graphic tools, means i have to use mac. But to get the ENV up an running it took a while. However, now the environment is exactly the same. When they do apt-get I do brew install. I really miss your point regarding "ability to solve problems effectively" . If you are proficient with a mac, and you can achieve the same tasks more quickly, then setting it up is the least of your problems. I agree with what you said regarding windows, as getting the tools up to date there is a nightmare, but OSX is really up there, and works fine. No real reason to run everything in a VM and waste memory
- falcolas 13y ago
  The problem I have with this is that you're not developing against the target environment - you're developing against the closest thing you can make to your target environment, given your utilities. The problems that I've run into in the past are typically subtle, but they're almost always show stoppers (either on the development side or the production side). That said, my current environment is on a mac while my production is on EL6, but my next one will not be. The up front cost to get a DB and nginx running properly is just not worth the effort to do again.

swah 13y ago

In my experience, Linux graphics aren't smooth like OSX. I have the same problems you describe here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6545726 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6545726

altryne1 13y ago

I have had the same discussion with my team mates who use ubuntu. Me being a front end dev and needing graphic tools, means i have to use mac. But to get the ENV up an running it took a while. However, now the environment is exactly the same. When they do apt-get I do brew install. I really miss your point regarding "ability to solve problems effectively" . If you are proficient with a mac, and you can achieve the same tasks more quickly, then setting it up is the least of your problems. I agree with what you said regarding windows, as getting the tools up to date there is a nightmare, but OSX is really up there, and works fine. No real reason to run everything in a VM and waste memory

falcolas 13y ago
The problem I have with this is that you're not developing against the target environment - you're developing against the closest thing you can make to your target environment, given your utilities. The problems that I've run into in the past are typically subtle, but they're almost always show stoppers (either on the development side or the production side). That said, my current environment is on a mac while my production is on EL6, but my next one will not be. The up front cost to get a DB and nginx running properly is just not worth the effort to do again.