5 ms·

Well, for one, getting sane build tools is difficult. Apple doesn't ship anything GPLv3, which means that among other things, GCC and bash have stagnated. You e

by cheald 13y ago

Well, for one, getting sane build tools is difficult. Apple doesn't ship anything GPLv3, which means that among other things, GCC and bash have stagnated. You end up relying on homebrew to provide modern versions of "basic" tools, which may or may not work properly depending on your use case. It generally involves a lot of trial and error and things mysteriously breaking until you find a StackOverflow question where someone has figured out the answer through exhaustive experimentation, and one of the sixteen prescribed fixes will actually work for your environment. OS X is better than Cygwin, but it's the same kind of mess - to get a functioning, cohesive GNU environment, you end up doing a lot of hacking around to balance things just so. Since you end up relying on a third-party package system, and the OS itself makes no guarantees about the availability or compatibility of the development tools you need, upgrades become dangerous and unpredictable. As for advantages...I dunno. Netflix, Photoshop (sorry, GIMP fans, Photoshop is still unmatched) and battery life? Linux power management is pretty horrid compared to OS X. However, basically the only time I care about that is when I'm on an airplane and won't be able to get to a plug for 4 hours, which is like...a half dozen times per year.

eropple 13y ago
I find what you're saying interesting, because it doesn't really match my experience. I came from Linux to OS X not too long ago (three years maybe?) and while the first thing I do is install GNU coreutils and findutils, I don't find myself having to do much else to make the command-line environment feel very friendly. Most "Linux-only" scripts that I run across are really just "GNU-only" scripts, and work fine. Obvious exceptions are ones that do specifically touch Linux-specific constructs, but I find that most are just not tested with the default BSD tools and suffer for it. My only other beef is that there's no rc.d system and OS X's startup stuff is messy, but I do that so rarely that it doesn't usually come up. The other major advantage for me is Xcode. I did not get-it until Xcode 4, but these days I really miss when I'm not using it. (I do mobile and web development on the JVM, but I write games on the side.) I've yet to find a C++ IDE that's as nice as Xcode, and that's including MSVC with Visual Assist X. Also, I haven't found serious issues with upgrades since moving to Homebrew from MacPorts. Your mileage may certainly vary, but I've upgraded the same Mac from 10.6 to 10.9 without any issues. I can't say the same for my Ubuntu system, but that may have been my fault. =)
- cheald 13y ago
  It may just be quirks of the toolchain - I'm primarily a Ruby developer, and I dabble in Java (mostly for Android) and Scala. Setting up a CRuby environment that can compile native extensions under OS X is a minefield. It's not hard once you know what to do, but you can expect to spend several hours working around esoteric issues the first time or two you do it. The lack of an rc.d system is another sore point for me - I can't ever remember the correct invocation to restart this or that service. Having to look it up each time is annoying. I haven't used XCode significantly (I tend to stick to Sublime and IDEA's Java/Ruby IDEs), but I've heard great things about it from iOS developers.
  - eropple 13y ago
    Gotcha. Never got into Ruby beyond the basics, so I can't speak to that. It's funny that you mention IDEA, though, because I find it way, way better on OS X (day job is Android development, I'm also a part-time Scala cheerleader). It's just so amazingly fugly on every Linux machine I've ever used--it's a Swing problem, I've never been able to figure out how to fix that. Heck, IDEA looking and feeling great on OS X was the reason I originally bought a Mac.
    - rantanplan 13y ago
      Usually this "-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd" will fix your fugly situation. Actually, at least since version 3 of PyCharm I don't have to muck around with java settings to make it look humane.
      - eropple 13y ago
        Tried it previously (I used a Linux machine as a daily driver for years). Doesn't look any different to me on Ubuntu.
- srik 13y ago
  >My only other beef is that there's no rc.d system and OS X's startup stuff is messy Have you already looked at launched. I've heard a lot of praise from people who've used it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd
microcolonel 13y ago
Also, to be clear, power management for laptops depends entirely on which one you got, there are a few where it makes better use of the same battery on the same hardware than OSX could hope to.

by cheald 13y ago

eropple 13y ago

I find what you're saying interesting, because it doesn't really match my experience. I came from Linux to OS X not too long ago (three years maybe?) and while the first thing I do is install GNU coreutils and findutils, I don't find myself having to do much else to make the command-line environment feel very friendly. Most "Linux-only" scripts that I run across are really just "GNU-only" scripts, and work fine. Obvious exceptions are ones that do specifically touch Linux-specific constructs, but I find that most are just not tested with the default BSD tools and suffer for it. My only other beef is that there's no rc.d system and OS X's startup stuff is messy, but I do that so rarely that it doesn't usually come up. The other major advantage for me is Xcode. I did not get-it until Xcode 4, but these days I really miss when I'm not using it. (I do mobile and web development on the JVM, but I write games on the side.) I've yet to find a C++ IDE that's as nice as Xcode, and that's including MSVC with Visual Assist X. Also, I haven't found serious issues with upgrades since moving to Homebrew from MacPorts. Your mileage may certainly vary, but I've upgraded the same Mac from 10.6 to 10.9 without any issues. I can't say the same for my Ubuntu system, but that may have been my fault. =)

cheald 13y ago
It may just be quirks of the toolchain - I'm primarily a Ruby developer, and I dabble in Java (mostly for Android) and Scala. Setting up a CRuby environment that can compile native extensions under OS X is a minefield. It's not hard once you know what to do, but you can expect to spend several hours working around esoteric issues the first time or two you do it. The lack of an rc.d system is another sore point for me - I can't ever remember the correct invocation to restart this or that service. Having to look it up each time is annoying. I haven't used XCode significantly (I tend to stick to Sublime and IDEA's Java/Ruby IDEs), but I've heard great things about it from iOS developers.
- eropple 13y ago
  Gotcha. Never got into Ruby beyond the basics, so I can't speak to that. It's funny that you mention IDEA, though, because I find it way, way better on OS X (day job is Android development, I'm also a part-time Scala cheerleader). It's just so amazingly fugly on every Linux machine I've ever used--it's a Swing problem, I've never been able to figure out how to fix that. Heck, IDEA looking and feeling great on OS X was the reason I originally bought a Mac.
  - rantanplan 13y ago
    Usually this "-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd" will fix your fugly situation. Actually, at least since version 3 of PyCharm I don't have to muck around with java settings to make it look humane.
    - eropple 13y ago
      Tried it previously (I used a Linux machine as a daily driver for years). Doesn't look any different to me on Ubuntu.
srik 13y ago
>My only other beef is that there's no rc.d system and OS X's startup stuff is messy Have you already looked at launched. I've heard a lot of praise from people who've used it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd

microcolonel 13y ago

Also, to be clear, power management for laptops depends entirely on which one you got, there are a few where it makes better use of the same battery on the same hardware than OSX could hope to.