Submitted by I was at the OpenStack Summit this week. The overwhelming majority of OpenStack deployments are Linux-based, yet the most popular laptop vendor (by a long way) at the conference was Apple. People are writing code with the intention of deploying it on Linux, but they’re doing so under an entirely different OS.
But what’s really interesting is the tools they’re using to do so. When I looked over people’s shoulders, I saw terminals and a web browser. They’re not using Macs because their development tools require them, they’re using Macs because of what else they get – an aesthetically pleasing OS, iTunes and what’s easily the best trackpad hardware/driver combination on the market. These are people who work on the same laptop that they use at home. They’ll use it when they’re commuting, either for playing videos or for getting a head start so they can leave early. They use an Apple because they don’t want to use different hardware for work and pleasure.
Apple’s laptops are still the best PCs money can buy at the moment (despite their horribly outdated displays). It’s no wonder Linux developers, too, favour them.
Interesting, the times I’ve used Linux for development the problems I have had are dependencies, Fedora has been the less difficult to manage, Ubuntu is fine and OpenSuse has been dissapointing but workable, but overal my experience has been pleasing.
At work, I use a MBP now.
It’s a good ‘middle ground’ in that it runs MS software (office, lync), VPN works, but you still get most of the tools and terminal convenience as with Linux.
When I need Linux, I either ssh to a computer or use Vagrant (e.g when developing a web app on my mac).
Also, that touchpad is best ever. Really. Try it for 15 minutes.
(I’m not an Apple fanboy by any means, e.g. I steer clear of iOS devices)
This!
I was MS guy (for me windows ‘just works’) with linux on remote/vm locally for work/tinkering but the experience was sub-pair. I got Mac for work last year – and slowly I found myself that I used old laptop less and less; on mac I could easily dive to work (you gotta love the hassle-less shell without cygwin or somesuch) and the UI that just works (like in windows; sadly my experience with linux was never ever that smooth).
And also – yes, the touchpad is amazing… saddly…
not as good as a track point though
Plus a thousand points to you, sir.
Actually, research suggests that touchpads are better than trackpoints: see second part of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick#Ergonomics
Exactly the same deal here. Everything I write is destined to run on Linux, but I have an R&D lab and Vagrant for that.
I wouldn’t pay for it myself but if my employer wants to pay the premium then I’m fine with that: I get a decent laptop with excellent battery life that does what I need. (Actually my one complaint hardware wise is that it only has two Thunderbolt ports and no Ethernet port)
I don’t buy the idea that OS X is some sort of Gods Gift to operating systems. It annoys the piss out me plenty of times each and every day, frankly.
Vanders,
I wouldn’t turn one down either, but I agree the price tag is hard to justify personally. Also, a “pro” laptop should have an ethernet port since I still frequently need it!
I didn’t think of that, but you are right. I find it ironic that the fanboys themselves create a kind of stigma around the platform (not everyone mind you, but a disproportionate about compared to other platforms). I’d use an apple laptop to get work done, but I’d want nothing to do with the smugness that these apple users so often exhibit. If I had a macbook, I might deface it to ‘be different’ and make a statement; I wonder if this would void the warranty?
Edited 2014-05-23 00:28 UTC
I stopped recommending Apple gear at some point to not be associated with those people…
Same here, MBP Retina.
Ehh…not quite. If you install homebrew stuff you can get most of the way there. Still, nothing like the Linux Desktop environments; and only works if you can get use to the various Mac-specific keyboard shortcuts.
After 6 weeks, it drove me nuts and I reformatted the system over to Linux so now it’s Kubuntu 14.04.
That said, there’s some things that don’t quite work right with it – namely disconnecting the Thunberbolt/Lightening Ethernet and sleep mode.
Oh God, talk about a space cadet keyboard. My battle against RSI and trying to remember which particular combination of Fn/Ctrl/Cmd I need at any given moment continues, and the Mac is winning.
Don’t even talk to me about Apples bizarre idea of what a GB-UK keyboard is.
What got me was things like Option+C instead of CTRL+C, and the line vs page cursor movements – CTRL+Shift+Up going to the start of the page instead of just up a line…or whatever the shortcut is…it’s all muscle memory. I don’t know why they have to forbid you from setting your own and then having it be different from everyone else.
It’s even worse than that: certain combinations will do totally different things, depending on if it’s a “UNIX” or “native” application. The number of times I’ve hit Fn+Left (“Home”, don’t you know) in a multi-line edit box in Chrome, only for the page to shoot to the top and me to swear profusely…
Yet Linux gets this right.
Dealing with this same issue here… just picked up a 2011 MBP 17″, my first Apple ever, and was really surprised at how ungreat the keyboard and the layout is.
Already swapped a few of the keycaps around, and been actively shopping for replacements in other layouts (a Swedish 2 would be a good start).
as someone who develops more webapps than anything else, the vagrant route was my solution when on a mac or win machine, but the performance gets horrible (VBox in particular.)
When developing natively on linux (most of my servers are linux) then tools such as lxc and docker make all of those problems go away.
Vagrant-lxc and vagrant-docker aren’t in the greatest shape, but once tweaked they work well.
Honestly though, that it takes some 10 seconds to get a new vm up and running is a big pro.
The problem is that as one gets older, the desire to tinker with GNU/Linux wanes off.
I used to push GNU/Linux at the University back in the late 90’s, but eventually got fed up of making it work properly, even on laptops that were supposed to have GNU/Linux factory support.
The trend to use Mac OS X among GNU/Linux developers gets some funny scenarios like at FOSDEM, where one can see developers talking about open source using Mac OS X, while bashing Microsoft!
That’s because as dysfunctional as Apple’s relationship with FOSS is, it’s still orders of magnitude better than Microsoft’s.
Only one that never used Apple in the old days can state that.
The old Apple made Microsoft look like a set of very nice guys.
Well, first you have to define what “old days” means. Because Microsoft was just as bad as Apple in those “old days.”
Edited 2014-05-23 20:03 UTC
Old days means proprietary Apple hardware and software APIs.
Microsoft was still busy with MS-DOS and early Windows shells running on top of it.
On those days, they still didn’t had the stronghold on the PC industry, which they started to pick up with Windows 95.
Both, MSDOS and Windows were proprietary and closed source. I fail to see what the point you’re trying to make is, other than going out of your way to indict Apple for basically doing what every other vendor was doing in the early 80s, Microsoft included.
In the big scheme of things, Apple has been cozier to the FOSS community in this century than Microsoft. Far from ideal, and still a pretty evil corporation on their own right. But that just highlights how anti-thethical to FOSS MS has traditionally been. So…
Edited 2014-05-24 00:46 UTC
Really? Its kind of a mess, IMHO. The only reason to use it was historically to buy/rent movies and music and interact with ipods.
There are better ways of doing most of what it was good for.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. People say iTunes is better on OSX than it is on Windows. I guess it must be REALLY f-king awesome to make up for how absolutely TERRIBLE it is on Windows. In fact, I find iTunes on Windows so patently offensive, I’d rather tongue the sweaty asshole of a Kenyan marathon runner than have it even installed. I hate it as much as the Angry Video Game Nerd hates Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M_4Yqk65f8
That being said, although I am no fan of OSX, Apple makes some really sweet laptops. My boss has one, and, if any PC vendor makes a better laptop than that, I haven’t seen one.
I hate iTunes, and I’m on a Mac.
Yes, it’s even more horrible on Windows.
It started out as a decent music player, and then somehow got morphed into a device management behemoth. Seems like a huge epic shoe-horn to me.
I’ve never even considered it a decent music player. It’s way too bloated to be a ‘Winamp Lite’ replacement and has nowhere near the flexibility of an app like Media Monkey. In short, except for syncing with iDevices (which it absolutely SUCKS at), it is as useless as boobs on a bull.
I am syncing 3 devices on Mavericks iTunes this morning as I type this….not sure what your issues are, but it certainly does the job in my computing flow; and as a music player, works fine, IME.
Again, I’m coming at this from a Windows perspective. Perhaps everything that sucks ass about the Windows version is addressed in OSX, I dunno. But assuming it works the same on both platforms, there are three things I’d invite you to try:
1. Try syncing your iDevices on a brand new PC with a freshly installed copy of iTunes
2. Try to sync a friend’s iDevice on your machine
3. Let’s say you have a spouse who has different apps/music than you do. Set up iTunes for manual sync with each device, with different stuff on each one.
.
My spouse and I sync 2 iPhones and 2 iPads with the same iTunes, manually…each device with a different selection of music, videos, apps, etc. It works perfectly, plus we create encrypted backups of each device…it is dead simple. I don’t let friends touch my system.
Samsung and Asus make some pretty sweet laptops that are comparable to Mac notebooks in design, and exceed them in performance. Lenovo makes awesome business laptops as well, though they are more industrial in design.
I’ve always seen Macs as mediocre hardware wrapped in pretty, minimalist designs, with a powerful OS. As long as the hardware is fast enough to run the current version of the OS, it takes a back seat in importance.
Of course there is the high price tag associated with Macs, but if you need a modern, stable version of OS X bad enough you’ll pay it.
Two things you don’t get with Windows laptops:
1. The amazing trackpad
2. Magsafe power. The barrel plugs of windows laptops are just too archaic.
Sounds like a Surface Pro 3 would give you all that you need for a lower price, lower weight, thinner and with a touchscreen.
Windows laptops have evolved a bit. My wife’s Asus Transformer also has a “magsafe like” connector and a great touchpad. But when she wants she detaches the screen and uses it as a tablet
True on both points for the most part, though I’ve used some pretty nice multi-touch trackpads on Windows laptops before. As for the magsafe-like adapter, I wish all laptops would use that tech. Hell, even my Pebble watch has one!
iTunes is one factor with my continued use of OS X. However, with Apple’s recent shift in new systems using SSD, I might be forced to get a Windows box for my iTunes box soon. I have a bunch of external hard drives using all my available usb ports on my Mac and they make it impossible to put a decent disk in them these days. With the Mac Pro ruined with no drive bays, there are no upgrade options anymore. A windows PC can have drive bays for iTunes content. It’s amazing to me that Apple has failed so miserably at cloud stuff when their computers have no disk space. If I were a typical user with a laptop Mac, I’d literally have no where to put my music and video. A laptop is not portable with 3 usb hard drives sticking out of it.
iTunes is not forgiving if the drive is not available when it’s opened. They really assume the user can put everything in their home directory on the boot drive. iTunes match only works with DRM free music or DRM music they still carry. Video is out of the question. I don’t think you can stream movies or tv shows with match yet.
I’ve had access to Macs since 1994. Off and on, they’ve been my primary machine. Mostly off.
I’ve spent most of my time in front of a computer running an ‘alternative’ OS. BeOS, then Linux. I’ve always had at least one Mac laying around though. For the last five years, the computer we had at home (the rest of the family used) has been a Mac. It just works. I don’t have to fiddle with it, and the wife and kids know how to use it without me having to baby-sit.
Then there’s Linux — which I’ve used various distributions of over the years, and have relegated to my ‘work’ machines. I’ve even used it successfully in the corporate environment for the majority of the last 12 years. But there’s always been things I had to really understand and work around that made it painful.
The desktop and vendor support is terrible too. Need to get product xyz working on Linux? You’re on your own.
I’m typing this from my 15″ MBP Retina. Best. Damn. Computer. I’ve ever owned.
Usability near what I could do with BeOS (I miss live filesystem queries, pervasive Drag n’ Drop, and applications not using walled-garden database formats — I’m looking at you iTunes and iPhoto…) but it works really well, and my wife and kids transition to it perfectly.
I don’t have issues with tool chains, and firing up a VM to dog-food for a few minutes is super-easy.
The earlier releases of OS X I had issues with as my ‘main’ OS because of the lacking support for some of my workflow habits. Snow Leopard fixed those, and Mavericks has polished them off.
I used to HATE trackpads. The oversized pad on the MBP is ah-may-zing. Really. There’s enough room to make gestures not suck, and the precision is there. It’s made a believer out of me.
Now, if I could find a good bluetooth (yes, bluetooth, I don’t want a damn dongle) ergonomic keyboard to replace my old Microsoft Natural Elite when I’m at the desk, I’d have zero complaints about this machine.
You can perform live queries on osx according to Wikipedia. It was implemented in osx by a former beos Dev.
Are sure? Do you have a reference on how to do this on a Mac?
Reading the WIKI page at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X it clearly says queries have been added to Finder and are real-time but I don’t know if this means the same as under BeOS or Haiku-OS. The main reason I am questioning this is if I am reading https://github.com/bevry/watchr/issues/48 which seems to imply you have to setup which files to watch where as BeOS/Haiku-OS will do a global watch for you.
On the other hand if the Mac can be set to monitor a folder and all it’s sub-folders only I do consider that a big plus as Haiku-OS only let’s me monitor on a partition level so I have to setup virtual drives to monitor selected folders only.
Seems to me that a Mac OS X “Smart Folder” is a persistent, realtime file system query. There’s a whole mess of criteria you can query on.
Spotlight on the Mac is a great facility that works really well, quietly in the background. It’s just one of the great features for development on the Mac.
Thank you, using the term Smart Folders got me the info.
And it looks good.
Also looks like Tracker’s ‘FIND’ needs more work to keep up.
Sure you can do a live fs query thanks to spotlight, but it’s not the same as BeOS, since the applications Apple creates use walled-garden databases rather than the _filesystem_ as the database.
So while I can query the file system using a smart folder, I can’t just open the smart-folder in iTunes and use it as a playlist. Oh no, I have to create a ‘smart playlist’ for that.
Same for iPhoto.
It’s things like this that keep it from being the indispensable tool it was on BeOS.
OS X is _close_. Very Very Close.
Yes. It is. Tantalizingly.
The other nice feature that modern apps are supporting is the pervasive saving and versioning of documents.
While you will likely lose recent changes with a hard crash (such as power failure or crash of the actual application), it’s more difficult to lose work.
A glaring example is my TextEdit, which I use to just make jots and notes, has 40+ “unsaved” files open. And the application has been closed and the machine restarted dozens of times.
While imperfect, I can almost shut down the machine with barely a prompt from an open app, confident that when the machine starts back up, I’m right where I left off.
I don’t want the blind, jailed document system of iOS, but a pervasive “document oriented” system where I don’t really “care” where the documents are, is attractive. Let Spotlight find it. The Mac is close to making that a realistic option for users, while still having the underlying Unix files and directories.
The laptop environment, with “instant” flash drives, and pervasive battery power, is about as close as you can get to battery backed up RAM on a consumer system. I open the laptop, I use it, I close the laptop, I put it away. When I come back, it’s where I left off — even 6 months later, even if I do lose the battery. It’s “always there”. It’s really nice.
This is a key component to the idea of having apps start and stop seamlessly. Like modern cars that stop the engine at stop lights, press on the gas and the car starts right back up. The Mac is working towards rather than swapping idle apps out to swap, it just kills them off and leave the windows around. When you get back to them, they quickly restart and recover to where you left off, with barely a blip. It’s a nice idea.
Because on OS X I still get a Unix prompt to do my stuff with, but there the GUI actually works.
At first I bought a Macbook because of the hardware quality, and went OS X on laptop and Linux on desktop for 2 years.
Then I hackintoshed my desktop.
I’ll probably get some Apple made desktop when my current machine dies – if there is anything resembling an Apple made desktop system when that happens.
Edit: i stay away from both iTunes and iCloud though.
Edited 2014-05-22 19:53 UTC
This explains a lot of people I know. People that picked on OS9 moved to OSX mostly for the bash shell.
I think Microsoft made a mistake not supporting a native unix like shell. People who use powershell seem to like it but not of the people I know personally outside of windows admins use it for anything.
If Apple made a consumer version of Mac pro I’d probably using OSX instead of Windows at home. I’ve said before though that Apple doing that is extremely unlikely and I don’t see them changing their stance on that any time soon. The only thing in that space are hackintoshes.
Yep, i get the impression that OSX get a whole lot of traction because it frankly is a off the shelf *nix.
One that you can walk into any Apple store with and get tech support to look at.
End result is that they can be found in the hands of quite a few that otherwise only touch *nix on some kind of server.
And frankly, Apple is the only ones that can pull this. Because Dell, HP and the rest are so dependent on the MS bulk discounts for their margins that any serious attempt at getting anything similar out there instantly flatlines.
Yes, they may toy with it endlessly or test the water ever so often. Maybe offer a RH alternative for “workstations”. But off the shelf on the high street, forget it.
PowerShell doesn’t feel like a shell, it feels like a replacement for VBScript and OLE Automation. Cygwin feels more like a shell, but seems to be falling out of favor for MinGW.
PowerShell is very powerful, as it combines DOS, OLE Automation, .NET, and POSIX philosophy. But the heavy-handed security requirements make it difficult to use at times.
I use Windows a lot, Linux a lot, Firefox OS a whole lot, but Macs become a distant fourth place because they’re expensive and the new OS X updates won’t work on not-that-old hardware.
And yes, iTunes on Windows is horrible and Safari on Windows is pretty much dead.
More than pretty much dead, it was discontinued.
Switched from Surface Pro 2 to Macbook Pro as my main development machine.
It’s simple. MacBooks are amazing laptops. Well built. Very fast. 16GB RAM with a Core i7. They run Windows. They run OSX. They run Linux.
A Windows PC (even the nice looking Surface Pro 3) can’t run OSX, which is admittedly very, very nice. It has a useable terminal, works well with open source software and is generally better than the hack jobs you have to do to get some tools running on Windows.
I do mostly C# and JS development nowadays, and my Surface Pro 2 only really sees use every once in a while now. That’s huge (both coming from me, and because it was my daily driver since I got it).
Oh well. Gotta love work purchased toys.
Most of my apps are available on OSX, but the OS is so gosh darn ugly that it is painful. Flat everywhere even the scrollbars where it makes no sense at all and apple breaks any theming software available for the OS with new releases. Do not get me wrong i still love my powerbook and use it almost every day but i rarely use my intel macs, but in my personal taste 10.4.11 was the best version of OSX and has been going down hill since then in general.
I run Linux on servers and I find it extremely useful there. I’ve had it on the desktop too. I don’t find it particularly difficult to use, but at the same time there’s no compelling reason for me to run linux on a desktop/laptop. Unfortunately, application support isn’t there, which is why I can’t recommend it for friends.
As for hardware, linux compatibility can be hit or miss, most things work, but without sufficient support from vendors it can be a struggle to get *everything* working. Stores won’t stock hardware lacking windows support, yet they’ll regularly stock hardware that doesn’t support linux. It isn’t even linux’es fault that manufacturers neglect to provide the drivers/specs, yet this lack of official support continues to be a nagging impediment to linux adoption.
I suspect OSX would probably face the exact same compatibility issues if it existed as a standalone product. Consider this, Linux is nearly always judged by it’s ability to run on unsupported hardware. OSX is never judged by this standard.
Few blame OSX when a hackintosh doesn’t work, but they do blame linux under the same circumstances.
http://lifehacker.com/5837615/how-do-i-choose-the-right-hardware-wh…
I hate to admit it, but Linux desktops/laptops have more problems because they don’t select the hardware (aka apple) and they don’t have much influence with 3rd party manufacturers (aka microsoft).
I have tried using OS X a couple of times over the years and it has never worked well for me. I can’t stand the interface, it feels to bright and bouncy, and far too restricting. Plus I constantly run into crashes and vague error messages. I can’t imagine trying to use a Mac for work. Some of my friends use them and swear by OS X, most others try it for a few months and end up swearing _at_ OS X.
My point being, some people say they prefer using OS X over Linux distributions because they do not want to tinker with the OS to keep it working. My experience has been the opposite, especially over the past six years. I use Linux because I just want to work, not tinker or deal with Apple’s broken software.
jessesmith,
My experience with OSX is very limited. Some labs at university did have OSX computers that crashed, but no more than the windows computers back then
More recently I used one for about a week for work (it didn’t crash, but there were one or two times I did need to call in help). It took some getting used to because I’m very proficient at using keyboard shortcuts and I found myself forced to use the mouse alot more on the mac. Although I didn’t see anything that made me think “wow this makes my work so much easier”, but then I usually work with remote resources where the local desktop doesn’t matter too much. I presume that eventually I would become accustomed to using the interface efficiently, so I feel pretty indifferent. I could see myself using OSX if only it was cheaper (I wouldn’t say that about Metro).
Edited 2014-05-22 21:43 UTC
Totally Agree. My wife has a Mac since 2008, while I have been running Linux as my desktop for the past ten years (Suse, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora), both on Gnome and KDE.
OS X works, but I would not work on that. It’s a nice machine (MBP 13 with i7) but the bouncing ball happens too often.
Me? Haven’t had issues with external projectors for the past 5+ yrs, my Latitude E6420 (2nd generation Core i7) is quite capable, Fedora runs very well, i have all the tools I need and eventually can fallback to a Windows 7 VM…
Freedom is freedom.
Regards
I won’t say the Mac is perfect, but I’ve been using it 100% for work for the past year. It’s as least as stable as the Windows laptop it replaced. I don;t know what tinkering you are doing, but I do no tinkering to get things working.
I have been forced to use OS X and here´s a few quick impressions. I don´t have time for a full review of all of the crap I have encountered.
Look and feel
The OS looks ok, but default fonts are too small for me and changing them system-wide isn´t as intuitive as it should be.
Changing folder icons for a different set of icons is almost an impossibility and changing the color of folders alone is an exercise in frustration. You can either only do it one folder at a time by editing the icon in “Preview†or you have to install an error-prone program “folder-teint†that only allows you to change the colors of the icons.
Source: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2746156
Task and Application Management
The dock as a task manager is a mess as it is hard to see what is open and what is not. Sure Mission Control comes to the rescue, but it feels more like a patch to a different problem than a real solution.
In KDE or even Windows 7, I can look at my task manager and pick the right application windows from several windows of the same app by just looking at the task manager. In OS X, that operation requires several clicks or keyboard presses.
Why do I have to sort manually all the applications in “LaunchPad�
Why in heaven´s name can I not right click and sort alphabetically? If you use a lot of applications, and I do, it is an exercise in frustration.
Window Management and Task Flow
Why isn´t it possible to split the “Finderâ€, MAC OS file manager, in two panes to copy files back and forth? Why can´t I split my desktop horizontally or vertically by snapping applications to the top or the side of the screen, just like Windows and KDE have done for a long time? Why will the top bar of an application not maximize the window? Why does maximizing a windows not take over all available area and only restore it to its previous maximum size?
Open Source applications
Open source applications such as LibreOffice and Inkscape are much easier to install and much more stable in Linux, and maybe even on Windows, than on the Mac.I haven´t had a single LibreOffice/OpenOffice crash in years on Linux, but plenty on the Mac
And the list goes on and on. Please stop posting these paid advertisements on OSNews.
Nobody I know uses a Mac for real work unless you are a DJ.
I agree with most of your talking points, but a few things stand out.
That’s funny, I have the opposite problem: Fonts in OS X seem too big to me, with the exception of the Numbers app. I usually find myself scaling them down, whereas on Windows I’m often scaling them up, especially in web browsers.
It’s not a maximize button, it’s a zoom button. The entire concept of maximizing windows is foreign to OS X native apps. When you click zoom, the window grows to the most appropriate size for the content currently displayed. Most third party apps treat the zoom button like a maximize button though.
I’ve never had stability issues with those apps (or other ported GNU/Linux apps) since the switch to Intel, with the exception of early versions of OpenOffice (called NeoOffice on the Mac back then). But this is all anecdotal for both of us. As for ease of installation, what’s so difficult about dragging and dropping to the Applications folder, or running a .pkg file? The former is so simple a child could do it, and the latter is no different from running an installation wizard on Windows. Conversely, the last time I installed any of those apps on Slackware Linux, I compiled the packages using Slackbuilds. That’s over the heads of most Windows and even Mac users.
Come on now, that’s just straight up flamebait. The rest of your post was insightful and topical, but you had to go and pull out one of the worst cliches of the computing world. If you’ve owned a Mac (and you make it sound like you have), then you know they are a good fit for just about any task as Windows or GNU/Linux, with a few exceptions. For example, the only reason my company hasn’t gone to Macs across the board is because we use Quickbooks, which isn’t supported on that platform. This is a vertical channel manufacturer/distributor, not a design house or recording studio.
You say that as though your experience on Slackware is representative. Other Linux distros have a one-click install process, so you should either compare with that, or compare your experience on Slackware to the experience of compiling packages for OSX.
No, I say that as a counter to “GNU/Linux is always easier than OS X”, which is what porcel was implying. You can compile to install on any of the three OSes mentioned, or you can use a package manager/installer on any of the them. Using software installation to try to say OS X is crap compared to GNU/Linux or Windows is just plain misleading.
You were saying that as a counter to this:
Which is a far cry from what you claim he is implying. The widest scope of his claim is installing open source software is easier, not software in general.
A better argument would be that it is those open source applications that don’t support OS X as well as other platforms.
Which is not what he did. He listed it as an aspect of OS X which he thinks is crap. In general, that’s the point of those lists – not that any one item makes it crap, but is one part that is crap.
Read his post in its entirety again, and notice the general tone of “OS X/Mac sucks”. It all comes to a head with his last flamebait sentence. Granted, a lot of his points are relevant, and I agree with some of what he wrote, as I already mentioned above. I’m just calling out factual errors and strawman arguments. In turn, you’re nitpicking my nitpicks. It’s quite the vicious circle, isn’t it?
Yes, but he didn’t say, as you claim, that software installation ALONE makes it the worst. His post in its entirety did that.
Sigh…
My last comment about who uses a Mac was ment to be a little tongue-in-cheek and I thought it would be taken humorously. But I wake up to find it was not. Next time, I will put a smiley next to it.
I know that there are very good apps that do vector design on the Mac, but inkscape is free in every way and we have been using with amazing results for the last three years and have two designers who have mastered them. We have built our workflow around apps such as inkscape.
So our experiment to switch to a Mac wasn´t succesful at all, among other things because installing inkscape on the Mac is a pain in the ass. First, you need XQuartz, then install X11, then install. Not fun, but once you have done that, the app does not feel as fast or as solid as it does on linux.
Of course, generally speaking, installing apps on the Mac is easy, but my point was that we rely on a lot of open source software whose ports either do not exist or are not as solid on the Mac.
And the reason I want to emphasize this is because I have gotten tired of hearing the same line over the years: Mac OS is just another linux with a prettier interface and nicer multimedia apps: “you see, you have a terminal app on the Mac too”.
It is not. And I for one prefer Kmail to Mail, Amarok to iTunes any day of the year; or dolphin to the “finder”; or ktorrent to “transmission” (an open-source app that also runs on linux by the way) and the list goes and on. Not to mention the beautifully written educational apps from KDE’s education suite that my two little kids use daily.
I realize that the Mac has its users and it uses, but I take offense to the generalization that Macs simply are better and that linux users such as myself will see the one shining light of truth any day now.
Notice I have focused on usability and never got into the economics of using a Mac vs a PC with Linux in terms of total cost of ownership because that is a thorny and completely different debate.
Sorry, I should have picked up on that. But the general theme of your post was more and more negative, and to end it with that kind of comment (as you said, without a “smiley”) put the final nail in the coffin, so to speak.
The great thing about XQuartz/X11 is that once they are installed, any future apps that depend on them are as easy to install as any native Mac app. If you are only installing them for one app, like Inkscape, I can understand the frustration. Personally, I always install X11 support and Xcode immediately after installing the OS on a Mac. Maybe that’s why I never see it as an issue.
I’ve always heard it as “Mac OS is UNIX/BSD with a nice GUI and commercial support”. The few times someone has said to me that OS X is “just another Linux” I always correct them. Linux (the kernel) is very, very different from the various BSD kernels, to say nothing of the Mac OS Mach microkernel.
And I prefer OpenBox, Claws Mail, Clementine, Thunar, and RUTorrent to the items on your list. I don’t just use a Mac; in fact, it’s my least used machine. I do most of my work and play in Crunchbang Linux and Slackware Linux, with some Windows 7 for gaming and the Mac for music creation. That’s the beauty of not tying oneself to a single platform.
You won’t hear me say “Macs are simply better”. They are great at what they do, and they make excellent general purpose computers. But so do Windows machines, and so do GNU/Linux machines. I spend a lot of time (relatively speaking) on Haiku and BeOS, but you won’t hear me say they are good production machines. I like what I like, and use the tool that works best. It’s the same for everyone, I’m sure.
Indeed it is; I’m debating whether I should replace my aging Core Duo Mac mini at the end of this year. I’ll have the money, but even as slow as my Mac is, for what I use it for, it’s still adequate. And, if I get a Core i5 mini, I’ll be tempted to put Windows 7 and Crunchbang on it and triple boot to consolidate all of my work and most of my recreation on it. Or, I could save $600 and just keep chugging along for another year on that old Mac, which reveals how much value you get when you buy one.
Most of developers doing real work use mostly terminals with vim, comparing KDE with OSX is not the issue here, it is about the entire enviroment, network configuration, media, etc. btw, are you even a developer?
Yes, they enjoy replicating the experience with green phosphor VT 100 terminals and wonder what those hippies at Palo Alto are doing.
What is this Alto thing they keep on speaking about.
If you care about how your OS looks, OSX may suite you (tastes vary). If you care about your OS looking different from the way you got it, OSX is definitely not for you.
You mentioned font size – that isn’t a look a feel issue, its a usability issue , and yes, imo OSX still has problems in this area (there are multiple ways to address the problem but all of them have caveats). Its not much worse than Windows though (better in some ways, worse in others).
As far as the color of the folders… I personally don’t care about stuff like that at all. But if you actually do, you may as well try something else because Apple doesn’t want the OS to look the way you want it to, they want it to look the way they designed it to look. Opinions on this approach to usability design (homogeneous vs heterogeneous) vary, but Apple is definitely in the homogeneous design camp.
There is a little indicator under each open item (assuming you are using default settings). I don’t find it to be a problem at all.
Right-click (or two-finger tap), pick the window from the jump list… Whats the problem with that? It actually works almost exactly the same way as Windows 7 (there has been a lot of “borrowing’ between MS and Apple in this particular area – in both directions – they are almost the same now).
If you just start typing the name of what you want it will filter the display by name… That said, you are right, it is a stupid omission. On the other hand I find Launchpad to be nothing more than iPad/iPhone propaganda – it doesn’t serve any useful purpose to me. I just put my applications folder on the dock, put it in list view, and Im done. Same thing (a list of all your apps), but they are already in alphabetical order that way and I don’t have to switch to a fullscreen view to deal with it).
Id like that too
Its not a maximize button… Apps that support full screen operation have a “maximize” button on the right – apps that don’t just have zoom (the button you are talking about). Zoom just expands the window to its contents, not to the screen. This gripe is not one I agree with you on – I far prefer this behavior..
Well I don’t use either of those, but Im a developer and I have hundreds of open source apps/tools (some GUI based, some console). I actually find I have less trouble in this area than on Linux, mostly thanks to homebrew (homebrew rocks).
Thats not fair. Opinions vary – some people like OSX, some people don’t. I could make a list just like yours listing reasons why OSX is better, but its not – its just different. If you like how its different you’ll like it, if not you won’t. That simple.
I have an entire web development team that would beg to differ…
Like he said. Real work.
* j/k
…well its real work sometimes
I’ve never tried OSX for any length of time, but I hated the way this works in Windows 7. The ONLY items I want to see in the dock/taskbar are the ones I have open. Fortunately, Windows (as of 8.1) gives me this option. Not sure about OSX. I’m not sure this is something I could ever get used to. I tried it for about a day in Win7, and was about ready to pull my hair out, esp when I had two different copies of the same app open, with only one icon in the taskbar to represent both of them.
And I use my MBP for SAP projects. Show me anything that’s more business and “real work” related than this: huge ERP systems, big iron, databases in the terabyte range
In previous years I have also used Windows and Linux. Currently a top of the line MBP simply works the best for me.
Time machine is awesome. Before going on a business trip I create a backup. If anything bad happens I get a new MBP, run a restore. Voilá: I have the same environment as before. Just smooth. No time wasted on tinkering with a new laptop. That’s what I expect from an enterprise grade machine.
Recently I had a good laugh: I have a SAP sandbox system running in a VM on the MBP. For one customer I installed a SAP development system running in a VM on their VMWare server. Looking at the resources I noticed that the sandbox system on my Mac has actually more power than the customer system shared by a couple of developers.
You’ll find that your mileage will be better if you approach new platforms with an open mind. It’s unfortunate that you’re being forced to use OS X. However, if you take the time to look around, you might find that many of your issues can easily be addressed with free software. Other issues simply fade away as you get used to the new platform. Who knows, you might even end up liking the new way of doing things better. It’s happened to me in the past as I’ve moved between operating systems, desktop environments, window managers, programming languages, frameworks, etc.
I know some programmers who insist on using their own code style regardless of the language and conventions around the language when they code for a new platform. Don’t be that guy.
Having read about Macs being on a downward path; I was on vacation recently and went into the cafe (with the best coffee) to use their wifi.
Having done my emails, I looked up and EVERY one of the dozen or more laptops in the room was a Mac with users aged from 20 to 70. My deduction was that this particular pendulum could swing no further!
Apple indeed has an amazingly high presence in Wifi-for-free coffeeshops. When I look around in a train or airport I don’t see many though. Maybe Mac-users prefer coffee to travelling?
The Unix core with the Commercial App capable surface makes the Mac a great experience.
I use iTunes as a music player, it runs all day long. But I don’t fiddle with it. I’m not constantly involved with it, making play lists, syncing stuff, or whatever. I set it up, maybe make a “genius” list to last a few hours, and let it go. But, just in general, Sound “just works” on a Mac.
Multi Monitor, mirroring, screen sharing. That all pretty much “just works”. We have a lot of MBPs here at the office, and several flat panels screens that make is easy for folks to screen share via Apple TVs.
My last Linux machine, 5(?) years ago, had both sound and multi-monitor issues (Ubuntu 9 at the time I think). I gave up to one monitor and just listening to my phone. It was a shame. I liked Ubuntu. I wouldn’t go back to Windows. I could go back to Ubuntu. But I have a Mac, so I don’t have to.
Time machine works. Time machine is great. It’s mostly painless, but I think the Mac may be picky about USB drives.
Using “non-C” based development environments help you break free from having to actually develop on Linux itself. Don’t have to worry about libC issues or other things that tend to be heavily tied to the system itself. You move running scripts or byte code around, not machine binaries. Everything else is mostly environmental (path names, ENV variables).
VM’s work. Virtual Box, VMWare, Parallels. Lots of choices there.
MS Office. Apples iWork apps (they’re functional).
And when all else fails, you can always drag the thing in to an Apple store. If you lose your machine, you can typically go to the Apple store (or Best Buy, or other stores) and buy a replacement. No need to hunt down parts or compatibility lists. Biggest weakness here would be memory. Since they only sell a few SKUs, chances are they’ll have your machine right there, vs some random HP machine the local office store is stocking.
But, if you can get by with a stock item. and if you have your Time Machine backup, you can be back up and running very quickly.
It’s difficult to appreciate this capability until you really need it.
Finally, it’s family friendly. So you get to develop on the machine that your family uses. When they call with a problem, you actually have a decent chance of being able to talk them through the issue and have them accomplish it vs running Linux at work and Windows at home.
Multimonitor has been a problem on OSX for a very long time and got worse until Mavericks: http://www.imore.com/os-x-mavericks-preview-multiple-displays
Your family friendliness statement is really weird. YOUR family might use Macs, but most don’t. If you would follow your logic a machine with Windows XP would be considered VERY family friendly still
If you compare a Mac with a similarly priced pc (not low-budget crap) they both pretty much work the same with their own quirks and benefits.
One of the reasons that Mac sales are slightly up lately must be because of developers. To develop any app for IOS you must use a Mac, even if you use crossdevelopment tools like Xamarin on Windows. Of course this means that a Mac is the best development machine because it is the only machine that allows you to develop for all platforms. In my opinion that also means that Apple is the most closed platform and because of ideological ideals I avoid them
Oh, the irony…
Indeed. I own a Dell Sputnik to develop, but for an iOS app development I need a Mac. My preferred SW stack for app development is Apache Cordova (a nice cross platform app envrionment) with Ripple as iOS simulator, but in order to release the software and to test it on a real iOS device, I have bought the cheapest Mac Mini available.
Although Apple has great HW and OSX is a nice environment, some Apple SW are not really that great. iTunes is just bloatware, the Finder was 10 year ago a nice file manager, but now it is outdated. Only Keynote is a decent component of the Apple iWork, Pages is only so and so, and Numbers is only a gimmick with poor functionality.
Mavericks didn’t fix milti-monitor support, it just turned it into a whole new bunch of problems. The multi-monitor support in Mavericks is a huge hack, and it shows. I turned it off again within an hour of turning it on.
Surely more is going on than itunes, aesthetics, and the mouse. If this was the only reason to get a mac, then the extra $1,000 you have to dish out for it would not be worth it.
For that reason I find the sentence, “Apple’s laptops are still the best PCs money can buy at the moment” totally confusing.
I think that it’s a fair statement as things currently stand. Sure, you do pay a premium for a rMBP, but for over 6 months now, a Retina MacBook Pro has had:
1) A retina screen
2) PCIe SSD
3) 802.11ac wifi
4) A non-sucky trackpad
You’d have a hard time finding a PC notebook that has all of the above right now. Apple notebooks are often ahead of the curve. They are usually among the first manufacturers to ship the latest Intel processors for example. This obviously depends on where we are in the update cycle, but generally, you can just purchase an Apple notebook and not have this nagging feeling that there might be another system out there that you might have overlooked. Apple gets most of the things right most of the time. A MacBook is a safe bet. Price excepted, you rarely think “this would be a great fit for me, but for…”.
If I really have to nitpick, I’d say that the keyboard travel could be better. The keyboards on the old PowerBooks were awesome. The current crop is good, but not great. I am also partial to ThinkPads because of their keyboards. I’d probably rock a ThinkPad if I didn’t like OS X.
As for iTunes, that’s a program that I reluctantly have to rely on. I would be pretty indifferent to it if it didn’t crash so often.
“despite their horribly outdated displays”
15″ MBP Retina here. Never seen another laptop with a display as good as this one.
You’ve run up against one of Thom’s pet peeves. He won’t be happy until we see a mainstream 11″ laptop screen with a 4K resolution, with perfectly scaled fonts and window decorations, and no need for a magnifying attachment.
In other words, he wants a unicorn, preferably the rainbow-farting kind.
A very strange comment Thom made about displays. At whatever price point or size, the display on an Apple laptop is one of it’s selling points, being at least an IPS panel (vs. TN on most PCs) and retina in the larger form factors. If you want to see a crappy display, look at ANY windows laptop. I guess maybe there are some IPS/HiDPI ultrabooks or higher priced PC laptops that I haven’t seen in reality. But if you go with Windows, you are stuck with their crappy multi-DPI-screen support, when you hook up an external monitor.
When did that happen? (I run a MacBook pro 2011 as my primary laptop machine.) Frankly, I can’t agree with people talking about the OSX command line being so great. It has the worst dependancy hell I’ve ever seen compared to Debian, Ubuntu or even Gentoo Linux. Packages always broken, out of date, hard to upgrade. Conflicts between BSD and GNU libraries. Really basic stuff that should have been fixed years ago. Try installing glib, or gtk onto a MacBook. It’s possible, but it’s actually a pain to do. Fink, macports, etc, all tried, packages horribly out of date, or just missing.
Now Linux on the other hand, has a working CLI, but a horrifically broken UI. It’s a shame that GNUstep never took off because then we’d have a system that’s basically OSX on the Linux CLI (try installing the NSMacintoshMenu style and an Apple theme. It doesn’t just look like OSX, it works like OSX too.). It’s pretty funny that ElementaryOS which is basically Linux made to look like Mac has taken off so strongly, yet GNUstep which actually uses the Apple APIs on Linux has been left to rot.
Edited 2014-05-23 01:26 UTC
I would say it depends on what your doing.
If you are not a developer, or your interest lies in running X-based software, while OSX can work it doesn’t work terribly well…
If you are and C/C++ developer who doesn’t want to use xcode, and you are primarily building for other platforms, OSX will probably suck hard.
On the other hand if you are doing development primarily in interpreted languages (Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java, etc.), OSX is actually pretty solid and very well supported (orders of magnitude better than Windows)
As far as the quality of the CLI itself, its just regular old bash. There is some weirdness due to OSX differences from other Unix, but for the most part I find it behaves pretty much identically to Linux. I run Total Terminal so I have the CLI on a hotkey and it window-shades down form the menubar – I find it extremely comfortable to use this way (especially in OSX because of the way window management works).
ps. Most everyone I know gave up on fink and macports long ago. Check out homebrew – for the most part it just works.
It’s a miserable experience because no one in their right mind would do that. Hence the packages aren’t updated. What’s the use-case here?
The use case is porting UNIX software, aka C based Linux GTK applications to Mac OSX. To initially compile against GTK, and slowly remove the dependancies on GTK/GL to port to an Aqua/Cocoa/AppleGL gui.
On this point I’ll also say, Windows sucks hard, but at least Cygwin is easily installable. Not that I’d ever use it for more than a toy. But it does install the packages. As horribly outdated as they are.
(I did try homebrew but it was complaining pretty hard about libraries possibly conflicting with old fink/macports cruft)
This is coming from someone who is trying to develop cross platform desktop applications. Not coding scripted/interpreted languages. I’m working with OpenGL, and C, potentially objective-C (IF I can make it play nice on Linux/OSX) I’m not particularly fussed with Windows support, if people want it, they can code it themselves.
From my perspective, the Apple hardware is great, the kernel is a masterpiece of engineering. The GUI/Userspace is brilliant. But the commandline sucks hard for a UNIX system, and I’ve had better on FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux.
Yeah… That was my “sucks hard” scenario. I feel for you.
You should be able to just do this to get glib/gtk
Of course you probably tried that already… I know gtk in particular often breaks – its seems to be kind of off and on as far as OSX goes.
On what planet has ElementaryOS taken off strongly? Certainly not on this planet Earth.
It’s in the top ten on distrowatch.com, above Arch Linux. That’s pretty damn impressive to me.
http://distrowatch.com/
Have to go with lenovo thinkpad x series. Better keyboard and real 3 button pads.
I’m not a developer, but here are my brief review comments on the Apple MacBooks and I’ve used at work:
One needs a new battery. Can’t just snap the old one out and a new one in, have to take apart the case. So no carrying an extra battery for a quick spare. Dumb design.
The screens are beautiful, but I hate the keyboards. Miserably poor tactile feedback. I don’t have one handy at the moment to check, but their keyboards feel cramped too, smaller than Dell Latitude or Lenovo that I’m accustomed to. It may be a visual thing though, with the bezels around all of the keys.
No standard connectors, have to buy Apple-brand cable adapters for everything. SCAM.
No optical drives = Deal-breaker.
No standard connectors? Come off it. I have a nice USB 3 blu-ray drive sat underneath my laptop stand and plugged into my laptop. I have a 28″ monitor plugged into the HDMI port. Seems like standard ports to me.
Ethernet, rs232, vga…
My Latitude has all of those. Even the low-budget Eeepc has VGA and ethernet. For connecting to monitors and televisions found in the “wild”, VGA is more common than HDMI.
I don’t even think the Macs have an SD card slot. The small model doesn’t, the larger model might. The Eeepc has an SD slot.
Edited 2014-05-23 07:16 UTC
RS232 is useful for some people but its use cases are hardly mainstream these days. You’re average computer or even developer joe will have no use for it, and there are USB adapters.
Agreed on the ethernet.
VGA though? It needs to die, and quick.
Modern screens I’ve used have connectors for both HDMI and VGA. Older screens have only VGA.
For the time being at least, VGA is the most universal video cable format.
It’s the most universal, but also very shitty in any decent resolution. It’s a crime against your eyes at anything above 1280×1024. It. Needs. To. Die.
Buy better cables, my monitors look fine up 1600 x 1200 and one monitor is crisp and clear at 1920 x 1200 but only that one monitor.
Good for you, but it will never beat a digital connection in image quality on the same hardware.
While I don’t disagree that the lack of an Ethernet port is annoying, and that Thunderbolt devices are eye-watteringly expensive, who cares about RS232 on a laptop?
I use it on a fairly regular basis (to log in to PDU & switch consoles) and even I don’t care. I just bought a £5 USB -> Serial adaptor, complete with ubiquitous PL2303 chip in it.
Work related, mostly. All of our comm stuff, even programming brand new modems, is serial port rs232.
Not many new consumer items use serial port connections; USB has become the standard, thankfully. But there are a lot of old devices still in use. Personally, I use it for a Garmin GPS and a TI calculator.
I have used the USB-serial adapters. They work well but do require special drivers installed.
13″ airs have SD cards, as do the mbp and rbmp
I’ll have to check again. Wouldn’t be the first time I was mistaken about something.
huh? what’s an optical drive for? I haven’t had a machine with one in it for i think 5 years now. At work I keep a dual usb in the cabinet that gets use very rarely, funny mostly for doing windows installs. At home I have a single plug usb dvd which I’ve only ever used to rip media. Some gives/sends me a software DVD my first thought always is: “how quaint”. Then the cursing as I have to go dig around to find the usb dvd drive.
Ripping CDs to create mp3 files. Gaming. Movies. Installing software. Burning CDs and DVDs. Accessing archived files. Playing music. Just about everything I use a computer for…
I don’t expect an optical drive on a lightweight $300 travel netbook. But on a $2,000 workstation laptop? Ridiculous to not have it.
bnolsen,
Actually they can still prove useful.
My parents bought a laptop without a DVD drive and I ended up needing to buy them an external DVD drive to install software they needed. The external drive is much clunkier than an internal drive would have been, and much less portable. It doesn’t need to come out often, but I find it lame to require external accessories.
DVDs are nice to have while we’re on long road trips. Not everyone has access to expensive mobile broadband packages needed for streaming (ie netflix). And unfortunately most streaming services are DRM encumbered with media that cannot be saved for later viewing. This leaves DVDs as the most practical way of obtaining DRM-free media that can be used anywhere without restriction (owing to the ineffectiveness of DVDCSS).
Even commercial services like netflix have a much broader DVD collection than streaming collection. The public library’s media collection requires a DVD player too. We purchased a collection of French Children’s Shows for our kids to watch, which don’t air locally and are only available to purchase as DVDs.
I don’t want to make too huge a fuss over it, we can get by without DVDs, but I thought it’d be worth pointing out that there’s still a lot of media out there only available on DVDs.
Heck, most of the software I use, both at work and home, is distributed on CDs. In fact buy any consumer device and the included software is likely on a CD. Nikon, Canon, Texas Instruments, HP, Epson…
So… you just ousted yourself as being from France originally? Or maybe Canada/Quebec?
;p
I love Apple gear, but:
No. Simply, no.
Beyond the hardware aspect, this article give a good pointer about why so many things go the wrong way in the Linux/FOSS world these days: a lot of (paid) developers who don’t like and don’t understand Linux, they prefer to use something different. Thus, they try to morph Linux into something to their liking, so we end with GNOME 3, Systemd and so on. Their are f*cking our Linux desktop experience.
My wife and myself use Linux as default system since 1994. I use UNIX since 1989.
My desktop history
* OpenView
* Motif (incl. CDE, 4DWM)
our common
* FVWM
* AfterStep
* Gnome2
* Gnome3
and we both like Gnome3 very much.
pica
Edited 2014-05-23 09:17 UTC
Used twm or whatever was on the IBM rt’s at school and whatever apollo workstations had. NextStep was just okay but something rubbed me wrong about it. First job ran OpenLook, the olvwm virtual desktop. Had to struggle to get CDE to do the things I really liked about olvwm.
For work I’ve settled with windowmaker, for laptops, etc xfce. Both gnome and kde really bother me.
Perhaps I’m not able to articulate it properly but I think I prefer window managers that get the hell out of my way and let me work on my applications most efficiently. xfce can be somewhat irritating but both kde and gnome are pretty upsetting to me.
I just can talk about Gnome.
Well, where to start.
OK, Gnome 1 — I startet with 1.4 — and Gnome 2 were pretty much desktops in the line of Motif, CDE. Also very similar to Windows 95 and successors.
Gnome 3 is a completely different beast. The first two weeks of using it, I hated it. Yes, I hated my now absolute favorite desktop. But I believed — more exact I somehow felt — it’s a layer 8 problem. So I investigated further and further. And I week later I started to appreciate Gnome 3. Another week later I started to like it. Now it is my favorite desktop.
So what was my problem with Gnome 3. Simply Gnome 3 is different. Gnome 3 is more like a work bench with a cupboard attached like I desktop. The objects are not visible all the time. You have to open the cupboard to see them. As a result using Gnome 3 I have a clean workbench instead of a cluttered desktop.
Greetings,
pica
No-one, absolutely no-one, uses a Mac because they want to use iTunes.
according to
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/01/23/apple-mac-q1-2014/
millions of Macs are sold each quarter.
Have you personally asked every single Apple Mac user to be that sure?
You know
Greetings,
pica
Touché
Agreed, I used it once because I had to use it to sync with my iPad. It was a painful and confusing process. As for music, I hate curating lists of my own tracks so I stream, 100%. Guess I could check out iTunes radio, but Apple is so far behind the curve on steaming.
even if Windows 8.1 lacks a lot of features I am used to use.
* Virtual desktops and
* arrange windows
are the most painfull missing features for me.
But Windows IMHO is the only choice doing .NET or Microsoft Office developments. Simply, most of my customers use Windows as desktop and the deliveries must work on Windows. On the server side Linux clearly dominates at my customers computing centres.
Apple OSX is not used by any of my customers, but Apple iOS, Android and even Windows Phone are used.
pica
I never had a problem with arranging windows. Mostly I just need to “snap” them with WinKey+Left, WinKey+Right and min/max/hide-all which is all very easy. I NEVER place windows pixelperfect next/above each other
I hate virtual Desktops since I used them in the Windows 98 era, but virtuawin (http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/) is tiny and works well for my wife
I like the look of apple hardware, but I don’t like the culture behind it (well mostly OSX), like I like Visual studio but don’t like the heavy handed help it provide.
Of course nobody want to struggle with making what everyone think would be basic to work, but as developer I hate trading my motivation to tweak for convenience.
Where I work right now Apple is #1 on laptops, tablets, and phones, and #2 on desktops.
We use C# and ASP.NET.
Quite interesting, which C#/.NET IDE do you use?
I am not aware of a C#/.NET IDE for Mac OS X. Well, there is Mono Develop, but that is no C#/.Net IDE.
Or are you using Windows?
pica
Windows.
https://www.privacyinternational.org/blog/what-does-gchq-know-about-…
might be of interest to you as a MacBook user.
pica
Absolutely NOT. This applies to every single modern PC. And pretty much every modern electronic appliance.
Too bad I can’t vote you down for the usual anti-Apple propaganda.
no, I am not anti-Apple and I like my iPod.
When I got my Sony Pro 13 (Jan ’14) I also evaluated the Apple AirBook, but that laptop was not available with a matte, non-glare screen. Overall build quality of the Apple AirBook is fine and it also would have been significally cheaper.
But, I dislike glare screens. This week I prepared a Compaq 15,6″ AMD A4-5000 based laptop with glare screen laptop for my father. After just 2 hours updating, (un-)installing, configuring, … that box I felt my eyes hurt.
pica
Edited 2014-05-24 15:01 UTC
OS X works great, except when it doesn’t:
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-23/osx-10.9.3-is-toxic.htm…
Too bad there aren’t alternative OS X’s to use.