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Apple's laptops are still the best PCs money can buy at the moment (despite their horribly outdated displays).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.
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Member since:2006-10-20
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 As horribly outdated as they are.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.
Member since:2006-01-25
Yeah... That was my "sucks hard" scenario. I feel for you.
You should be able to just do this to get glib/gtk
brew install glib cairo 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.
Member since:
2005-09-21
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?