“A little more than an year ago I wrote my rant post The Linux Desktop Experience is Killing Linux on the Desktop and for the first time in 8 years I wasn’t a desktop Linux user anymore. I spent about a month wrestling with Windows 7, but let’s face it – Windows is ill suited for professional Ruby programmers like me (and it’s ill suited for most programmers, except maybe Java & .Net I guess). Anyways, it was never my intention to stick with Windows – I was just doing my Mac due diligence. Now with 1+ year of OSX usage I’d like to share a few things about my experience thus far with you.”
There is nothing in the article that is objectively true. Just a bunch of generalizations to make the author feel good about the supposed advantages of his new OS.
I can´t stand when people make gross generalizations about the technical virtues of any platform. To me, nothing beats KDE as a great workstation, entertainment platform and development platform. Should I preach this from the rooftops on the hopes that somebody will follow me down the same path?
Paying a bunch of money for overprized hardware will make you do JUST THAT. People need to rationalize past behaviour by telling themselves how much better off they are because of said behavior, when, perhaps, objetively, the world is not as black and white.
I will say one thing which is an objective truth: I will not give any of my hard-earned money to a company run by assholes who believe in software patents and use litigation to kill competition.
Edited 2012-09-09 23:49 UTC
I thought that the article was fairly balanced. He mentioned a bunch of things that he liked, a bunch of things that he found OK, and a bunch of things that he didn’t like.
These type of articles are bound to be subjective of course. They are meant to be, since the author is writing about his experiences.
You are reading way too much into the author’s motives. Assigning intent is a slippery slope. I could say that you don’t like the author’s conclusions, and thus you rationalise that the author must be rationalising his choices because he spent a lot on Apple hardware. Sounds ridiculous?
There’s no need to reel out the whole “overpriced hardware” and “assholes” lines. Your “objective truth” sounds way more black and white than the article.
I absolutely agree with OP.
These types of articles are too subjective and are intended to make the user feel better with whatever he/she choose.
You don’t need to preach anything when everything is ok.
People tend to forgot that their opinion doesn’t really matter. What matters most is what is objective. Not everything is subjective, some things are intersubjective at least. We can surely say, that Apple hardware is overpriced. No matter how much you earn, it doesn’t change that fact. We could say many other things, but that’s not a place for it.
It’s not about assigning intent, humans simply have a very hard time disconnecting from various “motives” – just how our brains are wired up.
Consider http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-wine-011608.html or audiophile ~placebo. Or, WRT ~computers, http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mouse_vs._keyboard/index.html and how, despite numerous “experts” praising trackpoints, actual research seems to suggest that touchpads are in fact superior (some examples linked in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick#Comparison_with_touchpa… & http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=18522893 external link; conversely, note how the views and links supportive of trackpoint seem to be “subjective opinion” in character; and personally I even do like trackpoints, I’m used to the concept, but…)
The author shared his own personal experience. What he calls advantages are advantages in his view, not “supposed” ones. The article didn’t come across as the author just saying things to make himself feel good about switching. To the contrary, he made it clear it wasn’t painless and there are things he misses about linux.
Are you aware of all the generalizations you’ve made in your post? It’s like a guy saying he hates broccoli, then eating a whole plate of it.
He is clearly having a far better desktop experience with OSX than he ever did with linux. If he is telling himself anything, it’s probably “I’m glad I switched”.
He is no more wrong for his apparent love for OSX than you are for your apparent love for linux KDE. Although I’m no OSX fan, I do have to side with the author. IMO linux is complete trash for a desktop environment, with OSX and Windows shitting all over it.
Is it OSX you hate or just anything Apple-related? Being so emotionally attached to a company seems like a massive waste to me but hey, if that’s what turns your crank….
I think you are mostly right, but I don’t see how his last point isn’t valid. Two things:
1. Have you ever heard the word ‘boycott’? It is a perfectly valid way of action against immoral companies.
2. Isn’t Apple all about emotional attachment anyway?…
well when you put it that way, it almost seems like the linux desktop doesn’t suck! but it still does.
You are right dude.
No, because it’s not true: Xfce is better than KDE. Just kidding.
I fully agree with everything you said in your post. You’ve brought up some excellent points, very well said.
I’m also using KDE, although admittedly it’s not my primary choice for one major reason: it’s a bit to heavy on resources (especially memory) for my computer and my actual usage. I was running CrunchBang (with OpenBox) but when openSUSE 12.2 was released, all those new versions of programs were just irresistible. I’ll probably continue using it until the swapping starts driving me nuts (it’s already getting annoying–having only 1GB RAM really sucks).
I’ll tell you this: I’ve switched to OS X a couple of years ago as well and I still think to this day it was the right choice for me. And no, I have not spent one penny on Apple hardware so I don’t need to rationalize anything. Also I don’t need to feel good about my choice. If I don’t like an OS I just search for another one, that’s how I ended up with OS X anyway. As I never particularly liked Windows I used to have a cycle of Linux tryouts. Maybe twice or 3 times per year I would try several Linux distros as my main computer, but I’ve always reverted to Windows because I just couldn’t do my work efficiently or in some instances couldn’t do it at all on Linux. So about 2 years ago I tried OS X and it stayed.
It simply works for me. I develop, run and administer my own web sites, so I use the computer to mainly do PHP development, administer Linux servers, web-design and also some occasional DTP, photo and video editing. At the end of the day I need to run a business and after several years of trial and error I’ve came to the conclusion that OS X is the best OS for my particular business.
I don’t see the author of the original article preaching anything, he’s just sharing his experience with the goods and the bads, that’s all. I think the article is truthful and if anybody learns anything from it then it was worth publishing. On the other hand your comment sounds like rant blinded by hate.
So the guy changed from some Linux distro to OSX and is happy about it. I don’t necessarily agree but good for him.
This is news-worthy exactly how?
It’s not just a news site; also analysis. Some people are ignorant – me for example. I’ve never touched an Apple device, but i’m a bit curious. There’s plenty of stuff out there, but I’m more interested in an article like this which is not fan fiction or rabid rant, just someone who once liked linux but prefers osx.
There’s way too much stuff to sort through on the web – I don’t always want the hottest news, just the more interesting stuff even if it’s ancient or a personal experience.
“but i’m a bit curious”
So you are iCurious…
nice one 🙂
I agree with you in principle, but I can’t help thinking that Thom would have been damned if he did post this and damned if he didn’t (given how much criticism he gets for his Apple patent rants)
Nah, I doubt it. If he hadn’t posted it no-one would have known or cared about that blog post.
How would you know that? can you predict unposted articles?
Actually yes; they show up in the submit news page: http://www.osnews.com/submit
But that wasn’t what I meant. I was more referring to the submitter whining on about his pro-OS X articles being excluded from selection due to editorial bias.
Apple’s Video layer. That alone is better than anything on windows, Linux, or BSD land. OSX has a lot of things which make it nice, but for me it’s two things, the Video layer, and the single GUI API that Apple basically forces you to use. It’s nice having all my apps look the same.
Apps on mac look the same? really? Have you tried facetime, QuickTime Player, Contacts, Calendar, oh, even App Store? They are all Apple apps, and they all look different. Add to the pack 3rd party apps like Chrome etc, oh my!
I don’t use chrome, and all those other apps fit into Apple’s desktop metaphors. At the end of the day I can always look to the top apple menu for 99% of functionality and application preferences are always in the Preferences area. Linux could easily do the same if people supported gnustep instead of gnome and KDE. Gnome’s control center area basically rips off apple’s system preferences area anyway now. They could have just used the same api and been more compatible/saved time reinventing the wheel.
Edited 2012-09-10 02:35 UTC
de Icaza said they looked at GNUstep and decided it was “too complicated” — so they invented GObject
*facepalm*
Actually at the time Miguel preferred C as programming language and has always had a sweet spot for Microsoft technologies.
No way he would support adopting GNUStep.
Meanwhile, regarding video & GUI on OSX, Final Cut Pro (an Apple app…) doesn’t fit very well, is a resource hog (Sony Vegas is certainly much snappier), and I’ve never been on an official FCP presentation at which it wouldn’t crash at least once…
It’s interesting that he mentions being impressed about OSX having Emacs-style key bindings by default. In Windows, you can use AutoHotKey to define whatever key bindings you want, in any app you want. In fact, I use it to map the same shortcut keys for every app I use, so I never have to memorize different shortcut keys for different apps
Well, that’s just one of the many things it does. If I didn’t have this in OSX (or Linux), it would be a deal breaker for sure.
OK then here is my version:
I used OSX in 2009 for about 2 weeks straight. Loaded all the software I needed to work (I used it for work purposes so actually used it for 10 days). I couldn’t get comfortable with it and went back to Ubuntu with KDE4. Not worth writing a blog about it. Big deal.
I’ve been using *nix on the desktop over 15 years, since sometime in 95 I think. For me it was Linux back then. My favorite window manager by far for many years was WindowMaker. It was lean, fast, and did what I wanted.
I’ve also run DOS, Windows (since 3.0), and OS/2. It’s too bad what happened to OS/2 because that was a great system back then. It offered “virtualization” for DOS “machines” – how many multi-line BBS were run on OS/2 on a single machine? I know I ran up to 4 lines at one point.
I do many things, programming, sysadmin, databases, not to mention working with spreadsheets and documents, graphics, and so on. I don’t play a lot of games.
I switched to Mac in 2009. Personally I think Snow Leopard was the best general purpose Mac OS. I say that having both Lion and Mountain Lion on my two machines – I’m not a fan of most of the iOSification that Mac OS X has undergone. At the time I switched to Mac my primary desktop was OpenSolaris or Solaris 10 running Gnome.
I switched to Solaris and OpenSolaris after getting burned by Ubuntu instabilities one too many times, especially on new releases. The last truly stable Ubuntu system I remember using was probably a 2007 or maybe 2008 system. Before Ubuntu I ran SUSE/OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Slackware, and others I forget now.
I’ve tried KDE off an on over the years but never have been able to develop a taste for it. For some people it’s great, however it’s not for me. Likewise I don’t like the new Gnome interface either, though the work done by Linux Mint team is quite impressive (even if it is based on Ubuntu).
My point for all of this background is to highlight some of what I’ve seen and done over the years.
Right now I use Mac mostly, after that I use Windows and OpenIndiana, an OpenSolaris fork after Oracle took their (acquired) ball back.
My reason for a Mac as primary is quite simply efficiency. Other than the lack of focus-follows-mouse, the UI works, does what I need, and I’m not having to tweak things or figure out work arounds to get something to work. [Sadly, some of this is changing as Mac OS becomes more like iOS, so I’m already scouting for my next “primary” system/interface (time to take WindowMaker for a spin again). Not to mention I’m not a fan of Apple’s scorched earth campaign and the addition of barbed-razor-wire on their already walled garden mentality.]
The Mac offers me access to most of the programs and/or tools that I need, and most importantly is *nix under the hood (unlike Windows). I can sit down and go immediately to the task or job I need to work on, without the various idiosyncrasies I’ve experienced in other *nix desktop environments.
The Mac was, for me at least, the very first environment where I did not have to worry about the OS or system. I could just sit down and work. Of course, controlling hardware and software makes that easier for Apple than just about anything else. Still, it’s a powerful feature that doesn’t appear on any box.
I also find the hardware above par too. And the so-called Apple tax is negligible (unless you buy memory/drive upgrades from Apple), though I’m only looking at the laptop line, specifically the MacBook Pros. My previous laptop was a Lenovo T61p, 1920x12x0 (1200 or 1250) display and 4 gb of memory. It was purchased in 2007 or 2008 for about $2200 (with a big chunk of that from the high resolution display). [It’s now sporting a 500 gb hybrid drive and 8 gb RAM and is my secondary machine, still going strong.] I wanted another 1920×1200 display, but NO ONE offers that, the best you you find in 15″ is 1920×1080. When I was pricing systems, the MacBook Pro and the comparable Lenovo machines were both in the same ballpark. In the end I was able to save several hundred by getting a refurbed model from Apple, cheaper than the Lenovo would have been.
Add all of that up, and the Mac has been more cost effective and offered more value for my needs than the alternatives. I also have less “unbillable” time dealing with “systems” issues from the Apple hw and Mac OS than I typically had with Linux, and especially Windows. Again, another win for the Mac.
Is it the best choice for everyone? No, and I wouldn’t pretend it would be. I can just see the author’s point about why he’s enjoying the switch from Linux to Mac. His reasons means something for him, and for his needs that’s all that matters.
Edited 2012-09-10 01:22 UTC
OS/2 didn’t fit to its times and expectations of customers, with hardware requirements and their costs.*
Plus, deep down, OS/2 was about IBM desiring to wrestle back the control over the PC – so of course the numerous OEMs giving us inexpensive powerful PCs didn’t go for it, Gang of Nine style, and we should be glad that they made OS/2 fail. Imagine what would have been if IBM got their way…
Windows was likely the most optimal choice ( http://www.osnews.com/thread?522221 ), still largely is.
*BTW costs – how you brushed aside the issue of “Apple tax”, with another quite high-priced systems, misses that most people simply don’t want to pay for and don’t need such machines…
Moreover: the two remaining kinda-power-starved common usage scenarios, games and video ~editing, work better on PCs than on Macs – more optimised under Windows, hence working fine on typical low-cost PCs (Steam games generally get ~50% of FPS under OSX, on the same hardware – hence requiring more modest under Win for comparable performance; as for video editing, http://eugenia.queru.com/2009/04/11/stay-the-fuck-away-from-imovief… gives an idea, plus the generally moderate requirements of Vegas in particular – it runs fine basically on any typical contemporary laptop, is quite popular with mobile reporting and documentaries because of that)
Why do people use fonts as an example that OS X is better? Don’t fonts run on pretty much any system you install them on? Is there some kind of difference between font rendering?
Bytecode hinting, probably. I used OSX once – an old PowerPC version, mind – and the fonts looked quite good.
Mind, my experience is that font rendering varies a lot from monitor to monitor. For instance, on most laptops I’ve used, Linux renders much better than Windows ClearType; while on my 1280×1024 desktop monitor, Windows renders fonts more readable than Linux. I know there are lots of people whining about fonts on whatever OS compared to whatever other OS, but at this point I believe they all do a pretty good job of it.
You may find this interesting:
http://www.infinality.net/blog/infinality-freetype-patches/
I am using these patches on Gentoo (they’re in the Portage tree, keyword masked) and my font rendering is superb. I prefer my settings to what is default on OSX.
Most operating systems render fonts by aligning character features on screen pixel boundaries for crisper rendering, slightly altering character shape in the process.
OS X doesn’t, and instead resorts to heavy antialiasing to follow the true character shape more exactly. This gives its font rendering engine a characteristic blurry look.
In the end, deciding which one is better is really a matter of taste, as comparative studies have ultimately shown that people prefer the font rendering methodology used by their main OS. It can be argued that the OS X way is less readable, especially on lower-res screens, but more pleasant-looking and typographically accurate.
This is not Linux’s fault if GNOME/KDE sucks.
I have been using Ubuntu for more than 5 years. I have switched from using GNOME to xmonad during the last two years and I can never be happier.
Also nothing make you lazier than using apt-get install whatever.
Somewhat disagree. Gnome and KDE are mere shadows of their former selves, and DIY desktops can work, but the DIY approach is really not for everyone.
Edit: Xfce is a decent alternative at this point IMO, LXDE much less so. But for better or (probably much) worse, Gnome and KDE (and Unity, bleh) are the public faces of Linux.
Edited 2012-09-10 04:33 UTC
I switched from Linux to OS X in 2005. It was an iMac G5 running Panther (10.3).
To be honest it was a bit of a disappointment. It wasn’t as fast as I hoped it to be, the email client didn’t support IMAP subfolders, the browser was crappy, like were most applications.
So I downloaded Firefox, used mutt and slrn in a terminal window ssh’ing to my Linux server while trying to find acceptable native replacements.
Things changed with Tiger (10.4) though and from then on things only got better.
What I do miss is a nice and clear text console. When doing geeky stuff in Linux I liked to switch from the GUI to the CLI, not in a terminal window but the real text console.
What I don’t miss about Linux is all the time spend fixing stuff, making things work. Well, sometimes this was fun and very educational, but when you become a married working father you don’t have too much spare time.
My first distro was SuSE, then Red Hat for a long time, back to SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu.
Really? For me, Tiger was the high-point of OS X. It got steadily dumbed-down and bloated after that.
Yes, I can understand why you feel that way and more people have this same opinion.
For me Tiger also holds a special place. It was solid and no nonsense.
Each time I upgrade to a new OS X version I’m
disappointed at first, but after a while I start to get used to it. When I use a Mac with an older version of OS X I realise I’m missing features I got used to.
But I agree Tiger was solid and newer version of OS X seem less “whole”, some things feel like add-ons or plugins.
I stopped when something was “definitely infinitely better” — if I wanted hyperbole I’d become a retard and talk to myself
The biggest advantage of the GNU desktop is that it is free. It may not matter to you right now but in the long run you will be hurt by OS X. Your system will be deprecated, you will be forced to pay and upgrade, they will spy on you and sell your data. They will try to turn your desktop into money for them, sooner or later.
There is nothing to be had for free.
Developers need to eat you know?
There is a huge difference between developers talking directly to their customers, feeding themselves, their family, living an opulent life with even lot of extra money to waste and greedy parasites pilling up 100 billion dollars and trolling the government, the other mega corporations and the people to get more, more and more. This is not the same.
In the first case, the deal is simple for you. You pay for a developer and you get the software with the source. You can pay another developer to modify it and you can distribute it, and the source is free from anti users features, as guaranteed by the source.
In the later case, you pay a greedy mega corporation that will have to make more money next year than they did this year. They keep the source to them and give you a license to use the software if you bow to their terms. They they reserve the right to deprecate your software, modify it, add more anti user features and charge you when they want. And this not a conspiracy theory, this is written black on white and this is precisely the way they have played since the beginning
Not everyone that sells software for a living is an evil corporation.
Sure, but Apple is and Apple is the one selling licenses to OS X (not the software, the license)
I re-read your comment and it can be applied to any company selling software for a living in the desktop area, and to most of the companies selling software in the server side as well.
The number of open source companies that are able to pay the bills every month out support contracts is minimal.
With the risk of sounding like a broken record. Free isn’t solely gratis. It also has the long forgotten meaning of having no strings attached. While truly gratis or truly unencumbered doesn’t exist in our universe, Free Software does come close.
On another note, just because you can get something without paying, it doesn’t mean you categorically should. Donating to the projects you care about goes a long way.
…why is windows, or any other OS for that matter, not good for developing in Ruby? Where I work our desktops are all Windows, and we have written a few ruby apps. It’s not like Ruby requires anything special… a decent syntax editor and that’s about it. Eclipse handles Ruby, Sublime Text, Ultra Edit… etc…
Typical OS bashing.
I’m guessing it’s because a lot of Ruby stuff is based on cli and the Windows console is, well, less than good.
I don’t think stuff like RVM (which is the only sane way of using ruby/rails) and Capistrano even run on Windows.
he had me until “One app in particular – spotlight, blew me off the water, especially after having dealt on Linux with crappy clones like beagle (…)”
I dunno, a year ago? beagle? wow. no, just no.
There’s a lot to talk about, there’s the dysphoria that Canonical is doing something about (i.e leveraging ubuntu the operating system, instead of ubuntu the linux distribution consisting of random allotment of random software)
There’s the whole “how do I make an app, where’s the SDK?”
There’s also issues concerning the inherent attitude when approaching OSS projects, not everyone knows of the aspects of being an good OSS komrade.
but beagle? commes de fuck down to reality.
I tried Tracker once and it was even worse than Beagle. It slowed down the system more during indexing and was slower to query.
What Linux desktop search did you have in mind that he should have been using instead of Beagle?
…is the sticker price shock you get. Whilst the cost of Mac OS X upgrades of the OS itself are sensible, the initial hardware price is not and “officially” (Hackintoshes aside) you aren’t allowed to run Mac OS X on anything other than very, very expensive Apple kit. Here in the UK, the Apple store is ludicrously priced – about double the price for equivalent Windows-running hardware.
One of the major advantages Linux has, IMHO, is that it runs on virtually everything from embdedded systems, phones, tablets, DVRs/set top boxes, netbooks, laptops, desktops, servers and mainframes whereas Mac OS X and iOS only run on Apple hardware. It’s reckoned in a few years, Android will overtake Windows as the world’s #1 OS, so Linux will actually be the most popular OS in the world for the first time ever 🙂
Well, the price of OSX development is specifically hidden also in hardware costs – low upfront price of upgrades is largely just a trick so that Apple is able to retire older versions quicker (which also forces a bit those who would prefer to not upgrade – 3rd party software tends to quickly abandon older version of Apple OS)
To be fair, Apple hardware covers most of those categories… (covered virtually all as long as Xserve were around; I think some people even made ~supercomputer clusters out of them; and remember that Linux doesn’t really run natively on mainframes, they are built sort of around their own hypervisor, wits OSes running as a sort of virtual machines)
Though, curiously, Apple routers and/or NAS devices are running NetBSD, IIRC.
Edited 2012-09-17 00:08 UTC
is Finder. It’s a fscking mess. There is no option to have folders on top and get the same view settings in every new window (it might as well be using random function to set that option). The thing drives me crazy and there are no serious alternatives that I know of (except for that Total Finder hack that at least gets the folders right).
The folders on top i don’t know, but the default view can be get by simply setting the default view in either / or ~ . Not sure if either or both but as long as you set both of these places in your preferred view finder will stick to it after.
But i agree with you, Finder could need some love on its shortcomings.
Edited 2012-09-10 11:52 UTC
Just tried it. Seems to work for the folders that have no prior preferences set all others stay as they are, a “Apply to all folders” button would be helpful. Thanks for the advice anyway
i assume you tried “view” > “view options” > “always open in list/column/icon view” ?
also, the terminal command on this <a href=”https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2689512?start=0&tstart=0“&… should help you.
Arrange by/Sort by Kind. Folders are now “on top.”
Kind of gets the job done, true but it’s not really a full solution (as i’ve mentioned TotalFinder manages to do it better but it costs 18$).
Interesting post. I liked his conclusion; he basically says “Don’t be a zealot, use whatever OS works best for you, and OSX works best for me”. Reasonable enough. The post is mainly based on opinions and personal experience, which is fine, given his conclusion.
He mentions good stability on OSX, good stability on Linux desktops, and terrible stability on Linux laptops. Personally, I’ve never used OSX; I use Linux full time on my computers. My experience several years ago with Linux on a desktop was absolutely horrible stability, with frequent X server crashes that made me lose my work. Likewise, about two years ago I had major stability issues with Xorg on two Linux laptops in the then-latest batch of common Linux distros. Recently, on those same laptops, I’ve had excellent overall Xorg stability during the past year. So your mileage on Linux desktop stability will definitely vary depending on your hardware and the distro you choose. Stability is definitely no longer a reason to switch from Windows to Linux, because for years now Windows has been rock solid in terms of system stability.
The original poster mentions that he hates the lack of a package manager in OSX. In my personal case, I’m the exact opposite. I hate package managers in Linux. I hate dependencies. I hate having to add a new repository and refresh the repository just to install a new version of a given program. I hate not being able to easily transfer programs I have download on one Linux machine to another Linux machine to avoid re-downloading everything. I hate not being able to share programs and backup my download programs on a USB stick. I would love to manage software with nice, tidy, packages that contain the whole program with all of its dependencies and libraries compressed into one single file. Just like OSX.
Yes, I know it’s great to be able to update all your programs with one click. But I still hate package managers. 
That being said, I personally value my freedom to do what I want with my computer, and I hate Apple’s corporate culture and the way they treat their clients. So, Linux for me, with all of its imperfections.
This article pushed me that last extra step to drop Linux for OS X. I had been contemplating it for some time. As much as I love the control and the hackability, there’s always something that niggles one about desktop Linux. In my case, it was the poor support for my Mac’s wifi card, which would choke when there are a lot of networks nearby.
Given that I have a Mac to begin with, the switch to OS X was painless =)
“…for most programmers”
Sorry, what?
You can program just about anything through Windows, with a breath-taking array of tools (commercial and free) at your disposal.
I say this as a user of many platforms.
Please justify such a comment!
There is a particular project I had the misfortune of having to build in Windows.
Tracking down and installing the required dependencies in Arch Linux was as simple as typing:
pacman -S git openal glew boost-libs freetype2 devil libvorbis sdl libxcursor curl shared-mime-info desktop-file-utils boost cmake zip xz p7zip python2 java-environment
git clone <project-url>
In Windows however, I had to search for, download, install and configure the dependencies one-by-one. What took 5 minutes in Linux took all day in Windows.
Also, Windows lacks a decent terminal emulator and text editor. It’s fine if you like IDEs, but doesn’t really support a vim+zsh style workflow.
Windows is no different than other commercial operating systems.
Linux is one of the few cases where package management real works nicely, assuming all you need for your work is available as package.
OSX also has developer-friendly package managers (fink, homebrew…), though they are not officially supported. And if you want to nitpick, pretty much any BSD has them too.
Thus, I tend to agree with the OP that Windows is indeed weak on this front as compared to competition.
Try to find there user software related packages, instead of the typical vi, gcc, gimp and friends.
There many more operating systems out there than Linux, OSX and Windows. Sadly Windows happens to be much better than many of them.
Except Windows sucks balls with POSIX semantics while most other operating systems, commercial or not, doesn’t. This makes a big difference for most things that aren’t .Net or Java. Sure, you can do it but it’s not much fun. I’ve done Python on Windows and I’d rather not.
Don’t even get me started on the fun that is fskcing around with cygwin or even trying to build stuff from source. Breeze on Linux/BSD, not so much on Windows.
It works really well on BSD’s too.
Would be easier if people actually wrote portable software 😉
There are commercial operating systems that are even less compliant with POSIX than Windows is.
It would help if people would write portable code to start with, instead of trying to run POSIX everywhere.
Well I am presuming we’re talking about mainstream stuff here, not niche operating systems with even smaller market share than Linux/BSD.
POSIX is portable to pretty much every mainstream OS except Windows. Heck, the purpose of POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) is to be portable and it’s not exactly difficult to implement. MS just don’t care enough to do it even remotely well.
Edited 2012-09-12 03:30 UTC
Except when the OS decides to interpret what POSIX says in another way. Ever managed to make a serious POSIX application work across Mac OS X, DG-UX, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, BSD and GNU/Linux without a single #ifdef?
If you add the POSIX compatibility layer via the “Add/Remove features” panel Windows ends up also having quite some compatibility.
As for doing it well, it does not bring them money, so why should they care?
If Apple had decided otherwise and taken BeOS as their new Mac OS X, you would also be bashing Mac OS X POSIX compatibility.
Because they’re losing users and developers to OSX?
Alternatively, they could gain developers and users from *nix and OSX if they had better support.
Are they?
I work for customers that are part of Fortune 500 companies, and this year was the first we ever had to worry about the iPad, nothing else from Apple.
Most of our projects are always done for Windows and UNIX systems anyway, with a few projects which may use less known systems like OS/400.
The only Mac OS X system I saw being carried around were by sales guys, which don’t care a dime about its UNIX roots.
If the question was the same as here, “why do you say Apple is not for programmers?”, then yes.
Any operating system is for programmers, because programmers should work on the operating systems the customers want solutions developed for.
It’s not really fair to expect that, considering probably most OS in use are ~embedded…
I briefly considered trying to get a GTK/OpenGL application to work on Windows. In theory that should have been easy, since GTK and OpenGL are supposed to be portable, and I wasn’t doing anything OS-specific.
Windows POSIX layer put a stop to that pretty quickly. I used popen (which Window’s POSIX compatibility layer includes) to write frames of video out to an external process, but on Linux that required that I handle SIGPIPE, and Windows’ emulation of POSIX signal handling was woefully incomplete. Code that worked fine on Linux wouldn’t build against Windows’ implementations of signal (I think Windows didn’t even define SIGPIPE as a constant).
And what system interface should we write this portable code against? A lot of the APIs present in POSIX are pretty lean and pretty basic; the POSIX file API has, what, eleven major entry points*? You’re either saying that people shouldn’t open files, handle strings or allocate memory in “portable code”, or you’re saying that there’s some smaller, simpler, more portable API than POSIX that we should be using.
* fopen, fclose, fread, fwrite, fprintf, fscanf, fgets, fgetc, fputc, ftell, fseek; yes, there are obviously more, but those eleven will cover most of your common desktop use-cases.
Edit: I is not can kount.
Edited 2012-09-14 21:23 UTC
And assuming all of the dependencies aren’t broken of suffering compatibility issues.
And assuming you don’t mind all the dependency bloat that is typical of most linux distros.
Generally speaking it works good though, yeah. I agree there.
This is fair enough. It didn’t really click with me that we were talking about open-source/free libraries when I read “ill-suited to most programmers.”
I use Debian for many server-side projects and bringing in dependancies is equally as simple with apt-get.
I like to use MinGW myself, and I agree, it is a lot of work.
Agreed.
That’s exactly in line with my experiences as well. Getting set up for OpenGL development on Linux was as easy as “yum install a-bunch-of-devel-packages” and coming back in ten minutes. It took a couple of days to get everything squared away on Windows – although a large part of that was that I didn’t know how the linker worked on Windows, and I had to figure that out.
To set thing up on Windows, I had to download the source for each library, load it in Visual C++ (and I got to deal with the fact that some of those libraries use old build systems that need to be adapted to VC 2010’s build system, that don’t always actually get imported correctly). After building them, I had to copy the resulting libraries and header directories into specific system directories to link them into my own project, and fiddle with the include and linker settings in VC.
I also got hit by a 32-bit/64-bit issue; it turns out that you have to copy 64-bit libraries to a different directory than 32-bit ones, and that getting a source check-out of a library that uses an old build system may or may not be buildable in 64-bit (and even when you can, you might have to go to war with VC Express to get it to actually happen). I never actually resolved that issue, but just gave up and built my code in 32-bit (on 64-bit windows 7, in 2011).
This question also actually came up in a talk I did about learning Ada a few days ago. When asked where to get an Ada compiler, I essentially said, “On linux, just type <package_manager> install gnat. On windows, you get to fuck with Cygwin.”
OTOH, that seems like perpetuating unproductive myths…
( http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mouse_vs._keyboard/index.html & programming is not about typing)