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Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

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151–160 of 342 posts

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#151

I know the OTA dismissed Windows, but when I switched from OSX to Windows a couple of years ago, I found Scott Hanselman's "Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows" [1] to be indispensable. I've been doing Rails work on Windows since switching, but ymmv depending on what your workflow and toolchain are. I also found that there were a lot of workarounds/alternatives to software/tools that I thought I…

Is there a similar developer tools list for Windows 10?

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#152
post #26

To the point (reality) of Arch's amazing docs; I fully agree with the author. I've never experienced a more comprehensive and up-to-date doc regarding a distro. For this reason, I exclusively use Arch for both desktop and laptop. It is a freeing/empowering experience installing Arch.

Agreed completely. I juggle between OSX and Debian, but Arch's docs are still way better when it comes to configuration and gotchas.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#153
post #145

Many articles about wanting to leave the macOS ecosystem mention Sketch. Sketch is macOS only (and will be for the forseeable future), so it's understandable that people want to consider the implications of switching away from it. Recently, however, I stumbled upon Figma, a web-based, real-time collaborative interface design app (i.e., a competitor of Sketch). After convincing my group to experiment with it for a sch…

I've never really understood why people use Sketch. I recently worked on a project where I had asked for some basic vanilla templates of a mobile site from the designers and was sent a huge Sketch file. It was utterly useless and I had to code everything by hand myself, since the 'designers' very clearly had zero clue about HTML+CSS or any notion of responsiveness, thanks to apps like Sketch which teach nothing of th…

I'd be curious to hear what you consider to be an alternative workflow or tool.

Any tool can be used incorrectly in bad hands. The problem of choosing to work with talented and competent designers is largely unrelated from the choice of tool.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#154
post #145

Many articles about wanting to leave the macOS ecosystem mention Sketch. Sketch is macOS only (and will be for the forseeable future), so it's understandable that people want to consider the implications of switching away from it. Recently, however, I stumbled upon Figma, a web-based, real-time collaborative interface design app (i.e., a competitor of Sketch). After convincing my group to experiment with it for a sch…

I've never really understood why people use Sketch. I recently worked on a project where I had asked for some basic vanilla templates of a mobile site from the designers and was sent a huge Sketch file. It was utterly useless and I had to code everything by hand myself, since the 'designers' very clearly had zero clue about HTML+CSS or any notion of responsiveness, thanks to apps like Sketch which teach nothing of th…

If you asked for templates you should have gotten templates, not mockups and not wireframes and not a demo. In my experience there is a common misunderstanding between designers, project managers and coders about what word or phrase is used to describe those very different things. And instead of learning what they are and being specific I have been told the equivalent of "just do your thing" ie, stop bothering me. Then people complain "this isn't what I asked for" and I have to explain the whole thing again while they don't bother to listen. Sound familiar?

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#155
Anyone knows an alliterative to Alfred in Windows or Linux?

I really really like the ability to search apps with a few keystrokes and I really really like to be able to search clipboard history with another few keystrokes.

Nothing I've found are doing both or one as good as Alfred.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#156
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i3 is great, until you try to do something simple like change the time zone for your desktop clock or add some wallpaper. I switched from Linux to Mac because I was too well acquainted with making symlinks to /usr/share/ somewhere just to change my clock when I traveled, and then figuring out just how few processes I had to restart so it would take effect. Unfortunately the Linux desktops were actually worse than the…

> i3 is great, until you try to do something simple like change the time zone for your desktop clock or add some wallpaper. I switched from Linux to Mac because I was too well acquainted with making symlinks to /usr/share/ somewhere just to change my clock when I traveled, and then figuring out just how few processes I had to restart so it would take effect. Systemd makes using i3 so much easier. No more fiddling wit…

Most people hate systemd for the sake of hating something, or following the hate train. At least for me all my close encounters with it have been positive.

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#157

Anyone knows an alliterative to Alfred in Windows or Linux? I really really like the ability to search apps with a few keystrokes and I really really like to be able to search clipboard history with another few keystrokes. Nothing I've found are doing both or one as good as Alfred.

Not sure about searching clipboard history, but just about every Linux window manager has a decent application launcher that can be easily accessed with the keyboard.

I haven't tried it, but Albert may be worth a look : https://github.com/ManuelSchneid3r/albert

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#158

Anyone knows an alliterative to Alfred in Windows or Linux? I really really like the ability to search apps with a few keystrokes and I really really like to be able to search clipboard history with another few keystrokes. Nothing I've found are doing both or one as good as Alfred.

I use Kupfer on Openbox and LXDE, and it does a lot of what I need (it's more similar to Quicksilver than to Alfred).

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#159
post #131

Funny how we keep seeing these post from developers that aren't Mac OS/iDevice developers. NeXT's adoption of UNIX was just a way to fulfill expectations of the newly created workstation market. No serious NeXT application was a pure UNIX one, just like on Mac OS X. I never saw a NeXT full of xterms and vi, rather with applications that took full advantage of the desktop frameworks, including the devtools.

I hacked about in a NeXT in a research institution and spent a long while getting X, NFS, etc. to work "right" (which it never quite did), but yeah, you're right - except for macOS/iOS devs, Mac-using developers that target web or server-side are the ones actively looking for alternatives, because the tooling and targets are just easier to use on Linux these days...

Re: Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X

#160
post #39
post #10

I'm full-time OSX user/developer, but if Rails is really your sticking point, shouldn't the linux subsystem make Win10 at least viable for a trial? Or, frankly, anything that can run VMWare or Virtualbox?

I switched to Windows hoping to use the WSL - looks great for the most part, but there are still lots of blocking bugs. Ruby and Git install, but not OpenSSL, which makes Rails development difficult. Lots of niggles here and there, basically. Should be great when it comes out of beta, though - a good terminal and we'll be all set.

I'm using https://github.com/mintty/wsltty as a terminal for WSL, because it feels the closest to a Linux terminal for me. Give it a go.
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