311–320 of 472 posts
I don't have the time to dork around in Linux as I once did (never was that great at it) and while I'd like to take OSX for a spin I'm a penny pitcher so I stick with Windows at home. I'm happy with it.
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I would just like to add that there is a valid reason why Linux or the *BSDs are superior to Windows or OS X - they are Free. As in Speech. And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention.
Maybe I'm the only one... But as a professional developer working on everything from device drivers, embedded systems, up to your average LAMP stack and other web frameworks the "Freedom" of the operating system is worth exactly bupkis to me, ziltch, zero, nada. There are a whole host of reasons to use one OS over the other but this "Free as in Speech" is simply not a very good one. I'm far, FAR, more concerned about…
Every day, I start up a computer running OS X. Then, I proceed to fire up virtual machines for two Linux distributions, Windows XP, and Windows 7. I occasionally play around with a headless system that I have running FreeBSD. Then I may power up my iPod Touch to test recent changes to my mobile site. I also do a significant quantity of work while I am logged into a remote debian server via ssh. I doubt that I am the…
OT question for you: I'm a developer that does a lot of web development, from Perl to RoR. When I end up starting more than 1 VM with 4 GB RAM, my computer literally dies with Mac OS X. Now this is all with VirtualBox, which I suspect isn't the best all around VM application. For some reason I feel that it is the crappy memory management with OS X that is killing me. Other than getting more RAM do you do anything spe…
Asked and answered. I like VirtualBox - the price is right for when I just need to run an app or two on rare occasion - but it certainly isn't the most stable or least OS-crashing VM I've ever used.
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You would hope that on a site like Hacker News, there would be a good percentage of users who would get a lot of utility out of being able to tinker with their operating system in ways not sanctioned by the creator of said OS.
The issue is not that one would like to tinker, but that without a significant time investment tinkering, you can't get the basics working. Nothing precludes the OS from being tinkerable but mostly working out of the box.
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One more thing: A terminal as a first class citizen. Definitely not on Windows, and while the OSX one is orders of magnitude better, I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking. What ruins OSX for me isn't the terminal, though, it's that X apps aren't first class.
> I seem to recall it's still a bit lacking Not in the least since Snow Leopard, as Terminal.app has been perfectly fine (with Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin, and MouseTerm if you really want) and even better in Lion. For utmost configurability you could lean towards iTerm2, which you can tweak to no end (and arguably more than most X terminals). Platform-specific tools from pb{copy,paste} to tmutil are truly useful an…
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You would hope that on a site like Hacker News, there would be a good percentage of users who would get a lot of utility out of being able to tinker with their operating system in ways not sanctioned by the creator of said OS.
Yes, if it's your hobby. If you need to get something done (time = money) but have to stop to fix something in your free operating system then it is no longer "free" (as in money) I'm not talking about the openness of the system in relation to code etc..
A number of years ago, working on a semi-embedded system, I hacked the way Linux boots from USB devices to speed it up, which made the people I was working for quite happy. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about - I would expect to find a lot of people with similar stories on a site like this.
Also, configuring Linux machines is not really that onerous in this day and age. I suspect more time is wasted complaining about it than in actually doing it. There are certainly still some exceptions, and if you want the ultimate in "mom friendly", Mac OS is probably the way to go. But for a 'hacker', the ability to explore and modify might trump that need for ease of use.
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The issue is not that one would like to tinker, but that without a significant time investment tinkering, you can't get the basics working. Nothing precludes the OS from being tinkerable but mostly working out of the box.
In my experience this hasn't been true of (some distributions of) Linux in several years. I've talked to a lot of people who hold this opinion and they generally haven't tried Linux in 5+ years.
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I recently purchased a I'm deciding laptop ergonomics are really important (but $1000 important? cringe )
All that to say the trackpad, keyboard, keyboard controls for display brightness, and (my experience, obviously not common) battery longevity do seem to be worth the money. There's a ton of weird little pieces that apple really gets right that don't show up on the spec sheets.
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Maybe I'm the only one... But as a professional developer working on everything from device drivers, embedded systems, up to your average LAMP stack and other web frameworks the "Freedom" of the operating system is worth exactly bupkis to me, ziltch, zero, nada. There are a whole host of reasons to use one OS over the other but this "Free as in Speech" is simply not a very good one. I'm far, FAR, more concerned about…
It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks. I'm assuming that that's what you mean by "short sighted"? Well, that…