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The $80 web development workstation

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Re: The $80 web development workstation

#91

Post by darkstar999 »

cgag wrote: post #86
programminggeek wrote: post #81

A Thinkpad T42 is not in the same realm as a Macbook Air. That being said, a working dev setup for $80 is pretty cool. Even still, I've gone from doing full gentoo installs from scratch to Ubuntu, Windows, Mac, and lots inbetween and for my time and my effort, I'd rather just use a Mac. I'll pay for a well designed, reliable computer, so that I can do my job and get paid very well for it. Not having to muck around wi…

I haven't ever had to mess with drivers with Mint and my x230. I did spend time to set up i3 and configure it to suit my workflow. I view these as "sharpening the axe" types of activites, and don't really understand why I see so many people saying they don't want to spend any time at all customizing the device they regularly use for 10+ hours a day. The only thing to miss about osx over linux is the font rendering, b…

+1 for mint. I had been using Ubuntu since ~2006. Got annoyed with the direction they are taking. Installed Linux Mint. Didn't even have to install or configure anything for my wireless mouse/keyboard. Literally zero configuration, except for setting my preferences. I don't really understand the prevalence of Macbooks in web development. It's awesome hardware, but it's expensive. As far as software, there is nothing I am missing.

Re: The $80 web development workstation

#92

Post by dkuntz2 »

kevincrane wrote: post #40
Jormundir wrote: post #32

This article leaves out a key factor of why I've never committed to Linux full time, and why I wouldn't buy an $80 laptop to run linux. I have 1 laptop, and I don't just use it for development. I've tried over and over to use Linux as my primary OS, but every time the sheer jaggedness of the GUI experience, when I'm doing non-development (I guess normal consumer) things, bugs me non-stop until I switch back. It's lik…

It's popular to hate on Ubuntu, but I personally love it and its UI. I've used Ubuntu since 11.04 and run 13.04 on my personal laptop (for development and day-to-day stuff). I'm a sucker for pretty things like translucent title bars and snapping windows to full-screen, but I also love how easy it is to develop with Linux (as opposed to Windows). Everything is usually a single command away on the command line (sudo ap…

The core of Ubuntu is fine, I just don't really like Unity. While you can technically use regular Ubuntu and install Gnome, I've always had some weird stuff happen because Unity's still around.

My typical suggestion for other people is Ubuntu Gnome, because it provides them with the "just working" Linux, and most people I've talked to enjoy Gnome more than Unity.

As for regular Ubuntu, I'm not really a fan of their recent bouts of Not Invented Here Syndrome. Everything has to be made by them, for absolutely no reason. And they tried to belittle Wayland, and make up blatant falsehoods to do it.

If they were willing to focus on making ONE really, really good product, and push that towards consumers, instead of spreading their focus everywhere, I feel like they'd have a much better core product, Ubuntu Desktop (with Server out there, too, because it's not difficult to decouple the GUI stuff).

Re: The $80 web development workstation

#93

Post by dkuntz2 »

rbanffy wrote: post #85
quaunaut wrote: post #21

Honest question here: Why would anyone ever think OS X has "world-class interface design"? It's missing basic interface features that have been bog standard in Ubuntu/Windows for years, like any sort of proper window management. Hell, the maximize button actually doesn't work - it has such inconsistent use that you have almost no hope of actually getting what you want out of it. To get even decent window management,…

> Windows Vista had better interface design than this. That's just sad. Let's just not get that far.

It was at least shinier...

Re: The $80 web development workstation

#94

Post by superuser2 »

jasonlotito wrote: post #25
morgante wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hence the reason for your need to put quotes around "full control over the system." Or maybe I put quotes around it because I don't agree with that assertion and it's a quote from the article... > And problems I've solved in the past on Linux are still problems to this day on OS X. Can you give me an example? I'm genuinely curious... > This ignores people starting out, or in different locations. Yet the author cert…

> Or maybe I put quotes around it because I don't agree with that assertion and it's a quote from the article... Well, that's unfortunate, because you are wrong. You don't have full control over the system. It's not a matter of debate. You don't. You simply don't. There are elements that you cannot control in OS X. That are closed source. I mean, maybe you are a developer for Apple. I don't know. And maybe you do hav…

Windows are scriptable.

http://mizage.com/divvy/

https://github.com/jigish/slate/blob/master/README.md

Re: The $80 web development workstation

#95

Post by Mordak »

quaunaut wrote: post #21

Honest question here: Why would anyone ever think OS X has "world-class interface design"? It's missing basic interface features that have been bog standard in Ubuntu/Windows for years, like any sort of proper window management. Hell, the maximize button actually doesn't work - it has such inconsistent use that you have almost no hope of actually getting what you want out of it. To get even decent window management,…

> while literally not having an "up one level" button

Huh. I have honestly never taken notice that the OS X Finder lacks an 'up one level' button, and I've been on board since 10.0. I guess it's because I have used column view exclusively since day 1, so I just scroll left to see the entire hierarchy, and can one click to almost anywhere off the $PWD.

Icon and list views are awful - I was glad to leave them behind with Mac OS 9 (which also did not have an 'up one level' button, now that I think about it)..

Re: The $80 web development workstation

#96

Post by bluedino »

programminggeek wrote: post #81

A Thinkpad T42 is not in the same realm as a Macbook Air. That being said, a working dev setup for $80 is pretty cool. Even still, I've gone from doing full gentoo installs from scratch to Ubuntu, Windows, Mac, and lots inbetween and for my time and my effort, I'd rather just use a Mac. I'll pay for a well designed, reliable computer, so that I can do my job and get paid very well for it. Not having to muck around wi…

$80 for a laptop and $5/month for a VPS all running a free OS is just amazing in the sense of how anyone can build and launch a website nowadays.

Re: The $80 web development workstation

#97

Post by jamesaguilar »

threeseed wrote: post #69
jamesaguilar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non universal behavior in a universal button is a pretty sad state of affairs.

It IS universal behaviour. The green button maximises the window to the optimal size as dictated by the application. For a browser this could be full screen. For a word processor this could be just enough to see the page.

For me, the algorithm is too opaque and the results too inconsistent across apps to reason about. You could say, "This is consistent behavior, it sends off a request to mechanical turk for the optimal dimensions then resizes the window when the job is done." And you'd be right that the behavior would be universal, but it's not universal in the sense of consistency where the user will be able to guess what is going to happen if they press a button, and additionally want the result that they get.

Re: The $80 web development workstation

#98

Post by jasonlotito »

superuser2 wrote: post #94
jasonlotito wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or maybe I put quotes around it because I don't agree with that assertion and it's a quote from the article... Well, that's unfortunate, because you are wrong. You don't have full control over the system. It's not a matter of debate. You don't. You simply don't. There are elements that you cannot control in OS X. That are closed source. I mean, maybe you are a developer for Apple. I don't know. And maybe you do hav…

Windows are scriptable. http://mizage.com/divvy/ https://github.com/jigish/slate/blob/master/README.md

Neither of which solve the problem.

Edit: And if being able to script is your proof that everyone has full control over OS X, you also need to share your definition of "full" as it definitely doesn't mean what you think it means.

Re: The $80 web development workstation

#99

Post by zhemao »

threeseed wrote: post #67
quaunaut wrote: post #21

Honest question here: Why would anyone ever think OS X has "world-class interface design"? It's missing basic interface features that have been bog standard in Ubuntu/Windows for years, like any sort of proper window management. Hell, the maximize button actually doesn't work - it has such inconsistent use that you have almost no hope of actually getting what you want out of it. To get even decent window management,…

To go up one level press Command and click on the title bar. Pretty standard metaphor across the OS. Or alternatively if you are drilling back and forth through the folder hierarchy then switch to Column View. And if you actually think that Ubuntu's woeful file manager is anyway comparable to OSX Finder then I really can't help you.

What exactly do you need your file manager to do? All I need is some handy buttons and icons to click in order to move around easily. Nautilus even has the ability to go directly to a specific directory by typing it out (with tab completion) and supports browsing remote file systems through a variety of protocols. I recognize my needs are different from the average user's (I actually mostly just use the terminal and xdg-open instead of a file manager). But what features in particular do you think Nautilus is missing?

Re: The $80 web development workstation

#100

Post by barrkel »

davidhollander wrote: post #48
zdw wrote: post #9

I think the greater point here is the CLI first philosophy - it's faster, and more flexible, even on "lesser" hardware. For example, I treat my Mac nearly the same way with a few pertinent replacements - Vim for editing, Slate for window management, etc. You could likely do the same in Cygwin on a Windows box.

To me the most important factor for developing on a laptop mentioned in the article is the use of a tiling window manager. For me an incredibly common task in web development is to have a web browser and 1 or more terminal windows tiled horizontally, side by side, in an [ A | B ] or [ A | [ B | C ]] configuration, where A is a web browser, and B and C are terminals. In order for this to work for me on a screen resolu…

Tiling window managers don't maximize the use of small screen area; they ensure you'll almost always be using a fraction of the screen instead of the full screen.

Overlapping windows are the thing that maximized the use of a small screen, because they let you dedicate as much or as little of the screen to any given application when its window is on top.

What you are after, rather, is an efficient way of having the entirety of the windows of multiple apps on screen simultaneously. That's a slightly different problem. I personally get by with a combination of cascaded windows[1] and maximized windows with quick keyboard window switching.

[1] When you cascade windows such that the bottom left corner of each window forms a diagonal line across the bottom left edge of the screen, you can quickly select whatever window you want with a mouse, usually more efficiently than with a task bar, since the application identity is far more obvious when you can see a rectangle of its contents. And with choice of where each window is in the cascade order, you can get usable data out of multiple windows simultaneously.

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