Live data from Hacker News

Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 131 posts

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#41
post #30

Question for Mac/Windows users: I develop on Linux, but occasionally on Mac or Windows. To be honest I'm pretty happy with a text editor and a few terminals on any platform, but one thing I miss is fast window management. Specifically: * Focus follows mouse * Alt+LMB drag to move whole window * Alt+MMB drag to move nearest corner (ie resize) The default Mac interface in particular I find difficult, as there's just on…

On the Mac, the trick is to figure out what size you want for your apps and keep them there. Safari's always big for me, iTunes I almost always keep shrunk down, Mail shows a few messages at a time and has a large window for message display. Then I control everything via keyboard so focus never really bothers me.

There's also a Mac application that lets you resize your window from any side, but I don't recall what it's called.

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#42

Our team develops on two MacBooks and a Linux box. We virtualize Windows via VirtualBox (which is just amazing). Our production server runs Ubuntu on EC2.

I use vmware fusion, and I keep hearing great things about virtualbox. But when I tested the new 3.0 version a couple of days ago I still got multi-second freezes, increased CPU usage and a lot of general slowness. And yes, I have the virtualbox tools installed.

What am I missing?

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail isn't exactly an OS in itself. If we were to answer the poll according to the OS that the web pages we visit use, we would see a poll dominated by FreeBSD and Linux. Somehow I don't think that is what the OP intended.

of course Gmail isn't an OS, that's not what I meant, but when we use Gmail we're really making more use of the server operating system than the clients, so my point is that it very hard to really say what operating system we're using. It would be interesting to measure the usage of say posting this comment, how many machine instructions were used at the OSX end, and how many by the various routers (running their own…

The question is what OS we're using, not what OS we're using.

From my own experience, using Gmail is a different experience in each OS. I can't stand to use it on OS X, whereas on Windows it was always open.

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#47
post #30

Question for Mac/Windows users: I develop on Linux, but occasionally on Mac or Windows. To be honest I'm pretty happy with a text editor and a few terminals on any platform, but one thing I miss is fast window management. Specifically: * Focus follows mouse * Alt+LMB drag to move whole window * Alt+MMB drag to move nearest corner (ie resize) The default Mac interface in particular I find difficult, as there's just on…

There's an app called KatMouse for Windows which might be able to do focus follows mouse.

(I really use it because it lets me use the scrollwheel on any window, without bringing the window to the foreground or giving focus to it).

Post reply on HN