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

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 131 posts

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

#52
post #6

All my contact management, todos, calendar, etc are on the web on a Linux platform, SO, you could technically say I'm on Linux all day, however, I access everything from Windows and code in Windows so...

hello dpcan. what software do you use on linux for the tasks you mention - contact mgt, cal, todos, etc. Do you sync with other devices like an ipod or cell phone? Thanks.

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

#53

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?

You might not have enough memory allocated for VirtualBox. That would make it jerky. I give it 1 gig of my 4.

I'm not sure about CPU performance differences between VB and anything else, but it's never been a problem for me.

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

#54
My main laptop runs Windows 7 - nearly all development is done on this, compiles using Visual Studio 2008 and Cygwin. My netbook runs Windows 7 - I do nearly all my social/recreational stuff on that machine. Also it has VGA out and I've come to rely on Win7s projector detection magic for presentations to just work. It's the only machine I travel with. My top-of-the-range Alum Macbook runs just OSX, got it for xcode, which is gathering dust because most of my dev work is in VS.net and even after months I still can't get into the swing of using OSX. Machines synced with the amazing DropBox of course.

In serverland, 1 dedicated server (France) and 1 slice (USA) running Ubuntu 9.04 server, the other vps running RHEL; Mono 2.4.2.

I always have a stack of Putty windows open.

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

#55
post #23

I work with my Windows laptop and my Linux workstation side-by-side. I use my laptop for Outlook, company IM, Office documents, and web surfing. I use my workstation for everything else. That gives me a strict division between productivity sucks on the Windows laptop and productive work on the Linux box. When I want to focus, I can sit with the laptop outside my field of view, so I don't see new emails and IMs. If I…

Yes, I do think you should vote for windows too. you just don't enjoy the work you do in that context as much, but that isn't Windows' fault.

I was wondering if we were supposed to choose only one option. And I'm flattered by your assumption that I enjoy doing my job more than surfing the web -- it isn't always true, even though I try to work as if it were ;-)

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

#57
I assume this type of poll is self-selecting and that Windows is greatly underrepresented. In a 2005 article, PG states that the ycombinator visitor OS breakdown is as follows: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%

I would love to see the current OS breakdown from ycombinator logs to compare. Anyone?

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

#59
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…

Related question for Mac users: Don't you ever view windows in fullscreen? It seems there's no easy way to get windows to fullscreen, except for laboriously resizing and dragging to make it fit with the screen. This is one of the things that threw me off Mac (I bought one that I used as my main OS for about half a year, but I just never really liked it)

So do Mac users simply not like fullscreen windows, do they all have some utility that does this, or am I just missing something? To me it seems like an extreme shortcoming, but I'm sure there's a reason for the limitation.

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

#60
post #14
post #5

Does it not make a bit more sense to indicate why you're conducting the poll? I don't mind polls, but usually they're only interesting if the poster sets it up and comments on his/her own choice and the reason for the poll in the first place. Polls like this seem to serve no more of a purpose than "What's your favorite color?". Could you indicate the reason for the poll? That will get the conversation going in the di…

I am just curious about how HN readers are different from the general computer users when it comes to OS preference, this is interesting because HN community is a special group of people who are interested in technology startup, usually tech savvy and practical. This poll is different from the favorite color poll because it's technology related, I guess it's not only me who is curious about this question, as people a…

If you wanted to know our preferences, you should have asked what we wish we used. However, I think the question as you stated it is more interesting, since people are quite vocal about their preferences anyway.
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