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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#81

Post by crabl »

I just recently migrated from a late-2006 MacBook Pro with Leopard to a shiny new ThinkPad T500 with Ubuntu Jaunty. I'm actually impressed with how well Linux on the desktop has matured over the past few years (I experimented with Ubuntu in late 2005 and it was nowhere near as refined as it is today), moreover, how easy it was to get everything working as seamlessly as it did on the Mac.

Granted, in terms of user interface (among other things), OS X is far superior to Gnome; however, aside from the gorgeous design of Aqua, in terms of actual day-to-day usability, they are pretty much on par with each other (at least as far as I'm concerned).

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

#82

Post by jhickner »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #53
jhickner wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, I'll definitely give that a try. I have 2g of ram on my macbook, and usually only allocate 512 mb to my XP VMs.

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

#83

Post by bayareaguy »

mixmax wrote: post #59
dtf wrote: 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…

Although it does me little good at the moment since HN's text area is a mere 6 lines, I'm posting this from Opera's fullscreen mode which I use quite frequently.

While few applications on any platform seem to support this kind of true fullscreen mode, I use "almost fullscreen" windows all the time: on OSX the green orb in the upper left corner of every window acts as a toggle which maximizes the window or returns it to its original size. I say "almost fullscreen" because the omnipresent menu bar and window decorations remain visible when you work this way.

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

#84

Post by sho »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #53
jhickner wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm, have you tried any other VM solutions? Any killer feature VirtualBox had over them for your use? Apart from being free + open source, of course!

Just wondering what would make VirtualBox "fantastic", VMWare et al are already pretty good...

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

#85

Post by duairc »

I use Linux exclusively. I did try OS X before (I have an iBook), but I just couldn't get into it. Linux users trying OS X have already commented on problems with window managers etc, so I won't repeat what they've said.

The real thing is that I just can't stand about OS X though isn't about practical like not being able to get a certain application or type of application working or anything like that (I do generally prefer the applications I use on Linux to their OS X counterparts though). It's simply that it's non-free, and the whole ecosystem of software for it is generally non-free. I know lots of Mac users and this doesn't seem to bug them or occur to them at all.

When I first turned on my iBook, I have to tell it more than once "no, I don't want a .Mac account". When I start iTunes, and possibly other applications (I just remember iTunes specifically), I have to click "I agree" to a license agreement. There are lots of really trivial bits of software which you'd get with `sudo apt-get install x` in Linux but the OS X equivalent is some sort of shareware crap... I found this to be particularly bad for tools that convert between file formats.

Am I just crazy or does this not bother anybody else that uses OS X?

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

#86

Post by cpr »

thenduks wrote: post #36
dtf wrote: 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…

Put your windows where you want them at the size you want them and don't ever touch them again... that's what I do, anyway. Expose to get at things that are hidden. I also use hiding apps in general a lot, cmd+h to hide and then either click the dock, use opt+tab or use a launcher like quicksilver or launchbar to get those apps back. Personally I don't use the mouse much at all so I don't need focus follows mouse, an…

Also, note that you can use Spotlight to do fast app switching, just like Launchbar or Quicksilver: just type your Spotlight search shortcut (mine is control-space), type the first few letters of the app name, and hit return.

It's good enough I gave up on Quicksilver. I never used the fancier features.

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

#88

Post by path »

jamesbritt wrote: post #66
antirez wrote: post #27

I've two laptops, one with Mac OS X and one with Linux. I use both for development but as a client I prefer Mac OS X that Just Works. It was fun years ago to hack on config files and even to write my own device drivers when it was needed, it was a game with the benefit of learning a lot of stuff, but seriously, I expected Linux to be mature enough after a few years... instead it's the same problems again and again. A…

I have a Mac mini and Linux laptop, and use both for development, but prefer Linux Kubuntu that Just Works. Not sure what your specific issues are, but I've been finding development on Linux to be much more accommodating for me.

Linux seems to be a development "Just Works" environment, e.g. apt just works, and getting dependencies is simple, or at least reliable.

On the mac getting libraries can be painful with MacPorts (I don't use Fink, does anyone know if it's better?)

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

#89

Post by path »

zimbabwe wrote: post #45
sfphotoarts wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's wrong with Gmail on the Mac, the experience on Windows is identical

(practically)

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

#90

Post by jyothi »

minus1 wrote: post #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?

Actually we would need 2 set of numbers from PG.

[1] ycombinator visitor OS breakdown

[2] ycombinator visitor OS breakdown of people who actively contribute by voting/comments. (note intentionally avoiding the ones who post)

Given what user ratsbane reports (above) - windows 46% & mac 38% the gap is not big. So it could be like among visitors the breakdown win-(mac+linux) is like 60-30, then among ones who check out articles 45-50 and among ones who contribute it is 30-60.

Additionally it might be the case looking at comments people vote on both mac & linux as they use both and at same capacities.

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