Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#1

Post by buildops » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 11:16 AM UTC

For those of you who develop using Linux, what are your biggest frustrations?

Builds? CI? Testing? Lack of good IDEs? Lack of visualization? Dev tools? Refactoring? What are your challenges? (and of course what environment are you using and how does that affect it?)

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#2

Post by vhf » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 11:47 AM UTC

Lack of good hardware/laptops.

I had a Lenovo X200s for over 4 years and finding a viable replacement is almost impossible.

I am saddened by the fact that there are no i7 / 16GB / highDPI with decent keyboard at the price of a 2015 Retina MBP.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#3

Post by djent » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 11:53 AM UTC

vhf wrote: post #2

Lack of good hardware/laptops. I had a Lenovo X200s for over 4 years and finding a viable replacement is almost impossible. I am saddened by the fact that there are no i7 / 16GB / highDPI with decent keyboard at the price of a 2015 Retina MBP.

Try a 2015 Dell XPS 13. Fits all your specs, also has a developer edition with Ubuntu already installed.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#4

Post by bdpuk » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 11:58 AM UTC

vhf wrote: post #2

Lack of good hardware/laptops. I had a Lenovo X200s for over 4 years and finding a viable replacement is almost impossible. I am saddened by the fact that there are no i7 / 16GB / highDPI with decent keyboard at the price of a 2015 Retina MBP.

Have you looked at the Clevo 230SS? It goes under the name Optimus VI with PC Specialist.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#5

Post by bloodorange » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:00 PM UTC

* Having to make efforts to keep the system working smoothly after regular system updates

* Hardware vendors not showing much love

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#6

Post by misframer » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:01 PM UTC

djent wrote: post #3

vhf wrote: post #2

Lack of good hardware/laptops. I had a Lenovo X200s for over 4 years and finding a viable replacement is almost impossible. I am saddened by the fact that there are no i7 / 16GB / highDPI with decent keyboard at the price of a 2015 Retina MBP.

Try a 2015 Dell XPS 13. Fits all your specs, also has a developer edition with Ubuntu already installed.

No, it doesn't. The XPS 13 can only have a maximum of 8 GB RAM.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#7

Post by andrewchambers » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

Personally, I can't find a text editor I like. The closest I came was acme from plan9, shown here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M.

I would love to see an editor which clones acme, but follows a few of the modern ui conventions.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#8

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#9

Post by PatKelly » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:06 PM UTC

I develop applications in C++ on Linux and Windows. On windows I can enable heap tracing and have leak detection included in my test cases (Google mock/test). On Linux I need to run my app under Valgrind for leak checking as a separate process.

Re: Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with Linux development?

#10

Post by r3bl » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 12:09 PM UTC

I have to say I'm pretty satisfied, even more than I was before when I was using Windows.

Everything seems easier to install and I don't need gigabytes of space to build my environment. (Visual Studio, I'm talking about you!) Working with Git and gcc was as easy as it can get right at the beginning of my switch. Back in Windows days, I was primarily using Dev-C++ and a GitHub desktop client (which I really don't like btw). Now, I'm just using Atom with a couple of third party extensions.

Although I have to say that I kind of miss the easiness of building desktop applications using Visual Studio. I haven't found a single IDE that allows me to create forms with just a few clicks like Visual Studio does. I stopped paying attention to GUIs for my programs primarily because of that.