I used at OS X at work for 2 years and hated it. It's a nightmare for doing real software development on. Now I have a GNU/Linux workstation and things are much better.
Cue the OS X apologists.
A Linux User's OS X Experience
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: A Linux User's OS X Experience
#12I'm not quite sure what the point of this article is. He's quite clearly not the target market, and is shocked and enraged by this. This is clear right from the get-go: >Be customisable. I want to be able to replace any part of the system I would like So you're going to use a closed-source OS that's notorious for enforcing homogeneity wherever possible? >Be transparent in its workings Again, so you're going to use a…
Is transparency and customisability really so fundamentally incompatible with closed source software? The fact that the source code is not available does not prevent the availability of clear documentation detailing system functionality (whether or not you can verify whether the two correspond is another argument). Detailed documentation can allow for customisability by swapping out closed-source defaults.
I agree that the OP was never going to be happy with OS X, but were his expectations really so misguided? His requirements were not unreasonable.
Re: A Linux User's OS X Experience
#13Man there's a lot of FUD in that article, but this one in particular:
I mentioned this earlier, but most developers use virtual machines
in order to properly use OS X. The very notion that your operating
system is so lacking that it is easier to just run a virtual
operating system to fill the gaps shows you that there is clearly
something very wrong with this model.
Re: A Linux User's OS X Experience
#14tl;dr: he did give a chance to OS that clearly and obviously doesn't match his explicitly stated expectations from the get-go and it didn't impress him.
Re: A Linux User's OS X Experience
#15Angry nerd is angry.
Less flippant response:
So OSX doesn't work for you. Bummer, I guess?
I switched from Linux to OSX after I found I was spending more time fucking with configs to get simple things like Skype working than I did actually working. Bummer for me, huh?
Fortunately, there was another system out there that satisfied my needs. And I didn't even have to write a rageface blog post about how sucky the one that didn't meet them was.
Re: A Linux User's OS X Experience
#16I'm not quite sure what the point of this article is. He's quite clearly not the target market, and is shocked and enraged by this. This is clear right from the get-go: >Be customisable. I want to be able to replace any part of the system I would like So you're going to use a closed-source OS that's notorious for enforcing homogeneity wherever possible? >Be transparent in its workings Again, so you're going to use a…
Also, how is OS X not transparent in its workings? Underdocumented, yes. But Linux's man pages aren't exactly a model of consistency and clarity, either.
Re: A Linux User's OS X Experience
#17>But as a scientist and as a programmer, I will never understand why people enjoy such childish things. This is why we end up with software that is painful to use.
As a scientist, shouldn't he be all about trying to understand things as opposed to dismissing them outright?
He gave them a go of one week, which is more, then most would.
Even if his experiment was flawed from the beginning, which let's me question his scientificity.
Re: A Linux User's OS X Experience
#18I'm not quite sure what the point of this article is. He's quite clearly not the target market, and is shocked and enraged by this. This is clear right from the get-go: >Be customisable. I want to be able to replace any part of the system I would like So you're going to use a closed-source OS that's notorious for enforcing homogeneity wherever possible? >Be transparent in its workings Again, so you're going to use a…
Indeed - one of the main selling points of OSX has always been its UI (where swipy gestures are rather handy), simplicity, and 'it just works' appeal. If you don't care about any of those things it's clearly going to lose a lot of it's appeal. Personally I ran linux for years before deciding I had wasted altogether too much of my life recompiling kernels and got a mac, where I can do Unix-y things with better hardware and less headaches.
Re: A Linux User's OS X Experience
#19For me OSX gives one very clear advantage over Linux. Time. Running Linux I found myself constantly wasting time on fixing WiFi card drivers, etc after every update. I don't have time for that shit. A Macbook may be more expensive out of the box but the extra time I can spend on stuff that is important (and fun) is worth it.
Out of curiosity, when did you experience the issues with the drivers and such? I know that was a problem in the past (and I fought with it as well), but for at least the past 4 years, I have found linux to work "out of the box" on several machines, without any fiddling of that nature. I suppose there could still be some problematic hardware, but lately, I have found linux to be much quicker to get up and running. I used an iMac for ~4 years of my PhD, while using a linux laptop alongside it. I found it was easier and faster to use the linux machine's package manager to get up and running for python coding, compared to the package managers for Macs (I tried several).
Re: A Linux User's OS X Experience
#20I used at OS X at work for 2 years and hated it. It's a nightmare for doing real software development on. Now I have a GNU/Linux workstation and things are much better. Cue the OS X apologists.
I use OSX every day for "real development". I develop in Java and I can deploy the same things from OSX to my Linux (Centos) servers and know they're going to work as expected. In addition to similar environments, I can use real MS Office so that I can actually communicate with the rest of the corporation and have exactly the same formats and such (which is a huge time saver on both ends).