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Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

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Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#111

Post by netllama »

petcat wrote: post #14

I never found anything better than the latest macOS machines. I ran ubuntu for years and then switched back to mac just because I don't have the time to tinker and fiddle with stuff in Linux that just randomly makes the computer run hot, or a monitor to not work, or fonts looking awful. MacOS is just the sweet spot of great desktop + great unix-style devbox.

Every time I'm forced to use MacOS again, its worse than the last time. Everything feels like a bolted on afterthought in an OS that forces Apple's opinions on everything. My productivtiy is ruined trying to do things the Apple way, instead of the way that works best for me.

No thanks, I'll stick with Linux, where I can tinker to have the OS work the way that is best for me, instead of what Apple thinks is best for me.

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#112

Post by netllama »

QuiEgo wrote: post #85

I think laptop of your choice as a thin client to Linux box in a data center is super common. Most people seem to pick a Mac as their thin client, since ssh works well natively on it, it runs MS office, and the Windows laptop options are never the “nice” Windows options for some reason, but various flavors of plastic hate boxes that get 1/2 the battery life of the Macs IT offers.

Curious what industry you work in where thin clients are still a thing. Most people are doing far more than ssh to some remote server.

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#113

Post by netllama »

stOneskull wrote: post #99
Animats wrote: post #47

Linux. I retired the last Windows machine last year. Firefox on Linux, though, is not working very well. It keeps hanging during long typing inputs. No CPU or disk usage, just stuck. And it uses so much memory that the OOM killer sometimes kills it. I was never a Linux fanatic. It's just that I considered an operating system with ads unacceptable. I rather liked Windows 7.

which linux distro do you use? i distro hop and haven't experienced that with firefox for years.

Most likely is hardware specific (some driver bug).

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#114

Post by Froedlich »

My development is on Linux. Some of my work has to run on Windows as well; VirtualBox has several Windows VMs, a ReactOS VM, and Wine for testing.

I've never had to deal with the BSDs or Macs. If a customer was willing to pay for me to come up to speed on either of them I would consider it, but I have no interest otherwise.

I am slowly coming up to speed on Haiku, and now that most of my application and development software runs on Haiku and its hardware compatibility is much better, I'm looking to eventually move from Linux to Haiku for my primary workstation.

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#115

Post by alfiedotwtf »

If your editor is full screen, and you have a terminal emulator to build, test, and run, does an OS actually matter these days?

VS Code is good enough for 90% of grunt work, and Emacs will give you 110% more, but at the end of the day, you live in your editor not your OS (or maybe it’s just me).

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#116

Post by kldg »

petabyt wrote: post #39
dal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, if you use WSL you're OS is Windows.

I can't even imagine doing development in Windows without WSL anymore. I think Microsoft even requires it for some of their stuff.

I guess it depends on what you do. I do python, rust, and web frontend in Windows. I have a personal bias against Docker, which'd otherwise be the primary WSL draw for me since if I want/need Linux, I can SSH into the majority of the machines in my house.

I'll throw out my unpopular opinion/experience here, too: I haven't liked any "desktop experience" I've seen or used for a Linux distro, and they all look and feel very similar to me: foreign, basic, and difficult for me to tweak and produce with. I greatly dislike the React stuff both on the web and in Windows, and use Classic Shell, which I'm satisfied with. Windows is easy to customize and almost everything can be tailored without even needing a reboot, many even with registry options already made and just waiting for a bit to be flipped.

It helps my puny, smooth brain, too, to just think of Windows being graphical and Linux being text-based; helps me remember what I'm doing.

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#117

Post by QuiEgo »

netllama wrote: post #112
QuiEgo wrote: post #85

I think laptop of your choice as a thin client to Linux box in a data center is super common. Most people seem to pick a Mac as their thin client, since ssh works well natively on it, it runs MS office, and the Windows laptop options are never the “nice” Windows options for some reason, but various flavors of plastic hate boxes that get 1/2 the battery life of the Macs IT offers.

Curious what industry you work in where thin clients are still a thing. Most people are doing far more than ssh to some remote server.

I work in firmware.

Firmware build times can be comically bad. Most firmware builds are heavily optimized and you often build the same codebase dozens of times with each build optimized for one particular hardware configuration of many. You then get to deploy to a legion of test devices (also managed by machines you remoting into) and see which special snowflake you managed to break this time (it somehow is never the one you sanity checked your changes on during development :-D).

It's common to throw (a lot) of compute at the problem, and at some point it's way nicer if the 100+ cores you're cranking to 100% CPU for a few min are somewhere you're not sitting next to. It's also nice that those resources can be shared among many devs so they don't sit idle most of the time.

So, you end up with the thin client pattern. It's usually practical to build locally as well for a few particular targets, which might be a random dev board at your desk. But if I have a remote build system with a few hundred cores cores and a few dozen TB of ram, why would I not just use it instead of using my laptop?

Athough firmware and hardware is such a huge, varied field many people likely have different experiences. Brining up a big custom SoC is way different than bringing up a board with an FPGA and all off-the-shelf stuff.

What's "far more than ssh to some remote server" mean to you? It's always fascinating how different everyone's experiences are.

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#118

Post by woleium »

marssaxman wrote: post #109
petcat wrote: post #14

I never found anything better than the latest macOS machines. I ran ubuntu for years and then switched back to mac just because I don't have the time to tinker and fiddle with stuff in Linux that just randomly makes the computer run hot, or a monitor to not work, or fonts looking awful. MacOS is just the sweet spot of great desktop + great unix-style devbox.

I ran MacOS for decades and then switched to Linux, because I no longer have the patience to deal with an OS which cannot be tinkered and fiddled into the shape I prefer it in, its makers believing that they know better than I do what I ought to be doing with my own hardware. I cannot stand the paternalism. Linux has its quirks, but at least I can be sure that in the end, it can always be made to do what I want.

except sleep then hibernate on lid close of most laptops, it seems.

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#120

Post by baq »

winecamera wrote: post #70

I'd love to use macOS, but macOS's font rendering on low DPI monitors (2560x1440) looks awful compared to Windows's font rendering. It's to the point that it's unusable for coding, so I just use Windows with WSL.

BetterDisplay is $15 or so and it changes the equation from ’horrible’ to ‘good enough’. Still not as good as other OSes but at least you don’t have to buy an expensive monitor.

Why Apple decided to not support low dpi is beyond me.

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