The desktop and the developer • Hacker News Board

Re: The desktop and the developer

#121

Post by stcredzero » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:10 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #7

There is still plenty of software missing from Linux that you would want for the average web developer workflow. For example whilst there are graphical Git clients available, there's nothing as polished as SourceTree or Tower available. Same thing with database GUIs. Also anybody who works with designers is probably going to have to interact with .PSD files at some point and GIMP isn't always an adequate tool.

For example whilst there are graphical Git clients available, there's nothing as polished as SourceTree or Tower available.

What's wrong with GitX-dev (rowanj fork)?

Re: The desktop and the developer

#122

Post by harel » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:10 PM UTC

mnem wrote: post #43

harel wrote: post #33

I just don't get how OSX is so popular with a developers. It is essentially a "user's" OS. Not a developer one. Its geared towards, and hides a lot from, the common user. Setting up OSX with all the dev stack is usually a painful experience requiring a few workarounds (I see this with colleagues of mine who wanted a Mac over a Thinkpad with Linux). The keyboard as well is anythign but developer friendly. Where are th…

Hang on - it's been trendy for a decade now? That's pretty good marketing. Maybe, just maybe, different developers enjoy coding in different ways.

I never said the hardware was bad, not detracted from any developer's preference to use a mac. I just expressed my opinion. Yes, its true that the apple hardware is very nice, but at the same time, it was much nicer 10 years ago. Today its just stuff I'd expect from any laptop. There is on groundbreaking changes any more. And good marketing - you bet! The best marketing there is. Its herd mentality taken to the extreme. Have you seen an apple store on launch day?

Re: The desktop and the developer

#123

Post by harel » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:13 PM UTC

CmonDev wrote: post #51

harel wrote: post #33

I just don't get how OSX is so popular with a developers. It is essentially a "user's" OS. Not a developer one. Its geared towards, and hides a lot from, the common user. Setting up OSX with all the dev stack is usually a painful experience requiring a few workarounds (I see this with colleagues of mine who wanted a Mac over a Thinkpad with Linux). The keyboard as well is anythign but developer friendly. Where are th…

"I just don't get how OSX is so popular with a developers" It is not until there is a reliable statistics report.

I just see it often at the hands of devs. At my work we got everyone a Thinkpad running Ubuntu, but some wanted Macs and they got them. At the end of the day, this is a theological discussion influenced mostly by emotion. Pretty much a zero sum game - these are all tools best used at the hands of those who use them.

Re: The desktop and the developer

#124

Post by antsar » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:13 PM UTC

nswanberg wrote: post #117

Is the author suggesting using Macs is a new trend? Or is the main point that a new desktop focused on using cloud hosted services would become popular? Nine years ago Paul Graham wrote about hackers returning to the Mac ( http://paulgraham.com/mac.html ), where he concluded that his dad, who had not taken Paul's suggestion to buy Sun stock 10 years prior, should buy Apple stock (it turned out to be a good bet but fo…

Anecdotally, "which OS is better" arguments seem to be dominated by fanboyism rather than substantive functional differences.

Re: The desktop and the developer

#125

Post by puppetmaster3 » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:15 PM UTC

Consider system76.com

Re: The desktop and the developer

#126

Post by collyw » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:17 PM UTC

gooseyard wrote: post #69

I like OSX on a laptop because it's the only portable machine I've ever used where everything works correctly when I am constantly opening and closing the lid of the machine. At work I will leave my desk several times per day for meetings in conference rooms, then I take the machine home and I may open and close it a dozen more times in the evening. I've probably had 50 laptops over the last 20 years, and the only on…

Am I the only person out there who hasn't got a clue what the point in suspend / hibernate are for. Whenever I use them, it seems to take longer to boot than a complete restart, and half of the times it doesn't boot, and if it does, there is a good chance something is not working.

Re: The desktop and the developer

#127

Post by agumonkey » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:24 PM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #25

davexunit wrote: post #20

I've used OS X at work for the past 2 years and I completely disagree that OS X is nice for developers. I've had a lot of issues that I wouldn't have had if I was using a GNU/Linux distro like Debian. Major issues with GCC after certain updates, outdated GNU software like bash, brew is barely acceptable as a package manager (can't hold a candle to dpkg/apt), and I have to go to websites to get the installers for most…

As someone who's been using OSX full-time for the past two years, and using it in conjuction with a Linux-based desktop computer for the previous ~5. Yes. Linux is insanely better for development. But OSX is just passable enough that the form-factor of an Apple laptop wins out and I can work. I don't want to go back to using two computers and OSX is _much_ better at everyday non-developer stuff than any Linux I've ev…

Oh-my-zsh was pretty wasteful on resources (theming and plugins). The stock config in archlinux is pretty decent (good completion) but avoid OMZ pitfalls.

Re: The desktop and the developer

#128

Post by streptomycin » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:25 PM UTC

Ologn wrote: post #98

My desktop has been Linux since I installed Slackware off of downloaded 3.5 inch disks in the early/mid 1990s. He is correct about the availability of the development environment - back then the home user had to use Linux (or BSD) to get a Unix-type environment. Since MacOS has a NeXTSTEP core, this is no longer necessary. I go to a lot of Android meetings and presentations, sometimes hosted by Google. Most of the pe…

my best source is the sixth (according to Alexa) most popular site on the Internet

Probably not. For security reasons, hardly any distros put their names in browser user agent strings these days. Ubuntu might be the only one still doing it. For the other distros, what you're seeing in the stats is mostly old versions from before that shift (IIRC like 2-3 years ago?).

This is why the #1 Linux distro (twice as popular as Ubuntu) is "Linux Other". Ubuntu is definitely not 100x as popular as any other distro.

Re: The desktop and the developer

#129

Post by gsnedders » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:29 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #126

gooseyard wrote: post #69

I like OSX on a laptop because it's the only portable machine I've ever used where everything works correctly when I am constantly opening and closing the lid of the machine. At work I will leave my desk several times per day for meetings in conference rooms, then I take the machine home and I may open and close it a dozen more times in the evening. I've probably had 50 laptops over the last 20 years, and the only on…

Am I the only person out there who hasn't got a clue what the point in suspend / hibernate are for. Whenever I use them, it seems to take longer to boot than a complete restart, and half of the times it doesn't boot, and if it does, there is a good chance something is not working.

Suspend should take less than a second to resume. If not, something's gone wrong. Apple pushed in a big way to get it to a point of waking up from suspend being quick enough that by the time you've opened the screen fully, it's ready.

Hibernate will often take longer than a clean boot — because it has to read all allocated memory from storage into RAM.

Re: The desktop and the developer

#130

Post by jrajav » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:40 PM UTC

dkhenry wrote: post #90

jrajav wrote: post #53

Missing a killer feature here, at least for me: High-DPI support. No environment on Linux deals with high-DPI adequately yet. Between that and the other big one mentioned in the article, multitouch trackpad support, there is simply no way I can compromise. There isn't really anything else tying me down to OS X, but those two are huge. They're the only major changes I've seen in my workflow and desktop experience in t…

OSX doesn't have HighDPI support. They just scale everything and present a lower resolution. Go ahead and actually try to user a high resolution on your Macbook. I know I did and then I tried to set things to autoscale ( like gnome 3 will do right out of the box ) since most of the time I only want a few applications with lots of screen real estate and I want the others to have larger font. I gave up and just run OSX…

> OSX doesn't have HighDPI support. They just scale everything and present a lower resolution.

This is exactly what I'm referring to as High DPI support. Maybe it's not the solution you'd prefer but it is a solution. By contrast, Linux still has a lot of fit-and-finish issues with high-DPI, even in Gnome 3. I would believe that they're going about it in a better way on the backend, but the fact is OS X is the only one really delivering at the moment.