I spun up 12.04 desktop on physical hardware with discreet nvidia graphic card ( I have a lot of experience with server ) and I must say I was hugely impressed by the usability of the system.
Without thinking about it I was clearly able to get work done, navigate the system, access network shares.
If only I could have illustrator, Photoshop and the other graphics apps I use daily I expect I would be more than happy.
The Adobe stack is really the only thing that keeps me on OS X. I'd much prefer to code on a system that shares the exact same stack as what I host with.
It's for this reason that I use Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) - don't have to care what my development workstation is; I just spin up a virtual machine to hack and test in. :)
I think he means he uses a local virtualbox virtual machine for all his development stuff so he doesnt need to care about which OS (win, linux, osx) is running on his physical machine.
Totally true, though its never quite the same. VMWare, Parallels & VirtualBox are getting there but still don't quite have the performance needed for doing video or intense graphics work.
The need to virtualize graphics drivers, that then go trough standard API on the host adds an extra layer of indirection to already slow pipeline, is probably going to prevent any major gains in that area.
No, you do you CS work in OS X and your other development/web stack etc stuff in a VM.
Best of both worlds. Actually, I'd use a VM for development even if I was running Linux as my primary OS and didn't have a need for the CS suite myself.
I agree with the general notion, but not with the specifics. That is:
It's nice to code on a system that "shares the exact same stack as what I host with", but just running on Linux is not doing it.
Except if you only ever host with one single stack.
Normally, you'd have different stacks for different projects, different technologies (Ruby, PHP, etc), others would have Apache, others NGINX, MySQL or Mongo, different major or minor versions, etc.
So, I find the best way is to setup a VM with each hosting environment and work on that. You get easily reproducible stack, snapshots, isolation, and a cleaner main OS X or Linux install. With one click on the next image, you can completely change your environment.
We try quite hard to keep our stack homogeneous. We're Debian Squeeze from dev through to deployment, except for a very few Lenny services which haven't been upgraded yet (and won't be, until the service itself is replaced).
This means that getting a new service up and running should, by and large, be trivial. There's no discussion over what the best platform for a given service is, it's just a question of how to get it working on Squeeze. If we have to package something up to make it deployable, that's what we do.
Anyone coming to an arbitrary system knows what the tools are, and where to look. It's very, very simple.
Without thinking about it I was clearly able to get work done, navigate the system, access network shares.
If only I could have illustrator, Photoshop and the other graphics apps I use daily I expect I would be more than happy.
Would totally recommend checking 12.04 out.