

Trying Rails and Mac. Confessions of a .NET Developer - steverb
http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/11/trying-rails-mac-confessions-of-net.html

======
mikeryan
I think the lesson learned is that switching to a new development platform on
a completely different OS then with which you're familiar is not something to
be undertaken trivially.

I say this having gone through all his pain when I switched to a Mac but now
I'd never go back to Windows by choice.

------
peteforde
While this doesn't help him get his time back, next time I'd encourage him to
use rvm as the other posters have previously indicated — but instead of
actually installing the massive XCode bundle (4GBs is a lot if you're using an
SSD) I recommend he check out this 300MB bundle you can install which is just
gcc and the other bare minimum tools you'd need to get ruby and the various
gems working:

<https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer>

Also, one small gripe is that it sounds like the majority of his complaints
were actually trying to get Python and Mercurial working. This isn't really
the fault of OS X nor does it bog down most Rails devs working on OS X. Just
some perspective!

------
typicalrunt
His frustrations with getting the correct version of Python and Ruby packages
is completely correct. I don't understand why OSX and Ubuntu still bundle a
specific (usually old) version of languages to their operating system, and
then we (as developers) need to wait until a new package is available for our
operating system.

Is there any other good way to decouple the package management of languages
(Python, Ruby, Java, what have you) from the operating system? I've used
homebrew (edit: and rvm/rbenv) and like it, but it's not an official product
from Apple.

------
steverb
I've done something similar and flip-flopped back and forth between Ubuntu and
Windows. Other than the initial pain of installing Ubuntu and getting
everything working just right (which actually wasn't any worse than Windows) I
never had any trouble getting things to work beyond finding out what the right
tool was. Gotta love apt-get.

------
veemjeem
windows is definitely easier for newbie developers, but once you start to want
more tools, the unix env is still the best place to be. It's like trying to
use vim when you've eclipse all your life. Vim plugins have all these
"requirements" that make it look painful in comparison to eclipse addons.

~~~
tikhonj
I'm entirely a Linux person and would never want to use anything else.
However, I think Windows really isn't that bad as a development platform--
probably not the most fashionable idea in the HN crowd. I know developers--
experienced ones, at that--who are very efficient on Windows. There are now
tools like Powershell that give Windows the functionality you'd need.

While Windows is still proprietary and annoying, I don't think that just
having a unix env is enough to be so much better than Windows. Of course,
Linux is the best option for _me_ because I'm used to it and can leverage it
completely--and I'm sure it's the case for you too--but I've seen too many
people efficiently using Windows to just ignore it out of hand. (Well, I can
safely ignore it because it's proprietary, but that's completely unrelated to
the topic at hand.)

------
aliukani
What? Just use whatever you're comfortable with. All the OS dogma is BS.

