

On Why Open Source Developers run Mac OS X - sharms
http://www.sharms.org/blog/2010/12/on-why-open-source-developers-run-mac-os-x/

======
vog
From the article:

 _"And this, I believe, is why great developers tend to move towards OS X
(yes, there are plenty of exceptions)"_

With all due respect, this reads more like an Apple advertisement than a well-
thought conclusion.

First, I find it somewhat strange to declare those who stay with FreeBSD or
Debian as "exceptions", thus implying that moving to OS X is the norm. This is
not backed by any numbers. There are just some anecdotes of some people
switching to OS X.

Also, that statement implies it is meaningful that some great developers
switch. However, that detail isn't relevant at all to understand to process.
OS X is comparatively new, so of course people are still looking at it and
some of them move over. And of course some of those people are great
developers, as in any random group.

To make this more clear: Among the people who are switching, there are
naturally a lot more mediocre developers than great developers (as in any
random group), but the article wouldn't sound nearly as sensational if the
author had written: "thousands of mediocre developers switched to OS X".

Also, a lot of people switch from a proprietary system (like OS X or Windows)
to Ubuntu, Fedora and many other free software systems. However, those aren't
nearly as celebrated as those who switch to OS X. Why is that?

This article is so strongly biased that it is hard not to mistake it for an
Apple ad.

~~~
foljs
> First, I find it somewhat strange to declare those who stay with FreeBSD or
> Debian as "exceptions", thus implying that moving to OS X is the norm. This
> is not backed by any numbers.

Have you been to a OSS based conference in the last 5 years? Anything, from
Apache to Rails to Python? The number of Apple laptops is by far greater than
any other.

~~~
krschultz
So are people switching to Macbook Pros or to Mac OS X?

Because I think the the industrial design of the laptop is driving a lot of
people over, not Mac OS X.

Are people switching to Apple desktop machines at the same rate? I'm not
seeing it. If I were to buy a desktop tomorrow it would definitely not be a
Mac, but if I were to buy a laptop tomorrow it would be a Macbook Pro.

~~~
bonzoesc
People are switching to Mac OS X on MacBook Pro.

~~~
vog
How do you know that, if those are so many people?

~~~
jammur
Because when you pay attention to what's going on in a community, you notice
trends. In the open source community, most notably the web development
community, there has been a trend of moving to Mac.

~~~
Maascamp
Source?

~~~
jammur
I think you might have missed the point of the post you replied to. The point
is that sometimes you don't need data. For instance, in the fashion world, one
might notice a trend of people wearing a certain style of jeans. Nobody is
going to go out and do a a random sampled study to see if this holds up to
scrutiny, but the trend is noticeable to anyone paying attention. If you're
involved at all in the open source web development world for example, it would
be pretty hard to miss the trend of developers moving to Mac.

------
rwl
Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.sharms.org%2Fblog%2F2010%2F12%2Fon-
why-open-source-developers-run-mac-os-x%2F&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t)

I'm not an "open source developer." But I do write code from time to time that
I am happy to share with others. I run Debian on a desktop most of the time;
essentially the only program I interact with outside of Emacs is a web
browser. I do have a Macbook, though, that I use as a second computer when I'm
away from home.

I am constantly frustrated by OS X.

The biggest reason is one of the `features' mentioned in the article: the
`./configure && make && make install' routine seems to constantly break on OS
X. This is a problem for me because much of the software I use (or try to play
around with) doesn't specifically target OS X, so there generally aren't pre-
compiled binaries available, and often the build instructions do not provide
helpful hints for OS X users. I used to work in a lab that ran entirely on OS
X. Compiling scientific libraries (e.g. SciPy) was frequently a recursive
nightmare of trying to compile or otherwise install various dependencies (in
SciPy's case, I remember the lack of gfortran being an issue).

Often, the problem has to do with missing libraries or figuring out how to set
CFLAGS to cope with Apple's non-standard paths, both of which are headache
enough. But sometimes the errors are just incomprehensible -- at least to
someone without serious C knowledge -- and then I'm stuck.

Sometimes, Apple has done the hard work for you of properly configuring and
installing popular Free programs (e.g. Emacs, Python) but the versions are
Apple modified, can be difficult to get to work with outside libraries, and
are often very old.

(I'm venting a bit here because I have been suffering from these sorts of
problems fairly acutely in the last couple of days, but it really does seem to
be an issue every time I want to use something on OS X: from Emacs to Python
to Git to whatever else, _something_ always seems to go wrong, even if it's
not a dealbreaker.)

The bottom line is that OS X is a long way away, for me, from being an
environment in which I can comfortably use all the software I want to without
too much time lost down the rabbit hole of configuration. And I don't even
spend most of my time programming! So I'd have to disagree with the sentiment
of the article.

~~~
camperman
Amen to this. I've also been suffering from OSX compilation problems in the
last few days and I have years of experience compiling packages from scratch.
It's so bad that I'm about to switch back to using Ubuntu as a primary
development machine. And macports has never worked properly for me on Snow
Leopard. Fink is great for tools and libraries but the large source-based
packages I'm interested in always break for some reason. I have failed to
compile emacs, xemacs, Python, SDL, Irrlicht, gambit-c, Panda, Ogre and a
whole bunch of others I've probably forgotten by now on OSX. All of them
worked flawlessly on Ubuntu - ./configure && make && make install. Done.
Compiling and installing on OSX - ugh. Yes xcode is lovely if you know how to
drive it and are writing Objective C. For the rest of us, it's a wilderness.

~~~
rue
It really should not be that hard on 10.5 or 10.6. Try Homebrew?
<http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew>

------
ekidd
I bought a MacBook Pro 3 years ago, because I was sick of dealing with ugly PC
hardware and I had gone through one-too-many 30 hour sessions trying to get
suspend/resume to work reliably.

I've been pretty happy on the Mac. But I miss Ubuntu's giant repository of
binary packages, and I've recently fallen in love with XMonad's automatic
window management.

So now I'm running Ubuntu in VirtualBox, and I'm enjoying it greatly. And I've
learned my lesson about Linux laptops: I'm going to buy a premium laptop from
a high-end Linux vendor, and let somebody _else_ worry about drivers.

~~~
foljs
A "high end Linux vendor" for laptops? Like what?

And who would be that "somebody else", worrying about the drivers? Surely not
the "high end Linux laptop vendor" --because, even though he would have basic
stuff like the video card, wireless et al working, with anything not embedded
in the laptop, you would be on your own.

~~~
ekidd
ZaReason and System76 are two of the better known Linux laptop vendors.

Generally speaking, the biggest problems with Linux laptop drivers used to be
suspend/resume and the video card. Unless you were willing to put in a lot of
work for each new release of Ubuntu, it was hard to get a Mac-quality
experience. If your time was reasonably valuable, you were better off paying a
few hundred dollars extra for a well-supported system.

I generally don't worry about drivers for random USB junk. Nearly all of it
works fine with Linux, and if it doesn't, it's trivial and cheap to replace.

I can't wait for 8GB of RAM and an Intel SSD drive. Drool.

~~~
elai
System76 has laptops with that option now.

------
Apreche
In my experience it's heavily tied to whether you are a GUI person or a
command line person.

Most of the developers I know are using Macs, with only myself and a few
others preferring Linux. The Mac guys use the terminal, as it is a necessity.
But they are relatively slow at it. Most of them don't even really use tab
completion as much as they could, if at all. They also use the mouse very
heavily, especially in their web browser, finder, and text editor.

The developers I know that prefer Linux, including myself, freaking fly on the
keyboard. We hardly ever touch the mouse. We tab complete like crazy. We use a
ton of keyboard shortcuts for everything. Doesn't matter if we are vim or
emacs, it's keyboard keyboard keyboard.

I think the explanation is very simple. If you are a mouse using person, and
you compare a Linux system to a Mac, the Mac will be more comfortable,
especially with that great touchpad. If you are a keyboard person, the Mac
will drive you insane and Linux will be happy land. People tend to change
their software rather than change themselves, so mouse people end up on Macs.

~~~
michaelchisari
_If you are a keyboard person, the Mac will drive you insane and Linux will be
happy land._

I disagree. As a keyboard person, I can move way faster with the mac than I
can with Linux. Linux' keyboard-based workflow is constantly playing catch-up
with Mac OS X's (like Expose). On a mac, I can get by without hardly ever
using the mouse.

I'm a vi person, btw, since we're on the subject of religious flamewars. :)

~~~
Apreche
I am forced to use a Mac at work, and I use expose and such quite a bit. Yet,
despite using it for over a year, it's still just way more painful for me.
Here are my three major issues.

1) Animations are nice, but slow. Things like Expose/Spaces animations just
get in my way because I already know where I'm going, I don't need the visual
help. Just like I don't need to turn a light on to walk around my apartment in
the dark. I like it when things happen instantly.

2) Not enough keyboard shortcuts. For example, what's the shortcut to move a
window to the adjacent virtual desktop? Oh there isn't one, you must drag it
with the mouse.

3) Control vs. Command is probably my number one peeve. What's the shortcut in
Firefox to open a new tab? Command+t. What's the shortcut in the terminal to
go to the beginning of the line? ctrl+a. In Windows or Linux I have caps lock
converted to ctrl, and use it for everything. In Mac, I have to switch between
cmd and ctrl all the time. My thumb ends up doing work meant for my pinky.

I also have some non-keyboard related issues with OSX. The first example that
always comes to mind is when I want to show hidden files in the finder.

~~~
zppx
OS X is not perfect, the real problem for me is that some people just think it
is

My main problem with OS X is that Alt + D (plus Alt + B and Alt + F) just
don't work as it should, like in any sane Terminal, there's no difference
between Alt and Alt Gr on a Mac, sad, very sad. Also I would love to see a
real package manager, pkgutil is horrible...

~~~
mikeklaas
You can fix that in 2 minutes:

<http://blog.macromates.com/2006/word-movement-in-terminal/>

~~~
zppx
Thanks! Now, I am happy with "Terminal.app".

------
agentultra
I'm an open source developer and I have absolutely no desire to switch to OSX.
I don't really spend much time fiddling with my setup and I probably gain a
lot of productivity by having an environment that is completely customized to
my workflow.

Personally I'm running Arch w/ stumpwm on vanilla X. All I need is emacs, ff,
and a couple terminal windows. No distractions at all; no windows hiding other
windows, no tabbing through three or four windows to get to the one I want,
nothing popping up in my face, no bloat-ware monitoring useless information.
My fingers almost never leave my home row while I work.

I don't really know what this article was trying to get at. I'm sure there are
lots of developers who do use OS X, but I don't think that choice really has
much to say about open source developers as a whole and probably less to say
about developers who do not switch.

It's just an operating system.

~~~
beej71
Gotta love Arch for being cutting-edge on the packages, too. And AUR... man,
what a great distro. I probably spend something like 5 minutes a week
maintaining it, and 99% of that time is updating packages.

I run it on my Aspire 1, as well--and suspend on lid works just fine. :)

If I never got to touch a Mac again (if Apple releases their iOS dev tools for
Linux for instance... HAHAHAH!) I wouldn't miss it.

------
mindcrime
Fedora Linux "just works" for me on my laptop (a 2 year old Toshiba
Satellite), and I don't necessarily fall into the "fiddling with stuff and
rebuilding stuff for grins and giggles" routine, FWIW. I will concede,
however, that I am one of those people to whom F/OSS is an ideology, and I
strive to avoid using any proprietary software as a matter of principle. Hence
my refusal to own or use anything put out by Apple. :-)

~~~
foljs
So, can you, say, connect your mobile phone or your digital camcorder and view
and edit the files to send an edited version to your grandmother in a Fedora
Linux without fiddling?

If not, then "FWIW" should have been rewritten as "YMMV".

~~~
8plot
FWIW, using only ubuntu, I did both of these things last month to create a
Christmas DVD of home movies and cell phone video clips.

Without much fuss, I transfered the video files via ssh from my jail-broken
iphone, then edited, mastered and burned the DVDs using kdenlive. It was much
easier than I expected.

~~~
natrius
I don't think you're helping the case much when you throw ssh into the mix...

~~~
8plot
Why? SSH is very convenient, easy for anyone to understand (including my 9
year old nephew), and I trust the security. What is better?

~~~
natrius
Oh come on. You can't copy a video from an iPhone over SSH _without fiddling_
, which was the constraint specified in the original comment.

~~~
8plot
Since I don't consider using SSH "fiddling", I don't know what you mean, and
I'd guess that most developers don't think twice about how to use SSH. (If
they did, they're not much of a developer in my book).

It's ironic to me that the most difficult part was having to jail-break my
iphone. Apple certainly doesn't make my life any easier.

~~~
natrius
I think that difficult part constitutes fiddling.

~~~
8plot
I disagree. To me, the jail-break is just a default, one-time requirement to
gain control over a device I own. It's actually not too difficult, so I don't
consider it fiddling.

~~~
nailer
One time? How do you handle iOS updates?

------
rb2k_
And this is why they should use caching :)

copypasta:

A common trend among many of the best developers is to see them posting
screenshots running OS X. Many of the best developers, some my personal
‘developer heroes’, have made the switch to OS X.

It’s All About the Mentality

I respect and admire programmers like @migueldeicaza, @mitsuhiko, mandrake,
@dhh for all they have accomplished. One thing they all have in common,
present day, is running OS X. Mandrake cowrote Enlightenment (which is the
original really cool window manager for Linux), Miguel started Gnome, and the
majority of code both Mitsuhiko (wrote almost every useful Python library
ever) and DHH (Ruby on Rails) write run on Linux backends to say the least.

What are they most known for? Problem solving skills mixed with actually
producing / releasing.

Linux is Open Source

And this, I believe, is why great developers tend to move towards OS X (yes,
there are plenty of exceptions). A critical piece of writing software is
focus. When a problem solver uses a Linux desktop, they are immediately
confronted with the possibility of being able to modify every part of their
system. When a problem solver runs OS X, their options are severely limited,
by design.

I think all of us are guilty for hunting down PPAs to get a backported
browser, or running ‘./configure && make && make install’ at some point. And
when you have programming skills, source code can turn into a detriment to
productivity when you start modifying projects outside of what you intended to
accomplish. All of a sudden you start hacking a project for a few minutes, and
wake up days later in a coding haze with all of that time lost.

Personally I have had experience with this while using old Linux
distributions. We have SLES 9 systems and SLES 10 systems here at work, and in
the past year I have spent countless hours hacking Sprint 3G wireless drivers,
USB over IP, Firefox 3 and countless others to work on these older systems.
Why? Not because they are the primary goal, but because I could, which in turn
took up time from things I actually “wanted” to do.

Time is Valuable

Watching one of Miguel’s presentations, he mentions that he does not have
enough years left to “worry about memory management” and that they leave that
to the younger folks. This is the crux of the argument. For programmers, there
is far too much opportunity for distraction at every avenue. We don’t know how
long we will be here for, but certainly we know that nothing we care about
will get done as long as our focus is spread so thin across the spectrum of
Linux.

Summary

This is all just food for thought, not a judgement against any form of desktop
or usage pattern. For reference, I am still running Ubuntu on my desktop, and
being wildly unproductive on the tasks I want to finish.

~~~
Groxx
hyperlinka:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?aq=f&ie=UTF...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?aq=f&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.sharms.org%2Fblog%2F2010%2F12%2Fon-
why-open-source-developers-run-mac-os-x%2F)

------
huxley
For many open source developers/contributors, open source is not their entire
life.

The majority of open source users/developers/contributors are pragmatic about
the utility of open source software (it does a job they need done and the
access to open source code makes it better), but there is a very vocal
minority for whom open source/free software is an ideology (there's nothing
wrong with that either).

I'm 100% open source on the server. The combo of Ubuntu, Django, Nginx,
Gunicorn and Postgresql has made me very productive.

I like futzing with servers, I hate doing it with notebooks. OS X might not
always "just work" but it does for most cases that matter to me.

Other people might own consoles or use Microsoft Office (or Google Docs) or
other stuff which isn't open source, but that shouldn't affect their support
for open source in the areas that matter to them.

------
st3fan
I can understand his argument about tinkering and distractions, but personally
for me it is all about apps. If Linux had the same polished apps like OS X has
then I would probably use Ubuntu as my main OS.

~~~
timtadh
Actually two of my favorite apps ever are on linux, Amarok and Digikam.
However, in full disclosure I haven't used Mac seriously in a while. I am sure
there would be things I would love on it but for the most part I am very happy
with the apps available for linux, especially now KDE4 is becoming usable.

------
doron
Anecdotal evidence from my experience finds this to be true but only when you
consider the type of developer and his field.

Opensource web oriented platforms (i.e web developers who commit code to web
based projects in accordance to open source code licenses) use OSX in my
experience by overwhelming majority.

Lower OS Level developers tend to stick with Linux or BSD

In some instances it didn't make any sense at all, the pains I saw developers
trying to install couchDB on their OSX platform (i think it is a easier now),
it was far easier to do this on ubuntu.

Developers also have aesthetic impulses, and OSX looks good and feels good,
for most people, better then any X based GUI other platforms have. This is
also an issue with the relative comfort different developers have with the
Terminal.

Much can be said about this practice, no dog fooding might make open source
less viable in the long run.

------
Groxx
> _When a problem solver runs OS X, their options are severely limited, by
> design._

Hardly. On the surface, sure; that's part of the appeal. Underneath? GCC's a
couple keystrokes away. There's even <http://www.opensource.apple.com/> which
has kernels[1] and _lots_ of low-level code you can hack away at. Less than an
OSS Unix distro? Absolutely. But not by all that far.

[1]: <http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1504.9.17/>

~~~
vog
FWIW, the GCC, LD and other tools provided with OS X have a lot of deviations
in terms of command line arguments and shared library path/bundle concepts.

You can have a simple application with a simple Makefile that works out of the
box on any BSD and Linux system, but still have to adjust it to get it run
under OS X.

So yes, under that hat OS X is some kind of Unix, but it is a very strange
kind of Unix. OS X requires special cases in any build script, even in
portable *.pro files of Qt projects.

So to me, as a developer and problem solver, OS X confronts me with a lot more
distractions and nasty behavior than any other Unix-like system, including
Windows+MinGW.

(This is because the MinGW cross compilers behave like normal GCC/Binutils as
far as possible for the Windows platform. However, this solely because MinGW
is developed by a group of volunteers, while the GCC functionality for OS X is
developed by Apple. MinGW would surely look worse if it had been developed by
Microsoft.)

~~~
Groxx
A large part of that, from what I've encountered (by no means a representative
sample), is due to Unix makefiles expecting/requiring X in specific-
location-Y, or making things stringly-typed[1], or outright artificially
restricting the systems it thinks it can run on, failing fake sanity checks
up-front. Or other bad code.

But yes. OSX is _not_ a direct match to other Unix-like systems, and a lot of
source compiles not tweaked to handle OSX (many are) will require changing a
couple things. Though Qt worked just fine for me, so who knows.

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-
programming-j...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-programming-
jargon-you-coined/2444303#2444303)

~~~
vog
_> A large part of that, from what I've encountered ..._

Since I was talking about Makefile that run unmodified on any BSD and Linux,
I'm clearly not talking about the kind of crappy build scripts you are
mentioning. Those are an issue of their own.

 _> a lot of source compiles not tweaked to handle OSX_

The problem is that you _have to_ tweak scripts. You have to tweak even clean,
simple scripts or libraries that use only portable constructs (i.e. without
any hard-coded paths and other stupid stuff). And that's really nasty.

~~~
jammur
What experience is this based on? In my 6 years experience using a Mac as my
primary machine, I've never had a higher rate of problems installing open
source software with the default build scripts than on Linux.

Also, there's Macports, Fink, and Homebrew, which make it effortless.

------
mcculley
I've been using Linux since 1992 with SLS. I've had several laptops on which I
ran Debian. For years I did battle with audio drivers, printers, wireless, and
non-functional suspend/resume.

Upon encountering OS X I went out and bought a 12" PowerBook. I thought it
would be a nice machine to run Debian/PPC on. Instead, I so enjoyed having a
functional laptop, that I never left OS X. Being firmly in the open source
world, I described it as a crisis of faith. I'm on my second MacBook Pro now.

Having instantaneous suspend/resume is the biggest deal for me. Having
wireless just work and being able to plug into a random printer and print a
boarding pass is really nice. Plugging into a random projector or monitor and
being able to do a demo or presentation without debugging the latest
configuration mechanism to X is nice.

I still use Debian for servers and some workstations. Basically, if I only
have to configure it once, it is worth the hassle. But with a laptop, I am
essentially reconfiguring multiple times per day moving between locations,
networks, and peripherals. OS X makes this so much less painful.

People like to talk about Apple as a software company or a hardware company.
They are a systems company. Because they control the OS and the hardware,
there isn't the enormous problems getting suspend/resume to work like there is
in the Windows and Linux world where you have to get multiple vendors to
cooperate to get something done.

------
samd
Apparently, just like real people, programmers just want shit to work when
said shit is tangential to their project.

Ubuntu does a mostly good job at that, at least for me.

------
vital101
A once asked a professor of mine why he used Mac OS X instead of Linux. He
said to me "Linux is free, so long as your time is.".

I think that really gets the point across. While Ubuntu and a few others have
made great strides in getting things to "just work", OS X is still the king in
that regard.

~~~
foljs
Now, I hope your professor didn't try to pass that quote as his.

It's an old saying, most frequently encountered as "Linux is free, as long as
your time is worthless".

~~~
vital101
No, he didn't. He said it as "As the saying goes...".

------
riobard
For me OS X = A *nix desktop that actually works (no more tinkering with
various peripheral devices, drivers, etc) + generally better-designed hardware
+ much more higher quality apps = more time left to do other things

------
maximilianburke
I don't agree with the point made regarding having to build ones own software.
I've found I've done as much "./configure && make && make install" on OSX as I
have done with Linux -- if I'm using something that hasn't been updated in
MacPorts I'm going to be building it myself.

------
phamilton
I think there are three main factors for the switch over the last few years.

1) Apple switched to x86

2) The MacBook Pro unibody line is just a solid laptop with a great design.

3) The iOS "bubble", where iOS developers are in high demand.

------
rbanffy
I see Macs are very popular in the Python and Plone communities. Rails, too,
has its fair share of Mac users. Lots of Java developers who use
Eclipse/Tomcat/MySQL form a more even split among Windows/OSX users. Linux/BSD
notebooks don't seem to be as common on Java-related FLOSS events than in
other similar events.

I prefer Linux. Actually, I would be happy with any Unix-like OS with proper
system-wide binary package management and a modern GUI. I can live with the
occasional quirk when some part of the computer cannot function properly
because it was never properly documented. I know that, by the next OS release
(right now, that will be in about 4 months), it will.

Also, BtrFS is very interesting (although it doesn't compare to ZFS, but
that's another can of worms)

------
zoomzoom
Something else to consider is the rise of the cloud - people buy apple
hardware and then ssh into their linux boxes, or run them as VMs locally.

------
rbanffy
Because of "504 Gateway Timeout" errors? ;-)

edit: I really wish I could read the article.

edit 2: Now that I am able to read it:

> When a problem solver uses a Linux desktop, they are immediately confronted
> with the possibility of being able to modify every part of their system

Yes, but some of them never do it. They modify it once to tailor it to their
needs (I check-out my Emacs configuration) and never touch it again. When I
moved to Linux in 2002 or so, I spent some time trying skins and desktops and
so on. Now all my computers use the default look and feel provided by Ubuntu.
The last 4 years have been like that.

------
codelust
I think title for the post really needs to be backed up with numbers. There is
a major difference between "developers I know/follow" "and most open source
developers".

I switched to a MBP in 2007 since I was due an upgrade on the giant Toshiba I
was lugging around. By then, most of the PC options were on offering Vista. By
then, I had grown into a significant 'frenemy' arrangement with Windows XP and
just did not want to put in anoter x number of years learning another Windows
version and get it to behave to my liking. So I went with the MBP and after a
week or so I was quite happy and settled with it.

I switched to a Macbook after that (left the job and hated the abysmal battery
life on the MBP) and it has been my main work/dev machine ever since.

The reasons why I love the Macs:

1\. It stays out of your way. I don't often reboot for 30+ days. Between the
Finder, Terminal, Chromium & Textmate I get more work done and less time is
spent on understanding the innards of some inane bug.

2\. Ability to compile stuff has improved a lot. In 2007 it was a pain to get
most of the OSS stuff compiled on it, it is a different story now. But this is
also because the people who manage the products are doing a better job of
targeting the Darwin as an architecture.

I was a pretty involved Linux user in the day. There was a time when I would
get my kicks out of the fact that you had to work hard to get a video driver
going. I don't have the time for that now. On a recent Netbook I bought, I
tried the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It worked, but with a lot of glitches and
plenty of inconsistencies. Made an effort for 2-days, installed XP on it and
been happy ever since.

------
tbob22
<rant> Funny thing is every time I use Mac OS, I find myself tinkering more
than usual, whether it be on my Hackintosh, or a friends Macbook, although the
Hackintosh did require a bit of tinkering just to get it running 100%.

I guess I'm always trying to make OS X a bit more usable to a primarily
Linux/Windows person.

When I go down to that dock or activate expose I feel like I am losing
precious time watching those animations (probably just me), Quicksilver does
help but if I could just turn off the animations (like in Windows / YouNameIt
Linux Distro) it would feel much nicer.

I tend to use Windows (design, production and games) and Ubuntu (programming,
server related tasks) primarily and I have them set up very similar, using
"Expose with no animation" (switcher and compiz), Launchy, very simple grey
themes, a "Windows 7-like dock" for Ubuntu, and using the same fonts and
Firefox/Thunderbird profiles, it is almost seamless other than the restarting
part.

This works quite well and allows me to get real work done without flashy stuff
going on all over the place or processes running in the background eating up
precious CPU cycles that I can't seem to disable without breaking something.

It could be I'm just a hacker/tinkerer by nature, and when a system like OS X
says I can't do something it makes me want to do it even more.

So, Apple.. Where is that option to disable all animations, or to show folders
at the top of the finder (without totalfinder, or organizing by type)? </rant>

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michaelchisari
I'm an open source developer, and I run Mac OS X for one reason:

I find it's interface to be, hands down, the best I've ever used. Since I
work, essentially, two full time jobs (my day job, followed by Appleseed at
night), I frankly don't want to have to wrestle with my operating system, even
just a little bit.

I used Linux for years, haven't really used Windows since XP was released, and
switched to Mac OS X about three years ago, and I'm not really interested in
going back. I'm a fan of picking and choosing your battles, as opposed to
adopting an approach of total purity, so right now my focus is building open
source social networking, and if a closed system helps me do that without
tearing my hair out, then I find that to be an acceptable compromise.

~~~
Groxx
That's pretty similar to my reasons as well. I find it gets in my way _far_
less than others, and when it does there's a full-featured Terminal, or it's
likely minor enough to ignore entirely.

It's hard to realize how much crap you have to put up with while running
Windows, until you get rid of it (whether for OSX or Linux, BSD, what-have-
you).

------
bryanwb
At the GSoC 2009 Mentors conference, I was amazed that a majority of attendees
were running OS X

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sandGorgon
Robert Love @ Google (<http://robert.love.usesthis.com/>) - author of Linux
Kernel Development and ex-Ximian developer.

Laptop (though admittedly non-coding) - Macbook Pro.

'nuff said.

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bluesnowmonkey
I do web development. My code runs on headless Linux boxes, so I want to
develop on something POSIX. So Windows is out.

I've tried Linux every couple of years since at least 1998 -- I really want to
use it -- but I always end up searching forums for the fix to a broken
Makefile for a printer driver. Or maybe it's sound, wireless, graphics,
whatever. Still. After all these years. I _HATE_ dealing with that stuff. So
Linux is out.

OSX is the only man left standing.

------
CJefferson
Apple's C++ support has got horrible recently. Debugging mode in the C++
standard library doesn't work, gdb often fails to find symbols, Shark crashes,
and the compiler has no C++0x support, unlike the current compilers on both
Windows and Linux.

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jcfrei
I could see myself switching to a Mac because they have very nice laptops. a
macbook pro or a air is a fine machine. on the downside: the keyboards suck
and it would require me to setup a dual-boot system.

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compay
#1 reason for a developer to run Linux: KCacheGrind. Compiling and running
this on OS X is a terrible PITA. I'm not aware of any native Mac app that's
even remotely as good for analyzing profiler output.

~~~
danieldk
Instruments? DTrace?

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dedward
Not sure I buy the reasoning - but I will say I have seen a trend where
previous unix guys (usually linux, some bsd - as per the demographics) end up
going for the apple laptops just because of OSX.

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macco
Where is the evidence, that Open Source developers in general use OS X? Maybe
some programmers use OS X, because the curious, just to try something new.

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foljs
Even Linus Torwalds used an iBook with OS X --he wrote his book in it. And at
a time, he used a Powemac G5 as his desktop machine, although that one was
running Linux ( [http://news.cnet.com/Torvalds-switches-to-
Apple/2100-1003_3-...](http://news.cnet.com/Torvalds-switches-to-
Apple/2100-1003_3-5606030.html?tag=nefd.top#ixzz18O5JQMrP) ).

Now, the lure of an OS X machine for an OSS hacker, is that besides the system
"just running", with minimal hunting and improvising, they also need/want/like
to have several apps not available as Open Source, or with sub par
replacements. Stuff from running Photoshop or Omnigraffle to connecting their
mobile phones and being able to _see_ and _edit_ their video captures with a
minimum of fuss.

Of course, this only holds true for OSS hackers that are "pragmatic" and just
use what they think is best for their needs, not for hardcore "Libre Software"
types.

------
savoy11
"Open Source Developer" is not a job or career or profession. How many people
out there really make their money checking in open source code? 0.1% of all
developers? 0.01%? Most people do it in their free time, use it as marketing
tool for their consulting/commercial offers, etc.

Miguel de Icaza for one might have Macbook, but I am sure it at least dual
boots to Windows. It would not be possible otherwise, since he needs to run
.NET non-stop and copy/paste code from Reflector to his Mono implementation,
or whatever they are doing to clone .NET to Mono.

And I am pretty sure Apple Software has nothing to do with how they really win
their bucks. So no need to look for logic here - they just like the shiny
hardware cause they are geeks. That's it. No rocket science or philosophy
here.

~~~
jacksonh
I work on the Mono team and we do nothing of the sort. Most of us don't even
have a windows machine.

~~~
savoy11
That's why noone is taking you seriously, folks. Copy/Pasting .NET and you
claim you do not even have the original on your machine - nobody is going to
use your crap. How on Earth am I going to trust my business on Mono when you
claim that ridiculous shit.

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gcb
Because they don't.

Saying that Miguel de Icaza represents open source developers is just wrong. I
respect the guy very much. But he's a completely different beast than the
average open source programmer joe

Now most of the ones in academia do use mac (and used SGI workstations before
that) just because they have a fat allowance for gear and they have no idea
how to waste. so mac is the obvious way to go if what you need is to waste
money.

~~~
pessimizer
From my few experiences at open source software programmery events over the
past few years, I'd disagree. Always seems that a little fewer than half of
attendees have macs in front of them. I explain part of it to myself by
noticing that the numbers skew even higher than half when it's something
'webby,' and attributing that to the closeness to graphic design-media-
marketing types.

With other systems programmer types, I still see plenty of macs, but I blame
that on the fact that those programmers are spending all of their important
time on the server and some don't feel like futzing around on their laptop
with a more fiddly OS like Linux or Windows. The only thing that all
programmers seem to like to fiddle with endlessly is IDEs and text editors,
and there seem to plenty of mac options for that.

