

Why OS X just doesn't cut it - cloudhead
http://cloudhead.io/2011/04/18/why-osx-doesnt-cut-it/

======
YooLi
The title is missing "For Me" from the end. I moved from Linux to OS X because
Linux couldn't cut it _for me_.

The closer is arrogant too:

"If every thing I said went over your head, and you think I’m crazy, it just
means your time hasn’t come yet."

~~~
ihodes
Out of curiosity, why did you switch to OSX? I'm on OSX now, and I love much
of it, but the author's points ring very true. I'm less and less sure every
day why I stay on Mac as apposed to Arch, which I use on my servers.

~~~
kgo
I personally find X to really annoying due to it's architecture, no matter how
pretty Gnome and KDE get. Just one example that happens all the time for me on
linux.

1\. Taskbar yells that I have updates. 2\. I click the notification icon. 3\.
Nothing happens. No hourglass. 4\. Wait. 5\. Click it again. 6\. No feedback.
7\. Two copies of synaptic pop up. One flips out because another copy is
already open.

The analogous version of this never happens to me on Windows or OSX.

Sure it's not the end of the world, but when weird stuff like this happens
more than once a day, it gets annoying. It's like having that toilet where you
need to jiggle the handle.

~~~
hollerith
Same here: X is annoying for reasons hard for me to articulate, and the
analogous part of OS X is significantly less annoying.

If Canonical completes their plan to replace X with Wayland in Ubuntu, I will
give Ubuntu another try.

ADDED. I ran Linux for 13 years.

~~~
krakensden
None of the problems he listed are caused by X, they're caused by various
decisions in GTK+, Gnome, and Synaptic. Moving to Wayland won't fix any of
those things.

It will get you slightly faster compositing, though.

~~~
hollerith
It might be _possible_ to fix these things without changing X, but I get the
impression that it is _harder_ to write an app that does not annoy me in X
than in OS X.

------
Nizumzen
While I appreciate the sentiment this obviously comes from an author who has
very little Unix experience in general. For instance he claims that Darwin is
an odd duck and that "Things which build & run clean­ly on other *nixes won’t
nec­es­sar­i­ly build & run that eas­i­ly on Dar­win."

Really? Ever tried to compile anything on HP/UX or IBM AIX? Darwin is a bed of
roses compared to that. Even Solaris has its problems when compiling things.
The author obviously thinks that Linux = Unix even though the heritage of
Darwin / OS X is that of the BSD branch of the Unix family whilst Linux takes
a lot of inspiration from the System V family.

I kind of agree with the article in general I just think it was so badly
written and some of the claims so down right ignorant it masks a decent point.

Oh and as for managing daemons, launchd is a significant improvement over the
standard Linux initd and cron scripts. At least launchd will restart crashed /
stopped daemons when needed. Plus you don't even need to run the daemon at all
times on OS X. It will be automatically started when an incomming request for
it is made. To do that on Linux you need to move over to daemontools (which
actually also works on OS X as well so that nullifies that advantage).

------
edw
His profound disgust for Terminal.app to me is a case of Princess and the Pea
syndrome: I remember typing into actual glass terminals, so—without trying to
sound too much like grandpa here—he sounds a bit spoiled to me.

I knew a lot of people like this guy. I'd be sitting at a SPARCstation in the
computer lab running twm and there'd be some dude next to me that was never
content with something that _just fucking worked_ and he was constantly trying
to _optimize_ everything. As someone else already said, whenever I see people
like this, I want to ask, "Better for _whom_? Better for _what_?"

And what of this? "I don’t think I need to further argue this sub ject—we all
agree open-source is good." _Hello?!_ You're talking to Mac users here, they
may not agree to some statement that you find blindingly obvious, given that
they're not using a $300 netbook based on Linux.

Yeah, all things considered, maybe I'd prefer to _program_ Unix on a FreeBSD
box, but I do more than just program.

~~~
astrodust
I've done programming on computers that didn't even have a proper backspace
key, you had to literally hit CTRL+H, written hundreds of thousands of lines
on a system with no windowing system whatsoever, and this guy is complaining
because you can't "full screen" or use the mouse in Terminal.app?

If you want Linux, install Linux. Not hard. No reason to write an angry post
about how OS X isn't X11.

~~~
mturmon
So true. As the <http://usesthis.com> interviews have shown, people can be
highly productive using highly divergent development setups.

Even serious coders in the neckbeard tradition, which seems to be what the OP
aspires to.

------
pohl
I can't take this seriously. The author complains that MacOS X's support for
Valgrind is in its infancy. Well, how is DTrace support in Linux coming along?

One could write an essay like this that accentuated either platform. For
example, I'd like a diff/merge GUI like Changes on my Ubuntu machine. What do
I have at my disposal? Meld? I can't even navigate & merge individual changes
with the keyboard. Darned thing actually makes me use the mouse. The
_mouse_...on _linux_.

Yeah, I know: submit a patch.

------
ihodes
Those points are all reasons I get closer, every day, to switching to Arch.
However, OSX still has a lot over the Linices. To name a few advantages:

Great applications/uses that require a Mac:

1\. Todo lists (Omnifocus or Things): I manage far too many things, and need
to rapidly move through my data in a way org-mode doesn't allow. A GUI, a
beautiful one, is key here.

2\. Interfacing with my iPhone.

3\. 1Password, Alfred, DaisyDisk, Delibar

4\. Honestly…I'm struggling to come up with a lot more. I really like my
calendar application (BusyCal or iCal, depending on the year). Mail.app is
nice, but I just haven't taken the plunge to command-line applications yet. I
wonder which I'd prefer if I put in the time required.

What is holding others back?

~~~
jshen
What stops me from switching to Linux is that I value my time. On Linux I have
to spend time on meta things. My video driver stopped working, how do I get
flash to work, why isn't it finding my memory card, how do I get sleep to work
right, why doesn't copy and paste work between these two apes, why did the
dropbox menu item disappear when I updated my distro, etc, etc, etc.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Stops being valid when you buy a Linux computer instead of installing Linux on
hardware designed for Windows. They (System76, ZaReason, etc.) vet the
upgrades, the drivers and it should "just work". If it doesn't you know who to
blame.

~~~
jshen
can you link to some examples that you'd recommend.

------
jrussbowman
I generally prefer to use Linux on a desktop myself but honestly I really
haven't had any issues using macvim and the default terminal on my MBP and
doubt i'll ever buy a non-apple laptop ever again. For laptops having a *nix
interface on reliable hardware that works, the MBP just makes sense.

I actually refused to try it for a long time and stuck up for linux but after
yet another hardware issue and a laptop lasting for a year I decided to open
up my mind and try osx out. I don't consider myself a fanboy in any sense but
I have found osx to be a suitable workstation running on laptop hardware for
both working as a sysadmin and doing web application development. I do use
homebrew.

------
igrekel
I am always puzzled when I read articles like this and people say *nix when
its clear they means "linux". I remember working on Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX or
AIX and it was always full of little annoying variations.

The dominance of Linux and package management made everything so much easier,
articles like this just make me appreciate it more.

------
comex
Meh. I stopped using Linux a few years ago because KDE 4.1 was ugly and slow,
and there was only one viable WebKit browser (Chrome) while Firefox was laggy,
and pretty much everything X was laggy and so was apt, which took forever to
read its package list...

More recently I tried xmonad on my college's Linux desktops, enticed by the
idea that it might solve my window management woes and that it was a "killer
feature" of Linux, but I couldn't stand not having control over window
placement-- it was too hard to just temporarily maximize a window. Maybe I
needed more practice, but it didn't help that I couldn't figure out how to get
dzen2 to not go off the screen in the desktops' dual monitor configuration, so
I didn't have a working clock on my desktop.

I could switch to Linux on my laptop, but I love OS X's trackpad gestures, and
as far as I can tell the only Linux support for them is by some proprietary
"Gesture Suite" crap that only supports Synaptics trackpads.

Yeah, Terminal.app doesn't support a mouse (although it is extremely fast and
responsive, like everything), and MacPorts takes time to compile things, and I
had to manually patch gccgo to compile on OS X. And I _love_ open source and
hate to be running code I can't read. But all in all, it's hard to conclude
that Linux is worth the pain.

~~~
pohl
_Yeah, Terminal.app doesn't support a mouse_

FWIW, iTerm2 supports "mouse reporting", allowing you to position the cursor
in vim or emacs (for example) with a click:

<http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home>

------
bergie
I had pretty much the same experience as the author. After several years
developing on OSX, the development tools, package management and simpler
desktop experience of Linux just were more appealing.

It also isn't a disadvantage that now my desktop setup is a lot closer to what
we also run on the servers, down to exactly same packages and dependencies.

And it has to be said I love the regular upgrade cycles of major projects like
GNOME and Ubuntu. Every six months I get a new version with many incremental
updates. No need to speculate what Apple will put in or leave out from the
next big cat

------
riffraff
I never understood: why do people hate macports so much? Ok, it kind of
duplicates half of the libraries in the system, but it has worked fine for me
for many years, and it's usually reasonably up to date and quite large.

~~~
redthrowaway
For me, the constant re-downloading of dependencies was a pain in the ass. I
got MacPorts in order to get the apps OSX _should_ have come with, like wget
and curl. In the process, it fragged Python to high hell by installing just
about every version out there (often several for each package), which broke
the bangpath in all my scripts. I'm aware it's probably a pretty easy fix, but
a program whose use breaks other programs is a fundamentally broken and Bad
one.

I still use MacPorts on occasion if I really need a package, but my dreams of
using it to make the OSX terminal as functional as that of Linux is long dead.

~~~
daniel02216
OS X does come with curl, doesn't it?

~~~
mitchty
And wget as well.

~~~
redthrowaway
Not so much:
[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=wget+osx)

~~~
mitchty
Doh, forgot that I compiled it into my home directory. My bad.

------
eli
Unless you're developing an app that _targets_ OS X, I don't understand why
not just develop in a Linux VM. As a bonus, you get all the benefits of a VM -
easy snapshots, can run multiple at once, crashing the server doesn't bring
down your IDE, etc.

~~~
edw
How often does your OS X box as you're programming it?

/me runs `uptime`...

17:32 up 27 days, 2:13, 11 users, load averages: 0.11 0.15 0.24

~~~
eli
How often have I crashed a whole system while testing software on it? Not very
often, but it really sucks when it happens.

But it's quite common that I want to see how some server code runs on the
exact same kernel as will be used in production. This is a pain if that kernel
is also running your IDE.

~~~
nirvdrum
The corollary to this is corrupting your VM on a crash. For whatever inane
reason, my Mac reboots itself every few days. I grew tired of corrupting my VM
and having to rollback to a snapshot, losing whatever I had in there since the
last snapshot. So, I gave up on that and just develop on the Mac natively.

------
joshwa
Useful list of tiling window managers for OSX:

[http://superuser.com/questions/162849/tiling-window-
manager-...](http://superuser.com/questions/162849/tiling-window-manager-for-
mac-os-x)

I use Divvy, personally, but I'm not super-hardcore about tiling all the time.

------
zdw
OS X became so popular as the unix hacker laptop over the last few years,
because it "just worked". That and "normal" apps from MS and Adobe run on it.

Imagine it's 2003-2006 or so - sending your linux laptop to sleep/hibernate
was like russian roulette - will it start up again? Won't it? Kernel panic?
ACPI improved things, but often still has hardware specific issues.

Nice hardware and good design helped as well.

------
cpr
If you really want Linux with all the bells and whistles when developing, but
also enjoy using a computer for other things like Music and web browsing, boot
up a Fusion image and you're off.

~~~
njs12345
What's not functional about Linux for music and web browsing? There are
certainly areas where it's not quite there for some things, but I wouldn't say
those two had ever been pain points for me..

~~~
zavulon
I love Linux's elegance and power for development, but can't use it as a
"regular computer" for three reasons:

1) The GUI is terrifyingly ugly, in every single distro I've seen. Ubuntu is
trying, but they're still way behind. If I only ever needed command line
interface on my computer, I would've fully switched to Linux yesterday.

2) It doesn't have Netflix, Vudu or anything else with Silverlight. This is
not a "don't have it yet" type of deal - Linux doesn't have it and won't have
it in foreseeable future because of philosophical differences (because it's
using proprietary Microsoft code)

3) Most things don't work out of the box, and need some tinkering with. This
is not such a big deal, since I love to tinker and after tinkering, they
usually work much better than anywhere else. But for many non-development
things, I love when programs I install on my machine _just work_. For that, OS
X is light years ahead of everything else, and Linux is dead last.

~~~
technomancy
> Most things don't work out of the box, and need some tinkering with. This is
> not such a big deal, since I love to tinker and after tinkering, they
> usually work much better than anywhere else. But for many non-development
> things, I love when programs I install on my machine just work. For that, OS
> X is light years ahead of everything else, and Linux is dead last.

It depends on the hardware. If you pay attention up-front, it's very easy to
end up with zero-hassle just-works-for-everything. Anecdotally, I've been
using Thinkpads with Intel graphics drivers as my last three laptops, and the
last time I had to manually edit a config file for hardware was back in early
'07. With OS X, on the other hand, I can't use my phone to tether without
navigating a bewildering driver labyrinth.

Anyway, this stereotype is played out.

------
hucker
Although it was a bit arrogant at times, I find myself at a similar place as
he seemingly was before he switched right now. I'm doing all my development on
MacVim and iTerm2, which is way more smooth for me than the TextMate /
Terminal.app combo I came from. I am however increasingly annoyed, like the
op, by having to use my mouse at all while developing. Divvy is making window
management manageable, but it's still not quite the way I want it. The
package-manager-situation is just the top of the iceberg for me. I think maybe
my time may have come, so to speak.

I still love Apple hardware though, which leads me to my question; what is the
best distribution in terms of support of Apple hardware? Especially MacBook
Pro 5,5 which is my day to day development machine for the time being.

~~~
miketomasello
Out of curiosity, how does iTerm2 help you more effectively use the command-
line? I've seen many people say it's better.. but the features listed on the
site just don't seem to be things I need (or things more appropriately done
elsewhere, e.g. my zsh does completion).

The author cites mouse events, but this is something I've _never_ missed (and
never use it when I'm working on Linux). Is that something you use? If so,
what for? You use MacVim, so presumably you don't need mouse events in your
terminal for vim.

I should note I don't use a vanilla Terminal.app - I use it with Visor
(<http://visor.binaryage.com/>) to quickly invoke the command-line from
anywhere, and I use MacVim as my editor.

I get what he says about package managers. MacPorts really was something I
loathed. I recently discovered homebrew and "breath of fresh air" covers it
exactly.

~~~
hucker
Well, for one, with iTerm2 I don't have to use visor, the app itself handles
this. To be totally honest with you though, iTerm1/2 over Terminal.app hasn't
really been that big of a change, I mostly like the improved key-settings and
the theming. What motivated that change was that I was having a lot of trouble
with getting the modifier keys do what I wanted, as strange as that sounds.
Changing to iTerm just fixed it, and I liked what I saw, so there never was
any reason for me to go back and figure out what I did wrong.

The biggest change by far for me was going from TextMate to MacVim/vim, which
has boosted my programming speed immensely (after the usual month of pure
frustration and all development grinding to a near halt).

------
rawsyntax
One wonders what is he so angry about?

I switched from Slackware to OS X precisely because I felt OS X did more
things automatically for me. Also, If you've used slackbuilds, they are
actually quite similar to homebrew, in my opinion.

------
mduvall
His evidence from the author of Redis is not accurate - chronologically
speaking Salvatore jumped to the other side of the fence to OS X more recently
than two years ago on 8/27/2010.

He stated in his interview for usesthis.com that:

"In the past my desktop was running Linux as well, I used fvwm2, for more than
10 years, with this minimalistic setup. Now I miss it a bit… but switched to
Mac OS as it delivers a much better “just works” experience for me, every time
I want to do Skype, print a document, or alike."

------
calloc
I for the longest time was a developer on Linux and FreeBSD and was extremely
happy when I got my first Mac.

OS X for me is by far more superior than anything Linux has to offer, and
mostly with MacPorts it has all of the software I could ever want/need.

------
dlsspy
I posted a comment over on reddit, but someone who thinks linux is the
greatest thing ever (I've been using it since the mid nineties, don't get me
wrong) should be able to give me just a few of the unix server development
features I get for free on OS X:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gt29r/why_os_x_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gt29r/why_os_x_just_doesnt_cut_it/c1q3igo)

------
SriniK
I am in the same boat as the author is. I have vnc running on the linux box
which I connect to from the Mac. Mac is just a dumb play box for me when
html/js/css/py is being hacked.

Only time I am using native Mac is for mobile app developing using
xcode/eclipse.

I am thinking of getting a ghetto laptop with linux installed so that I don't
need to have my linux box switched on 24hrs a day.

~~~
r00fus
If your Mac is powerful enough, why not just run a VM? With the great

For the past 5 years, I have yet to have a web-app dev environment meaty
enough to require more than a small VM (Oracle CRM can be nightmarishly huge)
which ran fine on my macbook.

With git/svn scripts, it's easy to build and unit-test on your local VM, then
push to your stage/prod-test box.

------
T_S_
I run macosx along with 64bit Arch Linux and 32bit unbuntu under VMware
Fusion. If I ever get around to upgrading to a quad core notebook with 8 gig
of ram I think I should be able to get about 10 years out of that computer
instead of the usual 3. Of course I will probably need to buy at least 6
smartphones/tablets during that time between me and my family. Everybody sees
the trend, right?

------
rchowe
At this point, I just prefer the way gedit renders text compared to OS X. It
seems crisper and easier to read than OS X's anti-aliased with no regards to
the pixel grid. That's the main reason I do all of my non-mac development on
linux.

------
illumen
This guy uses OSX: <http://twitter.com/#!/hipsterhacker>

You need OSX to revolutionise social, and engage your target markets in the
mobile sphere. That and the other reasons the guy above uses OSX. Get
traction, get OSX.

------
the-kenny
If you don't like it, don't use it.

------
unwantedLetters
For someone who is singing the praises of linux, his website (it does look
like his personal website) is pretty awesome. Specially <http://cloudhead.io/>

