Microsoft realizes that they don't have a monopoly on this stuff and many other tools are just as good and as useful as theirs. So they had to actually innovate. That being said I would still not use Microsoft as getting Windows is a headache compared to getting OS X. I recently wanted to deploy my QT App on Windows and found out my old Vista box will not suffice for MVC2013, I need Windows 7. My Mac from 2009 is still good it can get 10.10, but the Vista box from the same time is SOL when it comes to compiling Chromium. When Windows is as free as OS X and Linux, then I might considering developing on their platform.
1. Vista is from early 2007. Windows 7 is from 2009. So if you compare you'r 2009 mac to a windows machine, it should be to a Windows 7.
2. If by free you mean as in 0 price (if you mean as in liberty then WTF), then your wish just came true: Windows 10 will be a free upgrade, and it's a major release.
I agree the past few years was a mess for MS, but things are changing and so should the public opinion.
Windows 10 is a free upgrade only for the first year.
I also don't understand what happens with my Windows 8.1 license after that ... so if I format my laptop after that first year, will I still be able to install Windows 10 on it? I'm not so sure I can, plus their wording on Windows receiving upgrades for "the lifetime of the device" is confusing; so does this mean that the notion of a retail license that you can move between PCs is gone?
So you see, Microsoft has yet to reveal their new licensing model, therefore I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions ;-)
This is kind of a nitpick. I can come back at you and moan about TRIM support on a 3rd party SSD in that same Mac Mini - no problem in that Windows 7 laptop. That's about equally relevant.
Having gone thru a nightmare trying to upgrade a Mac Mini to Mavericks - obscure error messages, things that "just don't work", and search results leading to forum posts that said "The problem went away when I took out the PNY RAM and put back in the Apple OEM RAM", I'm a little more hostile toward Apple products than I am to the "Wintel" environment.
*In the end we wound up buying a new Mac Mini. We needed Mavericks for website testing.
I've always had issues (and pleasantness) using any OS whether it was Macs, Windows, iOS, or Android. I don't really believe that one operating system is better than another in a general sense. At this point they are all way better than what we had even just 5 years ago.
On the other hand, I had no trouble upgrading 2007 MacBook Pros to Mavericks, even with third-party hard drives and RAM. Your nightmare experience is certainly not representative.
Interesting that my experience with Mac and Windows has been completely the opposite. I owned 2 PowerPC Macs which went the way of the dodo and I had to replace hardware AND software to run on Intel. So running my old Final Cut Pro and Adobe suite was not possible on new hardware.
Compare to Windows, I am able to continue running very old software without having to upgrade them. OSX is not free (as in freedom). You can't legitimately virtualise it on non Apple hardware, yet running Windows on Mac hardware is very straight forward.
If I had to pick a platform for web projects though, I'd actually pick Ubuntu. It's very easy to automate.
Macs are about the package, not the computer or the OS alone. You get a beautiful, well built machine with an OS to match. The OS is not terribly alien and, if you are a serious developer, it has enough Unix to make you happy. Unless you look too closely (I spend most of my time with Python) it looks a lot like the servers that'll run your code.
Ubuntu is my preferred OS for work. Matching the servers my code runs on is great, even though I run my code inside VMs or containers (often with the last LTS release). As you mention, it's exquisitely automatable - I can do and redo configurations in seconds.
Now, from one free software nerd¹ to another: It's not helping to kick this down.
Arguably Microsoft opened quite a lot of stuff recently. After ASP.Net and .Net Core I remember WCF, Visual Studio Code and VSO offers like this (plus the git integration).
Can we please see the good here instead of asking for everything (and unrealistic stuff, tbh), now?
① Liberate your documents or Fosdem t-shirt is the common setup here..
Microsoft is following its own strategy none of this stuff is positive for free software. It's just a way to enter and stay relevant in a market where free software whether that's android or linux has already won. Microsoft is not doing it for us, it's doing it for itself to stay relevant. Am I thankful, no not really. I would prefer Microsoft go away and the Unixes prevail. This just ensures the market stays fragmented with Windows leading the user base. Despite the fact that there are competitors out there good enough to replace most of it.
Microsoft is a business and openness is a business strategy. I don't see the problem with that. I also don't think it is unique for any of the big technology companies. Do you think OS X is Unix based because Apple loves openness?
Fragmentation is harmful when it's mostly similar ones with minor incompatibilities, like ten thousand Linux distros and Window managers. Not to mention the various stock browser versions on Android phones.
Across a market, having two to five differently implemented competitive products results in innovation instead of stagnation with just one.
Interesting perspective - we deploy our QT app on Linux, osx and Windows, but I find that the best experience has been on Windows. (we statically link QT and boost, which may cause more headaches than the default dynamic linking).
Specifically, maintaining backwards compatibility on OSX while marching forward with newer versions of the os has been a very big pain. We recently dropped support for OSX 10.6 because we simply could not get QT to statically compile on Yosemite, even after extracting the 10.6 SDK from a legacy xcode download. We did manage to keep 10.7 support though, thankfully, using the same SDK extraction method.
On Linux, the upgrade from QT 4.8 to 5.4 was the roughest. the number of dependencies dramatically increased, complicating the compilation of QT and breaking compatibility with older distros (specifically CentOS 6.x, where we hear the most complaints)
Windows & visual studio has always been our preferred developer environment, with the latest version of both. Maintaining support back to Windows XP has been particularly easy and painless. Where on Linux, it seems like the glibc requirements march forward with every release of gcc, and on osx it becomes dramatically more difficult to support older versions of the os with each new release.
A side note about QT on Windows - compiling QT and your application on the newest version of Windows helps a lot for customers on that platform - for instance, before we compiled on Windows 8, the application UI would default back to the legacy battleship grey theme, and simply rebuilding on Windows 8 with no source modifications fixed it.
on linux a couple of compiler flags (FORTIFY_SOURCE, etc) and providing a memcpy wrapper would get you compatibility back to about 2006. To go back further the glibc you compile against can have an earlier version of the linux kernel specified. I only bothered with 2.6.16 (or was that 18) at the time.
Your comment kinda confused me. At first you were talking about how it's difficult simply getting Windows compared to Mac OS X (considering Apple has had the app store on Macs for the past 2 versions or so I would agree) but I'm not sure why your Vista box is SOL compared to your Mac; you can still upgrade it to Windows 7 or 8.1 and do what you want it to do just like your Mac. Granted it's not free (your point later in the comment) but it's also not SOL.
Windows 10 upgrade is going to be free to a large amount of users; I'd be willing to bet further Windows releases will also be free so at least that's one issue possibly resolved.
Windows 7 upgrade from Vista costs as much as a used laptop with Windows 7 on it. Why would I upgrade to Windows 7 on an old laptop, I would rather just buy another one where OS X is free. Where as OS X and X Code, the latest versions were gratis on an early 2009 Mac.
> A cheap laptop is $299. The cheapest macbook is $1299.
You get what you pay for. You cannot compare the kind of computer Dell sells for $299 with the kind of computer Apple sells for $1299. When I need most mobility I got myself a $199 Asus Chromebook-like Windows box that now runs Ubuntu beautifully. It's cheap plastic, but I won't be terribly sad if it breaks.
Last time I bought a Mac, it was slightly cheaper than a similar Dell and much cheaper than a Thinkpad, which I'd have to reinstall and, possibly, deal with compatibility issues.
I bought a MacBook Pro once because I believed comments like this. Had lots of hardware trouble, boot problems, had to have it serviced multiple times. Never again. I'm just fortunate that I live in a country where consumer rights are strong and where if you bought a computer and have the same problem three times or so with the service people unable to fix it, you can return it for a refund. Still was a huge time waster each time the machine broke down, though.
This is odd. Apple's customer satisfaction is very high and my personal experience, from multiple Macbooks, is almost flawless. My wife had a minor issue with the trackpad of her MBPr13 and that's all the trouble we ever had with those machines. She won't even consider a non-Apple computer.
Ironically I have an XP VM on my work desktop because I need to build for (inter alia) Microsoft evc4, which won't install properly on anything more recent.
