I recently switched my Windows desktop to Ubuntu, with the intention of making myself an at-home desktop dev environment. I still use my Macbook for work, and my MBA for personal dev.
My thoughts have been positive, Ubuntu is much nicer than I remember previous brushes with Linux being. A lot of things required slight configuration, but Ubuntu and Linux have hit that critical mass that most of my problems can be solved with a simple search. However, there are a few persistent problems that have lots of different solutions that dont all seem to work; and I feel there are lots of lacking areas in the app ecosystem. For instance, there does not seem to be a single well-designed SQL gui for linux. Everything looks out of Windows-ME-era-enterprise. For Macs, you have Sequel Pro amongst a lot of strong competition. Additionally, homebrew is a lot easier/more robust than apt-get; no repositories to deal with.
I think this all points to something about me, specifically: I want software to make some assumptions for me. Brew does this, apt-get doesnt. This is both the strength of Mac and the strength of Linux -- they cater to the level of assumption that their camps want. I, unfortunately, want more assumption.
Also, as a small side note, I can't get League of Legends to work on WINE, so I am unable to play with excoworkers -- that was the main way we kept in touch and it's pushing me to a point that I might put Windows back on my desktop, if only to have that connection back -- a little juvenile, but oh well.
> Additionally, homebrew is a lot easier/more robust than apt-get; no repositories to deal with.
Until I can do stuff like `brew install safari` in OSX, e.g. keeping your whole system up to date with one tool, I find it inferior to the Linux package managers. Although I find pacman and emerge better than apt, them being much easier to configure and use.
Right. Homebrew is okay, but pacman is _amazing_. I actually have completely avoided setting up Homebrew on my Mac and the only Mac dev environment I have set up is in an Mountain Lion VM running on my Mac. I don't want to screw some strange thing up and then have to resort to using a Time Machine backup to fix it...
...Reasoning behind that one is that documentation floating around for solving Mac problems is quite terrible. A lot of information isn't well categorized and results for very old versions typically come up first. Fixes for problems I've had (getting CLANG to work in a VM under virtualbox, getting virtualbox to work after a restart because they stupidly use OSX features that were phased out) often only came up after digging quite hard to find the correct fix. Support and Documentation are what I do for a living, so I have a better shot finding the right fix than most.
Arch documentation and the forums are like the gold freakin' standard. It actually blows my mind how well organized and thorough it all is. I've yet to find a situation in Arch that didn't have a document to get me out of it...and often I use their documentation to fix problems in OSX and other Linux distros.
My thoughts have been positive, Ubuntu is much nicer than I remember previous brushes with Linux being. A lot of things required slight configuration, but Ubuntu and Linux have hit that critical mass that most of my problems can be solved with a simple search. However, there are a few persistent problems that have lots of different solutions that dont all seem to work; and I feel there are lots of lacking areas in the app ecosystem. For instance, there does not seem to be a single well-designed SQL gui for linux. Everything looks out of Windows-ME-era-enterprise. For Macs, you have Sequel Pro amongst a lot of strong competition. Additionally, homebrew is a lot easier/more robust than apt-get; no repositories to deal with.
I think this all points to something about me, specifically: I want software to make some assumptions for me. Brew does this, apt-get doesnt. This is both the strength of Mac and the strength of Linux -- they cater to the level of assumption that their camps want. I, unfortunately, want more assumption.
Also, as a small side note, I can't get League of Legends to work on WINE, so I am unable to play with excoworkers -- that was the main way we kept in touch and it's pushing me to a point that I might put Windows back on my desktop, if only to have that connection back -- a little juvenile, but oh well.