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Comment by bitshepherd | Hacker News Reader

Try to find a more solid, ubiquitous Unix-like environment that "just works". This is especially so if you're deploying entirely onto a Unix-like platform, such as a Linux flavor or BSD.

The Linux distros, for all their good, requires too much handholding and prodding to get a productive desktop development environment working. Windows, too, requires too much handholding, and you're liable to just use a VM for development.

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To add: I write Java, Node, PHP, and Python primarily. I used Windows for years, but was alway frustrated by the differences of my development environment and my deployment environment (Linux web servers). Also the complete shitshow of command line support was just getting to be too much to deal with.

Around 2005 I tried switching to Ubuntu Desktop, then Mint, then Fedora, then... but Jesus was that painful. The worst and last straw was when I went to Walmart corporate HQ as a consultant and the Linux drivers refused to allow me to Auth to their wifi due to whatever handshake problems they were having. Switching over to Windows- it just worked.

As soon as Mac switched to the Intel processors and the laptop bodies that didn't look like toys, I gave OS X a shot on a Hackintosh, then went out and bought my first MBP. I've NEVER looked back. When I have to do things in Windows (like use Visual Studio to write .NET) it just HURTS.

I also forget the link (maybe it was a consumer reports?) but they said the highest rated Windows laptop you could buy was a MacBook Pro- and had been for four straight years.

You do pay a brand tax when you buy one, but they really are consistently good pieces of hardware- certainly by mainstream manufacturer standards (Dell, HP, etc).

Long story short:

- Handsome aluminum body cases (completely my opinion)

- Linux like command line

- Good shell/command line support

- Decent GUI

- Decent stability and performance of the OS

- Good to really good hardware

- Windows support if you need it via Bootcamp/Parallels

- Retina displays

- The trackpad is f%#£ing magical

>The Linux distros, for all their good, requires too much handholding and prodding to get a productive desktop development environment working.

At least you CAN get a productive environment. The OSX window manager really really sucks and you can not configure much. Why do not Apple add X11 manager support ?

Because folks can instead use https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst if they want a tiling window manager like xmonad. It is pretty easy to install and it works well.

i don't want a tiling one, i want a configurable lightweight one like fluxbox

I bought a mac mini, the cheapest one, just to try it. I am not impressed with it. I can see some good points to UI, but I would not buy a Macbook for my web development work. Actually I recently bought another dell laptop.

I really do wonder how well Systemd76 would do with a few storefronts around the world.

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