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Comment by hvs | Hacker News Reader

This is what I've come to expect from articles about Ruby:

  And of course point them towards Linux:

  “Windows is not the best development platform in the 
  world for Ruby. I recommend you to try out Linux. Start
  with a simple distribution, like Ubuntu. And then I
  recommend something like Arch Linux whenever you feel 
  like you are ready for something more advanced!”

Really? In an article about Ruby you feel the need to point people at your personal pet OS? Pointless.

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It's not pointless at all. Trying to develop in Ruby or Rails on Windows in a huge pain in the ass. I know, I did it for a year or so. He could have recommended OS X, but the price is a barrier to entry.

I think the biggest problem is the number of gems with native libraries. I switched to JRuby, and felt a lot less pain. Now if only it had a faster startup...

Btw you can try nailgun to start JRuby's JVM once. See your $jruby/tool/nailgun/

I looked into it and it's definitely interesting. It's just a pity NetBeans doesn't use it (and given the current situation, probably never will). Anyway, thanks for the tip.

Ubuntu on Virtualbox is my preferred method of trying out new languages without worrying about my Windows install holding me back. I blogged a HOWTO on that back in December.

The improved flash performance of Ubuntu 10.04 will hopefully be enough to keep me out of Windows entirely from here on.

Same here I am also trying Ubuntu 10.04 on virtual box.. though hard time fixing the resolution :) still playing around RoR it's nice!!! I am a java programmer... playing around a bit with PHP, CakePHP stuff... but again and again considering RoR... RoR screencast and community is gr8.. so does the PHP manual... but CakePHP I don't like much... very confusing naming convention and it's not working as expected... Still not able to make up my mind to go for CakePHP vs RoR (each time thinking in terms of Facebook vs Twitter :) )...I know facebook not using CakePHP but still they r using PHP..

Rails development on OS X is so nice if you use things like MacPorts and Passenger. Coupled with TextMate I would not want to Rails dev on anything else.

But "Arch Linux"? Come on. Was that really necessary to push?

I'm sorry if you feel like I point them towards my "pet OS". I should have stated more clearly there are other alternatives, and this only is my opinion.

What does Arch Linux have to do with developing Ruby?

Don't have to wait 6 months and upgrade everything to get slightly newer versions of packages. The packages are pretty direct from upstream instead of being patched and split apart by the distro.

What advantages does Arch Linux have over Ubuntu?

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_to_Other_D...

The main one: Packages don't end up 6 (or more) months out of date between updates.

The maybe a advantage (if you agree with the OP)/maybe a disadvantage(if you like me, don't): Much more manual configuration.

Been a while since I used Ubuntu, but you can typically install newer packages from pre-release versions. You're not locked in to the 6 month upgrade cycle.

I think it's a pretty good model. For 90% of the installed software there's really no reason to update packages more than every 6 months.

Read at Dho's link. My primary reason for the switch was that I wanted to learn more about Linux.

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