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Comment by fritzw | Hacker News Reader

The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated. Particularly for work machines, I don't have time to compile and install just to get my box up and running. Mac worked for me for this reason, I presume the reasons are the same for many. You like the freedom and power your boxes allot you, I like the simple operation of the mac. My problem is Macs are quickly becoming more work with all of there services and issues. When I start having to search for drivers online I might consider switching to Linux, but this won't be a cure all, because I deal too much in graphics.

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I guess I implied it in my comment, but I'll explicitly say it here:

> I did not search for, manually install, or otherwise fiddle with drivers for any of my current 3 personal machines.

I have done so many times in the past, but not for these three[1].

This is particularly true for the System76 which not only had drivers pre-installed and the repository configured, but also had no issues out of the box...or ever in my case.

Dell had the drivers installed and the repo pre-configured...but out of the box there were some bugs in various drivers at release...but again for me it was a matter of waiting for a fix and just doing a regular `apt-get` update process...none of the typical online support forum crawling I typically am used to.

Don't get me wrong, there are many other things that might dissuade you from going the Linux route, but driver headaches of old are largely gone, especially if you get a laptop/desktop with OEM support.

[1] Aside for the aforementioned `update` and `upgrade` combination using the `apt-get` packaging system...but the relevant repositories were already configured (or configured automatically as is the case for custom build).

My machine wouldn't boot anymore because I followed apt's suggestion to run apt-get autoremove.

There are many packages and apps out there that get released but are far from stable, and no easy way for non-devs (as in Linux devs) to opt out of unstable software.

I don't charge a crazy amount of money, but 2 hours are a long time to waste for a developer, and I've wasted many times that with Xenial. That, while being someone used to using the terminal and installing and configuring server software on a daily basis.

Xubuntu is now my first choice operating system. I have it on 2 desktops (one Dell for work and my home desktop). It also works great on an old Lenovo X-series and a Dell latitude. I can honestly say that the one machine I need to keep Windows 10 on for work causes me hours more grief than my Ubuntu-based machines.

For me, the biggest annoyance is having Office365 at work and not being able to use things like Skype etc natively. The web apps are OK and I mostly don't notice, but there are times I wish Ubuntu got the kind of software support from MS that macOS has.

> The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated.

This seems a strange things to say considering everyone I know who uses a Mac for dev uses homebrew, which compiles as part of the install.

Homebrew tries to download a binary for pretty much every package, and only rarely compiles from source.

True. It used to be like that at the beginning, but now it's rare.

The "to get any of those boxes to work" part is, I think, the key part of that quoted statement. Homebrew may compile things (if there is no binary download available), but you don't need Homebrew to make your Mac functional.

I just switched from Macs to a Fedora desktop and never compiled anything. Maybe I've been lucky, but my Lenovo and Dell desktops and my old IBM and new Asus laptops run with no issues.

I'm capable of solving most linux driver issues, but I've been pretty impressed that I haven't needed to during my switch. Again, maybe I've been lucky.

I was a little disappointed that installing nodejs requires a magic shell script but it didn't require any effort on my part beyond setting similar things up on Mac with Brew (or Brew itself) Otherwise, Fedora's app store has covered my needs. That said, I don't do any graphics work, so maybe you're going to run in to issue I haven't.

I have spent more time dealing with compiling from the source and handling weird package interactions on osx than on any linux system I've used recently. At least the Linux system will come with a standard package manager that supports major developer tools.

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