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Odd — I'm running Snow Leopard and haven't had any issues with many of the libraries or apps you mentioned (boost, ampqlib, postgresql), although it's probably worth noting that I installed them all through Homebrew (http://www.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/).

That reminds me of another thing I disliked about macs. An open question: who is in charge? Macports? Fink? I couldn't pick one, because neither one had what I wanted.

I think Homebrew is fairly new. If it works, I'm glad, but it didn't exist a few years back. So, a disclaimer I should have included in my original post: things might have changed in the past year.

The package manager I found useful was virtualbox + apt-get.

MacPorts and Fink both annoy me. Not because they are bad but because they are "so close but so far." I end up mostly compiling stuff manually and managing /usr/local with GNU Stow. Which is frustrating because so many mac installers seem to want to install stuff into /usr/local. I've learned to unpack the installer and install it manually so my beautiful stow-ness isn't compromised.

Same here, homebrew rocks Fink and Macports way out of the water. If you need any type of packet management and you are on a Mac, it should be your go to option.

sex packet management?

homebrew is definitely the true sound of the digital underground

psycopg2 on snow leopard has been notoriously fucked forever. There are thousands of blog posts on installing this, of which only one has worked for me in the past.

This, granted, wasn't through homebrew; I wonder if that would have worked back then

Uncanny. I'm also 4 months in and am running Ubuntu in VMWare. That's now where I spend all of my time and I'm wondering why I haven't just dual-booted already or just over-written the OSX partition.

Are you me? 'Cause you sound just like me. I've even installed Ubuntu on a separate partition via Boot Camp, but I haven't had time to get all the stuff that doesn't work out of the box working. Maybe that will be my weekend project, we'll see... Good luck to you...me?

Installed virtual box on the first day and running Ubuntu since then.The day i convince myself(atleast fool myself) that i haven't spent too many bucks for OSX, will overwrite the partition.

Last company I was at provided me a quad-core 8GB mac pro. After the first week I wiped it and put Ubuntu on it so I could actually get some work done.

The biggest problem with OSX is that, for a unix-based system, it's so un-unix alike in key places that it's frustrating.

You mean un-unix or un-linux?

Which parts?

That's a fair statement. I think there were two big ones: - the service registry/init system - filesystem paths

The second is minor in the grand scheme of things. It only affects my user account but the first one was greatly annoying. My history is in AIX/HP-UX before going Linux full time so I'm familiar with the smit/sam model of doing things but have you ever tried to actually usea traditional unix/linux model for managing apache in the default OSX install? What about LDAP? It's weird and annoying. Launchd? Seriously?

The Mac I have is in the living room for family use so I have not "worked" a lot on it. I didn't use much of the default tools and relied more on macports for unix stuff. I was asking because I am considering a Mac to replace the windows laptop with cygwin I use for dev. I use Linux for servers but I am from the world of Solaris I also had HP and Irix workstations at different jobs in the past and a NeXT at home.

I know the defaults are all Linux oriented these days so any different flavor of unix is always a little extra work if the filesystem differs to much. Macports also adds a little twist to that.

I found launchd verbose (and the xml is not even that self descriptive) and I am not sure its worth the departure from the usual way of doing things but I didn't think it was so bad. I only did a few simple things anyway.

These seem like things I don't rely on too much on a dev laptop anyway. But I now believe I have to investigate a bit more before I buy the new machine. Thanks

In my case I find myself fullscreening a vm if I can't change to base install. I have too much muscle memory that I can't implement on other os:

Cmd-t new terminal Cmd-w new browser Cmd-e new vim session Cmd-f new file manager window

Then I have my ctrl-shift keybinds for terminator and my vim keybinds. I'm especially unproductive without the cmd-t option available and the terminator keybinds.

I, like many others, also use virtualbox for development. So much easier to develop on something close to my production servers, but it uses up too much memory.

I've been looking at some cheap Walmart/Frys PCs to install ubuntu on and develop.

Unfortunately the dual boot solution does not work if you're writing low-level code as I found out when playing with some gnu assembler code. I mostly do development on a VirtualBox machine. I'm considering switching back to a PC.

Can you be more specific? As in, why not install your preferred host OS, be it windows or some flavor of linux, and run virtual box on top anyway?

I must say that while I am not a huge fan of OSX, Macs have amazingly well designed hardware. I remembering staring and marvelling at the magsafe power cord the first time I saw it, and every piece of the hardware is well made too.

Having just had to replace a magsafe power cord (fortunately Apple does it free now, even out-of-warranty), I think the design needed a bit of tweaking, which later models have received.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1713 issue #6 , "strain relief issues"

kb

Macs are a lot more solidly-built than they used to be, but there are a few of things still keeping them from being competitive with Thinkpads. 0) They don't try to compete on screen resolution. The 13-inch Macbook screen is only 800 pixels tall, which is fewer pixels than my phone. 1) They're quite heavy. In particular the 13-inch is only marginally lighter than the 15-inch. 2) The glossy screens make them unusable outdoors.

Perhaps if you mostly keep your laptop on your desk this wouldn't be a big deal, but it rules them out for people who like to move around.

I don't think you could do much work on a 13" screen anyways. The 15" mbps, however, are competitive with resolution with the latest generation.

"I don't think you could do much work on a 13" screen anyways. "

I used a 12" Toshiba portege laptop as my development machine for some time, and the 1920x1200 res rocked. So much so that ever since then I made a point of getting 1920x1200 on each new laptop.

This was one reason I skipped on getting a macbook. Poor rez options, and no trackpoint mouse.

Confirmed here. I've chosen a Thinkpad x200s over a MacBook Pro.

Advantages of an x200s over a MacBook Pro 13": - high screen resolution: 1440x900 - smaller and lighter - I can change the HDD very easily - one USB plug more - the x201s also has support for Intel Core i7.

Disadavantages: - Battery life, I guess - Speakers, but doesn't matter for business users - Webcamera, whose lank on TP is quite strange

DVD writer is personal preference. I explicitly don't want it in laptops.

From a strictly techical perspective, although more loosely business one, choosing a Thinkpad x20*s over a Macbook Pro 13 is a no-brainer.

Just to toss this question in, because I've seen lots of people make a similar comment, but never have really seen an explanation as to why: what is the problem with iTunes?

For me, I don't do much in the way of using iTunes; I set up a play list, press play, minimize it, and enjoy listening to music while I do other things. Maybe I'm not a music player power user?

I dislike iTunes because it's so bloated and memory hungry (unless it changed changed over the years). I use Foobar2k to do the same thing, load up and just play music.

Some "features" of iTunes:

When I import my music folder, iTunes copies all the files to it's own private directories, using the filesystem as an index. Thanks, but my music is already arranged the way I like.

iTunes doesn't play flac or ogg. And when I rip a CD, it wants to save it in some proprietary flac-like format (which, as far as I know, does not work on non-macs).

I enjoy controlling my music from a phone/tablet/other computer. Shameless plug: http://github.com/stucchio/DJ-Pirate http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/software/djpirate/screenshot1.... http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/software/djpirate/screenshot3....

iTunes + iPod also has some extremely unpleasant anti-features: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1202

(Note: this may not all still be true, haven't used iTunes since 2007. )

You can turn the copying files "feature" off. Still annoying. I also hate iTunes.

The Venn diagram of (people who like iTunes, people who like mpd* ) would look like two circles, separated by hundreds of miles of barren tundra. That's like the intersection between plumbers and meerkats.

* Self included. Lua mpd library, FWIW: http://github.com/silentbicycle/lua-mpd

On one hand there's DJ Pirate, on the other there's Apple Remote. I'm not a fan of iTunes, but for me Remote is a big win.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/remote/id284417350?mt=8

> When I import my music folder, iTunes copies all the files to it's own private directories,

This is optional and IIRC, not on by default.

I have to add:

> Thanks, but my music is already arranged the way I like.

This just baffles me. Why would you ever manually arrange your music? I used to do this when I use Linux because I basically had to if I wanted to browse it in any sane way, but I much prefer having some app do it for me. It just strikes me as one of the many things that my computer can do well, so it should do it.

> iTunes doesn't play flac or ogg. And when I rip a CD, it wants to save it in some proprietary flac-like format (which, as far as I know, does not work on non-macs).

I have no clue about non-macs (iTunes generally sucks in Windows IMO) so I can't really help, but in OSX if you have the codec installed, it will work.

> I enjoy controlling my music from a phone/tablet/other computer.

Google around, there are a lot of remotes for iTunes (free one from Apple for iOS, one for android here: http://dacp.jsharkey.org/).

iTunes is one of the main things that I'd miss if I switched to Linux full-time.

This just baffles me. Why would you ever manually arrange your music? I used to do this when I use Linux because I basically had to if I wanted to browse it in any sane way, but I much prefer having some app do it for me. It just strikes me as one of the many things that my computer can do well, so it should do it.

It is more or less automatically arranged (by grip). I make the occasional tweak when grip screws up. As far as browsing goes, mpd supports all of that based on file metadata. Having a filesystem arrangement under my control is useful for this purpose:

    $ cp /misc/music/Johnny_Cash/American*/* /media/generic_non_ipod_music_player/

Since I have more music than normally fits on a portable player, this step is unavoidable (I can't just copy everything over).

(Actually there is another step involved since I store music as lossless flac files, which most portables don't play. See http://github.com/stucchio/Mp3FS for details.)

> Having a filesystem arrangement under my control is useful for this purpose:

> $ cp /misc/music/Johnny_Cash/American/ /media/generic_non_ipod_music_player/

Why can't you do this with iTunes' automatic arrangement? What am I missing?

I've found that iTunes organizes music in a very reasonable way > 90% of the time. Added benefit: When I add title/album/artist metadata (say it was missing or incorrect when I imported it into iTunes), the hierarchy and filenames automatically rearrange and rename themselves, no intervention on my part required.

    $ cp /misc/music/Johnny_Cash/American*/* /media/generic_non_ipod_music_player/

You lose me there. Why would you want to manually copy individual directories to your music player? How do you handle playlists, or worse, smart playlists?

I'd go insane if I had to manually move files over like this.

    $ cp_playlist.py countryfun /media/non_ipod_player <Tab> <Enter>

As I said, I can't sync iTunes to my mp3 player since a) it's not an iPod due to this anti-feature http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1202 and b) my music doesn't fit.

Some people like to manually arrange files they way they'd like to. Like, for example, many of us developers. It's fine that some people don't want to, and I don't think it means much beyond personal preferences; but it isn't exactly astounding that developers might sometimes feel plenty comfortable manipulating files manually.

Besides, yes, it's easier than people think moving files around via command. And when I do it by command, I know what I did, so I can see what happened, and it's all under my control.

I'll say that it's not perfect, but there have been pretty big improvements since 2007. Just turn off the option to copy files into a new iTunes location(I think it prompts for this upon first load) and it's a pretty solid player.

The lack of FLAC is indeed a pain in the ass though.

You forgot the part where it takes two hours to properly import 30GB of music on a fresh install of the OS. And then it forgets the index if you use a non standard location. And then it forgets it again. And then you delete iTunes and use Doubletwist.

Then you find out it sucks too and you wish for rhythmbox or amarok.

Do you really think that poor support for non-standard music library locations is a legitimate complaint? What's so horribly wrong with ~/Music/iTunes as the location for your iTunes music library?

I had a macbook with an 80gb HD, and a music collection that was about 400gb. I suppose I could have configured ~/Music/iTunes as an NFS mountpoint. But why bother with this when iTunes won't play my ogg or flac files?

iTunes already has a solution for this: shared libraries. It's much, much easier to configure than NFS, and it's fully supported. Why do you demand the ability to reinvent the wheel?

(Also, iTunes will play ogg files if you install the Xiph codecs for QuickTime. This has been the case since at least 2006, and you've stated that you last used iTunes in 2007, so I suspect you're not even trying to be fair in your criticism of iTunes, which is a shame given that there are plenty of real problems with it.)

As far as I'm aware, shared libraries only allows me to share with another iTunes library. My fileserver is not a mac. In principle, I could have screwed around with some linux server that attempts to convince iTunes it is a real mac. Or, somewhere in the preferences, I could have told iTunes not to copy to the local folder, and just run it off NFS.

In principle, I could have hacked my way around most of iTunes shortcomings. I freely admit that I didn't try very hard to do so since I saw little advantage in it.

Well, for one thing its format support is conservative. Like most people who haven't lived in the Mac ecosystem their whole computing lives, I have my music collection in a variety of formats- mp3, ogg, flac, etc. I would like very much to have a media player which didn't ask me to bend to its will. This of course is not an issue for most people, but its a sore sticking point for people who try to switch from Linux. In Linux, if you find a file in an obscure format, you can always find a gstreamer plugin for it and totem(or anything else) will play it without losing a step.

I myself tried to switch, but gave up after about a week. One of the main reasons was the iMac's boot time. After having used Fedora and Ubuntu, I found it unbearably slow. Was my experience just an anomaly or is this the general case?

To me the Macbook's boot time feels the same as my Ubuntu (or even Windows) machines' boot times. But I never compared them on equal hardware, or even did any proper timings.

I'm not an iTunes hater since I use it all the time, but it does have it's issues.

The primary issue is that it is SLOW. I have an i7 MBP that everything flies on except iTunes. Now, to be fair iTunes seems to work fine when just playing music. I have a decent library (30GBs +) that it handles okay. The problems arise when doing anything else with iTunes like podcasts, movies, updating apps, or anything having to do with ITMS.

Apple has made iTunes the centerpiece of their entire ecosystem. One would think that they would have at least tried to optimize it while throwing everything and the kitchen sink in featurewise.

I had almost exactly the same experience. I had a Mac (Powerbook) for almost 3 years and could get work done, but development was sometimes a hassle where it shouldn't have been (just to upgrade gcc one had to download 2gigs of XCode; installing exotic C/C++ libraries had to be done by hand; any X11-app, like inkscape, is a real pain to use; things like that). And in the end I was only using apps that have a natural home on Linux anyway (vim, latex, ocaml, java, inkscape).

I now run Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and that "Just Works" for development more than the Powerbook ever did.

I use OSX 10.6 for C and Python, at times Cpp and only if forced to I even do Ruby or Java development on my MBPs (got two - boast...). I do not like either fink or MacPorts and install everything myself. So far, I have not encountered a single library or program I needed and was not able to install after some research at worst. This means virtually all essential C and C++ libraries mentioned in these posts (I do not bother with "junk" - and OSX comes with a sensible default selection, too). The only big boo-hoo is that OSX' Python build is a narrow build, but fixes a socket problem that makes using MacPython slightly unattractive. So, if you really only want hardcore development from your beloved shell and vi, get a laptop and run Gentoo. If you want to enjoy digital media (movies, sound, etc.) while working and want to have a consistent and interoperable UI experience, go Mac. Period.

And if you want something in the middle, get Ubuntu.

right - i'm always a bit extreme :)

I do my primary development on a Mac and haven't had problems with boost, etc. I occasionally run into dependency problems or other frustrations, but no more than I would on any other system. I just enjoy the overall flexibility of having the POSIX system for development, but a ui that doesn't look and work like it thrown together by some kid in a garage when I want just want to web surf or play media, etc. I would highly recommend going the Mac route personally , but it really boils down to personal preference.

I agree, but you forgot to mention the killer issue (for me): there's no '#' key. Having to press Alt+3 for a '#' gets annoying pretty quickly when you're coding.

It's even worse if you're running Linux on the MacBook. You have to fiddle with a mysteriously named keyboard preference ("Key to choose 3rd level") to get even the Alt+3 combination to work - and once it does, you can no longer Alt+Tab to switch between windows. Fortunately you can choose a different key; the best compromise I've found so far is to the right Alt key. That way you can enter '#' symbols and Alt+Tab back and forth, but it turns what should be a single keystroke into a two handed combination.

That and the lagging OpenGL support are why my next computer won't be a Mac.

I'm confused by what you're saying here - do you have a keyboard with '#' as a primary key? Every keyboard I've ever used requires shift-3 to generate a '#'.

Your reference to 3rd level keys seems to refer to an international keyboard. Is your keyboard not a U.S. layout?

Can't you just use your own layouts on the Mac, if something about the keyboard bugs you?

(I only tried using dvorak an the Macbook, and it works fine.)

To be honest I've never tried. I use a standard UK keyboard at work and I've got a vague feeling that there'd be too much cognitive dissonance for me to learn a new layout without the right labels on the keys.

How about not learning a new layout, but just using a `normal' layout you are used to? Instead of having to get used to the Mac layout.

Sorry, I should have said: I'm talking about the UK models.

The standard layout for UK keyboards has a dedicated # key right next to the return key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#United_Kingdom

Mac keyboards for the UK - all of them, not just the laptop keyboards - omit this. I have yet to figure out why, but it's an unfortunate choice.

Is this done in hardware, or would it be possible simply to change the keyboard layout to US?

I recently (2 days ago) installed refit on my macbook pro and now have a dual boot with ubuntu 10.10 (which, by the way, rocks so hard I might not boot back into OSX again).

That's the best of both worlds for me: mac hardware, OSX for my wife and ubuntu for me. Perfect.

Can't you just run Linux on your Macbook?

The Blub paradox applies to operating systems, not just languages. You can only avoid the Blub paradox by truly immersing yourself, and I was making a genuine attempt to do that.

Macs are truly not right for me - if I gave up and switched to linux 3 months in, I'd never have known that.

Perhaps. Have you given the BSDs a try?

I'm dabbling with FreeBSD on a VM right now.

I plan to build a router/fileserver on FreeBSD at some point in the near future. ZFS looks sweet.

OK. On a grander scale, we should probably look into non-Unix operating systems more often, too.

You would have saved a lot of time, pain and effort if you just spent Day 1 installing Linux on your laptop whether it was a dual boot or via virtualization.