Poll: What OS do you currently use?

No, really. The official process requires two signoffs on each architecture (x86 and amd64), and then they ship it.

When I was working as a developer,there has has been a dual-boot between FreeBSD and Windows XP. But in most of the years I used to run Cygwin on a Windows XP. But Finally I switched to a pure Ubuntu workstation last year.

Just about every place that I've worked with Windows has had its own 'special' set of restrictions.

Where I'm at now for instance in the Windows menu is an option "Switch User" but it is disabled. For various reasons, I need to do a lot of user switching, and I find myself desperately missing the OS X fast-user switching. Having to log out and log in all the time is a massive PITA.

So I caught myself thinking "man, Windows is sooooo retarded". But it's not really Windows fault (I assume, unless they put that menu option in just to taunt us).

Then it ocurred to me that perhaps a contributing reason I like OS X and despise Windows, is that I've never had to do battle with a retardedly locked-down version of OS X. If your average IT dept could get access to my home machine, I'm sure they could reduce me to moaning and misery in fairly short order. :-/

  Mac OS  516
  Linux   492
  Windows 331
  BSD      49

At that time if you read articles about people going to Java conferences(1), they kept remarking about how many people were using Powerbooks. Apple also had this really small Powerbook ... 11 inches?

Anyway, Apple also had the most modern Java installed by default. Linux was still involved in a persisting match with Sun about whose freedom was the freest (probably just Stallman, but nobody wants to get in his way), so Java was hard to find and would get you ostracised. IBM had their own bizarre mutant version that ran on their boxen. Microsoft was still not returning Sun's calls after the big court battle over visitation rights, and the version of Java you'd get on any new PC was essentially random in the range of 1..N-1, where N = most recent Java.

So, if you wanted to do Java development, Apple was the coolest.

-----

But here's the thing. Apple fans may mock Balmer(2) jumping around on stage like an Orangutan screaming 4.('developers!') but Apple doesn't grok developers the way Microsoft does, and probably never will.

Apple is just a hair's breadth away from actually disliking developers. There's times when I feel like if they could they'd lock third party devs out and never even shed a tear over it. There's times when they throw us a bone, but those are few and far between. And fairly often they'll just take the bone back.

Example: their language support is spotty. They gave up on Java, they supported and then gave up on various trendy languages and their respective Cocoa bridges.

Apple may grok consumers (though I'd argue that) but they sure as heck don't get devs.

-----

(1) lots of things were cooler back in 2003... nowdays.... not so much.

(2) There were plenty of Microsoft fans doing exactly the same mocking of Balmer, so don't interpret this as an 'us vs them' thing

So you want to know why? Well, because it is still a nice looking bit of furniture, so it sits on my bookcase cycling through a range of webcams from around the world, like a set of ever-changing postcards.

(There are some great webcams out there. I especially like the Antarctic ones that show penguins and seals roaming around, and some of the isolated tropical beaches are nice too. You also get a nice sense of the changing seasons.)

Hey kid, here's 50c, go buy yourself a real computer. :D