[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398781 [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398618
It turned out I ended up using the Mac much more than my Windows machine. Why? Because it would come back from sleep in < 15 seconds, whereas my Lenovo would sometimes take 5 min to come back from sleep. Also, Windows would sometimes reboot my machine in the middle of coding a project. It had apparently "warned me" with some difficult to see message, and then just started shutting down my machine with no significant prompt. It would then sometimes hang in the update process, forcing a hard reboot and then another 10 min wait for startup. This was Win 7, mind you.
I took a nice paying dev project back in October, with the intention of using it to buy myself a new machine. I ended up buying a new MacBook Pro 15" with the anti-gloss screen and on the higher end of the hardware specs. Am in love with the computer. One of my housemates asked if he could borrow my Windows machine for an Excel class this weekend; I handed it over without hesitation. Haven't turned it on in months.
I originally thought I would have to install Parallels or boot camp when I first got my new Mac, not wanting to have to parallel path with the a separate Windows machine. In truth, I haven't ever installed any of these options. With Mac Office 2011, 99% of what I need to do is available. In the rare case when it's not, I may boot up the Windows machine for a one-off look at an Excel spreadsheet or something like that.
If I were MSFT, I would be worried. Around campus, the Apple logos outnumber the Macs in a big way these days. Two years ago, this was not the case. I'm a business school student, and Windows has always had significant crossover on campus from the corporate world. Our official school laptop is the Lenovo I don't use anymore.
Windows was always kind of a pain, but the variety of software available for it gave it tremendous leverage. I was a Mac addict as a kid, all the way up to around Windows 95, when it just became impossible to continue supporting the platform; the ecosystem had wilted at that point to a shadow of its former self. I have basically been on Windows since then, until the recent switch back to Mac.
Windows continues to ride the legacy train all the way to the graveyard. You can't do as bad of a job as MSFT has done in terms of maintaining a core platform and expect to maintain market share. Everyone from the CEO down should have been fired for Vista. Win 7 is basically the maintenance release that Vista should have been. In the meantime, the Mac has exceeded it by leaps and bounds.
Work: The thing sitting under my desk runs XP. It has three purposes: Outlook, internal IM, and a NoMachine session hooked up to a VM with CentOS 5.
It's also worth noting that the pole permits more than one selection, which defeats the purpose of asking, "What is your primary development system".
Secondarily, I have an Arch netbook I use on the run (also for video skype). The lid switch works, even.
And lastly, a MacBook Pro that gets used for iOS dev.
What's more annoying is doing port mapping through VirtualBox's XML configuration files, but this is a one-off task and not too complex. I'm seriously considering purchasing Mac OS X Server edition and using that in a VM as well but I can't figure out if this actually works. Does anyone know?
However, then I read this ServerFault thread and realised the bridge is a _new interface_, and hence you must either bind directly to it or bind to all interfaces in order to get your VM to become externally accesible!
http://serverfault.com/questions/206498/virtualbox-bridge-ne...
Fantastic!
And yeah, the reason something like AppEngine or Django wouldn't work is that they, by default, bind only to loopback/127.0.0.1, and are only accessible from the host on which they're running, as a security precaution.
Running two systems on your laptop is a perfectly viable strategy for dev machines, and if you're most at home in Windows, I recommend it. If you're Linux or OS X, though, I think it's probably worth the effort to keep your dev environment cross-platform instead of working on it in a VM.
I have Windows 7 running in Parallels, but the only thing I ever use it for is testing in IE.
Desktop -- 2009 Mac Mini 2x2.26ghz/4GB/320GB running Ubuntu 10.04
Laptop -- HP Pavilion dv2700(something or other) AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 TL-60/4GB/60GB SSD(!) running Ubuntu 10.10
Vanilla retail install of Snow Leopard, only thing I had to patch was the sound kext, and it (so far) has taken automatic updates all the way up to 10.6.6 (haven't tried 10.6.7 yet) seamlessly.
Love OS X, love getting to pick my own (cheap!) hardware even more. Though if I ever get rich, I want one of those Axiotron Modbooks so hard (Macbook pro taken apart and given a Wacom penabled touchscreen).
From my experience VirtualBox is faster and more reliable than Vmware.
Just because some people use Apple's shiny new fad doesn't mean everyone does.