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Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

What percentage of users are developers? 5 percent? Lower? It's unwise to cater the entire OS to the needs of such a small minority especially when they are the best suited to change the environment to meet their needs. Complaining about needing to download Xcode is a perfect example of why it is wrong. If it's bundled into the OS you're wasting 4GB of space on tens of millions of machines to save the 5% a 4GB download. That makes no sense.

The big problem with Ubutunu is still that it is, no matter how much nicer they make it look, a collection of inconsistently designed user interfaces for mediocre clones of better applications on other platforms. It has no soul. It just stumbles forward feebly copying whatever else happens to be popular on other platforms. It's always going to be playing catch-up to ever moving goal posts. Unless you have some religious zeal to use OSS software there is no good reason to even consider Ubuntu over Windows or OSX.

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Unless you have some religious zeal to use OSS software there is no good reason to even consider Ubuntu over Windows or OSX.

Problem with making sweeping statements like this is that you now make it difficult to continue any sort of rational discussion.

(and so, I downvoted you for that last line even though you had some good points to make)

I usually avoid sweeping statements for exactly that reason but I think it's true in this case. If anyone has a good counter argument I'd be happy to admit I am wrong. Just to give you some idea where I am coming from I used Ubuntu on my work laptop for about 5 years. I got a new machine recently with Windows 7 and I just couldn't think of any good reason to install Ubuntu.

I can think of a few good reasons, but hey are purely developer-oriented. At my last job, I had an Ubuntu-based desktop because it made virtualization cleaner with a more stable base system—and the company wouldn't buy Macs. Windows ran in a virtual machine, and I developed on Linux, Windows, and a couple of Unixes. For that job, Ubuntu was the best choice I made.

Now? I'm happily running on a Mac.

That's the idea - make lightweight, easy development the soul of your operating system. Build the entire OS around immediately useful GUI customization and task automation, for example, to the point that everybody that uses it can do it and wants to. Kind of like If This Then That, but for the desktop.

I think the point was that it should not be a 4GB download to get a C-compiler.

Your point makes sense if you accept a 4GB download just for a compiler.

There are many Linux distro's that come with a C-compiler which are less than 4GB in total size.

I think your view of the 4GB download is going to depend on your Internet speed. At 1 MB/s or so, I've found it annoying to wait an hour for a download, but it's hardly the end of the world for an occasional thing. Could definitely be improved.

What's wrong with this at 69MB?

http://llvm.org/releases/2.9/clang+llvm-2.9-x86_64-apple-dar...

And even then, many developers are locked into Windows Environments or Mac Environments (.NET and iPhone respectively).

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