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Comment by thomanil | Hacker News Reader

I can relate to the OP: I like OSX for general work, but prefer Linux for programming workflow and tooling (mainly because of the debian package system). My solution from now on is to do my dev work inside a Linux VM (through Virtualbox). Seems to work well. Would love to see others experiences with similar setups, anyone else going a similar route?

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I was an ardent Linux desktop user for years (Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu), and the model of OSX for desktop, Ubuntu VM for dev works well for me. I have this exact set up doing Django based work. I treat my Ubuntu VM as an IDE... suspend when I am not working, resume and I have 4 desktops in the same state they were the last time I worked (desktop for test server processes + celery, and logs, a desktop for editing files in vim, and one running FF on the project(s) I am working on).

OSX's desktop experience is so much simpler and straightforward for a lot of things. I loathe homebrew and XCode, and actively avoid doing anything with those tools under OSX (but I know I can fire up a terminal when I need to). iTunes and sync'ing to my iPhone have become indispensible, Notational Velocity / Simplenote kicks tomboy/gnote, text expander, Adium, etc. There are equivalents on linux, but they always lack some polish... I know people think OSX takes away choice and power (like some kind of toy OS), but I have come to be okay with that for the convenience and consistency it brings to the table.

Give me a vanilla OSX install over a vanilla ubuntu install any day of the week.

Exact same reasons here. I love being able to suspend, resume and clone VM dev environments, and there's plenty of OS X software I really don't want to give up outside of dev work (Keynote, Sparrow, Reeder, Final cut, Pixelmator, etc..)

I use a similar setup and it seems like the obvious choice to me - all the benefits of a sane dev environment and you still get the build quality and prettiness of os x for everything else.

Vagrant is a really nice tool for maintaining your development environment via chef or puppet

http://vagrantup.com/

Agree on Vagrant, great for headless deployment/testing workflows.

Yeah. It runs well enough for me to get work done, and I still have OSX around for handling the hardware (external monitor management and sleep/resume) and running some software. What is your setup, and do you use the 3D hardware support? I'm on an '11 Air, and I find the 3D usage introduces instability in my setup.

I was on a 11" Air until last week, transitioned to a 13" Macbook Pro this weekend. Performance was a bit sluggish when running a full Ubuntu desktop inside a VM on the Air, but feels snappy and great on the MBP.

My setup is just a basic Ubuntu desktop install inside VirtualBox (with Vbox guest additions installed). Haven't noticed any particular problems with the gfx support, but then my Ubuntu desktop is fairly basic - I only need an Emacs frame, Chrome and few terminals panes to do most of my day to day work.

I also use Vagrant to create, suspend, resume and destroy VMs when I just need something headless to deploy and test our product to.

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