One thing I have discovered in this transition is that I find the fanboism illogical and pretty much pointless. I've found that I can, for the most part, do about the same sorts of things in one OS as another, though the process is different. Yes, there are some applications available on one but not the other, but I have not found anything that forces me to believe that one OS is superior in all ways to another.
I can appreciate the differences and pros and cons to various operating systems, but I honestly get annoyed by people that attack or bash another OS with broad statements like "Well what do you expect from Microsoft?" or "Well I can do that on Mac why can't I do it on Windows?" Worse, it's never appropriate to associate an OS choice with a personal character flaw of an individual as often happens in flame wars. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux varieties are all tools and should just be seen as such.
If you are getting $150 an hour, there are better things to do with the money than flaunt it in public.
To say unilaterally that it's better for all people at all times in all use cases is, at the very least, an overstatement. While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability, and that's a choice we should all be free to make.
While some argue that this is the current situation, I want to point out that's a false dichotomy. Freedom and usability aren't orthogonal concepts like some make them out to be. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we need to lock everything down to make it "usable".
Also, Freedom of software (and hardware) ultimately has greater implications on society as a whole, which is why I raised the issue. It's not merely a feature, a pro or con, it's something which at least people like here on HN should be greatly concerned about. Computers play an incredibly important role today, and will only become even more important in the future. It's important to retain control over them on a fundamental level, and that requires Open Standards, Free Software and Open Hardware.
Nobody is making this claim, so why are you trying to refute it?
Yes. Just better for hackers who want to alter anything about the code they are working with.
"While being free is a top concern for you and many others, for some (perhaps many) usability might be their top concern and they may be willing to sacrifice freedom for usability"
False dichotomy.
> False dichotomy.
I disagree, he's not stating that there's a correlation between free-ness and usability. Just that what he (and maybe most "normal" people?) consider usable is not currently available in free form. As a result they end up with a choice between "better usability" and "worse usability" and it just so happens that the entire former category happens to be non-free.
Now I know a lot of linux fans disagree and say that linux is just as usable as OSX/windows, but I personally disagree and the markets appear to be backing me up on this. Unless you are supposing there is some other important reason for people not to switch?
Theoretically linux and the important applications can be made just as usable, but it hasn't happened yet...
The reason people don't switch may very well be that noone except tech-aware people has ever heard of Linux (I'm pretty sure my parents don't). And as this poll suggests, for people that know Linux, it is a very very good alternative to Windows, even better than that ;)
Do you honestly think so many people here would use Linux instead of Windows when it's not "usable"? You know, i'd like to get my work done, so i'm using what makes me most productive. Certainly not Windows.
Since XP the instability issues have Windows have been a thing of the past and the Windows 7 user experience has been pretty solid in my experience. Granted I don't do anything complicated under Windows (like I said, unix wins for programming), but neither do most "normal" people.
Edit: Also, note I'm not saying that Linux isn't usable, it is just that most trivial desktop tasks take me significantly more effort to get done nicely under Linux. Whether the benefit of other tasks (scripting your system/whatever) taking less effort outweighs this extra effort depends on the frequency of the different types of tasks.
Assuming you can then get the game to work , expect graphical glitches a plenty , occasional/not so occasional crashes , slower performance and issue with the audio and visuals being out of sync.
There are a bunch of older games (GTA3 etc) that work fine in wine, and some indie games that have been built for it to begin with but I couldn't recommend it to anyone as a gaming experience that is close to that available in Windows 7.
Steam on OSX brought some hope, but performances are just not there yet, and in any case, as long as developers will stick to Direct X, there won't be any other choice than having a Windows installation. I cannot blame them, Direct X seems to be largely above OpenGL, notably accessibility wise.
Throw debacles like Silverlight, OOXML, IE, and Vista into the mix, and it's not hard to justify a lot of the resentment toward the "Evil Empire" from back then.
Today (though Microsoft had to be dragged here kicking and screaming), Microsoft actively supports open source (CodePlex), open standards (ODF is officially supported by Office), and the open Web (they're clearly genuinely trying with IE9+); on top of that, they're rolling out some pretty solid products (Kinect, Win8, MSE, WP7, Azure/AppFabric, all the random stuff MS Research does, etc.). Mind you, I still wouldn't be caught dead using Windows or any other Microsoft product, but it's nice to such an influential tech company changing for the better.
[1] http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/08/ooxml_vo...
By using mostly Windows I trade the inconvenient and risks of non-free with other advantages. It is a informed choice.
RMS may hate me though :)
I think something like "non-power-users", or "random/average user" would be a better term ?
My experience suggests that a Free OS isn't worth it to me, but it's been about six years since I gave it a go full-time. The last time I gave Linux a good go round (as in using it as my primary OS for everything I did), I still had to invest time in getting my touchpad to work correctly with X or getting decent sub-pixel anti-aliasing. All of the freedom to tinker in the world is worthless to me if I can't get the basics sorted without a significant investment of my time.
Nothing precludes the OS from being tinkerable but mostly working out of the box.
I remember using Terminal to change every single .string string to "LOL" on one of the school macs. Good times indeed...
A number of years ago, working on a semi-embedded system, I hacked the way Linux boots from USB devices to speed it up, which made the people I was working for quite happy. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about - I would expect to find a lot of people with similar stories on a site like this.
Also, configuring Linux machines is not really that onerous in this day and age. I suspect more time is wasted complaining about it than in actually doing it. There are certainly still some exceptions, and if you want the ultimate in "mom friendly", Mac OS is probably the way to go. But for a 'hacker', the ability to explore and modify might trump that need for ease of use.
What cost? You're stating this as a fact, when it certainly isn't. As I've pointed out in another comment, the claim that usability is an orthogonal concept to Freedom is a false dichotomy.
Yes, there are quite some issues at the moment, I'm not going to deny that. The thing is, a lot of those, like missing hardware support, are not the fault of the Free Software community, it's the fault of the very things we're trying to stop: closed/locked hardware, proprietary drivers, non-open file-formats or Freedom-denying practices like DRM or tivoization, and finally plain and simple FUD (named as the single most critical problem GNU/Linux faces in an infographic released by the Linux Foundation last year[1]).
Before someone points out that shifting the blame doesn't make the problems go away, let me add that I'm perfectly aware of this. I just want to make it clear that it's unfair to blame Free Software for a lot of the problems it faces, when in fact we fought and tried to prevent a lot of them for more than two decades.
[1]: http://content.linuxfoundation.org/20th/images/linuxthennowi...
Relatedly, your most critical problem is not external, it's that the FSF is now associated more closely with non-issues like "GNU/Linux" nomenclature than solving serious problems.
Suck it up, grit your teeth, and press on. That's what it takes to be successful in just about any field of life. Anything else ends with you sitting on the sidelines, impotently complaining about how unfair it all is and how bad all the successful organizations are.
So no, we're not going to "suck it up", but we're going to press on, to make a better world for future generations.
"Suck it up" does not mean "accept defeat," it means to accept the blows that come with contesting the arena of ideas, and get serious about effectively pursuing your mission. You don't get to just pretend the arena of ideas doesn't exist.
Free software is an ideology, and as an ideology it badly needs a prophet, someone who can inspire reverence for the cause the way that Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson can inspire reverence for science.
rms is wasting his influence. Just look at the primary GNU Project About page; it's a disaster of anxious dissembling, fussing over terminology, scolding people who only 95% agree with him, and taking pages and paaaaages to do it. That is not how you lead.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
When the FSF has a message other than "the waves are choppy and all the boats are unsound so you better stay close to shore," maybe they'll find that people start listening.
I'm not willing to sacrifice productivity to make a philosophical point, so I only use Linux when Linux is the best tool for the job.
It's a factor which, in the real world today, makes them better for some purposes and worse for others.
There are reasonable but unproven conjectures that this kind of freedom could become the most important factor over time, but the existence of conjectures doesn't demonstrate any inherent superiority.
Not in the least since Snow Leopard, as Terminal.app has been perfectly fine (with Terminal Colors SIMBL plugin, and MouseTerm if you really want) and even better in Lion. For utmost configurability you could lean towards iTerm2, which you can tweak to no end (and arguably more than most X terminals).
Platform-specific tools from pb{copy,paste} to tmutil are truly useful and improved at each new release. Tools like brew give you all the package management love you could want, and xorg support is as first class as it could get without OSX being X-based itself.
I guess that if you want to go further than what OSX currently support, then you're looking for getty VTs, tiling window managers or Compiz customizability. As such one should probably not try to shoehorn Linux into OSX and rather use Linux (or some *BSD) directly.
The last thing I remember was that in OS X 10.5 I had to change some locale option to have UTF-8 working properly. But that's it.
Could you give examples where Terminal.app fails?
grep "$search_string" -n -C 3 --color # color bugs out
Because it operates at the object level rather than the files and strings of nix shells, Windows Powershell is more or less "one ring to rule them all."
Unlimited scrollback, the ability to copy and paste using the keyboard, key bindings to clear scrollback, change font size, etc., separate keybindings to scroll the buffer vs. send scrolling commands to the terminal, double-click on parens/etc. selects a range from there to the corresponding other one, and I could probably go on listing more-or-less unmatched _usability_ features for quite a long time. On the other hand, if it's functionality people are referring to then I guess I just don't know what I'm missing because I've never found it lacking in that department either.
As the cultists say, it "just works".
When I switched from Windows to Linux in the mid 90's it was a transition from a box with an illegal copy of MASM and a not-really-working copy of a C++ compiler to a box with a plethora of PL's, databases, code-examples and whatnot with an enormous educational value for me. On the winbox I learned Assembler, on the linbox I learned to program, that made the big difference for me.
Is it still that way for others or is the current situation on windows better? (not considering OSX as you can install pretty much anything there nowadays)
Lots of other programming systems also enjoy at least decent Windows support.
There are a whole host of reasons to use one OS over the other but this "Free as in Speech" is simply not a very good one. I'm far, FAR, more concerned about "Getting Shit Done" than I am about the free-ness of my OS. For some tasks the right tool for GSD is windows, for others it's osX, and for still others it's some Linux / *BSD (I'm a NetBSD fan myself).
It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. I guess it's a matter of what sort of things you grade on, For my personal OS grading metric there is only one item, "Helps me Get Shit Done". Nothing else matters, I just want to be productive.
It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks. I'm assuming that that's what you mean by "short sighted"? Well, that's a bit snarky.
I chose OS X above (though I'm moving more and more in the direction of Linux on the desktop again). I guess it just struck me as odd to use "short sighted" to describe the people who, for idealistic reasons, are willing to take a short-term hit to productivity to ensure long-term capability.
The huge appeal of OS X to me is, as someone said on here recently, it's basically *BSD with a fancy window manager and 1-to-1 hardware/software integration.
I don't want to run a system where, by design, the manufacturer can remove my ability to run applications I've installed after the fact. So, even though I'm happier in general with the polish and fit of OS X than current desktop linuxes, that's where I'm headed.
What would you have them do instead?
It's tautological that nobody can both provide something and freedom from the fear of the unintended consequences of that same thing simultaneously.
On the other hand, since the only way to judge the trustworthiness of code is to know its provenance, I don't see how we can avoid some kind of signing becoming ubiquitous.
To me that means that free software must eventually develop a decentralized code signing scheme.
My point is that the alternatives don't provide the user with the option to choose who to trust to begin with.
The ability to trust code is something that has to be created with engineering and design.
Yeah, I dislike negative consequences. :)
To me that means that free software must eventually develop a decentralized code signing scheme.
I wholeheartedly agree!
I pick a Mac laptop as I can run OSX, Windows, and any necessary flavors of Linux (Metric #1). Plus, it has a nice physical shell and for me, that's worth paying some extra cash (Metric #1). But that is me. I assume no cary over in what works for me with other people.
Laptops are as diverse and affordable as shoes (or any other commodity consumer product) and people pick these things based on whatever suits their fancy at that time.
In regards to getting shit done, I can pretty much get shit done on any distro for the most part once past any learning curve (if there is one).
But what's the point then? If it's just an academic process then that's fine, but for the purposes of determining a useful day-to-day primary system, it seems like 'It's free software' is a terrible metric on its own. All else being equal, of course, I'd rather free than closed, but all else is not equal.
It feels sometimes like this sort of 'free therefore better' ideology blinds the people doing the actual development to the fact that if they made the system more productive and intuitive for people to use, then more people would use it, and that's a net benefit to everyone. Perhaps if they DID focus on 'whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks', then their project would reach more people, and through that more people would be exposed to the (legitimate) benefits of free software.
I think it boils down to the difference between idealists and realists. Realists are always optimizing locally whereas long-term change is always brought by the persisting efforts of the idealists.
I also sense that you speak to FOSS as in "us vs them". You want to wait till their products become better than anything else while they are looking for comrades in their campaign to reach there.
That said, I think Linux and all the other FOSS OSes and software keep costs down. Without Linux, could you imagine what a Windows license would cost? I can't picture that we would have the same price points.
Do you think a similar argument could be applied to Android or any other free/commodity software/platform?
That's because they're free as in beer, not free as in speech.
Proprietary software - i.e., software you can not modify to suit your needs - can actively inhibit your ability to "GSD". That's kind of the point.
And Linux is the top system for ease of acquiring development tools. Compilers, debuggers, IDEs, version-control systems, scripting languages... you get it all on Linux.
On OSX, as well as the FOSS tools you can also choose from a set of nicely tailored Cocoa apps, some free and some worth paying for.
When im doing multimedia stuff , say using progs like xtranormal i have to use my windows because again, no port for mac is available. If im coding on an xterm connected to my amazon instances im using my macbook because its just alot nicer and basically all the tools i need come installed with the mac.
The thing i never understood is, if you are a mac fanboy and would never use windows or visa versa how do you manage to develop properly. How can an apple fanboy who refuses to use windows do blackberry development and how does a windows fanboy do any iPhone development, do they just restrict themselves to programming in objective C and dot net respectively ?
Yeh you could use a VM but i just found it easier to have two separate laptops with whatever OS i needed to run to get the job done
I guess you can have a preference , me i prefer my macbook when im doing general stuff because again all tools are included and if i need to fire up an xterm, run some network tool, quickly whip up a shell script or try some random thing its just easier on a mac but to be a fanboy who refuses to use the other OS makes no sense to me.
It just limits you ... doesn't it ?!
3rd party apps on Windows are a different matter however.
I'm decrepit enough that I remember the bad old days when proprietary OSes had a lock on things. I remember the number of times I ended up fucked because I couldn't look at the source of some crucial component, couldn't change it, and could only plead with a vendor to unbreak their stuff. And the standard response to my pleas was, "How many more units will you buy if we change that?"
I'm way more productive now thanks to the open source movement. My minor problems often turn out to be somebody else's big deal, so they end up fixed as if by magic. And if not, I can dig in myself, or hire someone instead.
No thanks to people like you, of course. But I owe a great deal to people who made the "irrational" choice to adopt an open platform and make it the most productive choice.
Everytime I've tried to switch from Windows to any usable Linux Distro, never has it happened that i didn't have to get frustrated due to some driver issues, laptop hibernation issues or some other issues which forced me back to Windows and kept Linux to either servers or a guest OS running in a VM in my PC.
I don't intend to be rude, but recommending ReactOS as a legitimate Windows alternative is reality-averse.
Superior (i.e. free) will not make me use it (Linux, or anything else that's free).
Every January 1st I refresh all of my personal PCs and laptops. Every January 1st I kick off Windows installs on three of them while I give a Linux distribution a go on the fourth - a stock Sony Vaio P-Series.
Never, ever has the install run smoothly. And I have to admit that a single bump in the road is enough for me to delete the partition and put Windows back on. Because I need stuff to work. I'm productive when I program, not while I debug installations.
Software being free means absolutely zero to me.
Because it's irrelevant. When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel?
On the contrary, it couldn't be more relevant. It's a fundamental issue of technology, and becoming increasingly important as we face the war on general purpose computing, a possible new advent of trusted computing with UEFI, and the list goes on.
I would go as far as to say Free Software is on of the most important things of the 21st century. We're moving towards an information society, and if we don't free the means to create, process and transmit information (as well as information itself), we will lose control to a few big corporations. I'm not planning to let that happen.
>When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel?
I haven't done that yet, but I occasionally poke around in the sources for things like the coreutils, read them, try to understand them and learn from them. I plan to do that with the Linux kernel at some point, too. You simply can't do that on unfree operating systems.
Therefore they lash out at anyone that dislikes or doesn't share the exact same preferences, it makes them feel personally responsible to "defend" their choices in life.
Flamer wars are inevitable, the internet was made for venting and complaining that people are complaining is a big waste of your valuable time.
Everybody gets one.
I use all three operating systems, and one major argument for me when doing development is the terminal. I know there are emulators on windows, but I have had moderate success with them. Ubuntu and osx give me much more power in that area.
Excellent troll.
I occasionally play around with a headless system that I have running FreeBSD. Then I may power up my iPod Touch to test recent changes to my mobile site. I also do a significant quantity of work while I am logged into a remote debian server via ssh.
I doubt that I am the only developer with this type of daily routine. I actually do think that this poll is pretty nifty (and I checked off OS X), but I think that it is still worth observing that the term "primary operating system" just doesn't quite carry the same weight as it used to.
Just things like resizing windows or minimising things becomes clunky enough that I prefer to just native boot into whatever I plan to use.
For my desktop, OSX provides the best combination of spatial window management (you can drag-drop nearly anything - esp. text without wiping the clipboard buffer), terminal friendliness, and MS Office (yes, Excel is still better than alternatives). Lots of hidden gems and a sustainable indie dev market.
I don't play much more than the occasional Nethack, so my need for Windows is pretty limited.
I use OS X for browsing the web, web-development, graphic design, video editing, and writing.
I use Windows 7 for music production and playing video games. At some point I want to start dabbling in game development, in which case I'll probably go with Windows for that, too.
I ssh into various Linux servers privately and at work. In my spare I sometimes play around with Linux distros on my desktop just to learn about the current state of affairs. I usually can't see any advantages in it over OS X other than the fact that's it's free software and that it runs on cheap hardware. I keep being curious though.
I don't use any virtual machines because I dislike the sluggishness and I don't really need them.
Sometimes I wish I could get by with only one OS without feeling crippled in some respect. My dream setup would probably be an OSS system that's great with multimedia stuff and has about a 99% adoption so hardware would be supported really well.
But that thought depresses me because it reminds me of the state reality is in, so I try not to have it.
I am fascinated by this claim. The last time I looked at Windows for music production was a long time ago, but back then CoreAudio beat the pants off of ASIO for real-time work. Is that not still the case?
What software do you use? Two packages that I use heavily, Logic and DP7 are mac-only.
Regarding ASIO vs. CoreAudio performance: http://www.dawbench.com/win7-v-osx-1.htm
There are a few freeware plug-ins I use that are Windows only. If I could afford to buy Altiverb 7 right now, which is OS X only, I'd probably switch to OS X (at least till Altiverb came out for Windows).
Mac is a better platform for audio but the difference is getting smaller.
It's true that they are a lot more freeware (vst) plugins on Windows. Great one like http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com for example.
The Variety Of Sound stuff is what I'm missing on OS X. I use those a lot.
Alternatively, every Mac comes with Garageband and is built from the ground up for reliable recording - if you buy a system and you hear glitching in recordings (which I've never heard of), you can take it to the Apple store and have a technician troubleshoot the problem.
I don't think most PCs face this problem (although prevalent hardware like HDMI ports is often problematic for smooth audio recording), but musicians tend to recommend Macs because the certainty that it will work out of the box has a lot of value.
Although I think this has a lot more weight when you talk exclusively about laptops, with which I indeed have had so many problems in the past that I would recommend a MacBook to any fellow musician asking me for advice, especially if he is going to go on tour with it.
The two DAWs I've assembled myself in the last 12 years were both super stable and performed really well. I don't think I would have gained anything by using a Mac.
In fact I'm on a machine that I recently built which dual boots into Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Maybe I will benchmark Reaper in both of them and come to a surprising conclusion. If I do, I'll post it on Hacker News.
Browsing the web: font rendering. I don't like Windows' aggressive hinting and the one dimensional anti-aliasing. Some non-standard fonts I find not only ugly, but unreadable on Windows.
Webdev: Unix underpinnings, Rails. Text rendering, again. And I feel like I'm a lot faster at switching apps and searching for stuff on OS X. But that's probably just habits I've built over time.
Overall, OS X gets in my way the least. That's why I would choose it if I had to choose just one OS. But I don't, so …
For some reason I feel that it is the crappy memory management with OS X that is killing me.
Other than getting more RAM do you do anything special? What VM software and how much RAM you running.
Use tiny VMs. Most development stacks do actually fit in 512MB, as long as there is nothing else running. Pay attention about which parts of your dev stack do actually consume the memory. In my case, it's mostly in-memory databases. Sample those for smaller datasets, its good practice anyways. If its still not enough, use odd values like 700MB. Rule memory leaks out (this is one of the big advantages of small VMs: memory leaks are easy to find).
Also, use one VM per project. Unless projects are tiny, putting 2 in one VM only replicates the problems of your host-system.
Finally, I also use VirtualBox with Vagrant and am quite okay with it.
You do make a good point about the extra cruft that isn't needed for a VM. I should actually know this as I have several LEBs on the web and optimize them highly for low memory usage. I guess personal time < work time.
More RAM would certainly help, more CPU cores (real cores, not hyper-threaded "virtual" cores) will too.
I have yet to try 10.7 stuck on 10.6 until the boss allows us to upgrade. This will probably be my next big upgrade before anything else.
Asked and answered. I like VirtualBox - the price is right for when I just need to run an app or two on rare occasion - but it certainly isn't the most stable or least OS-crashing VM I've ever used.
Going from 4GB to 8GB on my mbp made a huge difference running VMs. Also, get Fusion. For working in VMs all day Fusion has worked better for me over VirtualBox.
My new job doesn't require interacting with Windows at all so I work in OSX/sshed linux sessions all day.
I've built Departments and platforms on the old faithful OS, I even blog about it - but my contracts demand skype or even Oracle and whilst you can sort of get those things working I no longer can afford the extra time to make it work
Ubuntu just managed to auto install X on a chipset I could not get working manually, and so I am going to Linux land for my workstations. The contracts will require Linux and windows servers so Freebsd will run my in office DNS for now
the network effects of things like dropbox skype and so on are having their effect. I have gone from feeling my OS choice is a secretweapon to a drain on time and effectiveness
it's not a good feeling for diversity
Anyone else?
That said, I did the same thing and now use Ubuntu on my laptop and workstation. The only apps I really want are a terminal and Skype since I can run Konsole+tmux/Firefox/Chromium/Okular/etc remotely displaying locally via X.
It's a shame, because Ubuntu was soooo close to surpassing Windows from a "I just want to get stuff done without mucking with the machine" standpoint. But then Windows got much better with version 7 and Ubuntu took a nosedive into crazy UI fantasy land.
The final straw was when text started randomly disappearing and reappearing in emacs and xterms in Unity. I don't know why it happened, just that it was too much trouble to diagnose some weird bug for the millionth time. If I can't trust my desktop to run emacs(!) without glitching, see ya.
I'm getting older, and after about 15 years playing around with config files, I just want something that's stable and consistent, and OS X was never to my taste. Windows is leaps and bounds better than when I heavily used it last.
And Linux runs fine using Xfce in a VM where you can count on the host to have all the hardware working.
This is why we use Windows. When we buy a new computer, it's a former corporate business class laptop sold on eBay, it comes with some version of Windows preinstalled, and we don't mess with it. As with the recent Gmail discussion, the reason we use it is that it simply works and we need it to do work.
Ubuntu was soooo close to surpassing Windows from a "I just want to get stuff done without mucking with the machine" standpoint.
And, since being back in Linux land, I have never, ever had to maintain a system config file or touch it at all. I do have my own zshrc and .vim stuff, but I would have that on a Mac as well. Overall I find Ubuntu to be more productive than OSX. And since I virtualize my dev instances, I want something lighter and Ubuntu is WAAAAAAY lighter on the same hardware than OSX.
+ Composited desktop means a X11 artifact free experience. + Keyboard shortcuts for most tasks + Unified experience for different apps/programs + The windows key is no longer a dead key - Custom key bindings are hard
Unity appears to have altered my behaviour and I think the change is pretty nice.
I used to run OpenSUSE exclusively. That was fine when the world was young and my job didn't demand too much of my time. I didn't need any graphics support, WiFi or even ACPI.
10 years later, I don't have the patience and the time to sculpt a unique snowflake that will work with all the hardware in my laptop, and have it work in any reasonable network I might have to plug in to. Windows 7 works well enough. This is also a pity, since I've come to strongly dislike the post-Vista Windows UI - the new start menu, the new task bar, the new Windows Explorer windows. Everything was Just Fine with the Windows 2000 UI.
At work it's all Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a tiny bit of AIX (ewww). And I run NetBSD on Prgmr just for the heck of it.
I hate where we've gotten to. Opera is the only browser that still has a g*ddamned proper status bar.
Compared to that: whenever I start up Winodws (XP) in vmware to get my tax stuff done, I am horrified by all the messages that pop up (repeatedly), antivirus practically paralysing my computer for minutes (and longer), genuine advantage stuff etc. For my taste, windows still needs so much work invested in configuring these annoying things until the stuff is usable.
Is that 1500% improved with win 7?
That evenutally got me to dust off an old netbook, use it as my windows "server" that faithfully wakes on LAN, and just keep that in the cupboard access through remote desktop (Microsoft makes a great OSX app for this).
Every week the machine wakes up, backs up (to image), fires off a bunch of updates, potentially reboots, then goes back to it's aquiescent sleep state.
The RDC is generally faster and has the upside that crazy activity on Windows stays on it's own hardware, and I don't have a crazy 60GB file that's clogging my backups - the netbook has it's own backup.
BTW. I used Slackware for years but had to use OSX at a job for like 4 years. When I left that job I went and bought a MacBook Pro out of habit and I realized I just didn't feel natural using it, even after 4 years. That is when I put Ubuntu on the system and felt the "ahhhhhh" feeling. Nice to be comfortable again. Unity really is an awesome interface. First real innovative interface I've used in years.
If OS X disappeared, I'd probably spend a huge amount of time tweaking an Arch Linux install and would use less GUI software.
Disclaimer: I am from a parallel programming background, so I am biased towards performance rather than form factor or battery life.
No? I mean is a Panasonic Toughbook C1 "overpriced"? It'll always depend on what you value and what your qualitative and quantitative metrics are.
I guess if you're coming from the perspective of maximum CPU performance per $ being the key metric, then they probably aren't a great deal, but for most people that's not really the most important thing any more.
Macbook Pro: $2100 (Battery life 7hr) http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...
15z review. Battery life: 7.5hr. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4711/dell-xps-15z-sincerely-fl...
Just saying. Used the 15z for comparison, because I think it is closest in terms of form factor.
If you are going to use linux anyway, why waste the extra $900 to buy an OS you dont use.
I would also observe that I'm wasting money on an operating system I don't really want on the Dell as well, although it would likely be somewhat more useful to me than OSX.
I guess that it does look like a really nice machine. I think it says something though about Dell's image as a company that I find it hard to believe they've genuinely created something that good at this point (and yes, I have owned Dell machines before; that's part of why). I guess I should probably cut them some slack...
And pixel-perfect pointing is something to be desired with those ubiquitious small controls in OSX.
In discussions like this, where serious hackers praise OSX over Windows, I feel like I have some strange disease that makes me prefer my old Toshiba U500 over new MacBook Pro sitting on my shelf. (Really want the MacBook Air but feel like I'd hate it too) </rant>
(Awesome WM, vim and vimium on chrome).
Joking aside, I've never found any trackpad Apple or otherwise that I could use as efficiently for pointing and clicking as even a cheap-o mouse. But gestures and scrolling are so smooth and so useful on OS X that I keep one around (even when I'm at my desk - I now keep a mouse to the right and a trackpad to the left).
After Yggdrasil I took a short turn to Slackware (downloaded a lot of floppies), and then switched to Debian which I had heard nice things about - and I have been running Debian ever since.
I always get surprised at how complicated other systems (Windows, Mac OS X) seem to me, when I briefly encounter them. I guess it is the power of habit.
Here is a bar chart of the votes:
· http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/os/data.png
(Updated hourly currently.)
I have used Windows at work for 6 days total. I used it at a Java shop where the build system was Windows only. After 6 days I needed to get my job done and I installed Linux to get better dev and network diagnostics tools, hacked the build system to not include .bat-scripts, got my job done and never looked back. That was my first 6 days as a professional software engineer and my last 6 days of using Windows for non-gaming purposes.
I'll admit I was quite a fan boy in my teens, but now I really just use Debian because it's what I'm used to, or most comfortable with.
I think GNU/Linux in general is a fantastic development environment.
At work, I used Linux exclusively until 5 years ago. Since then, my Notebook is Mac OS. But large processing jobs still go to our grid that consists of several 172 GB RAM linux machines. I am an astronomer and I process quite a bit of data.
I fought for Mac OS at work and since I don't have to use linux on my notebook any more, life is much easier. But Lion and Apples cloud integration bs makes me fear, linux has to come back someday.
Do you encounter many issues performing your day to day work?
I've been eyeing it for a while and I had it running on my home server for a time but I didn't think it was quite ready to be my primary OS. I generally use Arch Linux at the moment, mainly because I like the configurability and frequent package updates.
The drawbacks have to be the lack of certain binary driver blobs available in Linux. Some may call it a feature though.
Obviously you need to be comfortable at a command line -- the most common "maintenance" you'll be doing is updating ports, and every couple of months you'll find that /usr/ports/UPDATING says "the foo port has [done something weird] and you need to run the following commands before/after updating" (often it's a matter of deleting a port because its contents got merged into something else) -- but if you've got Arch Linux experience I can't imagine that you'll find much difficulty using FreeBSD.
Hardware support is generally ok, though if you want 3D acceleration, Nvidia is about the only safe option (ATI is absent, Intel can be tricky or non-supported, depending).
Keeping 3rd party programs up to date can be a real pain, though. I haven't found a way to avoid long compilations, occasional breakage, and weird library issues. Compiling Firefox can be annoying.
(I run FreeBSD as my home server where basically all my data and important programs live, and a variety of other "throwaway" OSes in my day to day use)
FreeBSD has been my go-to desktop OS since 2005 or so, since giving up on OS X post-Tiger.
All my (IT) colleagues are using MacOSX.
My pro/contra list:
Contra:
- gaming
- want a proper desktop search engine/crawler
(that doesn't eat up my CPU every day when
indexing (and thus, creating far too much noise))
- everything else, never looked back
When i think back so much has improved in regards to Linux, it's awesome. No more kernel compiles, no more X11 configuration editing, no driver hassles. I'm curious what the future brings :)
I don't know you you define "primary"; outside of a web browser, I spend more time at a command prompt on a linux machine than at the command prompt on OSX.
Not working on graphics enough to buy those softwares, I'm happy on linux.
The trouble with digital photography apps is the lock-in - I've got tens of thousands of photos processed with LR, so I'm basically stuck with it. Glad that I didn't go with Aperture - at least I have two platforms to choose from rather than one.
I wonder what are experiences of members of the HN community who run Linux on their MacBooks, especially in case of a development-oriented environment. Could you share your opinions about such a setup? Is it worth the price of the machine?
I love how its very easy to develop on OSX because it comes with a lot of dev tools preinstalled. Not that it takes any effort to get your own personal environment set up, but its just nice how they package that all together.
Apple hardware is top notch and robust. I don't need that in a desktop - my hardware isn't going anywhere (hell I don't even use a case for my desktops). For a laptop though, portability and build quality matters. So for those I'll buy Apple hardware, and thus use OSX as it integrates the best with the hardware provided.
For servers, I like a light and lean platform, so I'll use linux. Requires very little maintenance, runs solid, and eats up very little resources. Right now I'm using Ubuntu on my two linode servers. I'm only hosting websites on them and seeding the occasional torrent, I don't need a custom setup. The out-of-the-box functionality that ubuntu provides works great for that.
This is by no means and end all/be all rule, but for the most part I find that this is how I'm using my devices and OS's.
I'd like to use anything but Windows, but guess how plentiful are my options to use CAD on other systems? Nonexistent.
The economic niche of CAD systems would have room for good CAD running on Linux. The bounty is good. At the moment it's practically impossible to get a serious CAD legally for no less than 2000$/copy.
I'm guessing that the 3D printing scene is held back by modeling prices. It's actually more expensive to model than to actually get that model printed.
I feel like I'm saying "Carthago delenda est", but I strongly feel that this should be addressed.
Not even tablets will run on top of browsers.
Developers will never give up a real operating system. You just can't develop on consumer devices like the iPad; these are designed for consumers, they come with many limitations to make the consumer's experience easy and smooth, but at the cost of hackability.
I always hesitate to use the word never. Things can change very rapidly. What developers need now may not be anything like what we need in 5 years.
But more importantly, what a "real operating system" is will probably change in the next 5 years.
Look at photographers. Despite all the consumer level digital cameras that have flooded the market, professional photographers (and even hobbyists) still buy the more expensive (and more complicated) cameras that a consumer would probably never buy.
Some people use to cling to assembly instead of using C. Now days it's rare to find someone who will use Assembly over C.
Your argument would work if, say, people start writing operating systems in Python.
Another important thing to realize: there's a big difference between the OS and the GUI. The GUI might very well be implemented on top of "web" technologies, but that's not enough to say that the OS is the browser.
These aren't all GUI related things. I strongly believe you can now have a OS that is basically booting you into a browser and all OS interaction would go through WebAPI and still build most applications we use today.Obviously there will always be cases which you need to drop down a level.
Developers of ChromeOS or boot to gecko seem to agree somewhat.
Have you seen Mozilla's 'Boot to Gecko' project?
I am astonished. I wouldn't trust anything from Google any more. They aim at control over our private data. Absolutely unacceptable for everyone, but especially for developers, if you ask me.
MS Office is really a lot better on Windows. It is miles a head on features and stability in for example Word, Outlook and Excel. It is so much more powerful and if you are an advanced user, OSX version is just frustrating.
The file management and the window manager of Windows is to me also a lot more convenient then on OSX.
On Windows you also have the Adobe CS and there is no substitute for it on Linux. Running it under Wine doesn't give the same user experience.
I see more and more web development tools for OSX only. I hope it is not necessary therefore to have to use OSX.
At work, until a couple of months ago I was using Windows Server 2008. I'm looking for a new job, not entirely coincidentally.
Right tool for the right job, IMO.
Final Cut Pro is another story, but I really don't use it very often anymore, and I'm well-versed enough in Adobe Premier that I could probably drop it.
I'm not holding my breath either, but I do dream of a world where most software is OS-independent. I guess we're closer now than we have been for a while.
EDIT: I just remembered that Reaper is Win/Mac. I hear it runs under Wine, but I'd be worried about latency there. Alas, we are captive to our tools.
---
[0] - http://reaper.fm/
Work desktop: 21" iMac running Debian (dual-boots to OS X but I rarely need it, and I'm much more at home in Linux)
Synergy works to share the mouse / keyboard across the desktop to the laptop to create a three-screen environment at work.
I used OS X for a good month or two when work got the new iMacs in; it just wasn't my cup of tea. My coworkers have a mix of Windows and OS X installs mostly.
It used to be OS X, but Lion was a curveball out of nowhere. Enough things don't run on Snow Leopard anymore to make that viable.
- You are a "business type" and prefer some app/workflow that you are already familiar with and don't want to change.
- You used to work at Microsoft and you know it way better than other OSes.
- Your target userbase has strong Windows lock-in so it makes the best business sense to use it.
- You are really into gaming and don't want to dual-boot.
I'm curious if any windows users have any other reasons...
I need to create Windows executables and installers as part of our product and don't know of a way to do that on OS X.
If that was a larger part of my development, I would primarily use Windows.
I'm currently using Solid Edge.
Then those pesky Windows computers got underfoot and that was all she wrote.
Here is what happened. I tried to install a tool on Windows, which required an updated version of the .NET Framework. So instead of doing what I wanted to do, I started doing what that little app wanted me to do. When I tried installing the .NET framework, it wanted an updated version of the MSI (Microsoft Installer). So now, instead of doing what the app wanted to do, I started doing what the .NET installer wanted me to do. You get my drift?
In the 2 years I have been using my Mac, I have not once come across words like virus, anti-virus, drivers or seen any avoidable alert boxes pop up. I am no Apple fanboi. Really, OSX is my preferred OS simply because it does not get in the way and let's me do what I want to do.
Yes it's the same, no it's not easier in any way. I get all kinds of alert boxes and inane dialogs in OSX. I develop all day on a mac and it's constantly annoying, as much or more so than windows7.
I WISH I could use linux as my primary, but I really can't justify all the flaws just for a bit more security.
Desktop : Linux Mint ( Was using Ubuntu until 10.4 )
Laptop : Linux Mint and Windows 7 Dual boot. The reason I have windows is that laptop battery lasts for 4 hrs on windows and only 1.5 hrs on Linux when not on charging mode. also I use windows when I need to use dual screens.
At the moment, I'm posting this on Windows 7 64-bit (my main software development machine), with a 64-Bit Debian for Linux development and a 32-Bit SliTaz for Linux testing running in VMware Workstation at all times and actively used (along with a XP image that I'll spin up once every couple of days for testing).
My MacBook Pro is on the other "side" of my body (my desk is an L), so by simply re-swiveling my chair, I'll be on OS X where I can do more coding, check my email, etc.
I think the OS wars are over. Web apps address the needs of many people (I actually don't use too many), but by and large, all three platforms have seen enough usage and statistics and have been around long enough that there's (GOOD) software to do X (whatever X is) on any of the 3.
I am familiar with System 76, but I personally prefer Fedora. Suggestions welcome.
I'd say my time pretty evenly split between all of these operating systems. I think I prefer Ubuntu overall, however the ease of use of OS X and Windows 7 are pretty tempting a lot of the time (try installing Spotify on Ubuntu 11.10 and get it to play local files). I'd probably prefer OS X among those 2, though since it's much better for development. However, for the most part it really doesn't matter what operating system I'm using.
http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS
It's not Cygwin "MinGW, being Minimalist, does not, and never will, attempt to provide a POSIX runtime environment for POSIX application deployment on MS-Windows. If you want POSIX application deployment on this platform, please consider Cygwin instead."; there's no emulation layer at all.
I've been meaning to move over to a MacBook for a long time now, since I love the iPhone, love the look-and-feel of the MacBook Air, and because so many programmers are moving to them.
The problem is, I've been so reliant on Windows for so long, and have so many modifications and workflows that I set up, that I honestly think it would take me months of work to get to the same comfort level in OSX, assuming that I even could get all the features working there. Is it really worth it?
Honestly, the two biggest problems I have with switching are my AutoHotKey customizations, and Total Commander, which afaik doesn't exist for OSX.
At home, I use Windows 7, simply because I don't want to reboot to switch back and forth from one OS to the other. I exclusively play Starcraft 2, and if it was possible to play it under Linux with excellent performances, I would switch and never go back again to Windows.
Now I have multiple machines running linux. I use linux at work too. I am an embedded developer and use Linux in most of the projects. Using linux machine makes life a lot easy.
At work : Windows XP. Yes. Welcome to Japan.
Desktops are two different systems--Windows and Ubuntu Linux. I need direct access to the hardware for development (CUDA) on both, so I can't VM. Windows is needed simply because Linux has always failed to provide me with the business apps I need to successfully work with the outside world. Not trying to start a flame war; it's just my experience.
Laptop is Windows, with Linux as a VirtualBox VM. Simply because I want to GSD.
At home: 1. 64-bit Windows 7 running usually at least 2 or 3 FreeBSD and Linux VMs 2. Macbook for reading mail and developing while watching TV. Some programming done natively, some done SSHed into a FreeBSD VM. Also sometimes runs 32-bit Windows 7 in a VM.
So... no idea which poll option to choose.
i use mac os on my laptop, because mac laptops are the nicest. i use ubuntu on my desktop because it's the cheapest option. i honestly don't notice a difference switching between the two. all the linux kerfuffle about window managers and whether unity is better than gnome2, it doesn't matter. you can switch between windows. you can get work done.
In the past I have had several windows laptops and none of them hold a torch to the mb pro. size, weight, hardware & battery life are all far supperior than anything I have ever experience on a windows based laptop. The price in my eyes is justified.
I tend to approach operating systems with a BSD mindset: use what works for you, and if you have a complaint - put up with some code.
So it would be Unix-like or Windows. Eh, and other.
EDIT: I don't agree with your classification. Sorry, Monday morning before my first coffee.
The classification is arbitrary, definitely. I'm not using "Linux" but Ubuntu, in the same way Chrome OS is a valid answer instead of just "Linux".
MS-DOS/Windows: 1990-1997
Windows NT: 1997-2005
OS X: 2005-2012
Honorable mention goes to the Commodore 64, OS/2 Warp, various Linux distros, and VMWare.
I sometimes I do despair at the fanatical and near religious arguments going on over a god-damned operating system as if it truly matters.
Pick your system, use it, enjoy it, get to know it. Just don't be a muppet about it.
- Edsger Dijkstra
By extension, I think it's more important for us to think about our programs than the operating systems they run on.
Understand where to get tools to do development with LAMP on windows, or how to cross-compile windows applications on Linux, et cetera.
I don't have the time to dork around in Linux as I once did (never was that great at it) and while I'd like to take OSX for a spin I'm a penny pitcher so I stick with Windows at home. I'm happy with it.
I use windows and Ubuntu, I use Ubuntu for almost everything nowadays, My only reason to boot into windows to get something done with photoshop.
[1] h/t to yegg, http://gabriel.weinberg.usesthis.com/
Windows 7 on my work laptop, but only because it has Optimus graphics and I want multi-monitor. I spend most of my time in a Linux VM.
Windows 7 on my desktop gaming machine.
Operating systems are a tool. All problems are not nails.
Mac OS and Arch Linux at home, with an OpenSolaris storage server and OpenBSD firewall.
For other programming work, I run linux in a VM. Can't work without the terminal!
Primarily a .NET developer, the lure of Node and Ruby have been calling to me lately
Impressions so far: it's awesome. Consuming is much better, which is most of what I do at home. Most producing I've done lately has been of the pure text nature (emails / blogs etc). The onscreen keyboard is mostly find for this, and if I need to bang a lot of text out I can attach the keyboard.
I'm a bit overwhelmed with work work atm, but when that calms down I'm keen to try AIDE[0], as well as look for a more light weight editor for python / html hackery that can connect via ftp/ssh or similar, and play with developing web apps that way.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui
I'm currently working on chef/sensu ssh'd into a few linux servers from osX desktop.
And: Is it a real alternative to a Mac for a developer?
Depends on the type of dev, but anything short of iOS is probably easier on Ubuntu. And, just an FYI, I know people that do iOS on Ubuntu as well (virtualized OSX instance).
I tried GIMPing it under various Linux distros for a while but it's just not comparable.
Linux desktop is boned, and not getting any better. KDE should be killed with fire and gnome is the moes tavern of WMs.
Can we now get the name of this site officially changed to Hipster News?
At home: OSX
What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it.
Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run.
The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Look, GNU is super important and they have done amazing things for Free software. I heavily support them and the work they have done. However, I don't force people that use my Open Source software in their products to put the name of my organization at the front of their product name or label just because they use it to develop their product and neither do most other manufacturers of other products in the world.
Using Linux as a generic label to represent all the Linux based Distros out there is not unreasonable just as using "Volkswagen" isn't. There is no need to cram GNU down peoples throats and force them to write and/or say "GNU/Linux" anytime they refer generically to Linux. If you feel that way, at least be consistent with everything you own and start refering to it by both the components its built from as well as the product itself.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MirOS_BSD)
It's mostly OpenBSD. I haven't used it. I do know the BSD man pages are better (sometimes very very much better) than the Linux equivalents.
The GNU project was conceived in 1983 to create a full free (as in freedom) operating system. This operating system combined many different projects (for example, X), in addition to creating its own components. Before Linux, it had one troubled component - the GNU Hurd, which was its kernel. Torvalds developed Linux (the kernel) in 1990 and released it under the GNU GPLv2 in 1991, which completed the GNU operating system by providing a working, stable kernel. The entire operating system was, and still is (except when GNU is not present, such as Android), GNU. The term GNU/Linux was used to give credit to both Torvalds and the GNU project. The term just as easily could have been "GNU/Linux/X" (and in fact that was used by the Yggdrasil distribution).
Linux, as it was conceived, is a kernel. GNU, as it was conceived, is an operating system. There is an important distinction there.
Fast forward a couple decades. Many people, in an effort to shorten the name "GNU/Linux", simply dropped the GNU portion and referred to the entire Operating System as "Linux". Also combine this with projects such as Android, which use Linux without GNU, and therefore are not GNU/Linux. Everyone has come to know any operating system that uses the Linux kernel simply by the name of "Linux".
Is that correct? Well, that depends on how the term is used. "Linux distribution" is certainly correct --- if your operating system uses the Linux kernel, then yes, distributes Linux. But to consider Linux an operating system is incorrect from both a project and historical standpoint, because it is not --- it is a Linux-based operating system. But to call an entire operating system "Linux" is saying that the entire system that you are using is part of the Linux project. On the other hand, calling your operating system "GNU", as long as it uses GNU, is correct, because GNU was always developed to be an operating system - a collection of components.
So given the history, why is the term "GNU/Linux" ridiculous? Why is the term "Linux" to refer to an entire operating system not ridiculous? Because that is the most popular term to refer to a Linux-based operating system? And given your statement
> The GNU user land is no more an operating system than the Linux kernel or the K desktop environment.
it would seem GNU is just as fitting to be used as Linux. So again, why is such a notion ridiculous?
Let's say that I released an operating system called "Mike OS", which used Linux, portions of GNU, etc. My only contribution to the operating system, aside from packaging, was a simple script to handle package management/configuration. Well, it's still "Mike OS".
I think much of the confusion comes from people thinking of GNU in terms of projects that the FSF personally maintains. As stated by http://www.gnu.org/: "GNU is a Unix-like operating system that is free software—it respects your freedom. You can install Linux-based versions of GNU which are entirely free software."
When GNU makes an actual distro, they can call it GNU/Linux.
I built my PC using hardware I purchased separately. I do see your argument - if someone asks me "what type of computer do you own", I would not list each hardware component individually. The problem is - that question is terribly vague. What type of computer do I own? Well, it's classified as a PC. Generally, when someone asks that question, they are looking for a specific company name. When I respond that I built my own, that answers their question.
If someone asks "what type of processor", I would then respond "I use an AMD-based system". In that sense, if someone asked what kernel I use, I would respond "I use a Linux-based system" --- they were specific enough to inquire about a specific component, so I would respond in such a way that answers their question.
"What operating system do you use?" Technically, I use GNU, and to those who understand what GNU is, I respond just like that --- "GNU". For those who may be unfamiliar with GNU, I will state "GNU with Linux" --- the GNU operating system with the Linux kernel. If I used GNU with another kernel, it is still GNU. Linux is one component of my operating system.
That said my display server, window manager, text editor, etc are also all useful components of my operating system. I would not say I use "GNU/X/Xmonad/Vim", simply because that is not a distinction commonly requested. Perhaps one day, if Wayland becomes popular, "GNU/Linux/X" would be useful/necessary.
As I find the GNU userland superior to other tools, I also find that it's worth consideration.
And in all cases, I find it's sufficient to acknowledge the FSF's contributions to the environment I use and prefer. It's GNU/Linux.
GNU defaults to NOT being POSIX-compliant, which makes most of GNU software a PITA to build on platforms which default to being POSIX-compliant.
Also, except for emacs, GNU is a failure. gcc we use today is an egcs fork, and the Linux kernel could have worked just as well with BSD userland.
I think you turned the point on its head -- I don't care about the operating system as much as I care about the tools.
So I upvoted both OS X and Ubuntu.
And, honestly, if getting a few downvotes for some random thing is "setting a new low bar" then something's wrong with your calibration.
Well, first of all, I didn't "distort your poll" because I didn't actually choose other. In addition to hacker news users hating the FSF, we apparently are also immune to sarcasm and humor.
Second, I'm sorry, I didn't know that polls on Hacker News were so serious and scientific. Do you police rules like "pick only one" with words like, "Come on guys! I'm trying to run a scientific poll here and you're ruining it!"?
Please.