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Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed. Linux (Ubuntu in my case) and OSX just work sanely mostly, but OSX is a horrible dev environment, so I moved back to Linux.

I thought Windows was a joy to develop on until I moved to Linux... then I realised MS had to develop all these wonderful dev tools to disguise the fact that the API's are disastrous and the command line is useless...

Amen. That's the thing. You don't realize how many hoops you've been jumping through to do the same things that devs on Linus or OS X do effortlessly until you make the switch. But people don't make the switch because they have this blind loyalty to whatever theyre using. So whenever they see someone else loving a different OS they dole out ad nominee attacks, call the products over priced, or too complicated for normal users, or elitist. It's all to do with justifying one's decision to use X despite evidence that Y may be better or just as good and possibly some jealousy in some cases.

In any case it's all dumb blind loyalty the vast majority of the time. And that applies to Linux, Mac, and Windows. You can't have a discussion about operating systems with 90%+ of people because everyone just defends their favorite and facts are distorted to suit those preferences. It really is just about useless to have a discussion about operating systems as "substantive" or "meaningful" discussions about the subject are about as rare as unicorns.

Actually OSX development environment is only horrible to cross-platform / open-source application developers.

But if you are Apple pet developer then you'd just use XCode/XCode projects/etc for all your needs. And would be very happy with that.

As a cross platform open source developer that uses Mac OS X and Linux about the same (Mac OS X on desktop, Linux on laptop) I don't see what's so horrible about Mac OS X in this regard. At worse, it's the same. I don't prefer either for programming (I do prefer Mac OS X for other things, though).

Well, developing using native toolchain is horrible. Because of legacy gcc 4.2 and unstable and often broken clang. At least about a year back it was the case. No. Scratch that. It is still the case. I just remembered helping a coworker hack some open source package to make it compile with clang. We lost an hour or so, completely unnecessarily. Would have taken him 30 seconds to apt-get it on linux.

And well, not using the native toolchain, and using something like mac ports feels like I'm under cygwin all other again. No, thank you. I love 13" Air, but as a development environment Macs are quite broken.

Plus that home key on the full desktop keyboard... If you are linux+mac user, you know what am I talking about :)

Curious, what package management system are you using to install libraries/packages? Ports? Fink? Homebrew?

Okay, our use cases are very, very different. I mostly do Go now and used to do lots operating system development and embedded work. For Go, your compiler complaint does not apply, and for embedded work you need to build or install a cross compiler anyway. There are some cross compilers which you can get with apt-get, but in practice for the work that I do, there are no distribution provided tools, and you need to maintain your own toolkit.

Same applies to libraries, you can get everything you want with apt-get, as long as you only want things for your architecture. If you need them for another architecture, you are out of luck.

For operating systems you use virtual machines. I use the host just for running my text editor and for my Unix environment needs. All operating systems I've worked on (Solaris, Windows, BSD, QNX, some other real time embedded stuff) have their own tools and compilers used to build the system.

MacPorts, Fink and even Homebrew are FUBAR, I'm glad I don't have to use them.

>Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed

Without qualifiers, that statement is meaningless. Perhaps you mean it's horrible for some devs? (Millions of others are doing just fine with Visual Studio).

For regular users, dropping them to Linux will be like replacing your mom's car's controls with the controls found in an airplane cockpit(command line) or playing "who moved my cheese ?" with the Linux desktop. Granted, everything is moving to the web these days, so why not just give them an iPad or a Chromebook?

Ubuntu works just fine for two kind of users:

1.) Grandmothers and the like who just want to read their mail and check the news.

2.) People like me who can and will use 4 + 2 + 1 + 0,5 hours to customize it over the course of 6-12 months to have an almost perfect working environment instead of living with a slower OS without virtual desktops.

The only thing I can think of that needs tinkering is some online banks that require applets to work, but then again even Windows doesn't come with Java preinstalled.

I think you mean Debian.

I know lots of people who successfully installed Ubuntu that don't know what a boot sector is but are still happy with it. (After all most people use web apps anyway.)

Wasn't talking about visual studio, I mean the UX as a whole. It is hugely inconsistent, slow, and hard to get sane information about whats going on. Once you are in an application, then generally its ok, its just up to that application, other than things like where new windows are created which are also broken. Oh and focus and switching, as things are always getting hidden.

Application UX inconsistency is a Mac thing AFAIK. Yes they all look 'pretty' and 'likable', but not consistent. Most decent Windows apps are modeled one after another and are very consistent. They have such things as status bars, sidebars, menus, list views. Usually standard controls, though times are changing with the advent of XAML and web-like interfaces.

And man tell me where should I have gone to get any information about why my _wired_ Ethernet connection wasn't working on Mac when it worked everywhere else?

[UPD: I'd give iOS apps 2/5 on consistency scale, Android, Linux and OSX 3/5, Windows 4/5].

Lots of programmers were doing just fine with punched cards and teletypes. That doesn't mean that punched cards and teletypes were not horrible. People just learn to be comfortable with their tools.

I really haven't found that that be the case at all with package management on OS X. Homebrew is almost always a joy to use, and on the few occasions I've had build errors using it I've found the Homebrew community connected to the official GitHub repo issues page to be one of the most responsive, friendly, and genuinely helpful open-source communities I've ever encountered. I agree things were a lot rockier back when the only package management choices were MacPorts or Fink, but Homebrew's a monumental step forward.

I can't say I've really touched Python at all, but as a relative newcomer to the Ruby world I found getting RVM set up and functioning properly on my Mac to be a complete non-issue.

Discovering Homebrew was wonderful after suffering the broken-by-design ports systems of Fink and Macports (a retrograde step from Darwin Ports). But it is not really strong competition for Debian's APT. For example, a day after first using Homebrew, I discovered that the Qt port simply didn't work. I fairly frequently have to install by hand software for OSX that has stable packages in Debian.

It's also true that Homebrew (and Macports, but not Fink) are doing something fundamentally less ambitious than the main Linux package managers: it offers a simple dependency system and scripting for compiling stuff, not directly installing the end product.

One significant difference between linux and windows/mac is the planning around features and the outreach. I work for a large organisation. The number of times a linux group has come round to our office to discuss what features are up-and-coming, or should be developed? None. The number of times Microsoft staff have done the same? Some.

Now I don't really expect linux volunteers to do this, but equally I don't really expect any linux distro to provide a coherent business desktop because they are not talking to their "customers" in the same way that their competition is. And the business desktop is a large market, if a bit unsexy.

There was always a dominate player it seems. Most people used RedHat (before Fedora) over Ubuntu.

>badly interacting upgrades of the OS and separately installed packages and system versions of python/ruby/etc., that I do most of my dev work in Debian in VirtualBox now

Well, sure, but (unless I am mistaken) that is no longer on the topic of the Linux desktop.