I love dhh and I applaud his manic obsession with Linux over the 18 months or so that I've seen on my twitter feed. I still don't exactly understand what the purpose of all of this is.

I'm sure it is very configurable, but every visual I've seen of this thing looks awful and not something I'd want to look at while working. But I understand we all have different tastes.

But even in the blog post I'm struggling with 'why?' here. Am I to understand the primary benefits here are improved battery life and increased developer productivity by tests running faster? Is that it?

I travel an inordinate amount and have never found a Macbook's battery life to be insufficient. I struggle to even remember the last time I've used my computer long enough to drain the batter and not be near a power outlet. I work from ski lodges, planes, my car. This has never been a problem for me. Not once. This just feels like a really bad metric to optimize for given a typical developers' schedule and work arrangement.

> On the flip side, we'll get a massive boost in productivity from being able to run our Ruby on Rails test suites locally much faster.

Is this not just a Ruby issue? I don't know what's basecamp or HEYs codebase looks like on the inside, but they don't feel like projects whose tests suites should require a completely different OS or hardware arrangement. I haven't used Ruby in a decade but I do recall it being frustratingly slow. This seemed to be an understood and accepted reality amongst teams that adopt it.

Anyway, I feel like a better 'why you should do this' in order, especially if it is being mandated amongst developers in a company.