Hacker News Reader

Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

I use Linux on a VM, running under OSX.

OSX is ... finicky ... with dev tools. Apple does the compilers, and the bolt-on distributions (brew, Macports, fink) seem to have trouble keeping things compatible. Linux distributions don't end up falling behing their own compilers every time the compiler gets updated. I'd rather stay off the bleeding edge compilers, and have everything just work.

There is the "Apple tax", but it's hard to find a good lightweight laptop which is much cheaper than a MBA. A few hundred dollars cheaper, but you lose that on the resale value. For a desktop, there's no comparison (a $600 white-box will thrash an iMac, and if you pay for a nice monitor it's better to keep it than sell it bundled with an obsolete machine).

View on HN

I can really recommend having an i7/64Gb desktop with native Linux OS as your primary development environment. It is like 20x faster than a Macbook Pro/8Gb with Linux VM.

And you could keep your Macbook Air for looks [and ssh to that box] ;)

this is what I do now at work. It has totally changed the way I do development. Instead of having a "build farm" or separate box to run continual tests on it's all in the same machine. SSHFS makes a world of difference too.

> OSX is ... finicky ... with dev tools. Apple does the compilers, and the bolt-on distributions (brew, Macports, fink) seem to have trouble keeping things compatible. Linux distributions don't end up falling behing their own compilers every time the compiler gets updated.

Seem to? From first hand experience, while MacPorts shows its age and cruft, homebrew just rocks. I just recently upgraded a SL+XCode 4.2 machine to ML+XCode 4.5. Zero issues. The only problem is old or broken software that assumes C == GCC in some way (e.g ruby 1.8). I've had more — although infrequent — problems with ArchLinux updating to latest GCC.

I've heard brew is great, but I haven't tried it (as my system is currently working OK).

But the reality is, no matter how good brew is, apt-get on a stable Linux distro is just going to be better. Unless you want OpenGL ;)

Linux can be fun when you want media. I told my brother to try Dwarf Fortress. He then proceeded to screw around for half an hour, installing OpenGL drivers (to display a text-based game, WTF?) and an audio library (to run the solo guitar track). It took something like the page-breaking apt-get here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=113626.0)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com