Comment by christopheraden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by christopheraden | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

christopheraden

It depends a lot on what you do for work, I bet. I'm in sort of a similar situation as you--Windows at work, Linux at home, but I also have a mac. I run a pretty bare-bones setup on my Linux desktop (#!: an OS for those who got frustrated trying to learn Arch and still like APT). The lack of extra stuff makes me less prone to messing around, so it's great as a GSD system and when I want to dedicate my CPU and memory to the primary task instead of to the overhead of a bulky GUI and other features. Having a CUDA-capable GPU is nice, too, instead of having to use an emulator. If you do technical or scientific computing, Linux may be a good bet. The vagueness of my advice is because I'm only involved in a small subset of the technical computing world, but a lot of the statistical programmers in the FOSS world use Macs or Linux boxes (Debian-derivatives are very popular in the R community).

OS X probably has a bigger advantage for front-end and mobile dev, though.

If your decision is based purely on aesthetics, given enough time, I'm sure you can find a GUI for Linux that you like more than OSX. While OSX gives you a GUI with no fuss, the customizability of a lot of desktop environments for Linux means you can tune it to exactly what you want, whether you want more graphical flare, or less (for the OpenBox folks out there--represent!).

> If your decision is based purely on aesthetics, given enough time, I'm sure you can find a GUI for Linux that you like more than OSX.

People choose OS X because of its design though, not because of its aesthetics. "You can't put lipstick on a pig" and all that. The trouble with Linux is that there's no consistency in UIs between various apps, and skinning just makes things even less consistent.

I'm in your scientific computing category, and I'm using OS X as my main machine right now--my only complaints are the occasional missing package from Homebrew. I suspect I might prefer Ubuntu in that regard.

In all seriousness, if it's just an occasional missing package, consider adding it to Homebrew. It's a relatively painless process and adds a tool to everyone's working palette. This is a mitzvah.

If that was a polite way of saying "many missing packages", that's a different story.

I agree, and I'm trying :) So far it's just been two packages, one of which has since been added (not by myself) and one is still presenting problems, but it's always a pain struggling to compile something knowing that it's a simple apt-get away on Ubuntu.

I'm mostly doing java, eclipse rcp, python and web stack work so Linux would be fine.

But occasionally I need to work with color-calibrated monitors for photo processing and I have yet to try out if Linux and ICC get along fine and if there's a chance to hook my Spyder calibrator without booting to Win or Mac. Also need to check if CR2 raw files in Gimp is something that I can build my workflow on.

Additionally, with linux I'll miss some music creation with a DAW and a bunch of VST plugins. That forces me to keep multibooting to Windows when choosing Linux.

With OS X it would be a single env.

Well, I haven't really tried it with a real color calibrator, but I have heard from someone who has used that argyllcms stuff successfully. Should be pretty straightforward to use. I don't really know how it is related, but there is dispcalgui/dispcal that automatically put themselves in ~/.config/autostart and load color profiles.

Also there is this relatively new colord stuff which gnome seems to support (I think only loading profiles)...

VST... well, it's a "standard" but it uses compiled native code. What can you expect? There are some projects like festige/fsthost/dssi-vst that try to integrate with wine. When I tried it I got very mixed results but then I did not try with a realtime kernel and additionally I only tried it with the default priority of jackd run as user. I was told it would work much better on low latency systems. Ubuntu Studio is apparently still a thing, so there are probably an number of easy to setup distribution with this stuff enabled. But yes, the VST situation is bad.

Sorry, '#!' is basically un-searchable. Which distro is this? I like Arch, but I wouldn't mind something even more bare-bones.

It's pronounced "shebang" but it's probably easier just to search "Linux distros" and Ctrl-F "#!", which is what I did. Google-fu :)

http://crunchbang.org

And agreed--this is a silly name for an OS, but it looks pretty cool at least! Though sadly it seems like they don't have a non-Bittorrent download option, so I can't try it out -- if anyone knows of a mirror, that'd be great.

Thank you!

I should have thought to search for it that way, given that I know that pronunciation...

I have heard great things about CrunchBang in the past, actually. Neat. I used Fluxbox at one point in time, so OpenBox shouldn't be too big of a change. It's also been a few years, so re-learning things would be nice as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com