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Comment by rubiquity | Hacker News Reader

It's always been a little mind boggling to me that in Web Development where we deploy to Linux servers nearly 100% of the time so many people, especially in the Ruby community, develop using OS X instead. Personally, I use OS X at work because that's what my employer gave me but at home I use Linux that runs just about perfect with a Dell Vostro laptop.

That said, there are some great, modern tools that people have made for OS X that won't work on Linux (brew, pow, rbenv, etc. - ok rbenv works on linux but its spotty) that I miss from when I switch to Linux at home. And while I know Linux has equivalents of the three examples I listed I think the interface of those tools, and many others on OS X, are just nicer and easier to use in general. It would be nice to see a focus on better tooling for Linux users and less OS X only tooling in the future.

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It makes no sense to miss brew on Linux ... The only reason brew exists is because OSX doesn't have an official package manager.

Also what problems did you have with rbenv on Linux? It seemed to work just fine the last time I used it ...

I think the interface that brew provides is very simple and easy to use. The terminal output during installation is nice. Again, it's the extra little polishing of these OS X tools that I think really draws people to them and keep using them.

In regards to rbenv, the "core" part of rbenv(switching between versions of Ruby) works fine. It's the other tools like ruby-build and rbenv-install that didn't work for me. I don't mind manually compiling my rubies though.

There is always pkgsrc. pkgsrc works, well, everywhere.

Yup, I'm a huge mac fangirl, and then only thing I miss from the linux PC I have at work is a real package manager. apt-get, yum, good grief even gentoo scratches that itch for me better than brew or fink or macports

Do people really do this on the native OS on a Mac? I use Macs for all my work, but we deploy to Linux, so that's what runs in all the VMs I run on my Mac. Currently I even use Eclipse in an Ubuntu VM to do the work. I wouldn't know how to install a package on my Mac if I tried, and given that all the production machines run on Linux, I've never seen the need.

It sounds like you're in the minority based on places I've worked and people I've met! Good for you though, I think it requires a lot of discipline to stay on top of VMs which is why so many people install things directly to OS X.

Huh? Using VMs is a very widespread practice, on the last 2-3 years. Maybe not in enterprise America, but for startups and modern software/web companies/devs, it's all the rage.

Hence projects like Vagrant too.

And not only on Mac: it's better to use a VM for development if you're deploying to Linux even if you run Linux on your desktop too.

Why would you clutter your desktop install with a deployment environment stuff that could even be incompatible between your different projects?

(And of course it makes even more sense if you work on Windows but deploy to Linux).

Those are all great points. These days there are great tools like(foreman from heroku comes to mind) that give you tiny configuration files to detect which versions of languages and environment variables you need to make an application run so switching between applications is actually quite seamless. I work in mostly higher level languages so maybe things aren't as delicate.

Vagrant is the answer. I mean virtulization itself is the answer, but vagrant packages it up in such a way that it's easy to use on any platform and easy to get going as long as someone takes the time to write the first file.

Basically, wave of the future. :p

rbenv is 'pretty spotty' on Linux? In my experience it works perfectly.

Linux is my development environment of choice and the beauty of it is I don't need 'better tooling' in order to get my job done quickly and efficiently; everything 'just works'.

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