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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

It's absolutely worth learning to use Linux in a VM for this kind of development work - you'll be deploying on Linux anyway, so it makes sense to use that as your development environment as well.

Give VirtualBox a try - it's free. https://www.virtualbox.org/

Personally I like Ubuntu.

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With Windows 8 and a recent processor, Hyper-V makes way more sense. Virtual Box only makes sense if the processor of the host doesn't support Hyper-V

http://www.groovypost.com/howto/create-virtual-machine-hyper...

+1 for Virtual Box, I find it to be practically as good as any of the paid options.

As for Linux, lots of people seem to dislike Ubuntu for various reasons, but at the end of the day, googling "ubuntu <something> tutorial" will almost always get you a good solution.

+1 I learned Rails on Ubuntu & later used it on Windows, too. If you watch online tutorials where they type "brew install [something]", you most likely will be served by either "apt-get install [something]" - if this doesn't work try a quick Google search or find the package's name with "apt-cache search [something]".

Been programming with a Windows box for a few years now with virtual box. It's quite good. Recent versions have solid dual monitor support too. It's still not flawless but it's good enough to not be disruptive or annoying enough to warrant dual booting.

A virtual machine is definitely the way to go. If you want, you can boot it, then use PuTTY (for shells) and Samba mounts (for disk access) and treat it like you'd treat any other remote machine. Quite handy as devops training with your Rails practice.

Agree. A Mac is totally unnecessary and I would advise setting up a vm like VirtualBox (easy and free) and running a popular Linux distro (Ubuntu).

Will look up VirtualBox. Thanks.

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