rabh

Thanks for the info.

On the points: A: This may be less necessary than I believe admittedly. I've only worked at companies with 100+ people before, all who gave similar hardware. The advantages were in the ability to swap computers. If your computer dies, you get a spare immediately (you can even swap the HD!) as repairs occur. If someone leaves, the computer can be given to the next hire (or an intern). B: Our dependencies are all open source. The full system though (needed for testing) uses kernel modules which don't have a (fully working) mac port. C: That's good to know. (hopefully easy on OS X -- no one currently in the company uses it).

Finally, again in the companies I worked, it was pretty much expected that company development stayed on company equipment, mostly for security issues. Is it pretty common in companies with < 20 people for devs to bring their own machines?

I agree that for most development projects, OS X will work fine. We've had interns in the past though who failed to get even the basics of our system working in os x. The complete one is guaranteed to not run due to kernel modules we use that are only available for linux.

On the hardware, is not receiving Apple's a dealbreaker? Apples is definitely quite nice - and if we issued someone some low-end netbook I would definitely see a morale issue that could occur. But a Thinkpad T-series is very high end (imo, better than a macbook when using linux)

Is it necessary to sync?

I'm liking the VM ideas people have been talking about here; is it possible to just mount the guest OS' file system on the host (perhaps by running an NFS server in the VM) and develop directly on it?

Good point on the hardware/software mix. Does the Mac have much value over Thinkpads without the OS though?

Thanks for the info.

We're not concerned about disk I/O but the app does have heavy network I/O. (though latency rather than bandwidth is the main concern).

Also, I assume for virtualization you are talking about the worst case (perf-wise): running Linux in a VM inside another operating system? Rather than the better one of having a hypervisor directly manage both the user's main OS (win/osx) and linux?

What sort of work do you guys do? Also how bad is the speed hit?

From this: http://superuser.com/questions/146623/performance-impact-of-... it seems like it'd be noticeable (20% I/O hit).

I edited the summary to note that we are not (entirely) blocking system customization.