"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." [LWN.net]

"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it."

Posted Sep 1, 2012 15:28 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: "Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." by robert_s
Parent article: Look and feel lawsuits, the second time around

> the two environments on a Mac barely interact in any useful way.

This is your point? You really need to try developing on a Mac. The terminal experience is second to none (painful to admit). And POSIX is an integral part of it.

The stock terminal is beautiful and rock solid, even better than gnome-term. The finger feel is basically indistinguishable from other BSDs, and far better than Solaris-without-Gnu. I love that there's no control-key ambiguity. True, MacPorts/HomeBrew can be a PITA, but no more than xBSD ports or Gentoo. And XQuartz sux but I only need it for GnuBG. It really is a full Unix workstation.

I've only been using a Mac for a few months (thanks gnome+fedora), but I'm using POSIX, GCC, VIM, and all my favorite Unix tools every day. And it was trivial to set up. It's a great, tightly integrated experience that lets me work with zero drama.

There's a reason damn near every developer I know (and I know hundreds) uses a Mac.

You're ignoring the enemy. Better to recognize him, acknowledge his strengths and weaknesses, and then use that knowledge to crush him.

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"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it."

Posted Sep 1, 2012 18:48 UTC (Sat) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I've used a mac from 2007 to 2009, in addition, of course, since only an idiot would limit himself to just one system, to linux and windows. I didn't find the OS X terminal to be anything special, compared to konsole. But then, I don't give a damn about the "finger-feel of the other BSD's".

It's kind of a full unix work station, but there's nothing at all in the OS X gui that makes me more productive than KDE; both are, of course, miles ahead of Windows. But the one thing I hated about OSX was the drama. The broken upgrades from one version to another. The vacillation between the preferred way of creating application installers. The ghastly developer documentation for both gui toolkits it shipped with. The drama from other mac users in my company who simply _had_ to tell me that I shouldn't be using four terminals at the same time, it wasn't the mac way. The horror that is x-code. Time machine disappearing my backups. The screen that broke after two years of usage.

"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it."

Posted Sep 4, 2012 20:32 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> The stock terminal is beautiful and rock solid, even better than gnome-term.

While I agree with that (gnome-term stealing the Fx keys sucks until I get it to not do that), I still like my urxvt256cd with tmux much better. I ended up installing iTerm2, but since I'm now using it over SSH only (the desktop is foreign to my XMonad muscle memory and the Ctrl/Fn keys are in the wrong place), so that's a moot point now too.

> The finger feel is basically indistinguishable from other BSDs, and far better than Solaris-without-Gnu.

I've never really used Solaris too much, but the BSD tools are missing lots of nice things the GNU toolset has (find -name complaining about unsupported options when the directory is missing). Plus, for physical finger feel, the keyboards are not my style.

> I've only been using a Mac for a few months (thanks gnome+fedora), but I'm using POSIX, GCC, VIM, and all my favorite Unix tools every day.

Same here, but I used it for about 3 hours and wanted to throw it under my desk and use it via SSH because I just couldn't stand the software (window management or, rather, lack thereof and more) and hardware (keyboard, trackpad).