Is there something I am missing other than “wow, that is pretty”? But I’ve been looking at Mac and Windows for the last 15 years and yet to see anything that really makes me jealous and I have yet to understand why developers have been moving to Mac is waves (especially in the Ruby community). Anytime I am on Mac I find myself saying “wow, this is pretty, but I’m still using the same tools that Mac inherited from the Unix community, so why pay so much just for pretty”. Anytime I am on a Windows machine I find myself crippled because the development tools suffer (unless you are willing to constantly pay money for the latest MS dev tools and still get sub-standard products). That combined with having some of the best development tools made me wonder does Mac or Windows really have anything to offer me. I have always felt that Linux had decent enough (not necessarily best) desktop. I am also not politically motivated, just pragmatic. I have felt this way about Linux since I started using it back in college (over 10-15 years ago). As long as it works for you, it really doesn’t matter whether you build your killer social-media-photo-sharing-Facebook-tweeting app on OS X, Linux, or Windows. All you need these days to build great things is a browser, a text editor, and the programming language or tool of your choice. I’m just as productive on Linux as I was on OS X, and there’s no reason you couldn’t be too if you wanted or needed to switch. In a shift from what David saw a few years ago, and despite being largely panned by critics, I find the stock interface in Ubuntu 11.10 to be just as nice as Mac OS X Lion. Perhaps surprisingly to some people, Linux hardware support has improved to the point that everything worked perfectly out of the box, just like on a Mac. When I wanted to do some real work, getting my development environment running for our applications was just as easy as on a Mac. Switching was a matter of copying over a couple of directories and configuration files and connecting Chrome and Dropbox to sync. Now, I use Google Chrome (web browsing), Terminator (terminal), and Empathy (IM). I basically used three programs on the Mac: Google Chrome (web browsing), iTerm (terminal), and Adium (IM). Something crazy happened when I switched: absolutely nothing changed. I can’t say that there’s a dramatic reason why I switched (it’s not some political statement about free and open source software) I just wanted to use some hardware that was impractical to get from Apple. Recently, I switched to using a Linux desktop as my primary computer. Over the last 20 years, my primary computing environment has gone from Windows 3.1, to Mac OS 6/7/8/9, to Windows for about a decade, and then back to a Mac a couple of years ago.
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