As a Python/ Django developer who's tinkering around with Objective-C I couldn't be more happy with OS X. But maybe that's because I used FreeBSD exclusively before OS X? Which he seems to think isn't comfortable.

Right?

My working assumption is that these complainers must be heavy-duty C programmers, or some other variety of coder that uses a completely different set of tools than I do. Or that they maintain some older codebases which link against older, incompatible versions of various libraries, so they need to install multiple versions of half a dozen libraries and then carefully control how the linking is managed. Or they're former Gentoo users who are completely obsessed with the minutiae of how their tools are being compiled and want to be able to tweak their compiler optimizations on a fine-grained level.

Or maybe I just don't understand Debian well enough [1], and if I did I would fall in love with its build system and spend all my working life in a Linux VM.

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[1] I mean, I maintain Ubuntu servers, but that doesn't require a lot of understanding of the build system. By and large, aptitude or apt-get just work.

I'm using Macports at work and Gentoo/Ubuntu at home. I generally use the same packages on all machines and have been using the same setup for about 3 years. I've never had a problem with Gentoo and Ubuntu in this time but I've hit several showstoppers with Macports. Just in the last two weeks a collegue has had problems with several ports failing to download because the location of the source distribution is out of date.

I respect what the macport maintainers are doing and have been grateful to them for fixing bugs. However, the experience of using and downloading packages doesn't compare. I suspect that Apple are part of the problem because they aren't in the business of providing a nice platform for Unix developers. One simple example -- I use macports gcc-4.3 but can't debug because a corresponding gdb isn't available.

Somebody in our office just chose a PC over a Mac because the Linux (specifically Ubuntu) experience is better when working with open source packages.

As to the overall article, I don't know, maybe I'm just never given Linux a proper chance as my main development machine (I do have three headless Linux boxes in the basement that get heavy use), but OS X seems to have 99% of the power of Linux while being drastically more user-friendly. It's like Emacs versus TextMate -- sure, Emacs may be marginally more powerful, but TextMate has more than enough power for anything I've actually tried to do, and incorporates the last 20 years of user interface design and practice, too.

That's the difference. On OSX they don't. And fink is a poor substitute.

My general take would be:

The most advanced binary package manager in existence is apt-get. The most advanced build dependency manager is portage. Both have evolved over many years (apt celebrated 10th birthday just recently) and are at the core of their respective distros.

MacPorts and fink, on the other hand, are afterthoughts, somewhat akin to strapon-dildos. Fink at least builds on proven technology, MacPorts reinvents the wheel altogether. Neither has performed convincingly for me over the longer term. I was regularly confronted with outdated packages, broken builds or other screwage as soon as I left the beaten path of the few most popular packages.

The package situation may have improved recently (my expirience is from 6 months ago) but the parallel universe, second userland issues are inherent.

It's just not possible to match the real thing™ by piggybacking a package-manager on top of a system that wasn't designed for it. Even when the package manager is as good as apt.

Overall, I like the system and use it quite heavily, but it does have some warts.

then goes on to say..

"Windows sucks. Period."

I've played with Macs, and have given Linux an honest shot, using it as my only OS for about 2 months. I am simply more productive developing PHP/MySQL on windows.

We should compare notes. I bet we're both doing something wrong/stupid in our rejected OS's.

The other thing, that "Windows sucks, period"... Well... Millions of lemmings can't be wrong, can they?

In 2006 I changed jobs and was fortunate enough to get a quad-core MacPro to work with. By that time I had already been an OSX user at home since Panther came out. Before Linux, I had the good fortune of being exposed to Nextstep on x86, PA-RISC, and even a SPARC 'tadpole' laptop. (Noisy beast!)

I don't miss using Linux, although I still love it. It has its own set of hassles. Most things do.

I respect this guy's choices. Obviously he feels the need to vent, and that's what the internet is for.

Not the internet as a whole, but that site of mine, certainly ;-)

I, on the other hand, don't really care what machine I'm running on; I just happen to really like OS X.

That is just plain false. Installing packages (that either don't come with OS X or just override the installed version) is a piece of cake. Without Ports.

While one could argue the original article was biased towards OS X and not entirely objective, this rebuttal is so frustratingly incorrect on so many levels. Either the author is misinformed or too stubborn to care that they're mistaken.

This article wouldn't come off as a troll piece if there'd been some explanation as to why Linux was quantifiably better for their particular uses instead of merely spreading misinformation about OS X.

It's about the same as having the opinion "I like Chevy because Ford sucks!"

I call it the Segway argument. ;)

Marathon runners, the type that train obsessively for days at a time, fly to exotic high altitude locales to starve their bodies of oxygen, etc, and are at the absolute peak of human conditioning, are quite capable of running very long distances without much effort, in fact a case could reasonably made to say that they actually enjoy doing so.

Try sell one of those people a Segway.

It will have no tangible benefit aside from getting in the way of that person, and in fact just the idea of trying to sell one to that market shows the entire thing for the charade it is. It is not designed to service people like that.

The thing is that you can fairly make an argument that Marathon Runners like that are probably wasting their lives / time developing that degree of ability simply to do something like get from A to B with a reasonable level of rapidity. Thus something like a Segway can actually make sense because it isn't targeted at marathon runners, but a completely different type of person.

Now I don't want to be overly bragging, but I am only comfortable speaking for myself in this debate so that is what I am going to do. Once you've been using Linux since 1994, keeping well abreast of all the changes and benefits that have been added to the platform between then and now. Once you've mastered that environment so thoroughly that the regex flows from your fingertips as easily as a normal user's expectation of a tooltip hover on a pretty OS X widget. Once you've become accustomed to the almost limitless flexibility and control of the platform, and all the niggling problems and voodoo that one must occasionally confront when dealing with such a fluid platform slips so silently into the unconscious competence basket that you cannot personally even define the fact that it actually requires any competence at all without thinking about it really really hard.

Once you've got all that, the idea of someone making a cut down variant based on the BSD code base and making everything "just work" instantly, providing a contiguous user experience, doing a ton of things that basically all group up under the heading of "eliminating the need to acquire any indepth computer literacy at all", the idea of switching to a mac is as puzzling to you as the idea of the marathon runner picking up a Segway.

The critical thing to take away though, is that this is all value neutral, the marathon runner is not a hero, he probably wasted a ton of his life and time that could be spent better elsewhere acquiring the conditioning and abilities allowing him to accomplish the feats that he can. The same could be said of people in my situation with regards to computers, I am prepared to accept that if something like OS X had existed back when I wanted a "real computer" in 1994, it would indeed have been a waste of my time to develop all these skills. Further fair arguments could be made that I've wasted a ton of time developing all those skills now when you can get it "almost" as good just by paying a little premium on top of your average computer's cost. I get all that, I want to be as absolutely non-elitist about this as I can be. Taking all the above information into account I can totally see how it makes sense for normal people, and even up to a threshold some pretty extraordinary people even in this particular sphere to choose OS X as a platform.

That is definitely something that was in my blind spot not long ago, just as surely as Segways were an utterly bewildering concept to a marathon runner, but I'm aware of it now. The fact is of course that your average person is generally a lot more interested in stuff like walking around and fitness than advanced computer science, thus the relative success rates of Segway and Apple Computer.

But just because that market exists, is real, and has genuine value propositions for a large swathe of humankind, should not be taken as a reflection of it's value for everyone regardless of experience or situation. People like me will probably always prefer what we've developed this intensely powerful unconscious competence in, and everyone else will look at us and say it was a waste to do that, and although I don't agree with that position, I can at least see how the conclusion would be reached and accept it.

And I'm typing this from my MacBook, which I've found to be the best development environment I've ever used.

Just like I tell people who bash on different types of motorcycles: ride what you like, like what you ride.

The reason why I changed was because I got sick of the nagging 1%. It didn't seem to matter where, there was always some 1% that wasn't polished. It was either that multiple monitors didn't work quite right (especially when plugging in my laptop) or that my wi-fi wouldn't come back to life after hibernating. There is always some little thing like that, and it interrupts what I really want to be doing (developing, not troubleshooting).

On top of that, I don't just use emacs. I use things like photoshop, scratch (always fun to code with my kid), garage band, keynote and pages. Yes, I can get the same functionality on Linux (usually), but now we are at a 90% experience (at best). There is truth (for me, at least) that well designed OS X software just gets out of the way.

Yes, I do deal with "multiple user land", though I've honestly never thought of it that way. My shells (including emacs) are set up to use ports, the rest of the system uses Apple's defaults. I've never run into a problem there, but, objectively, it is a little more pain than I would have on Linux.

If I were strictly using emacs and bash in a desktop environment, Linux would be better than my MacBook, but I don't. I think it is disingenuous to imply that developers don't do anything but that. In addition to being a developer, I'm a regular computer user, too.

With OS X, I get what I feel is a good development environment along with a great computing environment. With Linux, I got a great development environment with an OK computing environment. That was fine when I enjoyed spending my time troubleshooting the environment, but I'm not interested in that now.

This is globally applicable to any problem I run into now, because I have those unconscious competences built up from dealing with thousands upon thousands of tiny issues like this in the past, I no longer even consciously see them unless I look hard for them. Thus, taking care of those problems for me is not something I find very valuable.

In the same way, I've trained myself to stick to hardware I know doesn't suck for Linux, avoid ATI like the plague, make sure that all the devices I'm going to be using work before I fork over cash for them, etc. So right there there's a bunch of issues I don't even come across like your multi monitor issue because I have taken measures to offset them appropriately.

As in the original argument, you could indeed argue that such things are a waste of time and it's a lot easier to just pay some other company a premium to handle it all for you, and thus it makes sense for platforms like OS X to exist and thrive, but it still doesn't negate my original point, you've just evolved away from being in the same group of users as I am into another one altogether. And that is of course totally fine, but just serves to reinforce the original point even more.

Thanks for the reference about scratch, that looks kind of interesting, if I ever find myself having to teach I can definitely see a use case for something like that.

However, your central argument seemed to be "if you've used Linux since 1994, you would never find OS X better than Linux." I wanted to provide a counter-point that, in fact, it was possible to use Linux since before 1994 and still prefer OS X.

I'm still hoping for the day that I can have the same experience on Linux that I get on OS X. One interesting observation is that I seemed to be able to handle it better when the experience was 75% than when it is 90%.

Perhaps it is like human robots: the closer they get to being human, the creepier they get. :) Perhaps the closer Linux gets (without being there), the more I notice what's not right about it.

For anybody who isn't sure whether to go OS X or Linux, I'd certainly try Linux first.

My central argument was supposed to be that when you've spent the time to develop the skills necessary to use Linux as a platform to the point where the advantages of the OS X platform are invisible and the deficiencies are glaringly apparent, you're not going to prefer OS X, despite the fact that it's still perfectly fine for a whole ton of people.

There is a time you have to get rid of the training wheels.

OK, people who make broad claims based on anecdotes and hand-waving are annoying, I agr--

> Macs are the best computers for a lot of people, but not for software developers.

Goddammit.

My opinion of this article? troll.

Another one drinks the koolaid.

So I replaced it with a different Linux that didn't suck.

Unfortunately as long as Windows XP is above a 50% market share I must loudly point out what a maggoty decrepit worm-ridden corpse it is. Friends don't let friends date zombies. ;-)

OS X can be tolerable, but it's a bit like wearing a corset, it can make you look good; but it's kinda hard to breathe.

And the Windows license proved handy on more than one occasion - for instance, my bank insist on an ActiveX control and Internet Explorer for certain operations.

1) If you like Macs, use a Mac. 2) If you like PCs, use a PC. 3) If you think one is better than the other, keep it to your damned self you obnoxious bastard