Ask HN: What is your primary development machine?
At a recent conference I attended, I noticed that 80+% of the attendees all had Macs of one flavor or another. Since this was a developer-centric conference, I wondered if this is a general trend for the community as a whole to migrate to Cupertino or is there a more even distribution in a wider group...
For any pedants in the group: "Primary" here means the machine you spend 80% or more of your time on doing development work. Not surfing, watching Netflix, or anything else. Development only.
59 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadGoing forward can probably run OpenIndiana or OpenBSD on it, as Solaris 11 doesn't support non-T or -M class Sparc hardware.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/sonys-new-vaio-z-ultrapor...
But, I've already decided to pick-up a Macbook Air as soon as the product line is refreshed. I _want_ to like Linux on the "desktop" and continue using it, but after using a Mac at work for development for the past several months the difference is really night and day. The applications just aren't even close to being where I'd need them to be, and I want to branch out beyond Android apps to iOS as well in my free time.
In short: as long you're not using Windows you're fine. Unless you're a game developer targeting Windows and/or Xbox. Then you really have no choice.
I am a Mac/Linux user. My application problem is the opposite -- apt on Ubuntu is much less pain than port on the Mac.
I think it took me less time to completely uninstall everything that macports did and reinstall as homebrew packages, than it would have taken to just 'port update' a typical macports package.
Thanks for the reference, it looks good.
Apple seems to be loved by consumers, which no doubt makes people want to target things like the iPhone. But I admit I haven't bought anything from them because from my perspective their policies seem to be generally hostile to developers, and they seem to advocate the most-walled garden that they can get away with.
I'm guessing though that my views are perhaps either way off kilter, or people just don't mind as much as I do about these sort of things?
In the portable realm other OS's fail on at least some/all of these points, hence all the Mac laptop users.
Simply put, the Mac is probably the best development platform for a number of reasons. The hardware is generally top notch, the platform is, despite a lot of add-ons, nix-based (which means you have Vim, access to perl, python, ruby, Bash shell), can be dual-booted into Windows for access to Windows-only tools (Visual Studio, for example) and IS the only acceptable development platform for Mac tools.
In short, if I want to do Mac development, I have to have a Mac; and there's little that the Mac can't do for any other platforms.
Robert Scoble noted this phenomenon recently: http://scobleizer.com/2011/04/12/does-anyone-in-silicon-vall...
It's amazing. If you're contemplating getting a new machine, you can probably get by with adding an SSD. They're incredible.
Further, does it matter? How much data will you lose if your HD dies now? Perhaps you should log off HN and revisit your backup strategy.
[this is for personal work - python apps, web pages etc - for "real work" where i often need to run several vms, i have a nice little shoe-box-sized "desktop" with sub-100W amd 6 core, 2.5" raid + ssd, etc]
15" MBP, 2.2GHz quad-core i7, 8GB ram, 256GB SSD, external 24" dell flatscreen, external mouse and/or keyboard to taste.
While I like my gear efficient and portable, I don't know why I'm still on Gentoo.
Does quite literally everything I ask of it, and with aplomb. It's an amazing piece of kit.
FWIW, the laptop is running Parabola (a derivative of Arch), and the desktop is running a modified Ubuntu (It was once Ubuntu 9.04, but I've kept it up to date via source, since 9.04 stopped receiving updates).