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Poll: What is your primary desktop OS?

25 points by AhtiK ↗ HN
I'm moving away from Windows and torn between OS X and Linux. I've been using Linux for quite a few years but for the last 3 years had to use Windows because of a customer contracting work.

I understand that it all depends but curious to see where most of the HN community gets their stuff done.

84 comments

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mehrzad
OS X planning to jump to Windows and Ubuntu.
AhtiK
Interesting. Why the jump?
lucb1e
Better yet, why Windows?
mehrzad
I don't like Apple's direction with OS X ML. Windows for gaming and GNU/Linux for dev work. I also personally think Windows is snappier than OS X.
Falling3
I was really pleasantly surprised when I ugpraded to Windows 7. With enough ram, it is very responsive and a fairly pleasing experience.
Spittie
Gnu/Linux with KDE, I've been using it for a while and I find that it fit my needs perfectly. Currently using it under Chakra Linux, but I'm liking OpenSuse lately.
GalacticDomin8r
FreeBSD...has been my primary desktop OS for about 7 years now. Overall very stable with occasional problems.
ekr
For the last 5 years, the wonderful Arch Linux. Currently with XFCE.
splatterdash
Using the same setup and I've been loving it so far (almost 3 years now).

The package manager is just so sweet.

bradhe
I find OSX is a very powerful Unix with a very usable window manager. I spend almost all my time in iTerm anyway.

Plus the machines themselves are the best damn laptops I've ever used.

christopheraden
It depends a lot on what you do for work, I bet. I'm in sort of a similar situation as you--Windows at work, Linux at home, but I also have a mac. I run a pretty bare-bones setup on my Linux desktop (#!: an OS for those who got frustrated trying to learn Arch and still like APT). The lack of extra stuff makes me less prone to messing around, so it's great as a GSD system and when I want to dedicate my CPU and memory to the primary task instead of to the overhead of a bulky GUI and other features. Having a CUDA-capable GPU is nice, too, instead of having to use an emulator. If you do technical or scientific computing, Linux may be a good bet. The vagueness of my advice is because I'm only involved in a small subset of the technical computing world, but a lot of the statistical programmers in the FOSS world use Macs or Linux boxes (Debian-derivatives are very popular in the R community).

OS X probably has a bigger advantage for front-end and mobile dev, though.

If your decision is based purely on aesthetics, given enough time, I'm sure you can find a GUI for Linux that you like more than OSX. While OSX gives you a GUI with no fuss, the customizability of a lot of desktop environments for Linux means you can tune it to exactly what you want, whether you want more graphical flare, or less (for the OpenBox folks out there--represent!).

AhtiK
I'm mostly doing java, eclipse rcp, python and web stack work so Linux would be fine.

But occasionally I need to work with color-calibrated monitors for photo processing and I have yet to try out if Linux and ICC get along fine and if there's a chance to hook my Spyder calibrator without booting to Win or Mac. Also need to check if CR2 raw files in Gimp is something that I can build my workflow on.

Additionally, with linux I'll miss some music creation with a DAW and a bunch of VST plugins. That forces me to keep multibooting to Windows when choosing Linux.

With OS X it would be a single env.

Tmmrn
Well, I haven't really tried it with a real color calibrator, but I have heard from someone who has used that argyllcms stuff successfully. Should be pretty straightforward to use. I don't really know how it is related, but there is dispcalgui/dispcal that automatically put themselves in ~/.config/autostart and load color profiles.

Also there is this relatively new colord stuff which gnome seems to support (I think only loading profiles)...

VST... well, it's a "standard" but it uses compiled native code. What can you expect? There are some projects like festige/fsthost/dssi-vst that try to integrate with wine. When I tried it I got very mixed results but then I did not try with a realtime kernel and additionally I only tried it with the default priority of jackd run as user. I was told it would work much better on low latency systems. Ubuntu Studio is apparently still a thing, so there are probably an number of easy to setup distribution with this stuff enabled. But yes, the VST situation is bad.

Osmium
> If your decision is based purely on aesthetics, given enough time, I'm sure you can find a GUI for Linux that you like more than OSX.

People choose OS X because of its design though, not because of its aesthetics. "You can't put lipstick on a pig" and all that. The trouble with Linux is that there's no consistency in UIs between various apps, and skinning just makes things even less consistent.

I'm in your scientific computing category, and I'm using OS X as my main machine right now--my only complaints are the occasional missing package from Homebrew. I suspect I might prefer Ubuntu in that regard.

samatman
In all seriousness, if it's just an occasional missing package, consider adding it to Homebrew. It's a relatively painless process and adds a tool to everyone's working palette. This is a mitzvah.

If that was a polite way of saying "many missing packages", that's a different story.

Osmium
I agree, and I'm trying :) So far it's just been two packages, one of which has since been added (not by myself) and one is still presenting problems, but it's always a pain struggling to compile something knowing that it's a simple apt-get away on Ubuntu.
steveklabnik
Sorry, '#!' is basically un-searchable. Which distro is this? I like Arch, but I wouldn't mind something even more bare-bones.
Osmium
It's pronounced "shebang" but it's probably easier just to search "Linux distros" and Ctrl-F "#!", which is what I did. Google-fu :)

http://crunchbang.org

And agreed--this is a silly name for an OS, but it looks pretty cool at least! Though sadly it seems like they don't have a non-Bittorrent download option, so I can't try it out -- if anyone knows of a mirror, that'd be great.

steveklabnik
Thank you!

I should have thought to search for it that way, given that I know that pronunciation...

I have heard great things about CrunchBang in the past, actually. Neat. I used Fluxbox at one point in time, so OpenBox shouldn't be too big of a change. It's also been a few years, so re-learning things would be nice as well.

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Turing_Machine
OS X, but strongly considering a jump back to Linux (I ran Linux for about 15 years).
Turing_Machine
Oh, and I have a Win 7 partition on the drive, too, but it's rarely booted.
AhtiK
Was there anything specific that you felt especially annoying in OS X or something missing that was available in Linux?
Turing_Machine
I'm becoming increasingly unhappy with the direction Apple is headed.
mochja
I changed from Windows/Linux to OS X. It's much better now.
C1D
I have currently been using windows but today I switched to Ubuntu. I had previously used it but only in dual boot or a VM.
w1ntermute
I'm running Xubuntu. The combo of Xfce/Ubuntu gives you the flexibility of Linux, but without inflicting on you the constant changes you see in other DEs/WMs. It just works and gets out of your way.
dualogy
I've been jumping between the big three every other year now over the last decade (OSX when I was into MacBookPros, Linux or Win when I was into other hardware vendors).

They all have their own unique little annoying-quirks and favourable strengths. I've found that when your environment is say, Sublime Text + a browser + a command line, the outer OS matters surprisingly little.

jkrems
Really curious (I only have second-hand experience with it) - you made cmd.exe or cygwin work for you? I keep hearing from people who tried it that they gave up after a while, switching to an OS with native bash/zsh.
_a2_
From my experience, Cygwin can pretty easily be tuned to the state of fitting almost all the needs of an average developer looking for a *nix env at Win platform. The problems start appearing when you need to somehow integrate Win apps with Cygwin apps. For example, the idea to run Cygwin's ruby|python|php|gcc|whatever directly from Sublime Text can take a lot of figuring it out on how to do it.

cmd.exe in its turn lacks a portion of basic functionality, like tabs, for example. A 3rd party apps, like Console, can help solve this problem, but in its turn, they have their own issues. Console, for example can have noticeable delays when rendering output.

dualogy
I'm really not into Cygwin, just "Mingw / MSYS" works for me. But I'm not too much of a shell ninja to begin with--might rather script my needs in an x-platform way (whether that be Python or Node or Dart or plain Go) because I know I might be on Windows whenever I'm going through a gaming phase. Those come and go but when there is one, I'd want to take a quick break firing up Steam without needing to reboot, so I'd just work from Win7 to begin with.
cypher543
I boot into Windows on my primary desktop and use it most of the time, but I've been turning to a Linux Mint virtual machine for more and more of my programming projects. It just seems a lot easier to get up and running quickly in a Unix environment. I also recently purchased an Android tablet and will probably carry it around instead of a full laptop for doing remote server work and such.
cs02rm0
OSX. But I'm desperate to get back to Linux.
renanbirck
Ubuntu 13.04 with MATE, but most of my work is done on virtual machines (all sorts of Windows and Linux) and on servers I ssh to (mostly Linux).
QuantumGuy
I started with Ubuntu Linux then made the switch to Mint for a while and switched back just within the past month. After a few weeks of dealing with constant error popups on Ubuntu 13.04 I decided to permanently switch to Mint. May switch to Debian or OpenSuse just to see what they are like.
pmh
OS X for work (they gave me the Mac), but I spend most of my time in a Linux shell or IDE. I used to split my time between Ubuntu and Windows for development.

I prefer the dev environment of OSX and Linux to Windows and the UIs of Linux and Windows to OSX.

lucb1e
Linux at home, Windows and Windows Server at internship. Makes me remember everything I disliked about server administration. Let's just say the commandline is really my thing.

Edit: Oh and I got an Android phone that also runs Debian. Perhaps it's interesting to add iOS, Windows Phone and Android to the list? You can vote multiple options anyway.

sljd
Why you do not control your server by Powershell then?
lucb1e
I'd even rather use BASIC
sljd
Why the hell!? :)
bcl
Linux for my desktop (where all the apps I use live inside a tmux session) and OSX for my laptop.
bliker
What is a general opinion about hackintoshes?
rrrazdan
Not worth the effort. Though my last attempt was a couple of years back. Bought an MBP after that effort.
vq
I used FreeBSD for a couple of years around 2003, other than that I have been running GNU/Linux since the Atari ST days.
dysoco
Linux and Windows, the former mainly.

I have both installed in both my PCs (Desktop and Laptop) and I boot into whatever I need to do the work (Or gaming) I need.

Although lately I rarely boot Windows, and if I do: It's for playing some games.