If your stuff runs in Linux, your stuff runs in Linux - people can deal with that. I love OS X, but will use anything that's necessary to do a job...I have a desktop at home running Win7/Ubuntu specifically for that purpose, though I almost never touch it except to manage long-running tasks that I'd rather not tie my laptop up with.
Mandating that all dev must be done on a particular Thinkpad model, though, is a bit of a company smell. I can't think of many good reasons to prohibit other machines from being used.
I'd suggest the Thinkpads, by all means, but I wouldn't ban everything else; unless the hardware requirements are very specific, different hardware should make no difference at all, as long as people have the same software running.
Even as far as OS goes, if someone's able to get everything going on their own time on their own Macbook, is that really a problem worth worrying about? Provide the standard config, but if someone wants to go above and beyond, who cares? They've always got the standard rig to fall back on...
> I'd suggest the Thinkpads, by all means, but I wouldn't ban everything else
The author specifically mentioned the need for a complicated setup including hard disk encryption. I take that as meaning the development environment includes some company secret that should be protected as if they were nuclear launch codes. Which, in turn, is difficult to do at all and hideously difficult to do on your own.
I've always been both a happy Linux user and a happy Thinkpad user, but I guess it'd be a productivity boost if you let people choose between different models (e.g., a 15", a 14" and a 12" model, because people have different tradeoffs between mobility and primary screen size).
And if the contents of your development environment has vaguely less security impact than nuclear launch codes, you should consider how much productivity exactly you're willing to forego for reasons of paranoia. (Using a different development environment is pretty much bound to lead to distractions because you need to actively think about key combinations etc., especially when switching between the braindead-but-largely-consistent Mac key combos and the more-standard-but-sometimes-less-so Linux app key combos).
It's a terrible counterpoint. If your stuff runs on linux, it's perfectly possible to install a second python and use that (if you need any of the features added recently. Which most of the time, you probably don't).
Not only that, but in many distros if you "upgrade" you can actually destroy base systems needed to manage the OS. Because upgrading Python is either painful or nearly impossible...
Point being that it is not unreasonable for companies to expect homogeneity and focus on innovating on features, rather than supporting dev environments.
In most cases, it isnt a problem, but often it turns out to be.
For example, my linux machine has vm.overcommit_memory set to 0, which Redis aint comfortable with.
What I notice, however, is that people dont mind when they are "forced" to work on OSX (and given free Macbooks). I wonder if it is truly standards "Nazi-ism" that people are concerned with or is it simply a case of teh shineeyy.
> Because upgrading Python is either painful or nearly impossible...
It's not actually that difficult. You need not upgrade your python. You just need one more python. I have been successfully using this setup on RHEL 5 and Ubuntu. And you can couple it with virtualenv and pip to have a sandbox. I would say it has become standard practice in the python dev community.
Mandating that all dev must be done on a particular Thinkpad model, though, is a bit of a company smell. I can't think of many good reasons to prohibit other machines from being used.
I'd suggest the Thinkpads, by all means, but I wouldn't ban everything else; unless the hardware requirements are very specific, different hardware should make no difference at all, as long as people have the same software running.
Even as far as OS goes, if someone's able to get everything going on their own time on their own Macbook, is that really a problem worth worrying about? Provide the standard config, but if someone wants to go above and beyond, who cares? They've always got the standard rig to fall back on...