Uncanny. I'm also 4 months in and am running Ubuntu in VMWare. That's now where I spend all of my time and I'm wondering why I haven't just dual-booted already or just over-written the OSX partition.
Last company I was at provided me a quad-core 8GB mac pro. After the first week I wiped it and put Ubuntu on it so I could actually get some work done.
The biggest problem with OSX is that, for a unix-based system, it's so un-unix alike in key places that it's frustrating.
That's a fair statement. I think there were two big ones:
- the service registry/init system
- filesystem paths
The second is minor in the grand scheme of things. It only affects my user account but the first one was greatly annoying. My history is in AIX/HP-UX before going Linux full time so I'm familiar with the smit/sam model of doing things but have you ever tried to actually usea traditional unix/linux model for managing apache in the default OSX install? What about LDAP? It's weird and annoying. Launchd? Seriously?
The Mac I have is in the living room for family use so I have not "worked" a lot on it. I didn't use much of the default tools and relied more on macports for unix stuff. I was asking because I am considering a Mac to replace the windows laptop with cygwin I use for dev. I use Linux for servers but I am from the world of Solaris I also had HP and Irix workstations at different jobs in the past and a NeXT at home.
I know the defaults are all Linux oriented these days so any different flavor of unix is always a little extra work if the filesystem differs to much. Macports also adds a little twist to that.
I found launchd verbose (and the xml is not even that self descriptive) and I am not sure its worth the departure from the usual way of doing things but I didn't think it was so bad. I only did a few simple things anyway.
These seem like things I don't rely on too much on a dev laptop anyway. But I now believe I have to investigate a bit more before I buy the new machine. Thanks
In my case I find myself fullscreening a vm if I can't change to base install. I have too much muscle memory that I can't implement on other os:
Cmd-t new terminal
Cmd-w new browser
Cmd-e new vim session
Cmd-f new file manager window
Then I have my ctrl-shift keybinds for terminator and my vim keybinds. I'm especially unproductive without the cmd-t option available and the terminator keybinds.
Are you me? 'Cause you sound just like me. I've even installed Ubuntu on a separate partition via Boot Camp, but I haven't had time to get all the stuff that doesn't work out of the box working. Maybe that will be my weekend project, we'll see... Good luck to you...me?
Installed virtual box on the first day and running Ubuntu since then.The day i convince myself(atleast fool myself) that i haven't spent too many bucks for OSX, will overwrite the partition.
I, like many others, also use virtualbox for development. So much easier to develop on something close to my production servers, but it uses up too much memory.
I've been looking at some cheap Walmart/Frys PCs to install ubuntu on and develop.
Unfortunately the dual boot solution does not work if you're writing low-level code as I found out when playing with some gnu assembler code. I mostly do development on a VirtualBox machine. I'm considering switching back to a PC.
