![]() Anytime I am on Mac I find myself saying “wow, this is pretty, but I’m still using the same tools that Mac inherited from the Unix community, so why pay so much just for pretty”. ![]() Anytime I am on a Windows machine I find myself crippled because the development tools suffer (unless you are willing to constantly pay money for the latest MS dev tools and still get sub-standard products). ![]() That combined with having some of the best development tools made me wonder does Mac or Windows really have anything to offer me. I have always felt that Linux had decent enough (not necessarily best) desktop. I am also not politically motivated, just pragmatic. I have felt this way about Linux since I started using it back in college (over 10-15 years ago). As long as it works for you, it really doesn’t matter whether you build your killer social-media-photo-sharing-Facebook-tweeting app on OS X, Linux, or Windows. All you need these days to build great things is a browser, a text editor, and the programming language or tool of your choice. I’m just as productive on Linux as I was on OS X, and there’s no reason you couldn’t be too if you wanted or needed to switch. In a shift from what David saw a few years ago, and despite being largely panned by critics, I find the stock interface in Ubuntu 11.10 to be just as nice as Mac OS X Lion. Perhaps surprisingly to some people, Linux hardware support has improved to the point that everything worked perfectly out of the box, just like on a Mac. When I wanted to do some real work, getting my development environment running for our applications was just as easy as on a Mac. Switching was a matter of copying over a couple of directories and configuration files and connecting Chrome and Dropbox to sync. Now, I use Google Chrome (web browsing), Terminator (terminal), and Empathy (IM). I basically used three programs on the Mac: Google Chrome (web browsing), iTerm (terminal), and Adium (IM). Something crazy happened when I switched: absolutely nothing changed. I can’t say that there’s a dramatic reason why I switched (it’s not some political statement about free and open source software) I just wanted to use some hardware that was impractical to get from Apple. Recently, I switched to using a Linux desktop as my primary computer. Over the last 20 years, my primary computing environment has gone from Windows 3.1, to Mac OS 6/7/8/9, to Windows for about a decade, and then back to a Mac a couple of years ago.
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