[VeilEm]

Reading this post I am reminded just how much more work it is to have a functional linux desktop that ends up running worse than a Mac or windows box. More for less. Less battery life, less games, less driver support. Old hardware. I've been running OS X for many years now but I think in the future I see myself going back to windows and using docker toolbox to get an easy to start and maintain linux development environment.

Lot's of Windows tools have matured and there are good terminal options now for sshing into a local lightweight vm to do dev. On the hardware of my choosing, no more being locked into overpriced boring silver apple hardware.

[wtbob]

> Reading this post I am reminded just how much more work it is to have a functional linux desktop that ends up running worse than a Mac or windows box.

I'm extremely happy with stumpwm. It runs, it switches between emacs, Firefox and a good console just fine. It's infinitely more work to get Windows or an OS X box to the same level of functionality, because neither of them properly supports all of these key features: POSIX; a Common Lisp tiling window manager (which means I always have a REPL a slime-connect away); native X11.

I literally never miss Windows or OS X.

[codezero]

OS X is POSIX certified, no Linux distribution is but that's a minor point I assume.

[wtbob]

True enough; I edited my comment to indicate that I mean all those features at once.

[codezero]

mostly unrelated – but I wouldn't have known/cared about POSIX compliance until I ran into it:

On OS X, getopt is POSIX compliant. GNU utilities tend not to enforce POSIX in getopt, as a result you can do things like ls .txt -la

On a POSIX complaint system, the optional arguments must come before any file arguments. This is super annoying to me, after having been using Linux for 15 years :)

Personally, I've been super happy with OS X for all purposes except servers, but to each their own, and that's where Linux (and the BSDs) shine – giving you access under the hood, which is awesome, but some of us just want the car to drive itself, so to speak.

[wtbob]

> Personally, I've been super happy with OS X for all purposes except servers, but to each their own, and that's where Linux (and the BSDs) shine – giving you access under the hood, which is awesome, but some of us just want the car to drive itself, so to speak.

I can understand that, but I just can't live without a tiling window manager. Every time I have to use a UI with movable windows I feel old-fashioned and clumsy. If you think about, tiling is the interface folks are used to with their phones and tablets already.

There's good UI research potential in discovering the ideal ways to indicate how to split, move &c. windows in a tiling WM.

[codezero]

There are a bunch of decent tiling window managers on OS X but I don't know if any support a Common Lisp connection. Which one do you use on Linux, I'd like to check it out.

I've tried tiling wms in the past but they never stick for me, probably because most of my work is isolated to the browser and email, and I typically have each maximized on separate displays. I've always preferred my terminals to be backgrounded when not in use and to have all the tabs consolidated.

[downtide]

I mainly use Debian stable and Xfce, the latter of has a few annoying issues. I bought a cheap windows box, and hoped to use it as a work machine as you have described. But I have networking issues and other annoyances with my Intel wireless card. Bluetooth falls over as soon as the machine hits suspend, and when I loose WIFI signal, only a reboot recovers. Windows 8.1 is a crapfest, and it feels like a botched together repackaged version of Windows (the UI and admin UI is horrible). My Debian box is far more reliable. Anyway the grass isn't always greener... I remember when the Linux desktop space was really exciting and innovating. I'm still after something better.

[Niten]

It depends on your setup. I've had best results doing my development on a powerful workstation that, when coupled with a good LTS operating system like CentOS 7, doesn't give me any maintenance headaches (or at least amortises any headaches over a sufficiently long time that I don't care), and doesn't force me to deal with the battery issues you mentioned or the other fiddly bits of running Linux on a laptop.

This was pretty easy to setup and has run quite well without much administrative work beyond the initial installation (something I've never been able to say for Ubuntu, unfortunately), and when I'm away I can just SSH in from a Chromebook.

[atmosx]

Tools? It took 2-3 hours of reading howtows, tweaking and experimenting before getting Win8 in a "workable" state on a computer without touchscreen. Its like Linux backwards: to make the system work have to go backwards, disable every single "new" feature! If you wanna automate something, good luck, with that... Are you going to launch a VM to run a ruby or py script??? Docker support came last to windows and many nice tools dont run on windows at all.

Windows make sense to me if you wanna do specific things but a dev/admin OS outside the MS ecosystem is a awful.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Last time I installed linux from scratch (ubuntu 13.10), which was about two years ago, it took me an entire day to figure out how to get a screen resolution that didn't immediately give me a headache, and the only way I fixed the issue of "trying to display a particular font crashes the entire x server" was to upgrade to 14.04.

[collyw]

Only when it is preinstalled. Otherwise Windows is just as much grief.

[erkaes]

Have to agree with this. I freshly installed windows 10, and the sleep feature is just not working when the lid is closed. I've tried several suggestions and still got the same results. Feels the same like setting up linux desktop, only I know in the end it will work.