[ap22213]

For me, OS X has increasingly become too difficult for use in development. For a while there, it was the best, especially with tools like homebrew. But, it's just become too much of a headache. Too often, I find myself wasting hours trying to get over small OSS compatibility hurdles.

More and more, I've been finding myself picking up my 'other' laptop, firing up VirtualBox, and running Linux straight. I do miss the build quality of my MBP, though.

[acdha]

I'm curious, what do you have problems with? For me it's been smooth sailing since around 10.5 or so - and the only OSS problems were with projects which assumed everyone would use Linux with a certain version of GCC & autotools.

[duaneb]

Their reorganization of XCode into an app bundle was really, really annoying and, frankly, makes zero sense; making the command line tools an extra download makes me suspicious that the developers they care about are Mac/iOS developers (as opposed to general purpose ones).

[CrLf]

"makes me suspicious that the developers they care about are Mac/iOS developers"

No surprise here. It is very clear that the Mac is becoming two things:

1. Just a bigger iPad that isn't too awkward to use where your average consumer can actually create stuff (videos, photos, etc.); 2. A development machine to create iOS apps.

Everything else is an afterthought.

[duaneb]

Sigh; I might have to switch back to FreeBSD for development. The only things tying my into my mac right now are tax software and word processing. Word processing I can just convert to TeX, but the tax software is an annoyance.

So, UNIX development is still there, but I'm worried that in the future I'll need to pay a developer license to run unsigned code (or something equally ludicrous). The interfaces are going down the tube - look at Notes, or iCal. If iOS keeps influencing OSX, we'll see tape reels and bookshelves in XCode.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Windows 8's Metro actually looks better designed than modern Apple software.

[xentronium]

> the only OSS problems were with projects which assumed everyone would use Linux with a certain version of GCC & autotools

Projects that assume OS X are even worse. Homebrew, for example, hardcodes gcc as gcc-4.2. I tried working with gcc-4.7 (which is ridiculously easy to install using homebrew), but so many build recipes broke, that I had to just give up and reset to apple-gcc-4.2.

[acdha]

Oh, sure - I just find it really annoying when upstream developers hard-code irrelevant details or use something like autoconf poorly and then the distribution gets blamed for not remaining in stasis.

[ap22213]

Yesterday, it was 'pip install matplotlib' (through virtualenvwrapper). Just a few days earlier, it was getting a dev version of paramiko to work with ansible.

Most likely, both were user errors of some sort, but instead of spending a few hours trying to wade through homebrew recipes, I just decided to boot up ubuntu.

[danbee]

Couldn't you just run VirtualBox on your MacBook Pro?

[ap22213]

I could and have. But, the performance of VirtualBox on my 2011 Lion-based MBP seems much worse than on my windows box (with comparable hardware). I have a task on my todo list to investigate.