[pbiggar]

> "I bet this article about how awful Unity is"

I don't think it is. Its about the entire environment - note how he talked about backups, printers, trying in Gnome, etc. I don't think he's saying Ubuntu is bad, but its nothing like the polished experience of a Mac. (FYI: I used debian from 2001, Ubuntu from 2005 after briefly trying Gentoo, and switched to Mac in 2011).

> However, not going to Debian/Mint/any other alternative and just choosing to dump thousands of dollars for a new environment is something I would not do personally.

Here's the thing - that's what everybody said. You know all those Macbooks you see developers with - they all dumped something to get there, mostly Ubuntu and Windows. The entire developer ecosystem dumped thousands of dollars of working hardware and poor OSes because Macs are really that much better.

Try it! Honestly - you will not look back.

[glesica]

I did. Work bought me a Mac. I also bought a personal machine for myself because I liked the idea of being a single-OS kind of guy. A year later I actually switched to using Windows 7 at work because I hated Mac OS so much and I switched back to Linux at home after a couple months.

I use Mint these days. Linux lets me get shit done, that's why I use it. I honestly don't know how people can stand using a Mac for "real work". I guess I feel the same way about Linux that you feel about Mac OS, Different strokes for different folks or something like that I suppose.

[eropple]

> I honestly don't know how people can stand using a Mac for "real work".

I live in a terminal (aside: iTerm2 is head and shoulders better than anything I've found on Linux), Photoshop, Xcode and IntelliJ when working--and when not working, literally-literally everything just works without me putting an ounce of effort into making it work. So that's why.

I can be productive on Linux, but spending more than five minutes setting up my environment just starts making me frustrated. (I have a four-monitor desktop, two-GPU that choked on Ubuntu 12.04; I spent a week on trying to get Ubuntu working, gave up, Hackintoshed the thing, and had it running perfectly within two hours.)

[kimagure]

Sorry, I tend to be lazy and just group the whole Ubuntu environment UX as "Unity"

I do own an iPad and Mac Mini that I received as gifts, but I find them pretty unbearable to use outside of specific tasks (i.e. watching Youtube videos).

There is some OSX software that I like, such as Adium, SublimeText, and the default screencap tool, but I find the environment kind of annoying to work with and have a much easier time with Windows 7/8.

Overall, I give up just too much convenience and software (like MPC-HC, video games, driver support for appliances and game controllers, easy win-key + P,arrow keys,D,E,R,C,X) to be able to switch to OSX. Also that I value being able to swap out hardware and paying less for hardware in general (even if Macs often have sleek cases).

[pbiggar]

That's fair - all I do is code and email now, and its a great machine for both.

[AdrianRossouw]

> Try it! Honestly - you will not look back.

I know lots of developers who run linux on their macs. Many developers I know also switched to using linux virtual machines for serious development because dealing with the flustercuck of osx package management is too much.

I really want to switch back too, after 10 years of using osx primarily.

[pbiggar]

Have you tried homebrew? I agree that macports and fink suck, and homebrew had some problems when it started, but it has since matured into a wonderful package manager IMO, and I significantly prefer it to apt.

[stcredzero]

I will second homebrew. Not perfect, but pretty darn good.