[tinco]

No, you still have to refuse all OS updates. The OS update process costs you a few hours, spent carefully reading whatever the OSX hackers have to say about it.

Depending on your hardware there could be a standard process, but it almost always requires a bit of command line work, clicking cancel at the right time, and withstanding the temptation of clicking reboot when the installer asks you to.

That said, I've used OSX on non-Apple hardware for two years as my main development/entertainment machine. Upgrading wasn't desireable anyway because newer versions of OSX stopped supporting multi-monitors after 10.6.7 I believe. It really was great to be able to use OSX on my desktop.

Finally when staying on 10.6.7 really started to give problems, I decided to try Ubuntu again. I was pleasantly surprised that Ubuntu now actually is very usable as a workstation for development. It's got all window manager features 10.6.7 had, good terminal emulators, editors, and the important browsers, what more do you need? (don't say photoshop :@)

[taway2012]

> what more do you need? (don't say photoshop :@)

In my case it's Lightroom. :)

Longtime Ubuntu user here. Bought a Mac mini as my desktop replacement on the off-chance that I might write an iOS app.

I'm actually running Ubuntu inside Mac as my development environment. Ubuntu also nicely solves the "blurry text" problem [flame away! :)]

[coldtea]

There's no blurry text problem -- Mac has a "respect the font design" look, Windows has a "crude text" problem, and Linux is somewhere in between.

That said, a retina display totally changes everything. No "blurry" and no-crude. Just as reading a finely printed book. You wont want to go back to a low DPI monitor after a week of using a retina.

As for using Ubuntu for development inside OS X, that's actually the best of both worlds. You have a stable desktop system, and you can have arbitrary development environments for every job (assuming you use a VM), that are just like the target environment (assuming you deploy on Linux).

I'd also suggest trying Vagrant, if you don't use it already.

[taway2012]

Yep, I know the Mac's text looks blurrier:

Link for anybody else interested: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp... (linked articles are good too)

[taway2012]

OK, I see why a downvoter downvoted it. I meant to write:

"Yep, I know why the Mac's text looks blurrier" i.e., I meant to agree with 'coldtea' and add to the discussion.

The way I've written it now makes it sound like I'm disagreeing. Anyway, the link above should be useful to future readers.

[ChronosKey]

10.9 has pretty good multi-monitor support.

[coldtea]

>Finally when staying on 10.6.7 really started to give problems, I decided to try Ubuntu again. I was pleasantly surprised that Ubuntu now actually is very usable as a workstation for development. It's got all window manager features 10.6.7 had, good terminal emulators, editors, and the important browsers, what more do you need? (don't say photoshop :@)

Photoshop, Office, proper multimedia capabilities (DAWs, NLEs), full support for all my laptops features, and never ever having to tinker to get some basic device working.

[al2o3cr]

"newer versions of OSX stopped supporting multi-monitors after 10.6.7 I believe."

My two displays on 10.9 say you "believe" wrong.