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This.

I mean, I run linux on all but one of my machines, but if a company made me choose, I'd choose Windows over OSX.

Apple doesn't make things dev-friendly, the mountain of volunteers who make homebrew and packages make it dev-friendly. They didn't switch OSX to be nix-based because they wanted to entice developers, they did it because it allowed them to move faster.

Meanwhile, MS is releasing their nix subsystem, open-sourcing lots of crap, and generally going out of their way to pull devs back into the fold.

I wouldn't switch today, but the last year of releases makes it clear that this has been under way for quite a while... and will continue for many more. If the nix subsystem works as well as they say, I could see myself switching at some point in the future. (because I would really like some decent power management)



As with all things, this really depends on what your job is. I never use Homebrew. I installed it but I've never used it for anything. All I need is a super-reliable computer and bash. My Red Hat laptop gives me one of those, my Macbook gives me both.

But literally my biggest pet peeve with Windows is, it seems every few days I sit down in the morning and log in only to realize it had rebooted itself overnight. Or it's begging me to schedule a reboot. Or I installed a program and immediately afterwards it needs to reboot to finish installing. My Windows machine spends more time shutting down or starting up than it does actually running.


I don't get the shutdown reboot problem. Is a restart every 15 days unacceptable in return for reliable, consistent security/bug patches? Even Ubuntu is like that. I've used a mac book air for a little while and the update software had a glitch which caused it to get stuck. So I have zero experience with osx updates.


I think that it's unacceptable not to ask, as it effectively equals unreliability.


It is not acceptable because it breaks you workflow, possibly implies closing applications and opening them again.


As a note, when I was developing full time on Ubuntu, I used Ksplice which applied updates without a restart, even kernel updates. OS X still requires restarts after OS changes (in fact, I have a pending update to apply right now), though it's not as bad as Windows.


Windows and OSX's unpredictability with time for updates to install is a key issue. Sometimes my machine can be down for 20-30 minutes, which as a developer completely ruins flow. So I put off any restarting update for as long as I can tolerate the stupid annoying box.

How about working on getting me updates-without-restarts like ksplice instead of changing the colour of the buttons.




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