Thread

I don’t know if has been brought up before, I know its not important to development but just want to know what everyone uses. In general is there any advantage of one over another.

Myself I have only used windows really. Tried Linux but since everything is made for Windows I just haven’t made the move.

(Yes this does have something to do with the Mac Keynotes speech, that new laptop does look very sexy)

Well, I mean as web-developers all we “REALLY” need is a text editor and some kind of image manipulation/generation tool. So, any platform will suffice. But, as a user-interface-developer who takes particular notice of usability and user-experience I prefer the Mac (though I also like the BSD’s & Solaris) and yes the new laptop does look quite sexy indeed! 😉

Boy I hope this doesn’t turn into a brawl. :S

For normal development I would vote Linux/Unix hands down.  But for web development.  Mac all the way.  Textmate, Coda, you just can’t beat the options that are out there.  And speaking of mac, I think mine needs an upgrade - one inch seems kinda thick.

To be fair Mac is so similar to Unix that it only really differs from *nix by having a damn polished frontend. Most of the applications you get for Mac are on Linux anyway so I really cant see any beneficial difference in using the uglier version.

Im really not a Mac fanboy, hated them for years until I used one and found my productivity skyrocket. Most of that is because I have never been able to set up Eclipse with all the right plugins on my win box (stupid random pointless errors that even the IRC crew cant fix) so to be brutally honest I have never once spotted a difference between the 3 major OS’s that make me give a crap about either of them.

For general use its true that all are just as good as each other.
For web development if you want official packages you cant beat Mac for Adobe (much faster than the Win version) but for the rest there are plenty of open source options.
For gamers you really need Windows, as I dont trust the win emulators.

Other than that… they really arent that different these days!

I prefer Linux as it is an incredible good, free and open operating system. But my favourite text editor, PSPad and Notepad++ (better, more feature-complete than Mac editors IMO), only run on Windows, so that’s what I use a lot of the time.

As I said before I personally have only used the old iMac (the one all containing in a CRT monitor). Hated it to bits and since then have stayed well away. I suppose i’m interested in them again because I know XP will be coming to an end soon and I really don’t fancy vista. Linux is OK but for general use it seems far to complex.

Does anyone have any idea how I could test run a Mac? Seems alot of money to spend and not know if you like it.

I was on Windows for years, last year bought a Mac and have also run various flavours of Linux over the years. In my (humble) opinion there’s good and bad about all three, I would say: -

Windows
The Good
Loads of software
Perfectly stable and safe (despite what people say) IF YOU SET IT UP RIGHT! (most people don’t, when I was running 200 and XP hardly ever crashed one me)
Adobe Photoshop
The Bad
I hated how MS (& others) wanted to control where my files went
Tiny little file selection dialogs even when using HUGE screens
Every new version meant re-learning half the OS’s control panel screens
Lack of a decent command-line / Unix standards :o(

Mac
The Good
Very pretty, intuitive interfaces and app frameworks ie cocoa, beautiful fonts, encourages creativity
Adobe Photoshop
Textmate!
Beautiful hardware
Unix core
The Bad
Buggy and frankly less stable than Windows (I have more crashes on Mac than on XP)
Slow and a memory hog (I’ve got a 2Ghz Black Macbook and the thing is not nearly as quick as it would be under xp or linux)
Finder sucks serious ass, file management by morons
No uTorrent (or decent alternative)

Linux
The Good
Total customisation power, total understanding of how the system works (esp. Linux from Scratch)
Wide range of very groovy software, might have to build it yourself but stuff that wouldn’t ever get on windows
Open source is the future, example look at compix/beryl etc - prettiest & most powerful OS
The Bad
NO PHOTOSHOP!!
NO TEXTMATE! (slight less important since vi etc and plenty other good editors)
NO PHOTOSHOP!! (it deserves a second mention)

Summary
  Linux is great, still needs some polish to make things easier even on us techy people (let alone the general public, but we’ll get there) BUT without photoshop I can’t switch to it because I can’t work in it, I’m not going to reboot into windows or mac os every half day just to do my image editing (and please don’t anyone mention GIMP, I’m a professional and I need Photoshop, end of story)

  Windows gets a bad press because so many people don’t know how to configure it to be safe and speedy, you need to know how to set it up properly and make it secure and then it’s a decent OS. (This is based on XP, don’t know Vista to comment) - lack of a *native* Unix commandline is a real pity

Mac I have a love hate relationship with, I’m typing this on a macbook that looks beautiful, the keyboard feels great, the screen looks great but I also find it’s often slow to respond sometimes, things take ages to load and half the time when you close apps like firefox it calls ‘application not responding’. Also, things like turning up the volume on the remote take a second or two to ‘kick in’ if you haven’t used them in the last 15 mins or so, PLEASE frikkin’ multi-task!! It’s 2008!  (I’m only on 1Gb ram so hopefully when I do an upgrade to 2gb later in the year that will help)

Thought I’d get my 2 cents in now before it turns into the inevitable Mac fanboy, Windows defender, Linux evangelist mud-fight we all know it’s heading towards! ;o)

Im a linux all the way.
Have been using linux for about 10 years and using it exclusively (since my boss let me install a linux desktop at work) for 3 years.

I disagree (naturally) with a lot of the above statements.
I feel that linux is very easy to get setup, even for a non technical person, you just have to pic the correct flavor.

While I do tend to bash Macs (as ucantblamem can attest) they are not that bad. The issues I have with them is that in some earlier version of OSX it was very hard to configure anything from command line as the config files were sometimes in up to 4 different places. I am also not a fan of GNOME, prefering KDE or even XFCE, and so I do not like Macs for that reason as well.

I only touch Microsoft products when I absolutely must. I no longer even have an active VMWare Windows partition setup at home anymore because there is nothing on MS I need to use.

The things I can no longer do without, particularily in a development environment, under linux are
Eclipse
Krusader (Twin Panel File manager with excellent FTP and file sync features)

While I do mostly coding and little graphic I do find that the Gimp can handle any graphical manipulations I need to do, my only issue with it is that it does not support nested layers (or did not last time i used it a year ago) so importing from PSDs can be problems sometimes.

The main thing I like about Linux compared to MS in particular is that most Linux distros have a live CD you can use to test the distro first and they can install from that CD. Some do offer a full set of CDs or a DVD for a complete install. MS only offers a DVD for Vista installs
And once you finally install linux will contain a host of apps on the install CD including text editors, image manipulation, browsers, media players, messenging clients, video editors, games, office suites and much more
All you get on MS is 1 text editor and something that cannot seriously be called an image editor, the worlds second worst browser, 1 choice of media player, messenging client and couple of the simplest games.
And then dont get me started on the changes in Vista that mean you have to go through 6+ screens just to change some simple system configurations.

Linux just always offers so much more by default than MS does. Macs are ok if you want to spend the money but I do not think they are worth it (waits for ucantblamem to kill me now)

What about developing for IE? If your on Mac or Linux you need to test your browser on Windows IE since its the most used. Am I wrong but IE only runs on windows (I’m not counting the MacIE since in my experience browsers running on different OS’s behave differently. I made a site on Windows for F2.0, tested it, then opened it on Linux F2.0 and some of the css broke.)

That’s the only major reason to use windows, because +80% of people who visit a site on average will have IE.

I use Parallels with a Windows XP VM running IE6. I actually should mention that my Mac is “MY” Mac (personal). My work box is running XP which has IE7. So, at the moment I’m taking my lappy to work everyday and I have a DVI-KVM hooked up to a 22” screen. So; Mac for Safari, FF, Opera and IE6 testing, XP for IE7 testing.

I haven’t quite come up with an “ideal” solution for doing IE6 and IE7 testing on the same computer. We’ve been toying with setups at work for a while - one of the guys almost had IE6 and IE7 running side-by-side, but it turned out to be bad news for the registry and he had to pull it all apart and put it back together again (the registry that is).

For a while I had another box with ubuntu running IE’s 4 linux which was great, but the hardware was quite old and causing other issues with my setup, so I ditched it.

@thepyromaniac - Which Eclipse plugins where you having trouble with? Seems strange; Eclipse is a Java app so everything “should” be seemless across platforms. We run Eclipse at work with a pile of plugins on Mac’s, Windows and Linux boxes and we haven’t had any issues other than simple things like file-permissions (but that’s not really Eclipse’s fault per se).

@adamp1 - As my co-worker Tonanbarbarian eluded to; Those older versions of OS X are pretty shakey and even I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot-barge-pole. 😛

I haven’t seen any Vista users chime in yet… Is there really no one using it?

There are many OS independent editors/IDEs and for linux and mac there are solutions to run IE. And if you want to be absolutely sure you can use virtual machines.

I work on windows because it was on the pc provided by my employer and i use eclipse and vim so for eclipse it wouldn’t matter, for vim i would have to drop a version on mac (i not aware of a vim 7 ported to macos x)

Bottom line the developers can work with the OS and tools their employer provides or they chose for themselves.

I haven’t quite come up with an “ideal” solution for doing IE6 and IE7 testing on the same computer. We’ve been toying with setups at work for a while - one of the guys almost had IE6 and IE7 running side-by-side, but it turned out to be bad news for the registry and he had to pull it all apart and put it back together again (the registry that is).

You might want to try this Multi IE. I use it to test at the moment. Seems to work OK for me. Lets you install IE3,4,5,6 all at once.

Well it seems so far that no one has owned up to using Vista so far.

I haven’t quite come up with an “ideal” solution for doing IE6 and IE7 testing on the same computer

We have been doing it here by not upgrading to IE7 and using the info from the following site to run it stand alone - works a treat from what I can tell so far.

Run IE7 Standalone

Edit: Just relised that it’s from another section on the same site adamp1 posted - I like the looks of that multi-ie setup!

From the “Run IE7 Standalone” website:

Obviously some features will be broken like :
- Context menus
- Installing ActiveX components and ActiveX support.
- Showing combo-boxes
- Web pages that require authentication.

Bummer… Still not quite what I’m after. I don’t understand why Microsoft won’t/can’t release a “developers” edition or something???

Because that would take away from their prized ‘development time’ 😛

Did the Multi IE solution work for you?