> I am currently using Linux on the desktop on my work laptop. It's fine, but lots of things don't work...
I have been regularly developing on and for 3 OSs, Linux (Mint and Raspberry Pi), MacOS (including iOS), and Windows.
My verdict is:
* as far as user interface goes it is taste whether Linux or MacOS.
* The Linux machines are more reliable than the Macs, just. It is close run and other people probably have different experiences. But they are on a par
* Tools. Linux wins by a big margin. The MacOS command line is a Unix (BSD I think) command line ten years out of date. The package management is either the official App Store (is it called that on MacOS?) that is full of utter rubbish or homebrew, which I really appreciate, is a good effort, but a long way behind Debian. The compilers on MacOS are unreliable, the default IDE (Xcode) has a lot of nice features out of the box, and in the three years I have been using it some are starting to work better, but it has a long way to go. Swift would look good, if Rust did not exist. The ergonomics committee from Rust - if any body listening - I love you people. Swift has nothing like that. Swift's concurrence model is really bad. Really bad. Embarrassingly bad. ARC was a good idea in the nineties for simple languages but there is no excuse for using it as the main memory management in the twenty first century.
I will stop ranting now, but you get the picture. I could have a rant three times as long
For the tools on Linux, less promises are made, quality varies, but it is all fundamentally honest. The underlying Unixisms are up to date, the compilers are top notch, all the languages I could ever want are first class citizens (I have no interest in .Net - it might not be) etcetera.
So, from my perspective - perhaps not others, it is Linux that I have walked away to
It seems like your entire decision comes down to the BSD userland? Which is the exact same as you’d get in, eg, FreeBSD.
If you’re that wound up about it, why not ‘brew install coreutils’ and then add the optional command in the install errata notes to your zshrc, giving you the gnu userland permanently?
(The shell is probably low-key another point of friction. Zsh and csh do feel older compared to bash. Oh my zsh helps a lot imo, but you can also just use bash too.)
A reasonable question
> I am currently using Linux on the desktop on my work laptop. It's fine, but lots of things don't work...
I have been regularly developing on and for 3 OSs, Linux (Mint and Raspberry Pi), MacOS (including iOS), and Windows.
My verdict is:
* as far as user interface goes it is taste whether Linux or MacOS.
* The Linux machines are more reliable than the Macs, just. It is close run and other people probably have different experiences. But they are on a par
* Tools. Linux wins by a big margin. The MacOS command line is a Unix (BSD I think) command line ten years out of date. The package management is either the official App Store (is it called that on MacOS?) that is full of utter rubbish or homebrew, which I really appreciate, is a good effort, but a long way behind Debian. The compilers on MacOS are unreliable, the default IDE (Xcode) has a lot of nice features out of the box, and in the three years I have been using it some are starting to work better, but it has a long way to go. Swift would look good, if Rust did not exist. The ergonomics committee from Rust - if any body listening - I love you people. Swift has nothing like that. Swift's concurrence model is really bad. Really bad. Embarrassingly bad. ARC was a good idea in the nineties for simple languages but there is no excuse for using it as the main memory management in the twenty first century.
I will stop ranting now, but you get the picture. I could have a rant three times as long
For the tools on Linux, less promises are made, quality varies, but it is all fundamentally honest. The underlying Unixisms are up to date, the compilers are top notch, all the languages I could ever want are first class citizens (I have no interest in .Net - it might not be) etcetera.
So, from my perspective - perhaps not others, it is Linux that I have walked away to
No need to even talk about windows. Makes me weep