Speaking particularly about hacking on my OS of choice, I've got to hand it to the MacPorts crew for making that kind of thing possible without serious headaches. I've got a custom build of Apache, PHP (yes, I know...) and MySQL alongside my desktop OS tools that I love to use. It's a best of both worlds. Mac OS X from the developer's perspective is basically Linux done right.
Mac OS X from the developer's perspective is basically Linux done right.
That's an often-cited overgeneralization.
I'm a developer and OSX is not Linux done right for me. In my book the OSX window management is ridiculously clumsy and gives me nowhere near the speed/control that I have under ion3. For example: The latter gives me tabs on every frame, that means I can rapidly tab through any windows I have attached there, without moving my eyes. It also lets me setup multiple parallel mini-IDEs without thinking, because everything stays in place and never overlaps - unless I explicitly move it or make it so. People often get dizzy watching me because my workflow involves a lot of muscle memory; I know which sequence of keystrokes gets me where, hence my edit/compile/test roundtrips are quite a bit faster than what I've seen on eclipse or OSX jockeys - who commonly have to fall back to the cable-rat for any sequence that deviates from what their IDE anticipates (e.g. to juggle a few config files along the line).
For bragging rights, my sequence to setup a new "mini-IDE" with a 50/50 horizontal split (browser window full width on top) and a 50/50 vertical split in the bottom frame (two terminal windows each in left/right):
* F9, Enter (new desktop)
* Alt+s (split horizontal)
* Alt+Down (move to bottom frame)
* Alt+d (split vertical)
* F1, F1 (launch two xterms, left)
* Alt+right (move to right frame)
* F1, F1 (launch two xterms, right)
* Alt+up (move to top frame)
* F5 (launch browser)
That sequence takes me under 5 seconds, zero thinking and ofcourse I have the freedom to create any layout appropiate for the task at hand, with just a few keystrokes.
These sequences are my bread & butter (have 7 virtual desktops open for various tasks right now). I can not imagine going back to an old-fashioned mouse-driven window manager ever again.
So, show me functionality like that on OSX, then we can start talking about the other areas where OSX falls short for me.
+1 on using virtual desktops to position things in 'space'. That is how i work and it is mighty helpful, especially when you have many different simultaneous servers/environments open. also, for what it is worth, i love being able to run the same os and basic configuration on my laptop as on my servers.
