Poll: What is your primary development system? Mac, PC, Linux, Other

[thornjm]

Inspired by this comment[0] and the associated thread[1]. I would love to see what the distribution of development systems is on Hacker News.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398781 [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398618

[rosenjon]

Bought a Mac off Craigslist a year and a half ago to do development for iPhone; it was a beat up MacBook Pro 15" from 2006 with slightly messed up screen (backlighting was uneven). However, it was a good deal compared to a new Mac ($600).

It turned out I ended up using the Mac much more than my Windows machine. Why? Because it would come back from sleep in < 15 seconds, whereas my Lenovo would sometimes take 5 min to come back from sleep. Also, Windows would sometimes reboot my machine in the middle of coding a project. It had apparently "warned me" with some difficult to see message, and then just started shutting down my machine with no significant prompt. It would then sometimes hang in the update process, forcing a hard reboot and then another 10 min wait for startup. This was Win 7, mind you.

I took a nice paying dev project back in October, with the intention of using it to buy myself a new machine. I ended up buying a new MacBook Pro 15" with the anti-gloss screen and on the higher end of the hardware specs. Am in love with the computer. One of my housemates asked if he could borrow my Windows machine for an Excel class this weekend; I handed it over without hesitation. Haven't turned it on in months.

I originally thought I would have to install Parallels or boot camp when I first got my new Mac, not wanting to have to parallel path with the a separate Windows machine. In truth, I haven't ever installed any of these options. With Mac Office 2011, 99% of what I need to do is available. In the rare case when it's not, I may boot up the Windows machine for a one-off look at an Excel spreadsheet or something like that.

If I were MSFT, I would be worried. Around campus, the Apple logos outnumber the Macs in a big way these days. Two years ago, this was not the case. I'm a business school student, and Windows has always had significant crossover on campus from the corporate world. Our official school laptop is the Lenovo I don't use anymore.

Windows was always kind of a pain, but the variety of software available for it gave it tremendous leverage. I was a Mac addict as a kid, all the way up to around Windows 95, when it just became impossible to continue supporting the platform; the ecosystem had wilted at that point to a shadow of its former self. I have basically been on Windows since then, until the recent switch back to Mac.

Windows continues to ride the legacy train all the way to the graveyard. You can't do as bad of a job as MSFT has done in terms of maintaining a core platform and expect to maintain market share. Everyone from the CEO down should have been fired for Vista. Win 7 is basically the maintenance release that Vista should have been. In the meantime, the Mac has exceeded it by leaps and bounds.

[koenigdavidmj]

Home: Laptop with Slackware. A lot of the supposedly more user-friendly (okay, less user-hostile) distributions have a knack for leaving a mess of my machine without my telling them to. Or ignoring my configuration files. Or changing their init system every other release. Slackware gives me vi and bash and then stays out of my way, so I have no need to switch. The laptop has a bit of exotic hardware that plays poorly on the BSD flavours; otherwise, I would probably use one of them.

Work: The thing sitting under my desk runs XP. It has three purposes: Outlook, internal IM, and a NoMachine session hooked up to a VM with CentOS 5.

[actf]

I think these results will be inaccurate. How can I answer this question if I run Windows 7 as my OS, but use a Linux VM to do development work? Does Windows 7 count as my primary development system? What if I run Windows 7 at work, but do all my personal projects on Linux or OSX? Again, it's unclear to me, what counts as one's primary development system is in this scenario.

It's also worth noting that the pole permits more than one selection, which defeats the purpose of asking, "What is your primary development system".

[beej71]

Arch Linux on a quadcore with FVWM is my machine of choice. VirtualBox for XP and Win7, but that's just for web testing, and for using my old copy of Adobe CS3 when needed.

Secondarily, I have an Arch netbook I use on the run (also for video skype). The lid switch works, even.

And lastly, a MacBook Pro that gets used for iOS dev.

[patio11]

Windows Seven w/ Ubuntu running in a VM. It would be 100% windows but faking all the server-side components got too tough.

[baddox]

I haven't used VM software for ages. Do you get good enough performance on virtualized Ubuntu to do all your developing?

[jarin]

2010 Mac Mini with an 8 GB RAM upgrade so I can just leave MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, and Redis running all the time without giving me problems when playing Starcraft II.

I have Windows 7 running in Parallels, but the only thing I ever use it for is testing in IE.

[nantes]

Yay geek porn!

Desktop -- 2009 Mac Mini 2x2.26ghz/4GB/320GB running Ubuntu 10.04

Laptop -- HP Pavilion dv2700(something or other) AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 TL-60/4GB/60GB SSD(!) running Ubuntu 10.10

[daimyoyo]

Once I decided to start a new career as a developer, the first thing I bought was a new MacBook pro. It's great. Keep in mind that the computer I'd had before this was a Dell Latitude from 2006. I bought it back in 2008 and while it worked for what I used it for, it was REALLY slow to boot, had almost no RAM, and the outside was broken. One thing I've believed in since I had my first job was to use the best equipment you can afford, because that way you can grow your business without outgrowing your equipment.

[jensnockert]

MacBook Pro with OS X for most of my hacking and a desktop running Fedora for when I feel like I want a nice proper linux desktop (instead of VNC/X11-forwarding to a server).

[justrudd]

An iMac 27" is my main development hardware, but I use VMWare to run Debian where I do all my development. I've also got an i7 Debian Server running where I deploy to make sure stuff works on real hardware before it hits my host. I'm currently in the market for a "sofa programming" laptop. I'm thinking the 11" MacBook Air or the new Lenovo X220.

[baddox]

I too am interested in the X220, but man are all those ~13 inch laptops pricey.

[iwjames]

Windows 7 (PC game development). I would probably be on Mac if I could.

[shiftb]

I use my MacBook Pro 15" as my main development system. I have virtual machines setup for some projects usually using Ubuntu.

[alex3t]

4 years ago worked on Windows, when tried Ubuntu and after that Mac, I never return back. I cant understand how LAMP or Rails developers working on win machines, I'v 2 XP running computers at home and using them only for gaming(very rare)

[mindcrime]

Primary dev box: Fedora Linux on a Toshiba laptop. Miscellaneous dev/experiment boxes: Various flavors of Linux (CentOS, Fedora) on a mishmash of PC hardware; and EC2 instances when needed, or just for playing around with Hadoop.

[jfdi]

27" iMac, 15" PowerBook. Win 7 in a VM on each. Laptop is the mobile option when the desktop gets too cramped or need some air. Now & then I'll boot up an EC2 image (typically Ubuntu) and dev in the terminal if I'm in a pinch.

[cowpewter]

Hackintosh: Intel 3.1 ghz core 2 duo with 8gb ram on a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P.

Vanilla retail install of Snow Leopard, only thing I had to patch was the sound kext, and it (so far) has taken automatic updates all the way up to 10.6.6 (haven't tried 10.6.7 yet) seamlessly.

Love OS X, love getting to pick my own (cheap!) hardware even more. Though if I ever get rich, I want one of those Axiotron Modbooks so hard (Macbook pro taken apart and given a Wacom penabled touchscreen).

[hector_ka]

Primary dev system is a Windows 7 laptop because i bought it like that.Secondary system is an Ubuntu machine. And the third is an embedded system with Debian.

[watmough]

iMac White 20". Oldie but a goodie. However, the LCD is starting to decay somewhat, with lines and smudges internally, and 3 Gigs ram is getting a bit tight.

[prodigal_erik]

Home is a gaming desktop which dual boots Vista and Ubuntu. Commuting is a new Win7 netbook; Emacs and GHC work fine, so I haven't bothered saving the recovery image and settling on a GNU distro yet. Work is a decrepit XP box due to be replaced, apparently with a Mac, which I guess I'm okay with if OS X (unlike iOS) continues treating owners as human beings and tinkerers. Servers at work are openSUSE.

[emeraldd]

Gentoo running on a Dell Inspiron 1525 at home. At work I run Gentoo on a Dell Optiplex 980 ( I think I have that model right)