From Mac to Linux: Web Development with Linux

To me a huge selling point of linux is i3wm. If you haven&#x27;t used this thing yet, you absolutely have to try it out! It is the best tool that I have discovered since emacs.<p>It allows me to easily and conveniently manage dozens of windows, and it&#x27;s hard to describe how convenient that is until you get used to it.<p>I usually have around 10 workspaces open:<p>1. Emacs with personal notes, goals, todo lists.<p>2. Emacs windows I use for development and code.<p>3. Terminals for all sorts of servers and processes running in the bg. Django, compass, webpack, stuff like that.<p>4. Terminal for &quot;practical&quot; tasks - updating git, ssh, all sorts of commands I want to use.<p>5. Nautilus.<p>8. Video player with tutorials and courses I&#x27;m watching.<p>9. Photoshop and other graphical&#x2F;visual stuff.<p>10. Chrome.<p>I can switch to any of those with one hotkey, and navigation is super easy and convenient. It is so awesome that I&#x27;m thinking that it&#x27;s almost the main reason I&#x27;m not going back to mac.<p>Oh, and also Ubuntu 16 is fucking great. Everything works pretty much out of the box, everything is easy to install, just perfect.<p>The only drawback of linux is editing graphics and videos. At the moment I&#x27;m using Photoshop with wine for design and kdenlive for video editing. They are good enough to work, but do have bugs and inconveniences, not as great as you would want.

I recently switched to using a Mac (for work) after 5-6 years only using Linux. Again and again the most painful aspect of the Apple ecosystem is that Apple have already decided what is going to be best for me.<p>By default, it&#x27;s impossible to use workspaces without frequent switches to the trackpad, which wouldn&#x27;t be so bad, but without installing third party software it&#x27;s not really possible to create shortcuts or start remapping keys either. Even once you&#x27;ve installed and started Kwm, Karabiner and Seil, the botched keyboard layout renders the Alt key useless for wm shortcuts. There&#x27;s not even a keyboard shortcut that makes a window fullscreen without removing it from its workspace!<p>So much of the system lives in this unconfigurable space. As a Linux user, if my window manager isn&#x27;t working for me, then I just install another one and start again with a fresh _and customizable_ blank slate.<p>Ironically the things that don&#x27;t frustrate me about the chance from Linux to Mac are the things the author identified in the article. My editor works just the same in both OSes and Homebrew could be a lot worse.<p>And I get it, the OSX experience is a system that is averaged out to be comfortable and intuitive for everyone from musicians to graphic designers to programmers and business people. As a result, the user experience punishes power users the most.<p>If you primarily identify as a programmer and use a Mac on a day-to-day basis, go pick up a cheap Chromebook, throw a linux distro on it, and see how it feels. If it&#x27;s not quite right, tweak it. If you get it working, great - you&#x27;ve just saved yourself ~$1000 and a vendor lock-in. If not, all you&#x27;ve lost is $150 and a few hours of your life.

The apt-get install for damn near anything is a big one (for Debian based distros obviously) in my opinion. I think the access to build tools and packages is big too. I had case recently where I needed to make a one line change to an Apache module; wget the source, make the change, configure, make, make install, exactly the same as on the prod server.<p>Unfortunately the author delves into text editors, which can be flame inducing.

It&#x27;s no surprise that linux is by far the best development system for everything, since it is not a consumer product, but a collaborative meta tool.

Interesingly, the &quot;&#x27;apt-get install foo&#x27; and it just works!&quot; aspect of Debian-like distros was what initially got me hooked, but has since become the bane of my existence.<p>Debian has a policy of shipping a sane default config, and generally enables&#x2F;launches services for you. This is friggin awesome when you&#x27;re experimenting and learning. apt-get install nginx, and bam, running webserver.<p>Unfortunately you then start automating processes, and it becomes quite painful. Wanna build a MySQL host with a non-default size innodb log? You get to install the package, stop the service, reconfigure mysql, blow away the log files created when the service was started by dpkg, then start the service back up. Compare this with RHEL&#x2F;CentOS&#x2F;Arch: Install package, configure service, start service. These are 3 discrete operations.<p>(Yes, there are workarounds for this, such as using policy-rc.d, but they bring their own complexity to the table.)

Having the same environment on your local machine as on your target server is a real productivity saver and a good reason to use Linux.<p>Additionally I&#x27;ve recently started using elasticsearch docker containers and I found Linux is a far better host than Docker for Mac (as it still runs a tiny Linux vm with associated slower disk access).

Honestly, nice if that works easy for you when using just <i>developer tools</i> on the terminal or a text editor. As a web developer, though, you might end up using more than that. A Mac offers so much more commercial applications that just do not exist on any Linux distribution.<p>Gimp is no replacement for Photoshop and Inkscape is not replacement for Illustrator, ...<p>Btw, mostly everything you install with `apt-get` can be installed with `brew` as well (MongoDB, Elastic, nvm, etc.).

Is this post part of a series (intentionally short?) while I liked the post it wasn&#x27;t long enough for me.<p>It was only:<p>1. Apt-get is cool 2. Vim 3. Sublime 4. Atom?<p>I felt a little more effort could have been put into this post (similar to a tutorial?)

I use a Mac, but just as a terminal to a Linux workstation.<p>Unfortunately, I work in a place where we need access to Outlook (and its calendar), and Skype for Business &#x2F; Lync. There is not really a good story for these things on Linux still (and I doubt we will ever see a Skype for Business for Linux), and even with Thunderbird + Exquilla, email is tough.<p>That said, my laptop mounts my workstations home dir, and then I use iTerm&#x27;s fantastic tmux integration to connect to the shell.<p>(My personal PC at home is still Linux though :) )

The problem with most apt-based distributions is I&#x27;ve found that a lot of packages are out of date.<p>Try out a pacman-based distribution some time. The idea of a rolling distro is great in my mind and most of the packages in the repo are up to date. If something is missing there is usually an AUR.<p>If you use zsh with oh-my-zsh then you&#x27;re going to have a much easier time finding whatever you need to install. Pacman has an autocomplete written up for it.<p>Also, everything is near-perfectly documented in the arch wiki.

As someone else mentioned, linux (Ubuntu) + i3wm is perfect for most development needs (sure, still need a mac for iOS&#x2F;OS X&#x2F;tvOS apps) but if the following apps or feature complete alternatives were on linux...it&#x27;s be near perfect<p>1. GUI git client (yes, i know how to use a terminal, but at times, you just wanna get work done and not google a command - I used to use sourcetree, and now Tower but there&#x27;s nothing great on linux. The best I could find is Smartgit which is ok at best - but not on par with the others I have mentioned).<p>2. UI development - Sketch&#x2F;XD etc.<p>3. Adobe Suite<p>I want to add games to that list, but we have recently got Rocket League so that and along with various valve games and Minecraft seems to be enough for casual gaming right now.

Well TBH, I did go the other way around and I have to say that the advantages of MacOS are for me much more worth it.<p>All what the articles says I do achieve simply by using docker and I have all the nice integrations around. I can have any target environment setup and switch between them in seconds. And since I can mount my code directories directly into the docker containers I don&#x27;t need to do any complicated scp like deployments.<p>Well, but in the end it&#x27;s a matter of personal taste. I am happy where I am :-)

This kind of crap on HN? Srsly? The problem with desktop Linux is poor hardware support. I have Ubuntu on a desktop and on a relatively recent HP laptop. Here&#x27;s a short list of problems I&#x27;ve experienced - incorrect Nvidia drivers installed by default, random crashes after screen lock, brightness controls don&#x27;t work out-of-the-box, Wi-Fi dies after waking up, fingerprint scanner doesn&#x27;t work and never will. I never had to deal with such crap on a Mac.

You can see the differences between linux and macOS when you consider your environment as a <i>desktop workstation</i> rather than a simple dev machine. I&#x27;ve switched from linux to macOS after 13+ years because, IMHO, the linux desktop overall experience sucks for everyday use.

So what is so much better on Linux than Mac? You can use nvm, etc

Anybody have success with Linux on a Surface Pro 3 or 4?<p>I am considering the purchase of a Surface Pro 3 i7 w&#x2F; 512GB for Linux web-dev.

Whilst I work with Linux on a daily basis and understand that `apt-get install {package}` is really handy, how does this change from a brew install? (granted brew is 2 commands extra to install if you include the xcode installation)<p>Also, given the prevalence of various types of virtualisation - is this still overly relevant to the developer? (Genuine question, keen to understand how people work)<p>I&#x27;m writing this now on a mac running vms for ubuntu (14&#x2F;16.04) as well as OpenBSD. I don&#x27;t necessarily feel like it&#x27;s a blocker but understand we all work differently.