So I have been programming in Python for over a year, and have recently begun to delve into C. I run Mac OS X 10.10, Linux Mint 14 and Windows 8.1 all on the same laptop. I really only use Windows for games, and do almost all of my programming in Mac OS X or Linux (with the exception of fiddling around with Visual Studio). After forcing myself to write a lot of my C code and some Python in Linux Mint, I have come to the conclusion that I actually prefer OS X as a programming platform. It just seems more stable to me, and it's not nearly as "locked down" as many would have you believe. After all, its still UNIX underneath. Getting a few extras like homebrew, switching to zsh, and getting a third party window snapping tool is a necessity in OS X, but I work much faster in OS X for some reason. Thoughts? What is your favorite OS to program on?
OS X is rather open. It's just that the GUI is designed to be a hell of a lot more user friendly than other OSes, where as Linux is normally straight up basics. I've always had good experiences using OS X, but I've never had experience running it as my main OS because I've never owned an Apple computer.
They definitely design the GUI to be easy to use, sometimes harming productivity for power users. However, there are a lot of "hidden options" you can uncover that can help improve productivity, and of course keyboard shortcuts help quite a bit. I am curious, you say you never owned an Apple computer, (obviously indicating Hackintosh) what kind of hardware are you running?
i prefer linux for programming because I spent much more time and I know it. While on the other hand I owned some old apples like apple 2 in days and they were great. But today I find mac's ugly babies that should not exist, it supposed to be better and cheaper - and today its more expensive than anything and i can't do what I want; and I want to be able to do anything that I want to do on my system.
on mac's everything costs cash, I am too poor to buy 3rd party software for everything.
I think the reason I like OS X is simply because I have used it for so long. I find that in OS X when you cant "do what you want" there is almost always some kind of third party solution to the functionality you might be missing. It's obviously not nearly as robust as Linux from a customization standpoint, but I have been able to find third party solutions to a lot of things OS X doesnt have the other OS's have (window snapping being one example)
I was able to hack a lot of licence keys to get stuff for free that was otherwise paid (I have a fully functioning free version of Parallels for example)
Never used it on anything I've owned. I've had plenty of experience using other people's MacBooks, and the music rooms in the high school I went to had Mac Minis.
Ah ok, I just assumed you did a hackintosh. I have an AMD based system so I think hackintoshing it would be particularly difficult, but thats what I have my laptop for.
Well I mean basically you don't code on a certain OS, you code inside a certain IDE or text editor and compile it with a certain compiler. That's what will influence your workflow more than anything else. I'm always a little bit baffled when people start wars on 'OS for programming', I'd say it's rather about your tools.
That being said especially when you code in C I don't see why you wouldn't want to use Linux. Why not coding C on the biggest open source C project? You can look into kernel hacking, you can look into open source software you use on Linux and hack around and change it etc. I mean maybe your not interested in that low level stuff but I'd say that's the perfect way to learn about coding, operating systems, organization of open source projects etc.
Also for Linux there are some great tiling window managers which are basically the most productive desktop environment you can have, another little advantage I wouldn't want to miss. Open software, move around and arrange windows not only with a few keystrokes but with the same keybindings I use to edit code inside my text editor and my IDE, with the same I use to navigate a browser or inside documents. (i3 set to vim keybindings) Clicking around in OS X or windows or other desktop environments in Linux feels ridiculously slow once you're used to it
So personally I think a lot of the factors which influence my productivity don't really depend on my OS, for the ones which do so I prefer Linux.
I use a combination of keyboard shortcuts and using the mouse. I haven't gotten into window managers like you have however, so I can see how Linux would have the advantage there, I am assuming their is a largish learning curve involved with the more advanced ones, I just haven't taken the time to explore them yet.