"switched to [..] Windows and everything pretty much just works". That sentence pretty much just beat OSX with its own slogan!

Did I ever say to use WAMP or run a VM? I said to run everything remotely. Just set up a Samba share on the Linux server and mount it on the Windows machine. My SSH client of choice is KiTTY[0], though there are obviously a million options out there.

Then you can use whatever editor you want. I usually use Notepad++, but Vim, Sublime Text, etc. are available.

0: http://kitty.9bis.com/

Something I can do as well. Local vs. remote plays no role here.

> Not to mention being independent of a net connection to develop.

This is true, but seems like an edge case to me. Wifi is available pretty much everywhere you spend significant amounts of time, and a mobile hotspot is a must if you're a mobile developer anyway.

Besides, I'm always looking stuff up while coding, so I need the connection anyway.

So you have it set so one key combo from your editor saves the file you're working on, copies it to the appropriate location on the staging server automatically, and refreshes the page in the browser? That doesn't sound so bad actually; maybe I need to rethink my VM plan for Windows web dev, which turns out to be very timely for me.

[Oh, I see, you don't even keep a local copy; you edit the remote copy directly. I wonder if the Github client for Windows can watch a remote dir.]

And yes, the remote files are directly edited. There's a volume (i.e., Z:\) on my laptop that is the remote directory I've mounted. I use Samba, but you can also use NFS by installing the necessary client software from Add/Remove Programs, if that's what you prefer.

I don't know anything about the GitHub client, so I can't help you there.

[1] http://osxfuse.github.com/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754351.aspx

I'll list my own reasons (beyond Linux "just working"):

- Unusable command line (unless you install Cygwin)

- Lack of tools (unless you install Cygwin)

- Case-insensitive filesystem (in 2012!)

- Drive letters (in 2012!)

- You can't delete open files (in 2012!)

- It's ugly - Windows 95 GUI elements often poke through everywhere

- No package management - I have to download software from sites all over the web

- If I'm deploying on Linux (or other Unix) why deliberately use the most different OS possible

Don't get me wrong. If you are developing for Windows or other Microsoft platforms, there is nothing better than Windows to develop on. It's just that it doesn't make sense in any other case.

What are the advantages? You can test all browsers, including IE.

> - It's ugly - Windows 95 GUI elements often poke through everywhere

Not in Windows 7.

> - No package management - I have to download software from sites all over the web

What sort of software are you talking about? I don't have any development tools on my local machine except for Notepad++ (text editor) and KiTTY (SSH client).

> - If I'm deploying on Linux (or other Unix) why deliberately use the most different OS possible

To the contrary, I'd say it's the most similar OS. Windows will be the OS used by the majority of your site's visitors. They will be accessing the site from a Linux server, which you will be also be using, for development.

Of course the machine is shared, but our development workspaces are not. We all have separate accounts on the staging server. The idea is that the staging environment is identical (in terms of software) to the live environment. Of course, we would have to coordinate any sort of hardware stress testing in order to get accurate results, but that's a rare edge case and would be true even if you were developing locally (since stress testing on the local machine wouldn't give useful results).

> If your development server is yours only, I fail to see the point: your real development machine is the remote one and your Windows box is nothing more than a glorified VT-100.

Oh come on, don't be obtuse. The reason I use Windows is because Windows 7 is a genuinely good OS that helps me to be productive. The UI is well-designed and I have direct access to all the various browsers I need to test sites on. I have good text editors and SSH clients. I have a solid laptop with features that I desire (easily upgradable, TrackPoint, much more durable than a MacBook). The only downside is that Windows comes filled with bloatware, but that's a matter of just installing a clean copy of it.

I never seriously tried this but I'm curious if it works:

http://www.suacommunity.com/tool_warehouse.htm

Agree developing for *nix on windows is not great. I use a VM for that.

I think they pulled an OSX and embraced and extended to deny cygwin their market. Typical. But whatever you think about the strategy, SUA works really well.

I'm still quite happily using both, but OS X has been spiraling downward and Windows has been spiraling upward for a while now. I wonder if I might find myself thinking back on that conference as the moment when I realized that one overtook the other.

Dual monitor is something that really really should be a solved problem.

Many developers use more than one monitor. Many professional (with big budgets) customers use more than one monitor. Multiple monitors make great sense for many people and many user interfaces.

And yet sometimes it's a hideous kludge. randr, xrandr, etc are for most people impenetrable gobbledygook. You've seen people struggling to get modern computers working with projectors. People on HN often mention the frustrations of weird behaviour with multiple monitors.

TL:DR nice to see some competition between OSs.

Keynote is probably the best presentation software available on any platform, in my experience.

Pages is the word processor and page layout tool. It's just OK for light word processing but pretty good at page layout.

I haven't used Numbers much, but apparently it doesn't provide the advanced functionality offered by Excel. But I certainly prefer it to the Google's web-based spreadsheet tool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynote_(presentation_software)...

And, FWIW, I only occasionally need a spreadsheet at home and Numbers works perfectly for my limited requirements.

In Numbers' case, I was going by claims I've heard from Excel power users, who say it lacks Excel's advanced functionality. I edited my original post to reflect this.

Mail was Steve Jobs' baby ever since NeXT, and it was built to be used (and useful) internally at NeXT/Apple. It's the best mail client I've ever used, in a sea of extremely poor mail clients.

I have had better luck with Sparrow, but even that has its bouts (its slows down all of a sudden and then comes back, which makes me suspect its doing some background compaction/garbage collection).

Even though I am no longer a huge fan of the Gmail web interface, it still works the fastest.

Perhaps it's related to either your specific hardware, gmail, or Mail's support for gmail?

I love iWork! Keynote is a masterpiece!

Then I might as well use the best tool available to me, and that's Keynote, hands down.

If one collaborates to produce a presentation across suites, you should focus on content and use the common denominator, which works perfectly fine. If it's distribution problems, well, sharing a presentation is always lacking. Slides by themselves miss most of the content. Anyway, Keynote has an interesting export system which creates an MPEG 4 video with chapters and stop points. That's the only way to produce a result with 100% accuracy (unless you design your slides in HTML5).

Isn't that obvious?

I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation.

OpenOffice/LibreOffice <--> MS office is pretty painless. iWork, not so.

Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

And I don't really understand why you think your anecdote is relevant considering you switched 3 years ago to Windows Vista. Which lets be honest was universally recognised as not being Window's finest release.

For the sake of 'usability', Windows Vista hid a lot of functionality behind 'ease of use' features that served only to provide the user with less information, making tech support more difficult for no real benefit. Users still have no idea what's going on, but receive no error messages that indicate why.

Vista also added helpful features like the whole 'Let Windows find a solution!' concept, which is great in theory but, in my limited, anecdotal experience, has never once actually provided any sort of solution. The closest I've seen was yesterday, when Windows 'found a solution', tried to implement it, and failed.

They spent a lot of time and engineering making a 'usable' OS on the surface, but all it was was a pretty sheen over top of an OS that didn't, at its core, work significantly better in a lot of areas.

Windows XP was an OS I disliked strongly, but tolerated grudgingly. Windows Vista was an OS I actively discouraged people from getting. Windows 7 is the first version of Windows I've ever recommended people upgrade to, but Windows 8 looks like another step in the wrong direction.

Sure, Vista works (and had for many many people), but XP set a responsiveness standard that Vista did not meet - and to be honest there were real, major issues pre SP1 (file copy crawling while music playing was the most egregious).

Meanwhile, Apple was slowing getting better and better with OSX, and right around that time, the Linux-powered netbooks first hit the stage and were quite good for the time and price.

Vista was from a technical point of view, like going from MacOS9 to OSX...

They introduced a new kernel transaction manager, entirely new audio subsystem, new scheduler, new network stack, SxS, UAC, new display driver model, entirely new graphics stack, new power management stack, new crypto API, a whole load of new fonts and a proper stable 64-bit environment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y

I switched to windows 7.

Just saying that just because it affects you personally does not make it a widespread issue.

You are wrong. This is not a personal issue - it's very widespread and makes a huge number of people suffer constantly:

1. How broken is it: http://www.id3.org/iTunes

2. Other people with problems: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ipod+wont+play+songs

They keep trying to push the Album Cover view, yet flipping through hundreds of album covers is an idiotic way to navigate a large music collection. Ping seemed like a half-baked idea destined to fail, and its iTunes integration was so poor. At least they're cutting their losses and yanking that.

I'm not aware of a better alternative though. What program to play, organize, and upload music to your devices do you recommend?

Right now I can't check whether the bug still is present in the Mac version, but I can see it still exists in the Windows version.

I've tried a lot of stuff, but nothing can manage well libraries over 10GB. There may be alternatives now, I haven't really looked for one in years (as I said, works for me and I like it).

Thanks!

iTunes is hardly the only software with issues related to ID3v2 reading/writing.

I learned the hard way.