A Whole Lot of OSes at Once

I realized I haven’t talked yet about my workspace setup, including the choice of computer(s) and operating system(s) which I prefer. A topic like that is a perfect opportunity to provide fuel for countless flamewars raging through the Internet forums, so it seems like a no-brainer if you want to round up some passionate readers ;)
So, what’s the best these days? Is it Windows or Linux? Or maybe OS X? Should you get a Mac or a(n other kind of) PC? Make it a desktop or just a laptop? Or perhaps subscribe to the post-PC doctrine and grab a tablet?…

Well, I don’t know. I won’t really advise anything here. Myself, I take more… holistic approach. I just use all of these things :)

Desktop split in two

As I see it, desktop PC is the place where stuff gets done. Be it “work” or play, you cannot easily forfeit the conveniences of big monitor(s), full keyboard layout, snappy mouse that fits your palm, and a comfortable chair.

Thing is, those two activities require two completely different operating systems. When it comes to games, Windows is still reigning supreme, with only some small glimpses of what might shake up this status quo. Sadly, I have little hope much will change here in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, it’s pretty much given that the best system for most kinds of development work is some flavor of Linux, preferably sporting such powerful a package manager as apt-get. There are no (good) alternatives for certain vendor lock-ins (*cough* iOS) but if you are not forced to comply with them, anything else is almost certainly an inferior choice.

How to reconcile those requirements? There is dual booting, of course, but the need of frequent resets would get old very quickly. So instead of that, and after conducting a bit of a research, I opted for virtualization, choosing a simple solution of running Linux as guest OS through VirtualBox.
This turned out to be super easy to set up; the only “trick” was to flip a switch in BIOS in order to enable CPU virtualization features, required to run a 64-bit system as guest. With these on, performance is a non-issue: it feels like running directly on the hardware, for all intents and purposes – including running Android emulator inside the VM :)

Laptop as versatile substitute

Now, if only all that goodness could be made available on the go… Although some may pretend it is, most (sane) people cater to their mobility needs by getting a laptop. This is immediately a compromise because of the form factor alone, but even more so because of inevitably inferior hardware specs one could cram into it.

So no, I didn’t try to replicate the VM-based setup described above :) While possible, it seemed way more sensible to try and kill two birds with one stone by getting a computer that:

• adequately (though not perfectly) substitutes Windows for gaming and Linux for coding
• runs the third major operating system, in case that ever comes handy e.g. for testing purposes

As you’ve likely guessed, that description accurately fits a MacBook. Of its virtues and woes I have already written elsewhere, so let’s just say it fulfills its purpose pretty well.

And even when it doesn’t, there is always Chrome Remote Desktop to bridge the gap :)

Going Apples

So, I got myself a new laptop.

The main reason was that I wanted more powerful and – most importantly – slightly bigger portable computer. Up until now I used a cute 11.6″ machine that claimed to be a gaming laptop but worked pretty well as all-around development kit. The various trials and tribulations I had to overcome to make Ubuntu work reasonably well on this thing (it’s officially “not supported”) significantly increased my skills in tweaking Linux. And sometimes things worked so well that I actually managed to accomplish some work!

Nevertheless, the small size started to irk me quite a bit; the (small) additional mobility just wasn’t worth it. So this time I went for something just slightly bigger, but with a lot more pixels.

HOLY CRAP DAT SCREEN

Alas, I got a 13″ Retina display MacBook Pro. Admittedly, I was a bit reluctant to be a semi-early adopter here, because the way increased resolution seems to work on these screens is a bit confusing. I mean, it’s apparently very natural to almost anyone: things look nicer, end of story. However, for someone who remembers how back in the days the difference between, say, 800×600 and 1024×768 made such a huge impact on UI scaling, the Retina’s quadrupling of pixel count may sounds pretty scary.

Just recall that the standard width for many website layouts is still around 960px, which translates to a little more than 1/3 (!) of Retina display’s width. Does it mean the web comes with big slabs of wasted whitespace and tiny column of content in between?…

Not really, as it turns out. By default, Retina cheats: the real (millimeter) size of UI elements is still roughly the same as on normal 13″ display running something around 1280×800. For typical GUI applications involving standard components and some text rendering, it’s indeed just making the interface sharper and more vivid. For pixel-perfect apps (such as games with set resolution), it seems the default solution is to stretch them proportionately; things might not look as nice then but they still work well.

Where the Retina display really shines is any serious text “processing”, be it reading websites, writing articles or – of course – programming. The additional level of detail might not be noticeable at first, however the difference becomes apparent when you look again on a screen with lower pixel density. There’s still some way to go in order to fluidly present even the smallest noticeable details to the sharpest of eyes, but it’s pretty short way.

I just shudder to think what resolution is needed to replicate the same sensation on 27″ or 30″ monitor :)

It’s Linux on the desktop, essentially

What about the operating system, though, the glorified OS X?

Besides handling that precious little screen very well – which cannot be said of some other systems – I don’t actually have much to say about it. With the rampant scavenging of UX concepts that goes back-and-forth between today’s platforms, the differences in look & feel of their graphical interfaces are mostly superficial. Whatever it is in the upper-right corner of your desktop – be it half-bitten apple, a rotated square or circle with dots – is unlikely to dictate the shape of your UI experience.

…Once you move the Dock to its proper position on the side, that is.

Under the hood, OS X is just a *nix, some say even more POSIX-y than what Linux currently is. This makes it a viable native choice for most developers, while the rest (i.e. those working with Microsoft products) can be accommodated via outstanding virtualization options. But all this goodness doesn’t come without few caveats.

Probably the biggest one is the horrendous functionality gap: lack of built-in package manager and installer. Life without apt-get really sucks, and the bottom-up effort coalesced into Homebrew cannot really make up for it. I was especially appalled when I had to revert to the old google-download-unpack method for installing new programs. Amazingly, the Mac App Store is still mostly useless some two years after its inception.

Will it blend?

Although I’m readily pointing out various quirks of the OS X platform here, I must say I’m not particularly concerned with them in the long term. I do not intended the Mac to become my primary system of choice, especially for development purposes. Its goal is to serve as handy portable computer, while simultaneously providing access to the third important platform to address any testing needs.

But that’s all aside of the most important perk: finally being able to visit those trendy coffee shops, of course! ;-)

Windows 8 Is Coming and I Don’t Care

The upcoming release of Windows 8 is stirring up the tech world, mostly because of some controversial decisions Microsoft has made regarding the new version of their flagship OS.

Were it a few years ago, I would likely participate in various discussions about this, springing up on message boards I typically frequent. Probably I would have also tested the development preview which was made available several months before. Most likely, I would have clear opinion about viability of the new Metro UI, WinRT apps’ platform or the overall push in the general direction of HTML5.

I would… But I do not. Actually, I couldn’t care less about the whole thing.

It’s not only because I touch my Windows installation once in a blue moon, almost exclusively for gaming. No, that’s mostly because it’s 2012, and Windows still doesn’t support some crucial functionality you could expect from modern operating system.

Unfortunately, most users don’t expect it because they never knew any better. Therefore I will try to highlight some features from alternative operating systems (typically Linux or OSX) that I think Windows can be rightfully scorned for lacking.