Why I switched from OS X to Linux - <AUTHOR> https://jeena.net/why-i-switchedfrom-osx-to-linux <comment><USER8> I think it's important to note here that the reason a lot of people switch from macOS/OS X to Linux is because they _can_.

There's been a tremendous amount of work over the last ten years to make the Linux desktop environment habitable. At first it was usable for very narrow use cases, like living within an Office-compatible application, but over time that space has grown. What was once done out of spite can now be done for the sake of convenience.

Instead of being all negative about Apple not living up to our expectations I think we should appreciate how much Linux has exceeded them.

<comment><USER9> I don't intend to scoff at the work done on Linux distros; however, many of us looking to make the switch are doing so _only_ because Apple has gone too far with their latest pricing schemes, and/or due to hardware changes.

Personally, I don't care about USB-C replacing USB 3.0, or the introduction of the new Touch Bar. The problem is the pricing (that Touch Bar is costing me $700-800 on top of the equivalent 2013 MacBook Pro model). The removal of the physical escape key and the inexplicable removal of the 3.5 mm jack on iPhones does not help to relieve fears that Apple has completely lost control of basic sense as to what their professional users want and need. The MacBook Pro line has fallen into the same category as the MacBook Air. It's supposed to be a professional machine, but it's now being specced to the lowest common denominator, meant for any average consumer.

For some of us, Linux is not being transitioned to with enthusiasm. We do not consider it a drop-in replacement for OS X, and already pre-emptively regret the inferior keyboard and trackpad we'll get on the OEM PC laptop manufacturers offer. Honestly, what the hell is with PC manufacturers that still include the TrackPoint™ Style Point, Nub, Nipple Mouse, Clit Mouse[1]?!

tldr; Apple is alienating its professional users. Windows is flat out unusable as a Linux-based developer platform for us. Linux is simply the only remaining alternative. Frankly, it's not "good enough" \- it's simply the only remaining alternative when you can't reason spending $4,000+ on a laptop you actually _do still want_ to buy.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/243/](https://xkcd.com/243/)

<comment><USER10> They include it because people use it. I actually disable my trackpad on my thinkpad, and only use the trackpoint. (So does Randall according to that link). Thinkpad keyboard is in my opinion better than the apple keyboard.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. I just joined a company where Macs are mandatory, and so I'm reluctantly making the transition from Linux/Thinkpad to MacOS/Macbook.

I'm experiencing substantially more carpal tunnel issues because of the Mac's trackpad-only setup. The trackpoint means I never have to take my hands off the keyboard, which I love. Two months in I'm used to Apple's keyboard, but I don't think it's as good; my error rate is still much better on Thinkpads because the more sculpted keys make it easier for my fingers to know where they are.

And I should say that here I mean the older Thinkpad keyboard, not the newer one that looks much more Apple-ish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm on the other end.

Early last year I switched to OSX. In the past I was heavily into various Linux distros: From Ubuntu, to the more lightweight Xubuntu. Fedora. Elementary. I've played with Gnome and Kde.

It is my opinion that the people who seem ecstatic about their switch to Linux are still in their honeymoon period. I don't feel like any Linux distro out there comes close to the stability and elegance of OSX.

I've had so many issues over the years, it's hard to even list them:

\- Ubuntu only used the dedicated gfx card on one of my laptops. Never would it settle into integrated. This caused performance issues, overheating, and I ultimately decided it was impossible to use.

\- Gnome had so many display, rendering, and performance issues... I still don't know how people tolerate it. Even software listed in this blog post: KeePassX copy/paste never worked for me. Random software that would just blank out and require a full system restart.

\- Crashes... so many... crashes. Especially when using multiple monitors.

\- Some distros (Elementary, for example) seem to have quite a few hardware limitations. Half the computers I tried to install these distros on would run into errors, a lot of bios chasing, too much time spent on forums to find help... Most of the times you just give up.

\- There just isn't enough software. And Wine isn't exactly the perfect solution. Not ONE single good MySQL gui for Linux (just an example). Think about that - and no, Workbench isn't good! It's extremely intensive on resources and bloated.

I moved into OSX because I was fed up. I wanted to work and be productive and not constantly look after hardware and software. At the end of the day I wanted access to bash, pleasant to look at, with plenty of software options. I didn't want to worry about performance, random crashes, and lack of support for multiple displays. It's costly, but the solution for me was OSX.

<comment> loup-vaillant My solution (not for everyone): Don't use what doesn't work. So…

\- No dedicated graphics card. Intel's work well enough.

\- I use Lxde with Xmonad. It's fast.

\- No crash since I bough my laptop 8 months ago. No multiple monitors either, though.

\- Still need proprietary hardware, so I stick to distros that distribute them. I blame the hardware vendors for their needless secrecy.

\- I don't miss anything but the latest Windows games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice article.

I started using Linux (Ubuntu) last year. I was trying to get into open source software and I had a choice between a Macbook or a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it.

I was aware that Linux had a reputation of being difficult to use but I was planning on doing some learning anyway, so why not give it a try? Of course, another factor was that I've never really cared for Macs much. I never understood the appeal of Mac design and I always felt like Mac products, and particularly one button mice, violate "form follows function." (note: I'm not design-minded).

Anyway, I was really surprised that Ubuntu desktop (unity) was basically the same thing as Windows, except the sidebar was on the left. That and I could use the software manager (and later, apt-get) to install common programs instead of googling "skype installer," which is what I would have done on windows.

Later, I learned to appreciate how easy it is to edit config files in Linux. Plain text files vs. regedit? Yeah, I'll take the English please.

<comment><USER14> You just got started :) many long time users would agree that unity is the most terrible ux out there. Go and try gnome shell, mate, kde, i3, ... ;

<comment><USER15> I disliked Unity when I was new to it, but after learning the keyboard shortcuts I really like it. I think that, and getting used to the idea of searching for things rather than expecting a directory structure for displaying programs/operations, is the main limitation.

Of course, discovery is an issue with this method, and that just came with a few weeks of using it.

<comment><USER14> Same for gnome shell. I also prefer this way a lot

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I loved the design of the original Mac OS. It was a breath of fresh air in comparison with the ascetic world of MS DOS. I loved Windows, too, both in its 16-bit incarnation and as the 32-bit NT. It gave you the power unseen before. The design of Windows NT, as it was originally conceived, seemed amazing to me. And I loved Linux, too - for being a UNIX, for its openness, and for its virtually immediate availability at no charge...

As years passed, both Mac OS and Windows have been gradually losing their appeal, getting more and more bloated, resource-hungry, sometimes plain crazy. Finally, they deteriorated to the point of a marginal usefulness to me. Linux, on the other hand, has been improving at an astounding pace. Today, it is friendly. It is snappy. And it does not spy on you. There are many variants to choose from. You can get it up and running in no time. It is there to suit your computing needs.

Today, there is _nothing_ better.

<comment><USER17> How exactly has Linux been improving??

<comment><USER18> Two I've noticed in the past 3 years: \- Better compatibility with modern hardware. In particular, working out of the box just the way you'd expect from windows, without having to go find some drivers and build them yourself. Still some ways to go here on some peripherals (wifi adapters in particular), but a lot of progress. \- Much more emphasis on user experience. Ubuntu in particular really has tried to create a non-power user friendly desktop experience. If you need a program you can get it without having to compile from source and decide where to put it yourself. Once again, this is much longer term and also requires the people actually creating the software to make changes, but it's definitely improving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How one can switch from OS X to Linux and still feel comfortable without a track pad with the same quality?

Everything Macbooks (and the OS) provide is replaceable with good alternatives on a Linux environment and I personally had the satisfaction to do so. But still, there existed no notebook with the same keyboard feeling, trackpad (touchpad, whatever), weight and durability as a Macbook. What do I miss here?

Edit: Grammar fix. :)

<comment><USER20> What's so nice about Mac trackpads? I've heard that argument frequently but when I use my wifes Air and switch back to my laptop (either HP, Dell or Lenovo - not the cheap ones) I don't see a difference, at least when I added in synaptics driver the natural scrolling by swiping up and down.

Right now I think that Mac trackpad has three issues:

* it is freaking cold in the morning (metal case)

* you don't see the buttons (I still don't know if mac 1 one or 2 or 3 buttons :)

* click sound, when you have a child sleeping you don't want to have it so loud or at all (it should make same sound as pushing a keyboard button).

<comment><USER19> Yes it is cold in the morning, takes up to 10 minutes to heat up at the office.

The advantages are:

* 3 finger, 4 finger gestures for desktop switching, window management etc. * You don't really need buttons. 1 finger tap/click is the left click, 2 finger tap/click is the right click. There are tools (i.e MagicPrefs) to make 3 finger tap/click the middle click. If you prefer clicks over taps, the sound can annoy you, that is a catch for sure. * Natural scroll is almost always pixel perfect instead of line snapping.

<comment><AUTHOR> The desktop switching works in GNOME ith 4 fingers too, tap/click, 2 finger for right works the same. The line snapping only is in the browser, GNOME apps are pixel perfect, but I'd like to know why it doesn't work in the browsers.

<comment><USER19> Legacy GTK does not support pixel perfect scrolling if I remember correctly. That may be the reason,

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been on Ubuntu for a couple of years now.

I would never go back to Windows or even OSX.

I love Gnome's workspace switcher. OSX's workspace switcher felt tedious and slow by comparison.

With Ubuntu/Gnome, I just Ctrl+Alt+arrow-key to move between workspaces and it's so smooth/quick. It's great for writing/debugging code; I have one workspace with the app/site I'm building, one with my source code and one with the terminal for launching/killing processes. Sometimes I use the fourth workspace to do CPU profiling when doing performance testing.

It's nice that there are just four workspaces - One in each corner, then I can switch to any one of them with a single hotkey without even having to think - I can instantly bring up the one I want in a fraction of a second. It really adds up.

Windows was terrible. I had to move the mouse and click several times every time I wanted to test a change I made to the code. I can't believe I was doing that just a few years ago.

<comment><USER22> Same here. Ubuntu with quick desktop switching is a breeze to develop, Windows feels cumbersome compared to it, needs way more keystrokes and mouse gymnastics to get the work done ;-)

My Windows usage is restricted to gaming and music production. Sadly, getting low latency audio on Linux requires lots of fiddling, and even if I do get it running, I'm still going to miss the tons of windows-only audio plugins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> At one point, I ran everything I needed to on free _nix, then got a Mac in the early 2000s. Over the years, I enjoyed trying the shiny new things, and being on a supported platform was a novelty. Plus, it was liberating to not futz with XF86Config files and to have a mobile \_ nix workstation.

But there hit a point when learning the shiny just felt like a chore, and I started gravitating back to tried and true software like emacs. And Linux stopped requiring much futzing to work pretty well. And the need to exchange Word docs evaporated due to Google Docs, LibreOffice, and life circumstances. And somewhere I decided that workstations are a luxury.

And then MacOS started crapping up the UI with stuff I never asked for. It became more of a hassle to strip the Mac than to build up a more comfortable free \\*nix environment.

I'm unlikely to go back. I'll always be glad for the decade+ Apple gave me. But I'm even more thankful for the luxury of not needing them.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm mostly enjoying the KDE Neon distro. It's polished, built on a stable newish base for the rest of the system.

But as I've said repeatedly in the past, the thing that still drives me completely insane are the keyboard shortcuts, their general inconsistency across DE, apps, etc., the layering interaction of how they're intercepted by different parts of the system (so even when I can manually change them to be consistent, I still can't guarantee they'll be interpreted correctly), and their use of the Control key as the primary modifier in both GUI and Terminal applications.

Linux mostly copied Windows in this regard, and it's just as painful as Windows (and then some) for that reason. I would gladly pay $1,000 for a KDE Neon or Fedora Gnome distro that went through the trouble of thoroughly implementing and maintaining a version with fully Mac-like keyboard shortcuts and keyboard shortcut customization facilities.

I'd pay that per user for my team too. We'd make the money back quickly on savings in hardware purchases.

<comment><USER25> On the other hand, KDE is the most configurable DE I've ever seen. I've never looked too much at its defaults because I usually switch to KDE in my "let's customize everything" moments (and get back from it in my "let's learn to live with defaults" ones).

Being able to bind almost everything (including running custom scripts) to a keyboard shortcut, having tons of desktop options you can force by matching window or app properties, using special attributes or regexps, all of that screams "don't use default and customize me" to me, which is where KDE really shines, IMO.

<comment><USER24> I agree. It's almost customizable to the extent I'd want. Except that several things don't work because they're either not under KDE's control (shortcuts for Firefox, Chrome, Gtk apps, etc.) or its flexibility is subverted by the layering of its concept of Global Shortcuts, Application Shortcuts, and where both of those things slot into event handling along side Xorg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This could use some copyediting, OP. You make a _lot_ of typos, like 'controll' or 'powerfull' or 'simmular'. Have you tried adding Flyspell to your markdown-mode Emacs hooks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm no I didn't, but I should!

<comment><USER27> Also your comments on Ubuntu looked too emotional.

There are Linux users that love to hate something, but we those at a distance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I felt that need to change from mac to linux very recently also; it turns out, I lost plenty of time just to get the desktop environment "to work".

Used ubuntu + Unity, then switched to i3 on Ubuntu. After lots of tweaking, I found out how to get nice font rendering on i3 (default rendering is not so good when you're used to osx).

Then I went on the hunt for replacement apps for my office work : email + calendar + contacts; oh my, spent hours trying Thunderbird, Evolution, Geary (and it's new fork also), also Gnome Calendar, Thunderbird lightning and California for calendar.

In the end, I settled on Thunderbird + Gnome cal, but it felt like a compromise rather than a happy choice.

After some weeks of working with that setup, not finding emails when needed, forgetting about calendar appointments because of sync issues, I just gave up and when back to The Path Of Least Resistance for me : macos.

<comment><USER29> The whole email/calendar/contacts thing works so much better in KDE I think, however personally I have had all that stuff on google apps for business for many years now.

<comment><USER30> The sole problem with KDE PIM apps is it's using MySQL underneath and it can get dreadfully slow. Otherwise it's quite neat, though I'm fine with Evolution for now.

By the way, so many are using gapps and gsuite these days that this may not matter at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> His "Usecase OS X Linux Comment" table is interesting. My main workstation is a desktop machine I built that's running Ubuntu 14. I've been slowly stockpiling parts to build a new/bigger/better/faster desktop, and I'm going to run Ubuntu 16 on that. 90% of my work is done in the terminal, so I'd be just fine on OSX, but I can't justify paying so much for the hardware when the OS is just not that much better. My good ol' reliable 2009 PowerBook finally died and I'm not traveling with a ThinkPad Yoga 11e thing. Windows 10 has been acceptable, though the updates are just damn painful sometimes. I found MobaXterm works well for me in the way that I work. I keep thinking I really _want_ a new PowerBook, but I just don't know _why_. I know it's just not worth it. The only time I use the laptop extensively is when I travel, and the ThinkPad/Windows gets the job done just fine.

So, yeah, switching from OSX to Linux now isn't so bad. Isn't 2017 the year of "Linux On The Desktop", or was that 2016, or 2015, or 14...

<comment><USER32> FYI ThinkPads have great Linux support. Tested my X1carbon with Ubuntu 16.04LTS.

[http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki)

<comment><USER33> They also have great spy support..

[https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop- virus.html](https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just wanted to share my personal experience with Linux. I recently got a new laptop and was very salty about it because it came with SecureBoot on and Windows 10. However, with the help of some people on the Internet, I managed to figure out how to turn off SecureBoot and install Ubuntu on it. I tried various Linuxes and always keep going back to Ubuntu, might be the familiarity of it. I like Mint as well, but I miss the Unity desktop, heh. Anyways, I'm currently on Windows 10 again, but I keep switching to Linux and back to Windows because Windows bothers me, and I think soon enough I will permanently break free from the shackles of Microsoft and use Linux full time. Currently what bothers me most is that the mouse pointer is fiddly and requires some terminal commands to fix but it never "just works" as on Windows. I have a weird USB Wireless mouse, and it's old and becoming broken slowly, so I think I might fix it with a new mouse. On Linux, my most used feature is SSH, because being able to remotely control a computer with text (on a 1Mbps upload connection, RDP is too slow to use), from a phone or a laptop over 3G or something, it's amazing. And I often forget a file on my computer when I'm working on a laptop, and I can just SSH into it and transfer it with FileZilla or HTTP or whatever. It's nice. I have become much more grateful for open source and Linux in general, and much less angry and entitled. Bit rambly but it's 5AM I don't even know what I wrote...

<comment><USER35> Welcome to the Linux family!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What finally got me to switch was a tiling window manager. I hated all graphical desktops on Linux, and finally bit the bullet and installed XMonad. My productivity has increased measurably. Its the only graphical environment I can tolerate besides OS X's window manager, and I actually prefer it.

<comment><USER37> "OS X's window manager" wait what? IIRC it doesn't have any tiling support at all.

<comment><USER38> XMonad's killer feature isn't tiling, which you can even disable.

It's the multi-workspace support, that completely decouples workspaces from screens. (So you can swap them around arbitrarily.)

<comment><USER37> Ah didn't know that, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I can't tell if there's legitimately more of these articles going around, or if I'm just noticing them more because they reflect my personal desires. Like the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon when you get a new car.

<comment><USER40> Seems like there are more of them than before because of the recent disappointing Mac updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why I switched from OS-X to Linux: 1. tensorflow with GPU acceleration only works on Linux. 2\. Mac Pro is silly expensive and old, HP z440 with Haswell 8core xeon + much better GPU cost me much less than the entry level Mac Pro 3\. I can reboot into Windows and play games (on a good GPU)

I realised I liked consistency of keyboard shortcuts and replaced my work MBP15 with a X1 carbo nand realised how crazy heavy the MBP is.

Still miss Lightroom and Preview on Mac OS.

</comment><comment><USER42> I love Linux. I use it every day and have since around '98.

Recently I decided to get my teen brother, who's going into CS soon, a Linux laptop for development and a Raspberry Pi for a project we're doing together (a "magic mirror").

Instantly found desktop Linux to still be a giant pain in the ass. Ubuntu on the Pi defaulted wifi to only manual addressing, not DHCP. On top of that, set to IPv6 only as well. After digging through SO and other forums for a while we finally figured it out.

I've never had a desktop Linux experience work "out of the box". It still takes a power user to make it even half-way tolerable, and as a power user, I found it intolerable. I could see how overwhelming it was just writ plain on his face. Then realized I was making the same expressions.

Apple is definitely irritating me lately with their hardware decisions, but at the end of the day OSX is just better with desktop tasks. Hell, I'd choose Windows desktop experience over Linux, even with MS's privacy issues with Win10. Because I don't want to spend 3 hours figuring out how to turn on wifi.

<comment><USER18> I totally disagree. I've installed Ubuntu on 4-5 systems over the last 3 years, I find it exceptionally quick and easy compared to installing Windows. Obviously, I can't compare it to OS X for install because it's not possible to buy it standalone.

Additionally, if you're installing on a raspberry pi you're fundamentally at a power user level - my non-techie friends and family are nowhere near that level. If you actually install it on a desktop it's a breeze, I think your frustration stems from engaging in an activity that's fairly challenging no matter what you do. There are plenty of alternatives for your pi, but neither OS X nor Windows are among them.

I'd be more interested to hear how the linux laptop went. Did that come preinstalled? Did your brother like it?

<comment><USER42> Bad on me for mixing my frustrations with the Pi and the laptops together. I suppose just having frustrations with both in just the past few weeks added up, ha!

The laptop for him seems to be going okay as a development machine. He's definitely not using it as a daily desktop. And editor and console open is mostly what he's using it for.

It wasn't pre-installed, it was a laptop donated from my work without a hard drive. I gave it to him with a new in box HD and a bootable USB stick for his birthday in November and told him to roll with it. Eventually I had to step in and help because the install just wasn't working, we switched to a DVD install disc instead. The USB just wouldn't work.

I did the same for my daughter for Christmas, except with me doing the installation. This was going to be a desktop experience for her to use for homework and the like. Google Docs, watching YouTube videos, etc.

Sound card issues. Browsing issues. Bluetooth headphone issues. Blue or black screens with no response. Eventually I just bought her a Windows laptop and she's been productive ever since. I'm sure given time I could have corrected every issue by delving through documentation and forums, and in fact she was willing to over look all the issues and power through. But at end of the day I wanted to give her something that worked.

I love Linux for servers. But Linux for desktops still seems like a tinkerer's passion to make it work. In my own experiences it seems not that more advanced than it was a decade ago. I'm glad it works for some though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> For any Android devs out there. I built a linux beast workstation just for running Android Studio/Gradle et al. Then used NoMachine to headless into it. Kept my 2013 MBP and got a 4-5x improvement in build/deploy cycles without leaving OSX completely behind. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER44> You wouldn't happen to know where to get a decent NoMachine 3 replacement would you? I'm completely sold on the compressed/cached X forwarding that 3 offered, even if the server can only be an X11/*nix based machine. It was so fast it beat my school's on-LAN citrix server when I was remoting home through my house's DSL! I'm sad they abandoned it for more server compatibility in 4 and won't provide old 3 downloads that I could find...

<comment><USER45> NoMachine, in the Workstation version uses the exact X protocol compression of the version 3, even improved, with the same brilliant performance. Anyway the Workstation is a commercial product, so I understand some may dislike it or prefer completely "free" stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> That "usecase" table is pretty handy! I must admit that I'm enjoying all this recent spate of articles on the front-page about Linux compatible laptops and similar programs, even if they cause a bit of an adversarial comment section. :)

As [astrodust] points out, there's been great strides in making the Linux ecosystem "habitable." With more people thinking about putting in the effort to switch, I think it would be useful if we focused on the positive aspects of a free operating system and not just that you can run them on systems without a touchbar. The article mentions configurability and being able to run it on anything. I'd add zero cost and privacy. If you value those things then switching could still be worth it in the end even with other pain points.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm always surprised when these discussions happen how few people are using macOS because of Mac-only software. I'm thinking of things like BBEdit or TextMate, Messages, any of the Omni Group's titles, Automator, Final Cut, Scrivener, GarageBand, etc...

<comment><USER48> A text editor shouldnt tie someone to a platform in 2017

<comment><USER47> Why not? The text editor by itself might not be what ties you, but how that application integrates itself into the operating system might. For example, you can do some pretty cool things with Automator and BBEdit.

<comment><USER48> Im curious, like what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Uhhh this person re-wrote a text editor because TextEdit now defaults to iCloud save? Something that non-developers probably appreciate, but we may not.

Is it not known that this behavior can be disabled back to the old way with a single line command? You simply run this from Terminal:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

<comment><USER50> Actually, probably not. I'd say a majority of macOS users are unaware of that particular setting, much less that settings can updated via the command line. Thanks for posting this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I know various MacOS refugees who switched to Linux because of gaming and Apple abandoning their OS. With OpenGL stuck on 4.1 for years, and no Vulkan support in sight, they for example can't use many latest features in Wine that depend on recent OpenGL and Vulkan, while Linux has no such problems.

<comment><USER52> Wait a minute, switched to Linux because of gaming? I'm considering switching to macOS so I can play StarCraft. (That's not the only reason haha)

<comment><USER53> I have used Steam on Linux for some time, of course many games are Win only but the choice on Linux is not bad, I guess the situation has improved thanks to the introduction of SteamOS.

In addition, often you can play Win games using Wine, while on a Mac [EDIT: the following is true only if the game needs Vulkan or OpenGL > 4.1] the only way would be using bootcamp (which means you have to reboot every time you want to play).

Disclaimer: I haven't used Mac OS in recent times so I may be unaware of other solutions.

<comment><USER54> You can use Wine perfectly well on Mac, as far as I'm aware. I have used PlayOnMac (a wrapper of Wine) for Artemis Bridge Simulator and it works great. Though Wine is used more often on Linux, I think, so it may be more stable.

<comment><USER55> Wine on Mac does not support 64 bit, because OS X overwrites a CPU register that Wine requires.

<comment><USER53> I was curious about this topic so I googled a bit and it seems it's being addressed by the community, there is experimental support for some x64 applications: [http://www.wine-reviews.net/2016/04/run-64bit-wine-197-on- yo...](http://www.wine-reviews.net/2016/04/run-64bit-wine-197-on-your-mac- osx.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Sounds very similar to my story with some minor differences. I never had an Amiga/Atari ST/C64 as I simply had...nothing (friends had ST and Amigas so I got some exposure). Later on my family got a super expensive PC (first generation with CD rom, 486 DX2/66Mhz) but we had no internet access for a quite some time. Did some programming on it, learned from books I picked up in a local store because they looked exciting (that big TurboPascal book). Linux from magazine CD...completely butchered the first attempt at a multiboot install, said screw this and just installed Linux (it was a Suse). Then also had a Gentoo phase which was great for learning. Bought a G4 Powerbook eventually (don't even remember why I did that), thought the OS was horrible. Installed different Linux distributions on it (Yellow Dog, Debian) and eventually went with OpenBSD.

After that pretty much a desktop PC with different Linux distributions, have since standardized on Xubuntu. Got a MBP for my current job. Not exactly loving it but it's ok. Next laptop will very likely not be an Apple laptop. Maybe I'll just stop the little iOS stuff I'm doing completely (as it's my experience that it's fairly horrible on non-Apple products). I'll gladly take recommendations (I was thinking about maybe buying a Mac Mini the next time I get some iOS request) but that's pretty much the only reason why I'd buy Apple hardware now.

</comment><comment><USER57> I recommend Geary if you wan an experience like Mail.app. The keybindings are a lot more ergonomic than Mail.app's (C-M-a is finger-gymnastic, especially on Mac keyboards).

<comment><USER58> If you're looking for a great mail experience on Linux, I definitely recommend checking out Nylas N1. It's open source and built on ElectronJS with a beautiful UI and modern features.

[https://github.com/nylas/n1](https://github.com/nylas/n1)

[https://nylas.com/download](https://nylas.com/download)

PS: I work at Nylas. :)

<comment><USER59> What is the Nylas business model?

<comment><USER60> [https://nylas.com/pricing/](https://nylas.com/pricing/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Aside from the Terminator being better than iTerm2, he's pretty spot on :)

<comment><USER62> Same, I was surprise to see this bit ;-)

Konsole has been my daily terminal emulator since the move from GNOME {2,3} (since the removal of fallback mode which subsequently disabled compiz fusion, also breaking a lot of my long term formed habits) to KDE 4.10 (now latest plasma 5). Cannot complain.

However, there is a new GPU accelerated terminal emulator emerging - <USER2> which claims to be the fastest in the business. Looks promising (I've tried it) -> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13338592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13338592)

<comment><USER63> My issue with Alacritty is that it is attempting to be a GPU-accelerated terminal in the space that urxvt operates in (bare-bones, few configuration options, etc). One of the things I _like_ about iTerm 2 is the ability to configure so much of it (even just small things like having multiple cursor styles to choose from, and configuring cursor blinking).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Windows and OSX are pushed to consumers. Untill someone starts bundling Linux with matched hardware and markets it widely to endusers Linux will always remain a pull model. End users come to it, out of curiosity, ideology and the things it's good at - programming and systems related needs.

Its only because a lot of general use case computing is becoming browser specific and Linux desktops have made massive strides in usability that the general use case even becomes a possibility but the push factor still remains.

Poeple who are not computer centric will use what comes to them and nearly impossible to imagine a scenario where they reach to install another OS. Even developers are often not systems folks, they know how to get their programming environment going and little beyond that.

The kind of knowledge you need to really manage an OS from installing, hardware, networking, storage is specialized and unless is designed in by hardware and software vendors with support and training be it Linux, Windows or OSX becomes an uphill battle. Possible but time consuming. This knowledge is held by people who are paid to know it or are in technology software industry and unlikely to interest people who just want to use stuff and not gain an indepth knowledge of it.

</comment><comment><USER65> I just sold my 2011 13" Macbook Air and bought a Razer Blade Stealth to run Linux. Will have to write up my thoughts soon (I don't have the replacement yet)!

<comment><USER66> I'm in a similar boat. I'm replacing my 2013 13" Pro with a new XPS 13. It just came yesterday so I can't really review it at this point, but I'm impressed so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I'm a long-time Linux user, I've used Linux on a desktop for years and I started that with Slackware when I was about 15 or so.

But now I'm my late 30's, I work as a Linux Admin/DevOps/automation engineer for a living and I have more money than I have time. So time has become very important to me. Even in 2016, running Linux in a desktop is a time sink, since researching hardware and troubleshooting X, etc. other issues, selecting which variant of some basic killer app with strange names to use, all that other stuff I ENJOYED doing I now don't enjoy, because I have hobbies.

HOWEVER, I would be willing to forgo all of that, and suffer the miserable time sink of running Linux on a desktop again for one thing: Adobe support. Lightroom and sometimes Photoshop are 'killer apps' for me for photography as a hobby, and no, I'm not moving to Gimp or something else that's open source. Again, my wallet has more power than my free time is vast.

I had a Mac Pro tower years ago, the big heavy one, before the newer revisions turned it into a tiny garbage-can-shaped appliance that you can't upgrade (soldered graphics, clever). Then I've Macbook Airs, and once that new Pro came out, needless to say I had to pick other alternatives.

At the end of the day I chose a Microsoft Surface Book, because a) Microsoft is now the underdog (and this is coming from an open source, Linux guy by trade) b) the hardware is sexy, with a screen that comes off a real base with a discrete GPU and decent keyboard, turning itself into a tablet c) It runs Lightroom and Photoshop! And the pen is a nice touch.

So that's my story. I'd have a story more closely aligned to moving to Linux if I weren't hobbled by Adobe dependence. But I do say, I don't regret the (very expensive, but time-saving) Surface Book.

</comment><comment><USER68> I may be switching to Linux sooner than I expected, just because the latest Emacs for MacOSX is so broken regarding input issues.

<comment><USER69> Which version are you using? I've never found emacs in OSX to be great. When homebrew came along, it greatly simplified and improved my experience because they maintained a better version of emacs. And when I'm feeling particularly lazy, I use Aquamacs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> now that so many applications (slack/atom/spotify/signal) are built with Electron, there's tons of first class software in linux, plus with tiling window managers that are better than anything on macOS

<comment><USER63> Signal is built with Electron? I thought it was a Chrome App, not a standalone app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> A few people have made the point that the ability to switch is much easier-- both because linux has become more user friendly & their skills have evolved as well.

Linux is great. I have been coding/learning/programming for almost 3 years and there is a lot of knowledge neccessary to be productive-- in any environment. There have been a large amount of these "os x alternative posts"; and I agree with them.

Apple is alienating people like me-- not just the archetypal guru ninjas who contribute to the kernal or live in vim. I just bought a used 2011 15" macbook pro. The 2012 mbp are really the _last_ year that could be hardware updated. I have a flashdrive with bootable yosemite and a carbon copy of one of my hard drives that run Yosemite. This is because if you upgrade you can't revert to previous gens. Sometimes even when testing a beta.

I am ALL for progression, it would be AWESOME if people updated their browsers and the web could push forward-- but os x has gotten worse. El capitan & sierra are pretty bad imo and many others.

Also, the hardware is leaving a lot to be desired. Also, linux is rising, shit even Microsoft is making software for linux. Apple is barely competing in the "pro" space.

I am sure people will still decelop plenty of hq apps for iphone and macos but with Linux, Android and Microsoft making such obvious pains to win devs, this could be a mistake.

I am running 2 OS back on a 5 year old hardware and the experience is only alightly worse than when I had a 2015 maxed MBP. Also web platforms are allowing tons of greatvsoftware to be env agnostic.

I am semi sick of these posts, but there is a reason they keep topping HN. A few years ago I remeber PG even calling Apple out. He said something like, he had just unconsciously subscribed to Apples next computer, but it wasnt obvious he would anymore. They weren't keeping up.

OS X was-- and still is, pretty great. Cook is likely making the right business decision in the hub progression:

laptop is hub > cloud is hub > phone is hub

But a little more effort to ship better software and reasonable hardware would go so far. No ports, non-upgradeable, limited memory and SSD storage for f __ __ing 1600.

I can punt on a decision for 1-2 more years with current configuration but without marked improvement and inprovement v alternatives i will leave amd so will many other like me-- avg & beginner developers, designers and media(photo/video/music) pros.

Bummed.

</comment><comment><USER72> Good writeup. I made a similar switch after the new MBP announcement this year. I used windows through college (muh games), switched to linux in the 3rd year, used it for about 2 years, then bought a mac which was nice at first because of the nice unix tools while having supported software and a decent gui. 10.11/12 did me in, the OS is so much worse than it used to be, and that brought me back to linux and it has honestly been a breath of fresh air. Everything is so nice!

</comment><comment><USER73> The OSX third party app eco system is leaps and bounds what's available on Linux and that's unfortunate and really the only thing that keeps me on OSX. I switch back and forth every few years. I need 32GB of ram so I may switch again.

There of course are far more apps available in apt/yum, but the quality of them typically doesn't compare at all to what you get on OSX. What's a super simple app in nix nearly always tends to have a far higher quality OSX version that has a nice menu bar with actions available, status changes, integrations with other apps, etc.

A lot of simple third party apps that I use daily, like popclip which saves me a ton of clicks when copy/pasting, 1passwords browser extensions (you can run it in Wine but the extensions can't connect to the app), bartender, fantastical, some pomodoro app I always forget to use tend to not have nix versions or alternatives that are anywhere near the same quality and once you've gotten accustomed to using these your workflow when dumped into a raw nix desktop just plummets.

Not to mention when any new hip thing is released on github I can almost guarantee that there's going to be an OSX release readily available.

It's a chicken egg situation which sucks. There's less users so there's less incentive to port the apps.. and there we stand.

</comment><comment><USER74> Strange that iTunes was one of the reasons I switched from Linux to OSX a decade ago and now it's first on the list of applications I'd like a decent alternative to.

</comment><comment><USER75> The replacement apps list does not look very appetising though :)

</comment><comment><USER76> I'd love to switch back also. But 3 counter arguments:

1\. dtrace (I don't see systemtap improving that, and there's the unhealthy NIH syndrom)

2\. wifi reconnnection time (10x slower)

3\. power (always behind, always have to patch or recompile kernels or kernel modules. this actually broke my last linux laptop)

OS X is getting worse and worse, almost to the state of systemd. But do I want to switch over to systemd? No, hell no.

</comment><comment><USER77> Interesting.. my path is Windows -> Linux -> Mac = Happy ever after.

<comment><USER63> Interesting. My path has been Windows -> Linux -> Windows -> Mac -> Linux -> Mac -> ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> This is so illuminating. I think I'll write a blog post on why I switched from Wheaties to Corn Flakes.

</comment><comment><USER79> I got to the part where the Op says "we are creating custom Linux distributions for car manufacturers, we do UI work, we write Linux drivers, Linux middleware and so on" and thought of course you'll be running Linux. With that kind of work what else would you be using mate?

</comment><comment><USER80> I was alienated by Apple before it was cool. :P

Seriously though, it was only until last year that I decided I want to only use Ubuntu (specifically) because I did not want to switch between keybindings between my work Mac and my home PC. My work MacBook is actually much more capable than my home PC, with the retina screen/better processor/etc. However, it now sits collecting dust, only opened to watch movies and will be used as such if and when my employment terminates. I regret asking for a MacBook, thinking I was going to be doing more work within OS X.

However, my mind changed when the little things about OS X started to get to me. I work on two screens mostly (unless it is just my laptop at home.) All windows are usually full-screened. They usually consist of Emacs, Chrome and a terminal, with some side applications like Skype. I don't use any special Unity features, like the Dock, etc. and only use the graphical file browser occasionally. In this setup, OS X seemed to conflict with my desires towards this use-case. I was also getting scared that Apple's use-cases would override mine in the future, conflicting with my rather simple and stable usage requirements. Ubuntu, through the years, has been incredibly stable for me; I rarely have issues with it. When there are issues, they are usually just dumb ones. However, it was 16.04 that solidified the case for me, because it turned out to be more solid than previous versions.

A long time ago, the cracks were starting to show when I threw up my arms over OS X over compiling ruby gems. At the time, I had to always fight with it to compile ruby gems. In Ubuntu, things just worked.

My wife still wants to use OS X/macOS, running a 2010 macbook pro (that is in an advanced state of decay :)) but that's her. I wish I can just by a cheap+powerful PC laptop and stick ubuntu on it, but that's not going to happen.

To sum, to me this is about taste and tolerance. I am glad people are interested in using GNU/Linux-based distributions more. With the audience growing, I am glad to see that this can lead to more investments in the desktop Linux space.

</comment><comment><USER81> I have been Linux for a few years, OSX for a few years and now back to Linux

\- i3 is great, better than tiling WMs for OS X, including amethyst.

\- I didn't notice lack of Microsoft Office - Import to google docs and LibreOffice have been more than sufficient.

\- Gimp and inkspace are the biggest difference. Photoshop and Illustrator are much better. On the other hand, I disliked spammy "Adobe creative cloud" on Mac.

\- Installing many dev tools is easier. brew was much worse than pacman/yaourt in Arch Linux.

\- For many tools mentioned in article (mail, music, calendar) web interface have been better for me, even on Mac

\- If you want to use nice new things happening in 2016, like train deep learning models or play VR you need a PC.

</comment><comment><USER82> Procrastination isn't it? mac, linux, bsd, windows, even android or ios seem to work for some people. I have this feeling that if the trackpad quality and other osx niceties are a must have for some, they should just stick to it and move on.

\- everything sucks at some point \- it has never been easier to test before making a decision \- it is possible not to switch but to adapt and use different devices and systems \- "switching' is not an life commitment; if it sucks for you, switch back; it is not an insult to the system you chose \- when encountering issues, spend some time contributing to reports or wiki. Not a user but archlinux wiki is great.

<comment><USER83> _« "switching' is not an life commitment; if it sucks for you, switch back;»_

Switching back and forth assumes investment of time and effort, which are tradable things. We trade our time and effort for money, we are willing to pay money for things that saves us time and effort. It's kind of a big deal for some of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> > Then they introduced iCloud into TextEditor and instead of starting it and > you could instantly write, which I used often to take notes, you had to > create a file first, so every time this one extra step which I hated.

What is it with MacOS and this workflow? It's annoying enough to make me want to buy Office just so I can open an app and fiddle before I decide if and where I want to save things. Why does everything have to be in a concrete location in the filesystem before I can do anything in the office apps? I do think they fixed this for textedit though so that's nice, that'd have been annoying.

</comment><comment><USER85> As a web/app developer there's nowhere to go unless third party apps mature. The OS itself really doesn't matter.

What I feel unreplaceable, (I don't mind free or paid)

\- Sequel Pro (Windows may have HeidiSQL)

\- Source Tree (Windows one exist but not Linux.)

\- Better Touch Tools

\- Forklift / Transmit (That does dual pane file browser / sftp remote browser)

\- QR clipboard (To pass URL to phone)

\- Xcode

Web browser, email and Jetbrains stuff are available all over, so those are fine though.

It's sad and ironic that I can't recommend a good git gui client to a friend who uses Linux daily.

<comment><USER86> > Xcode

That one's going to be a hard nut to crack...

> Forklift / Transmit (That does dual pane file browser / sftp remote browser)

MC anyone? /semi-s

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> For Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Tasks you should really consider Evolution. I've switched ~2 years ago, and it's amazing. Stable, sleek, and with tons of options.

It has a bad reputation because, back in the day, it was buggy and bloated. But I haven't hit a single bug over these years, and while it eats a significant amount of memory, it's on par with other options (and these days everyone has plenty of RAM).

I'd love to see more people giving it a second chance.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've never switched to apple hardware when it was the trend, in late 2000' and stayed on pc/linux, so my apologies if this comment is naive.

I see a lot of "leaving apple" articles and comments lately. From what I gather, this is because their latest macbook is disappointing. But from what I remember, the initial reason for switching to apple was because of the incredible UX of macOSX.

Did I miss something and there also are software problems in apple world?

<comment><USER88> It's not just the MacBook, I think.

The fact that Apple machines built in the last ~4 years do not allow to upgrade RAM, for example, is a problem to me. I own a MacMini, the last version that allowed upgrading RAM, and I just went from 4GB to 16GB, and the difference in performance is significant. Next, I will replace the hard disk with an SSD. Both are impossible on more recent Macs.

Also, it appears many people feel the quality of OS X (pardon me: macOS)) is not what it used to be; Apple, I heard, is also rather slow to deliver patches for security issues other bugs.

The feeling I get, while not following Apple-related news that closely, is that they focus most of their resources on the iPhone/iOS, and OS X and Mac hardware is not really that much of a priority any more.

The UX of macOS is very nice in some points, but personally, I find it about as nice as Gnome2/Mate - some things I like better on macOS, some things I like better on Mate. And of course, this is highly subjective, and may be largely due to force of habit. (In all fairness, Gnome2/Mate seems to have taken a lot of, uh, inspiration from OS X, but still.)

<comment><USER25> Thanks krylon.

Now that you mention it, I think I've heard something in the stance of "they focus on mobile and leave desktop behind" before.

Thanks for feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> I'm loving Win10 with WSL and Mintty on my Lenovo X1 Carbon. A few glitches here and there, but the touch interface is intuitive, battery life is good, and reasonable driver support. I've also been quite happy with Linux VMs managed through Vagrant, regardless of host OS.

</comment><comment><USER90> I'm bored so here's a revision of that table:

listening to music = cmus

cutting pictures = darktable can stay

text editor = emacs or vim

audio processing = idk about this one

writing iso = nope dd is perfect

irc = erc or weechat

email = mutt or gmail website

calendar = org agenda mode (emacs)

address book = org mode table

terminal = urxvt or st

rss = idk i don't read rss

tweeting = don't

passwords = paper

don't have your don't read articles to you, either.

bonus:

browser: vimb or chromium i guess

terminal: alacritty (fewer kinks every day)

clock: xclock

<comment><USER91> Music - <USER3>

Text Editor - Sublime (nothing comes close, sorry)

Illustrator - <USER4>

Terminal - <USER5>

Passwords - <USER6>

Browser - <USER7>

All of these are available for Mac _and_ Linux. A good and simple image editor for Windows is paint.net

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> I moved from fedora linux to OSX in the last few months (free macbook). I miss fedora a lot.

</comment><comment><USER93> Instead of Ableton, you could use Bitwig which was developed my ex Ableton employees..

</comment><comment><USER94> I really don't understand why these posts keep making it to the front page.

</comment><comment><USER95> The real time audio situation can be vastly improved using a nice kxStudio tool called Cadence. It starts up Jack, session handling and bridges PulseAudio and alsa properly for most use cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> My use case is: I have a Bluetooth headset which works great with PulseAudio, if I'm on the train I use it because it has noise cancelation and I can listen to music or YouTube with it. I'd like to use it to work on my podcasts too which I do in Ardour, but once I start Ardour it wants to start jack and I haven't been able to get the Bluetooth headset to work with jack, I don't know where to start looking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> > GNOME Calendar (...) It's getting better but still lacks the day and week > view, which is really bad.

Consider using Lightning, it's a plugin for Thunderbird and it's really excellent.

</comment><comment><USER97> What office software do you need to use? I still find LibreOffice is not compatible with Microsoft Office for complex formatting. Or are you only using Latex?

<comment><USER98> Have you tried the latest version, LibreOffice 5.2.4 ?

<comment><USER97> They keep on improving, but it's not enough

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Yet another piece of proof that Linux remains a great operating system for programmers and techies.

For the rest of the world... sadly, just look at it.

</comment><comment><USER100> Is it yet possible to build an iPhone app using something like React Native on Linux? This is the only reason I'm still on a mac.

<comment><USER101> Kind of but not really: [http://www.proreactnative.com/How-to-Develop-iOS- Apps-on-Lin...](http://www.proreactnative.com/How-to-Develop-iOS-Apps-on- Linux-Using-React-Native/)) I see no reason why Apple would make it easy to develop iPhone apps on anything but MacOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> Might as well switch to Windows now. They've got a bash shell (thx Ubuntu) and have a much more polished UI.

<comment><USER27> You do not get the full Linux, just the Ubuntu user-space packages.

But once you need something advanced, you can install Ubuntu as dual-boot and you will be at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> @jeena, have you considered applying infinality patches for your freetype package, or using freetype v2.7?

</comment><comment><USER104> Great post. I'm working on migrating from OSX to Linux.

</comment><comment><USER105> hexchat isnt a good replacement for textual. There's a lot of features that textual has that hexchat is missing, even comparing to limechat

</comment><comment><USER17> I was a Windows user from 1993-1998, then when Win98 was released my new custom PC would lock up every 90 seconds, so I bought a 6" Linux bible and learned enough to get a Linux machine up and running.

Then XP came out, it was better, but still much of the same, I wanted Linux. Went back to Red Hat. Then Ubuntu came out a few years later, stuck with that, but overall Linux didn't progress much.

In 2007 I switched to Mac and stayed with the platform until summer 2015, when I sold my Macbook Pro and switched to a Lenovo Thinkpad running Win10.

Windows 10 is solid, stable and fast, but it just isn't - and will never be - a developer's OS (unless you're a .NET dev). This past summer I built a rig and was running Win10 for a while but couldn't stand it. I installed Linux Mint with Cinnamon. But Cinnamon crashed every time I logged in, no idea why, even on fresh builds (as I kept a separate /home partition).

So a week ago I ventured into the mysterious world of Hackintosh, and I am kicking myself for not doing this sooner. It's the best of both worlds, assuming you don't mind maintaining the system before/after updates to keep it running. I don't have a WiFi card/adapter nor a bluetooth one, so I obviously don't have all the functionality the platform offers but I don't care, it's plenty good enough otherwise. I even have iMessage working with no issues at all.

OS X is the only platform for me, plain and simple.

<comment><USER106> Windows 10 is solid, stable and fast. And runs my games, and Lightroom, and... And now, with Linux Subsystem for Windows, also runs the Ubuntu 14.04 userspace quite well. I've setup the dressed-down version of mintty with VcXsrv for the occasional X11 app, and to my surprise it does what it wants. Now, for most of my day-to-day development I either use Tmux or iTerm2 with tiled terminals or IntelliJ, so YMMV, but I'm actually seriously considering to have my next workstation be on Win10.

<comment><USER17> I was excited when MSFT announced WSL, I immediately started digging into it when I received the AU last summer. What killed it for me was being unable to edit the same files between WSL and Windows - I'm a CLI guy but I do like the occasional text editor to write in. So I gave up a couple months ago. I also found no way of storing ssh/ppk/pem keys anywhere for WSL.

I know it's in beta and I know many changes are coming, but I needed to start working on a real side project and needed a reliable and dependable dev environment. maybe one day we can replace CMD with bash entirely, that would be nice.

But I also need to target and test Ionic apps on iOS, so I need OS X in some capacity. I've used Phonegap Build but it's a hassle and not free, I'm just more comfy in OS X

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Linux has all of the foundation in place to be a great desktop OS, but the various user interfaces for it have all been inferior in my opinion. I've tried all of the major distro's and I've always come away thinking that the desktop UI was no where near as polished as OSX and the gap never seemed to shrink. There was this one distro I thought might have a chance, but Papyros never amount to much and seems to be in perpetual alpha. Linux has always been a function over form OS and that will probably never change, but it sure would be nice if form and function had equal billing one day.

<comment><USER84> Have you tried elementaryOS? It's very inspired by macOS and us basically a design first distro with Ubuntu upstream. I had betas on an old rubbish laptop and it was never as stable or fast as Ubuntu, but I always saw praise about it and the design is nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> My biggest peeve with OS X is HFS+ and the defaults regarding case sensitivity and folder names (They are insensitive). Having OSX for developers and Linux in prod can be a bad combo as you are sometimes led to believe that the systems are very similar... Well they are, but then at the same time they arent.

</comment><comment><USER109> Linux is fine until you need to install a graphics driver. Then you can expect a black screen and failure to boot.

<comment><USER27> Indeed. But mainstream distros won't let you go there, so it's not an issue anymore.</comment></comment>


How does HN deal with programmer's block? - <AUTHOR> I have seen guides for defeating writer's block but I don't know how to deal with programmer's blocks. Any good suggestions? <comment><USER2> Talk to your rubber duck

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging), works for design problems as well)

Move around (not slowly walking to the kitchen to fetch yet another coffee, something more energetic)

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on why you're feeling blocked. Is it because you don't know what to do next or because you just aren't enjoying writing that program?

Pair programming can help with both. When you have the social pressure of someone sitting next to you, you can build up momentum that you can hang onto even after you're back to programming alone.

</comment><comment><USER4> Assuming you mean the inability to solve a provlem...Play a few games of ping pong. Walk around outside. Talk with another coworker about the problem, from start to finish and have them question all your assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER5> I prefer to pull out my sketchbook and try to visualize/diagram the problem/challenge in (sometimes) several ways.. This always helps me get a new perspective on it.. And get some cool doodles in which is always fun.</comment>


Follow-up on EA/Origin being unavailable in Myanmar - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/5aap99/op_from_the_myanmarorigin_ban_post_here_a/ <comment><AUTHOR> Notably, an EA rep has answered here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/5a51e2/ea_games_and...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/5a51e2/ea_games_and_origin_quietly_bans_an_entire/d9e7e40/)</comment>


EBay shares lessons learned from designing site - <AUTHOR> http://archives.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/06/07/ebay.lessons.learned.idg/

<comment><USER2> The yellow to white trick was pretty clever. But it seems 8 years later that they're still struggling with usability & design. Amazon has me nailed down...I haven't gone to Ebay in ages.

And I know compete & quantcast aren't perfect, but these aren't good signs:

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ebay.com/?metric=uv>

<http://www.quantcast.com/ebay.com#traffic></comment>


Silverlight Update Aims for Greater Adoption Through Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Silverlight_Update_Aims_for_Greater_Adoption_Through_Developers

<comment><USER2> _Microsoft now claims about one in four computers have Silverlight installed._

If this is true, Microsoft is doing better than I expected.

(And I'm a .NET developer, not one of those politically opposed to Silverlight because it isn't free enough for their particular preference of free)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't believe those figures for a second. I'm usually surprised when I see SL installed on someone's system.

<comment><USER3> i have yet to view anything that makes me want to install silverlight. that's unlikely to change.

<comment><USER4> The Olympics.Streaming, high-quality, LIVE video feed. The low bandwidth quality SL content easily beat the high-bandwidth quality of Flash streams on sites like Hulu and Amazon VOD.

And that was just the beta.

<comment><USER5> "And that was just the beta."

I don't understand what you mean here. Do you think Microsoft will fund even more people to make SilverLight-exclusive content after the beta?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It simply doesn't matter if anyone has Silverlight installed or not. If you build a killer app with it, users will install it if you tell them to. How do you think Flash got so big?

<comment><USER5> Not if they can't. What's the current best selling hardware category in computing? What OS do they use? Does Microsoft provide a stable, working Silverlight plugin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe microsoft installed it itself in my xp but i will never install it by myself. They bundle it with messenger, live id, explorer toolbars or who knows what.

<comment><USER8> they bundle it with the latest Office installer (including the OSX version)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: YC Intern- Housing in San Francisco? - <AUTHOR>

I am talking with one of the Y Combinator companies about interning this summer at their San Francisco office. I'm now looking for affordable living space in the San Francisco Bay area with transportation access to downtown San Francisco.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the cheapest possible place within a reasonable distance of downtown besides Craigslist?
Are there any recommended modes of transportation to and from the city? Only one I am familiar with is BART.
Thanks for the help HN community! <comment><USER2> Interning for a YC startup? Seeing as YC doesn't really pay anybody enough to live in San Francisco, I have to imagine your best bet is going to be a cardboard box under the freeway in-between 2nd & 3rd and Harrison & Bryant.

<comment><AUTHOR> The startup has received funding following its time in Y Combinator.</comment></comment>


Schneier on Security: Halloween and the Irrational Fear of Stranger Danger - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/halloween_and_t.html

<comment><USER2> It's ironic that, while the fear-mongering is stupid, much of the advice given is actually pretty sensible.

> But instead, most Halloween articles to this day tell parents to feed > children a big meal before they go trick-or-treating, so they won't be > tempted to eat any candy before bringing it home for inspection.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Eat healthy food, so you won't be tempted to eat unhealthy food.

> Face paint so no mask will obscure a child's vision.

You know what? Wearing a mask isn't fun. Sure, it's fun for 30 seconds in the store. It's also fun for 30 seconds after you put on your costume and say, "Look at me, everyone!" But after that, yes, it obscures your vision. It makes your head hot. It pokes you relentlessly in irritating places. It itches, and it makes it difficult to scratch.

So my take on all this is that the trend away from masks (which, sadly, I think has been starting to reverse in recent years) means that a lot of kids have had more fun on Halloween then they would otherwise have.

And, by the way, masks also make photographs less interesting. "Here's my kid's Halloween costume. Yes, the kid's inside it. Trust me."

(EDIT: Yes, I know the fear-mongering is stupid. I said as much.)

<comment><USER3> It's the means, not the ends, that are being criticized here. Fear-mongering is poisonous whether or not you happen to like the end result.

Having a big healthy meal to encourage healthy eating in preference to gorging on junk food is fine; having a big healthy meal so that your kids won't touch candy before you can check it for DEADLY POISONS and RAZOR BLADES is ridiculous and promotes an irrational fear of the community in which you live.

Similarly, not wearing a mask because you don't like masks is fine; not wearing one because MASKS MIGHT KILL YOU is deeply silly and strengths the disconnect between perceived and actual likely risks.

<comment><USER2> Thus, the irony. Thus, my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was a blast from the past.

When I was a kid, not only was someone going to die from strychnine in their Pixie Stix, but the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups also probably contained razor blades and needles.

These days when I think of Halloween I just think of women in the marketing department dressed like strippers. Or are they supposed to be Lady Gaga? _shudder_

<comment><USER5> The rumors and advice in the media, as silly as they were, were better than the home-grown advice that was passed from parent to parent. Don't let your kid eat fruit -- it's too hard to to see where the razor blade went in! Tell every parent on your block to pass out sealed candies only, not candy with wrappers that can be put back on after they're taken off! (Seriously, there were parents who thought it was irresponsible for honest people to pass out Tootsie Rolls and Brach's candies on Halloween, because it made it easy for killers to pass out re-wrapped poison candy.) And, of course, there were the various numbers (all made up) about what percentage of your kid's body it was safe to paint before the kid would suffocate and die.

Contrary to current stereotypes, anybody taking their kids trick-or-treating in a car was assumed to be poor, and an uncaring parent, because they were forcing their kids to trick-or-treat in "better" neighborhoods so they would get more candy.</comment></comment>


Bulgaria testing Covid tracker wristbands - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52409893 <comment><USER2> This is another wristband kite-flying story on the BBC, I will bet good odds that these will be introduced into the UK shortly.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Recovered coronavirus patients could be given 'immunity bracelets' to ease lockdown, Matt Hancock reveals (April 3)

[https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/matt-hancock- mulls...](https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/matt-hancock-mulls- immunity-bracelets-for-recovered-coronavirus-patients)</comment></comment>


Diversity in Faces: A Dataset of Annotations of 1M Human Facial images - <AUTHOR> https://www.research.ibm.com/artificial-intelligence/trusted-ai/diversity-in-faces/ <comment><USER2> Who can agree to the terms of usages?

IBM grants Licensee a limited, revocable, nonexclusive, nontransferable license for testing, training and solely for non-commercial, non-production and research purposes to: 1) access and use the IBM Website; 2) use the IBM Research DiF Dataset; ...</comment>


Why the Sun 2 has a message "Love your country, but never trust its government" - <AUTHOR> https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-sparc2-has-the-message-love-your-country-but-never-trust-its-government/ <comment><USER2> HN hug of death, so cached version (text-only):

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why- the-sun-sparc2-has-the-message-love-your-country-but-never-trust-its- government/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

<comment><USER3> HN has a hug of death now? Man, this place is turning into reddit... _ducks_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When digging inside my Acorn Risc-PC I once found a message along the lines of "Help! We are being kept in a cellar and forced to write software!"... :-)

<comment><USER4> Okay, I checked on the details. The verbatim message was "Help! We're being held prisoner in a software factory!". Close enough! :)

<comment><USER5> A reference to this story? [https://store.bbc.com/jackanory/help-i-am-a- prisoner-in-a-to...](https://store.bbc.com/jackanory/help-i-am-a-prisoner-in- a-toothpaste-factory)

<comment><USER6> The general form of this joke apparently goes back to at least the 1950s:

[http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264228](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=264228)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With regards to the copy protection aspect, it was a pretty common practice back in the day (perhaps even still is).

In the Macintosh Classic's ROM, there were debug sequences that not only would display pictures of the development team, but write the text "STOLEN FROM APPLE COMPUTER" to the screen. [http://appletothecore.me/files/mac_se_easter_egg.php](http://appletothecore.me/files/mac_se_easter_egg.php)

<comment><USER8> That's in part because Apple was the canonical case of a company whose ROMS were stolen by cloners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oracle did something similar with the network protocol of its database driver. Not to prevent copying, but to prevent others from writing their own drivers: [http://dacut.blogspot.de/2008/03/oracle- poetry.html](http://dacut.blogspot.de/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html)

<comment><USER10> OK, is this for real ? Does everyone have to use the Oracle OCI library under the hood ?

<comment><USER11> Definitely real. I WTF'd the first time I read that poem out of a packet capture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If anyone was curious, this quote is credited to Robert A. Heinlein, a science fiction writer.

<comment><USER13> More and more it seems like trusting any large org structure is a fools errand.

<comment><USER14> > More and more

Same as always, rather.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had a fluke network tester that would put "elvis lives" in the padding of it's ping tests.

</comment><comment><USER16> > NFS ran in plaintext and used the sender's IP address for authentication

and it still does

<comment><USER17> It was much worse than that.

Back when I was a summer intern at Sun in 1987, it was common knowledge among the engineers at Sun that NFS stood for "No File Security", and the rpc mount protocol would trust the client to tell the server its host name, which the server would look up in /etc/exports to decide how much to trust it.

So if you know that Scott McNealy's workstation's name was "doober" (which it was), and it gave permission to a server named "mama", then on any workstation you could type:

% hostname mama; mount doober:/usr /mnt; hostname `hostname`

And you'd have Scott McNealy's /usr file system mounted.

This also worked over the internet!

<comment><USER18> NFS used to be one of the most popular ways to break into machines on the 1990s Internet. Leendert van Doorn wrote a CLI for NFS that was modified with a bunch of different exploits and passed around among hackers. _Everyone_ who attacked Unix systems in (say) 1995 had a copy of NFS shell.

<comment><USER19> I wrote one myself. Fun things: 'int getuid() { return 0; }' in the userland code was sufficient for authentication. And the mountd returned the root handle of the file system. When you presented that handle to nfsd it would happily serve you even when you are no longer in the exports table.

<comment><USER18> NFS also hosted one of the first widely-exploited integer overflows (not for code exec, but for privilege escalation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I may be missing something, but what is the link between the DES chip and the message being triggered? Because the message shouldn't be triggered without doing the convoluted key combination, right?

<comment><USER21> Gilmore's reply seems to be in the context of a thread that had discussed the DES chip.

<comment><USER17> It had nothing to do with the DES chip, which was optional. The phrase was in the Sun-2 boot ROMs, which John wrote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sun Microsystems Founders Panel - CHM [1].

[1]: [https://youtu.be/dkmzb904tG0?t=1h38m29s](https://youtu.be/dkmzb904tG0?t=1h38m29s)

</comment><comment><USER23> Isn't there a name for this? Poison pill? Logic bomb? Honey token?

[http://www.sans.edu/research/security- laboratory/article/log...](http://www.sans.edu/research/security- laboratory/article/log-bmb-trp-door)

<comment><USER24> Copyright trap

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry#Copyright_tra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry#Copyright_traps)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Apple does something like this as well:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579272)

</comment><comment><USER26> Ask NSA...

</comment><comment><USER27> Nor its marketing industry.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if this trap street message, which was inserted in some code initializing a DES chip, was chosen because it was rumored that NSA had backdoored DES. The article doesn't mention it, but it would be quite a coincidental choice!

<comment><USER18> The entire article explains what the string is doing there. You don't have to speculate.

<comment><USER28> The article explains that the message is a trap street; it says that Gilmore had read it and noted it years before and at he "plucked it" as the secret message.

I can't seem to find in the article the reason he plucked just that message, and why he stuffed it in the DEC routine.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER29> John Gilmore's political views are well known. And the statement was likely chosen because he felt it was inline with his own beliefs:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_%28activist%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_%28activist%29)

<comment><USER30> Whoa.

Fifth employee at Sun, wrote the first version of what became DHCP, started the EFF. What an awesome life.

<comment><USER31> He stopped by our offices last year on his way across the country and we took him out to lunch. He seemed genuinely thankful when I told him I'm an EFF supporter. Fun guy to talk to, and he's really into what the EFF is doing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some companies that make good startup videos? - <AUTHOR> I've heard of Sandwich Video (they're great), but I was wondering if anyone can recommend some other companies that provide similar services. I'd love to see some examples of their work if possible. Thanks! <comment><USER2> [https://videobumperfactory.com/](https://videobumperfactory.com/)

</comment><comment> startup-video1 [https://startup-video.com/#work](https://startup-video.com/#work)</comment>


The Interrupt-Driven Life (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/interruptdriven <comment><USER2> Wow. He must have been the worst startup employee ever. 13 half finished projects? At a startup this is worth exactly nothing.

<comment><USER3> Finishing half of the "login module" is worth about nothing.

Finishing half of "google" is worth about eighty billion dollars.

<comment><USER4> Yahoo and Altavista finished about 90% of Google, a couple years earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > This is clearly how the real big-shots "get things done".

And then he cites a movie as evidence? I think he's seriously confused about how great stuff is usually completed. I think most big-shots that you'd want to emulate do the immersion thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of working with tenured research faculty. You start out immersing for two weeks, have a 20 minute conversation, then two more weeks end loop. This process repeats itself until you've certified yourself a genius or dropped out (in finance that usually means to a consulting or worse a teaching gig) at which point other people immerse themselves thinking about your 20 minutes of wisdom.

Ed Prescott (Nobel in econ) had an office down the hall from me, and he was famous for saying things like "aggregate balance sheets matter" and much smarter people than I would spend a week trying to parse just what he meant.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if any smart people have ever tried to see how long they can get away with being meaninglessly oracular.</comment></comment>


Programmers and lawyers discuss "Solutions to the Software Patent Problem" - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121124032902769

<comment><USER2> So in summary, lawyers like software patents and software engineers don't. Nothing new.

Lawyers will never "see the shortsightedness of this policy." They will continue to dismiss complaints as "anecdotal." Lawyers stand to lose a lot more. Thousands of lawyers have built careers on software patents in the last 10 years and would have to start over at a time when there aren't many other jobs for them.

Of course in the long term this really hurts America's growth, but who will stand up for long term gain and endure short term pain? Certainly none of our elected leaders, none of whom know a thing about technology.

</comment><comment><USER3> We have always had a solution to this problem: patents on math are not allowed. Now we just need the patent office to stop giving credence to the "well it's not a patent on math because it also says 'on a computer!'" lie, and this problem will go away once and for all.</comment>


Study Finds Working from Home Increases Team Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2015/03/31/new-study-finds-telecommuting-increases-team-productivity/ <comment><USER2> I enjoyed their 10 ways you're making your employees less productive infographic. Managers must realize open offices today are distracting, increase illnesses, etc. working from home at least once a week increases my productivity by an extra day for sure. Pay me for 5 i give you 6. No brainer and my gas appreciates it.

<comment><AUTHOR> And yet my CMO just sent out a memo saying he thinks everyone is working from home too often. #sigh

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Per other articles I've seen on HN, the biggest problem now is bosses think "But you're just not in the office enough -- we need you to do office politics and be friendly." It's easier to feel like you're running a successful company if you show up at an office daily, perhaps?</comment>


Introduction to Theory of Computation [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~michiel/TheoryOfComputation/TheoryOfComputation.pdf <comment><USER2> I believe Brian Cantwell Smith should be mentioned here.

        Which leads me to say something about computing. I have repeatedly
        mentioned computation as one of the intentional sciences. Some of you will
        know that for almost 30 years I have been engaged in a foundational inquiry
        into the basic nature of computing—trying to figure out what it is, where it
        came from, what its intellectual importance is, what it augers for the future. I
        have spent 30 years, the project is largely complete ... and I have failed. Or
        rather: I have succeeded, I believe, in coming up with the answer. But the
        answer is: there's nothing there.[0]

[0]: [http://www.ageofsignificance.org/people/bcsmith/papers/smith...](http://www.ageofsignificance.org/people/bcsmith/papers/smith- godapprox4.html)

<comment><USER3> Very bracing read. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like if you want a good introductory theory text you need to focus less on everything up to (and including) decidability and get as quickly as you can to complexity theory. There are certainly a few central milestones, but to spend 200 pages and only get to P/NP seems like a crime. There are so many other topics to whet one's appetite for theoretical computer science!

Then again, this text appears to have been written for the kind of readers who have never written a proof before. So I expect this would fill a semester of puzzling over the minute details of the pumping lemma and various closure properties (but again, to what end?).

<comment><USER5> There are quite a few important insights along the way:

[http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/14811/what-is- th...](http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/14811/what-is-the- enlightenment-im-supposed-to-attain-after-studying-finite-automata)

<comment><USER4> I think very few of these are actually revealed in such an introductory course, and you can gain the same insights from other topics in complexity theory (for example PSPACE = NPSPACE).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the title I thought it would be this one:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_the_Theory_of_C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_the_Theory_of_Computation)

(It's also a good book so recommended, the part on automata is useful even for those not interested in theory, and being theory-averse myself, I didn't find it to be too dense --- although the later chapters certainly are.)

<comment><USER7> I second this. The Sipser text was one of my favorites from my university career. It's very short and covers a lot of material. There's no fluff at all, but it still manages to do a good job explaining the topics. Solid textbooks like that are very rare. It's one of only 3 books I elected to keep after the course was over (the others being an 8086 assembly language reference and an intro to computer security).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> when I took this course in college, this is what helped me get through. Guy is awesome [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyUK5RAJg1c&list=PL601FC994B...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyUK5RAJg1c&list=PL601FC994BDD963E4)

</comment><comment><USER9> It makes me sad to read the introduction and see that their course has become only an elective now. I'm sure it was replaced by some trivial course about a new fad language.

<comment><USER10> More likely more electives. Because having 1/3 of the credits be non-CS and non-Math wasn't quite enough.

 _glares at his Carleton CS degree_

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd have assumed this was Sipser's book as well, except that I was recently at a university bookstore and saw the third edition of his book priced at over $200. Sipser's a great writer, but that's an outrageous price. When I was in school, it was still expensive at a bit over $100.

I am grateful this free alternative exists, because the subject matter is really fun.

</comment><comment><USER12> Happy to see book released under Creative Commonns license. A quick glance made me think that book is heavily influenced by Sipsers book. Should have used custom LaTeX template for books ([https://www.sharelatex.com/templates/books/](https://www.sharelatex.com/templates/books/))

<comment><USER13> "The course as we teach it today has been influenced by the following two textbooks: • Introduction to the Theory of Computation (second edition), by Michael Sipser, Thomson Course Technnology, Boston, 2006."</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Consulting while bootstrapping? - <AUTHOR>

My co-founder and I are a couple of Ruby/Java coders with a broad range of expertise.  We need to pay the bills while getting our product off the ground, so we're looking at doing some contract work.
We're experienced in the IT/coding realm but n00bs at the consulting thing, so here's some questions for people who have done this before:
1.  What's the best way to start drumming up consulting gigs?  Craigslist?  Google ads?  Cold calling?
2.  What kind of rates are reasonable for a strong 2-person coding team with enterprise experience?
3.  Are there any special pitfalls for bootstrappers that we should be aware of?  We'll be trying to juggle product development with any other work that we do.  Any time management tips?  Legal things that we should watch out for?
I know we're not the only bootstrappers out there, so there's probably a lot of HNers with the same questions.  Any advice that you give will be deeply appreciated.
And if anyone needs work done on Java/Ruby integration or full-text search, shoot me an email.  :) <comment><USER2> The biggest pitfall is that you will be successful as a consultant long before your startup will make any money and the temptation to drop the startup and concentrate on full-blown consultancy will be nearly impossible to resist.

If you are going to do this be _rigorous_ from day one and set aside a number of days per week when you do not allow yourself to work on your consultancy stuff at all.

Stay away from consultancy jobs that are even remotely related to the startup you're doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's darned good advice. Right now it feels like our biggest problem is avoiding starvation, but I can see how distraction would be a bigger risk long-term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it's important to make a distinction between "doing consulting work" and "selling consulting work". I'm bootstrapping, and I'll do consulting work for clients I've worked with in the past, or with people who seek me out specifically.

There's no doubt that doing consulting work takes time from my business. However, I think it's an hour-per-hour trade-off -- overall, I haven't found that consulting work decreases my motivation.

On the other hand, selling consulting work can be stressful and exhausting; especially if you really need the money and you're not accustomed to selling. (And if you don't really need the money, then why do it at all?)

Some other thoughts:

1\. If you get bad vibes from a potential client, politely walk away.

2\. The more they pay you, the more they respect you.

3\. Your client doesn't care about your startup, nor should they need to.

</comment><comment><USER4> both are hard.. and both are full time gigs. When you're not programming, you have to some how figure out how to find customers in consulting. Then trying to program for your clients, and then programming a startup. almost impossible.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it's really hard to do this personally because you will have to hustle business as if you own a second business. if you can get a part time gig or a job somewhere making what you need to make. It'll be easier, trust me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Consultant gigs aren't very fun, but they definitely can be a great way to pay the bills while you're planning for your next big thing.

I've recently (in the last week) started offering some specific services on a few forums that I'm actively participating in, and have already pulled in a few thousand bucks. Once I get the system down pat, I'll just crank out work, and eventually have my remaining debts paid off and be ready to do my startup I've been planning, with a few month's salary in the bank just in case.

If you can offer a specific service as your consultant income rather than just "hire me for whatever you need" type stuff, you can greatly reduce the amount of effort you need to use to make the same amount of money.

<comment><USER7> Disclosure: I'm the other half of the startup. :)

Being specific sounds like great advice, but it still prompts the question as to how to advertise yourself -- should I just roll around and tell people how I can massively improve the performance of their Ruby (Rails or not) web stack, or are there some specific tactics that you've employed that work well?

<comment><USER6> Well, I was lucky enough to be an active participant at the forum I ended up announcing my service at, so I already had a reputation around my name. I make it a point to answer people's questions and really give good advice, something that a lot of people don't like to do sometimes, so when I announced my service, the trust was already there from all of the users who saw it.

Now, it is a bit of a risk to my reputation, as I need to come through on the service to make sure I make people happy. But, it's nice to be able to say "this is the service I'm offering. It costs X dollars. Take it or leave it"</comment></comment></comment>


Firefox OS Phones Available for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Firefox-Phone-OS-Developer-Mozilla,22197.html

<comment><USER2> Firefox OS is a brilliant idea. Yeah, another phone OS is an uphill battle, but the idea of wrapping the entire OS around extremely mature and hardened web technologies is just a great idea. How many of us are familiar with web development, and how many are familiar with the nuances of compiled native apps? If I have to set up another one of those horrible android dev environments just to make some small tweak of open source app, I think I'll die. Can't wait to see how the performance works out, and more widespread availability. I expect performance will be better since there's so much less between the JS and the hardware. Much better idea than an Ubuntu mobile OS. You might be thinking, oh what about the critical mass required for an app store? I don't care at all and would gladly run Firefox OS on my primary phone today as long as I have 4G. Native apps are so 3G. Web is all we need, and I'm sick up android constantly updating.</comment>


Chrome Extension store – is Google brewing another fail? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.itlater.com/chrome-extension-store-is-google-brewing-another-fail/

<comment><USER2> > _When it is time to improve and upgrade, people usually use the original > gadget cost to determine if the additional cost is reasonable._

This seems to be his entire argument: Chrome is free, so Chrome extensions are worthless. Pretty weak.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is now how much they are _worth_ but how much people will be willing to _pay_.</comment></comment>


Attacking Chrome IPC [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9579-attacking_chrome_ipc <comment><USER2> Great talk. Imho, the most interesting aspect is Neds emphasis on the length and intensity of the work, and his own attitude toward learning. Over a year of studying and hammering on the sandbox before a win presented itself.

A lot of people seem to be kept out of the field by the notion that finding these vulnerabilities can only be the result of some kind of genius

<comment> dane-pgp Yes, his story and his humility are inspiring, but I think there is a bit of survivorship bias in drawing conclusions from a talk like this, or from one person's experience.

For example, I can't imagine someone being accepted to give a talk at a security conference about how they tried for 2 years to learn C++ to find a vulnerability in Chrome, but failed to even get as far as understanding enough to change a line of code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a great talk and has some useful insight about how he got into fuzzing. I liked the part where he kind of demystified himself by making the argument that one doesn't have to be smart to do this kind of work but just has to invest a lot of time. It's a pity that the title doesn't reflect better on the actual focus of the talk.</comment>