I tried learning Ruby on Rails on Windows 7. It mostly worked, until it didn't. When I asked others around for help, and it became clear I'd done some newb thing to generate an un-google-able error, I was on my own. No one I knew developed on Windows. After being stuck enough times with maybe-Windows-specific errors, I decided I need a Mac.
Some gems reference Posix specific things. And your Gemfile.lock may include the platform upon which Bundler was run, be it Windows or Posix, and that can be a problem when trying to install gems on a different platform. And some nice utilities, such as Ruby version managers, don't work on Windows.
In a world where you want to be able to develop for anything from a single machine, Mac is your only option. e.g. If any of the courses offer iOS, they'll need Macs. The machine can boot, or run VMs for other OSes but you can't boot OSX (legally?) on anything else.
Opinions
I don't like the UI, looks like ubuntu, the finder is probably one of the worst designed ever file manager (no parent folder, need to enable hidden files display in the terminal) , some coreutils works differently (like sed), some basic windows management is missing (always on top, windows resizing). At each new version, tools like valgrind are broken for some times. You can't set keyboard shortcut easily, and need admin rights to do so. Still better than windows to work thanks to the unix base.
Lots of students buy MacBook to have an unified experience when working at home, because there are little differences with dirent/stat/xattr/acl, and "it just works (tm)".
I prefer spending 1 or 2 hours settings something to work how I expect it to do than an inconvenient pre-set software.
The hw has issue too, there are turned on 24/7, there are screen burn after some times (like old CRT), and the down left angle of the screen are burned (mostly visible on white, it's dark like something behind the glass burned it). We're using an old magic mouse which is a joke (can't right click without removing the left finger of the mouse, the 360 mouse wheel never works, need a mouse-pad to work, and doesn't work on white).
/Opinions
I must agree. But you gotta agree that software in mac is much more user friendly and professional than those in windows and Linux. This is not and advantage of the mac per se, but it's just what it is. I recently got me mac os x and I'm astonished by the quantity and quality of software you can find, things I didn't even imagine were invented. Finder aside, mac's UI is pretty damn straight forward and fucking beautiful. (compared to Linux and windows)
Objectively, you can do anything on OSX that you could do on Linux plus you can do the Apple stuff. But because Apple intentionally prevents using their stuff anywhere else, they can suck eggs.
I don't... Apple is really stubborn about selling their own hardware with every copy of their OS... no thanks, my hardware is fine. And as a matter of fact, my Linux is great too.
Comments
it's great, except the Macs
I tried learning Ruby on Rails on Windows 7. It mostly worked, until it didn't. When I asked others around for help, and it became clear I'd done some newb thing to generate an un-google-able error, I was on my own. No one I knew developed on Windows. After being stuck enough times with maybe-Windows-specific errors, I decided I need a Mac.
I don't understand how it could be a problem to do RoR in windows?
Some gems reference Posix specific things. And your Gemfile.lock may include the platform upon which Bundler was run, be it Windows or Posix, and that can be a problem when trying to install gems on a different platform. And some nice utilities, such as Ruby version managers, don't work on Windows.
Window 10 Anniversary update has bash shell based on Ubuntu 14.06 integrated in Windows. I ran it from Parallels VM on my Mac and it works well.
In a world where you want to be able to develop for anything from a single machine, Mac is your only option. e.g. If any of the courses offer iOS, they'll need Macs. The machine can boot, or run VMs for other OSes but you can't boot OSX (legally?) on anything else.
Do you think mac is better than Linux?
Opinions I don't like the UI, looks like ubuntu, the finder is probably one of the worst designed ever file manager (no parent folder, need to enable hidden files display in the terminal) , some coreutils works differently (like sed), some basic windows management is missing (always on top, windows resizing). At each new version, tools like valgrind are broken for some times. You can't set keyboard shortcut easily, and need admin rights to do so. Still better than windows to work thanks to the unix base. Lots of students buy MacBook to have an unified experience when working at home, because there are little differences with dirent/stat/xattr/acl, and "it just works (tm)". I prefer spending 1 or 2 hours settings something to work how I expect it to do than an inconvenient pre-set software. The hw has issue too, there are turned on 24/7, there are screen burn after some times (like old CRT), and the down left angle of the screen are burned (mostly visible on white, it's dark like something behind the glass burned it). We're using an old magic mouse which is a joke (can't right click without removing the left finger of the mouse, the 360 mouse wheel never works, need a mouse-pad to work, and doesn't work on white). /Opinions
I must agree. But you gotta agree that software in mac is much more user friendly and professional than those in windows and Linux. This is not and advantage of the mac per se, but it's just what it is. I recently got me mac os x and I'm astonished by the quantity and quality of software you can find, things I didn't even imagine were invented. Finder aside, mac's UI is pretty damn straight forward and fucking beautiful. (compared to Linux and windows)
Objectively, you can do anything on OSX that you could do on Linux plus you can do the Apple stuff. But because Apple intentionally prevents using their stuff anywhere else, they can suck eggs.
I don't... Apple is really stubborn about selling their own hardware with every copy of their OS... no thanks, my hardware is fine. And as a matter of fact, my Linux is great too.