Mac computers for programmers?

I temporarily switched to an Apple Mac laptop, but after about two years I switched back to Linux. Here's why.

My original reasoning was that Macs support all the Unix goodness I value for programming, and furthermore they have better shell features such as network configuration and file managers. True, they have a higher price, and they are closed source, but it's worth spending money on good tools, and I don't plan to hack the kernel or the graphics engine, right? After a long sequence of individual observations, I came to realize this summation is not very accurate.

Software support. The software support can be summed up as: everything I need is available on Macs, none of it works better, some of it works worse, and a lot of it needs to be installed manually. In detail:

• The X server is crashy. I lost a lot of time trying to make X apps work decently, but they just don't.
  
• Eclipse works identically to Linux.
  
• Java works identically, though for the longest time they were stuck at version 1.5 when the rest of the world was using 1.6.
  
• There's no Debian or Ubuntu, but there is Fink. Fink has several essential packages, most importantly Latex. However, it's an order of magnitude smaller than the Linux distributions it mimicks. I like software distributions. They provide a great way for software developers to help each other. With Apple, you get what Apple gives you and the third-party market is much skimpier.
  
• Gnu Emacs works fine. I experimented with Aquamacs for a long time, to try and do better than on Linux, but I found it had a lot of quirky problems.
  
• Scripts work just like in Linux.
  
• Scala and Scheme Shell work fine.
  
• I tried the built-in calender, email, and contacts support. Ultimately I switched to Google equivalents, however, which are much better.
  
• The built-in word processor and spreadsheet are just OpenOffice, the same as on Linux.
  

Operating system shell. Apple is famed as building great user interfaces. I'm coming to ask why that is, though. Sometimes they make something easy, and sometimes they make it impossible and then try to pretend like you'd never want to do it. It's as if they optimized for demos and didn't do any user studies. Over time, I found myselef replacing one chunk of the shell after another. Specifically:

• Display management I will concede: it works great on a Mac. If I unplug an external monitor in a Mac, the display mode readjusts to display just on the built-in monitor. If I unplug an external monitor on Linux, it stays in that state, and it can be really difficult to get the display fixed back up.
  
• Suspending to disk and to ram is about the same on both. I've had times where my Mac wouldn't resume, and I've had times when resuming a suspend-to-ram took longer than fully booting a Linux machine from scratch.
  
• VPN software works better on Linux, in my experience. The Internet was developed on ancestors of Linux, so it has good networking in its genes.
  
• The file manager on Linux is superior. I pulled my hair out trying to find a way to manipulate archive files (tar, zip, jar) with the Mac finder. There's nothing built in for it on a Mac, and I tried 2-3 extensions but none of them worked well. They act like archive files don't exist.
  
• The default terminal program on a Mac is terrible. There's a decent replacement named iTerm, and iTerm is about par with gnome-terminal.
  
• The window manager doesn't do multiple desktops. I hear there are extensions for that, but I never braved trying one.
  
• The window manager shifts focus at the granularity of an application, and it has a notion of "application" that is terrible for programmers. If you click on any terminal window, they all come forward. If you click on any browser window, they all come forward. Likewise for hiding: you hide one terminal, they all go away. In general, the window manager is optimized for the way a graphics designer or an audio engineer works: 3-4 apps at a time at the most. When I program, I have 3-4 browser windows and 3-4 terminal windows, each with their own tabs internally.
  
• The app launcher bar is okay, but I prefer how the Gnome launcher has a row of mini-icons plus a nice hierarchical menu of the whole system's software. I have tons of software installed, so a row of gigantic icons doesn't work.
  
• Selecting wifi networks works well, but then it also does on Linux nowadays.
  
• Network sharing is better on Macs. I use network sharing on a laptop maybe once a year, but when I do, it's easier on a Mac. On Linux, I have to install some extra software, pray my wifi driver has AP Mode, and read some docs on how to configure it all.
  

I would sum up the system software as sometimes much better and often much worse. Several aspects that work great out of the box on Linux, I have to install upgrades on a Mac to match it.

When I add up all the above individual things, I notice that there is hardly anything I particularly like about Macs, and there is quite a lot where I have to replace things to get it up to par. The applications I use aren't any better, and are sometimes worse. Surprisingly, the system software isn't particularly good, either. I vastly prefer Ubuntu to Fink -- it's just a larger, richer community. Also, while I don't hack the kernal or graphics software myself, it is nice to be able to apply patches that third-party people have written.

Macs are good computers for programmers, to be sure, but I'd still give Linux the edge.

"Free" as in not really

Apple is apparently going to start rejecting GPL apps, but the reason isn't what I expected.

The sticking point was that the App Store's terms of service says that a piece of software downloaded from the store can only be used on five devices. But the FSF said that the terms of service impose numerous legal restrictions on the use and distribution of GNU Go that are forbidden by GPLv2 section 6:

So, the FSF is considering it not redistributable enough that an application is available for free via the iPhone store. The quibble is something about, the receiver of the software should be able to further redistribute the code for free, versus telling people that they can download it themselves from the app store.

In general, the GNU license isn't all that "free" in any common definition of the word. It seems pretty darned free to me if anyone who has an iPhone at all is able to download the software, run it all they like, and even go grab the source code. It's hard for me to see this as anything other than the FSF trying to get negotiating leverage and make itself more important. The problem is, their efforts to gain power are involving steps that are against their mission. To promote free software, they're seeking power, and to seek power, they're blocking the distribution of free software.

Open source is not for everyone. However, if you really want to give away software, it seems to me it should be given away in some simple, intuitive way. Either public domain it, or, if that seems too radical, use a clearly free license such as the MIT license.

Meta-platforms make bad apps?

John Gruber has a claim that Steve Jobs appears to endorse.

I can see two arguments here. On the one side, this rule should be good for quality. Cross-platform software toolkits have never — ever — produced top-notch native apps for Apple platforms. Not for the classic Mac OS, not for Mac OS X, and not for iPhone OS. Such apps generally have been downright crummy. On the other hand, perhaps iPhone users will be missing out on good apps that would have been released if not for this rule, but won’t now. I don’t think iPhone OS users are going to miss the sort of apps these cross-platform toolkits produce, though.

I used to believe this. I thought about Tcl/Tk apps, which are always fumbly and unpolished, versus native Apple and Windows apps, which at least sometimes have slick UIs. Thereofore, cross-platform toolkits are bad. It was a hasty generalization, however. Applications based on web frameworks, Java, or .Net are much better than those based on Tcl/Tk. They look just as good as native apps, and they fit the native look and feel just fine. Thus it comes down to an issue of functionality, and on functionality the native apps don't compete very well.

I spent a couple of years recently trying to use a Mac laptop and live the Apple dream of everything being compatible with everything. One by one, I grudgingly stopped using almost all of the native Apple software in favor of cross-platform software. Specifically:

• Mail, contacts, and calendar form a trio that take good advantage of interop. However, the mail program can't thread, which I ultimately admitted is a show stopper for anyone participating on mailing lists. The calender program is okay, but I can't share events on it with other people, which again is a really important bit of functionality. I switched to web-based versions of both of these, after which the built-in contacts program had nothing to interoperate with. Thus I switched to a web-based contacts solution as well.
  
• For editing documents, I tried to love the built-in NeoOffice. It's not really any better than stock builds of OpenOffice, though. Ultimately I stopped using OpenOffice, because there's no good problem for it to solve. For simple documents I used web-based tools, with their improved sharing and publishing affordances. For documents where I work harder, I use Latex.
  
• For software development in Java, Intellij, Netbeans, and Eclipse are the heavy hitters. There wasn't even a native app for me to try. Apple supplies XCode, but I never really tried it. I'm not sure it even supports Java at all.
  
• For all other software development, Emacs is so good I never even considered an alternative.
  
• For web browsing, I initially tried to like Safari, and it's pretty good. However, I ended up wanting to use Firefox for a lot of things, for reasons I can't remember now. Ultimately, I ended up using Chrome.
  
• For command-line access, I initially used the built-in Apple terminal program. I later switched to a different Apple-specific program called iTerm.
  

As can be seen, in almost every case, the best of breed software for Mac Laptop is built on a meta-platform--exactly the kind of meta-platform Jobs is banning from iPhones. Good thing he hasn't done so for Apple laptops, or they'd instantly become third-rate for working professionals! The native apps are okay for very basic usage, and they are sometimes prettier, but they're woefully underpowered once you try to do anything with them.

This emperor has no clothes. Anyone who currently believes that native Apple-specific software is better, ask yourself: what software do you use day to day? Is Apple-specific software really any better, or is it just cutesy demoware that is good enough if the main thing you do with a computer is show it to people?

I'm checking out of that game. If you use your computer to get work done, then you need good application software, not just a good OS. For that, you want a large pool of candidate software to draw from.