I use Linux on my Sony Vaio Z23A4R laptop, and here is why: because no other OS works well enough for me.
First, here is why not Mac OS X on a Macbook.
I live and work in Russia. During my work (and sometimes this includes "at home"), I have to read and write e-mail, write network-related software in Python and C, debug it (this includes looking at IP packet traces), review patches, package it for Debian and then deploy to our production servers. These activities involve a lot of ssh, so a good terminal emulator is necessary. Due to the general Russian cultural habit of using Norton Commander workalikes, I often run Midnight Commander on remote servers. However, the default Terminal app built into Mac OS X eats all functional keys (such as "F3" to view a file, or "F10" to quit), making mc nearly useless. This is probably solvable by installing a different terminal emulator.
And for examiling packet traces, Wireshark is the king. Unfortunately, the official package sucks terribly (possibly due to the general GTK+ suckage on Mac OS X). It takes several minutes to start up due to the "fc-cache" process. Then, I need to open the capture file and filter it. In order to filter, I need to type some expression like "tcp.port eq 3128", which has Latin letters in the middle. But I can't! If the Russian locale is configured on Mac OS X (and I need that), GTK+ allows only input of Cyrillic letters, completely ignoring the system-wide cmd+space shortcut that switches between Latin and Cyrillic layouts. That's a deal-breaker. Under Windows and Linux, there is no such bug.
And now here is why not Windows.
This laptop has a 1920x1080 13.3" wide-gamut screen. So, in order to get a reasonable font size, the zoom factor needs to be set to 150% (or 144 dpi). And to get reasonable colors for photos (well, not required for work, but still nice), color correction has to be applied. Unfortunately, when the font scale is set to anything >= 120 dpi, Windows renders all applications that don't explicitly declare support for such high-resolution displays (i.e. almost all applications - including Chrome and Adobe Reader) into bitmaps, and upscales these bitmaps. And it doesn't have built-in full-screen color correction. So the whole benefit of having a good laptop screen is wasted. Linux, on the other hand, has no big problem with 144 dpi (especially good are GTK+ based apps), and has two window managers with working color-correction: Compiz 0.8.x (with CompICC) and KWin.
So, currently, Linux is by far the best choice of the OS on this laptop for this kind of work.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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The arguments also work the other way round
Date: 2014-05-20 04:06 pm (UTC)First, here is why not Mac OS X on a Macbook.
I live and work in Russia. During my work (and sometimes this includes "at home"), I have to read and write e-mail, write network-related software in Python and C, debug it (this includes looking at IP packet traces), review patches, package it for Debian and then deploy to our production servers. These activities involve a lot of ssh, so a good terminal emulator is necessary. Due to the general Russian cultural habit of using Norton Commander workalikes, I often run Midnight Commander on remote servers. However, the default Terminal app built into Mac OS X eats all functional keys (such as "F3" to view a file, or "F10" to quit), making mc nearly useless. This is probably solvable by installing a different terminal emulator.
And for examiling packet traces, Wireshark is the king. Unfortunately, the official package sucks terribly (possibly due to the general GTK+ suckage on Mac OS X). It takes several minutes to start up due to the "fc-cache" process. Then, I need to open the capture file and filter it. In order to filter, I need to type some expression like "tcp.port eq 3128", which has Latin letters in the middle. But I can't! If the Russian locale is configured on Mac OS X (and I need that), GTK+ allows only input of Cyrillic letters, completely ignoring the system-wide cmd+space shortcut that switches between Latin and Cyrillic layouts. That's a deal-breaker. Under Windows and Linux, there is no such bug.
And now here is why not Windows.
This laptop has a 1920x1080 13.3" wide-gamut screen. So, in order to get a reasonable font size, the zoom factor needs to be set to 150% (or 144 dpi). And to get reasonable colors for photos (well, not required for work, but still nice), color correction has to be applied. Unfortunately, when the font scale is set to anything >= 120 dpi, Windows renders all applications that don't explicitly declare support for such high-resolution displays (i.e. almost all applications - including Chrome and Adobe Reader) into bitmaps, and upscales these bitmaps. And it doesn't have built-in full-screen color correction. So the whole benefit of having a good laptop screen is wasted. Linux, on the other hand, has no big problem with 144 dpi (especially good are GTK+ based apps), and has two window managers with working color-correction: Compiz 0.8.x (with CompICC) and KWin.
So, currently, Linux is by far the best choice of the OS on this laptop for this kind of work.
-- Alexander E. Patrakov