Windows vs OSX vs Ubuntu for Ruby/Rails Development

When I first started working with Rails, I had a windows laptop and so that’s where I worked. Later I got on two different Rails projects that used OSX (on Mac minis). Now I’m using Kubuntu. I thought I’d take a minute to compare them all.

I’m not going to mince words here -- try to avoid developing in Windows if at all possible for these reasons:

  • Tests will run very slow (by a factor of 10 or more).
  • The mysql drivers are not so good (When I developed in windows, I noticed I kept losing my connection to the database during operations that took more than a second or two and I couldn’t get any of the replacement drivers to work).
  • A fair amount of the plugins will be much harder to install (we are using the Raspell gem for “did you mean” functionality which needs aspell and the windows dudes still haven’t figured out how to install it. On Ubuntu, it was a simple “aptitude install”).
  • Help online is usually not geared towards the Rails on Windows developer.
  • If you have to develop in Windows, get IntelliJ and load up Cygwin

If money is no object go for a Mac:

  • TextMate is about as good as it gets for Rails Development (It has a bunch of readily available macros and pretty darn good auto completion).
  • All the cool kids use Macs for development so there’s plenty of help online.
  • They’re very pretty and fun to use (this sounds like a lame reason but if you're going to be using something for 8 hours a day it might as well bring you some joy).
  • However, sometimes the package management on the Mac let me down. Fink and Ports and all that tend to fight it out and getting image magic installed ended up taking down the whole system (we had to wipe it -- no foolin’).

If you think Mac’s are overpriced, then go with Ubuntu (or some other linux distro).

  • It’s free!
  • It has a rockin’ package management system.
  • IntelliJ (with the Ruby plugin) is pretty darn good and I have a feeling its going to get better.

Really the choice between OSX and Linux is mostly the choice between TextMate and IntelliJ (or Eclipse/RadRails). And, for now, I think TextMate has a slight edge. TextMate’s auto complete is a joy to work with while IntelliJ’s indexing makes for crazy fast searching. In fact once IntelliJ gets a bit better (don’t let me down Jet Brains – help a brother out with some autocomplete (and maybe some refactoring support)) then it’s just a choice between a really slick operating system and merely a functional one.

Comments

Shlomo said…
Good to know. I have used linux pretty exclusively for the past 3 years with a little sprinkling of windows here and there for some .NET stuff. I think you nailed the most awesome part of linux, aside from the benefits of everything being open source is that the package management is second to none. And it is pretty darn good at everything else (unless that thing relies on proprietary code). Windoze totally works, but be prepared for just making due on lots of stuff. Mac, i have no idea, but am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt since they are unix based.
March 28, 2007 at 11:32 PM
Unknown said…
I watched a RoR related video on the IntelliJ site yesterday...looked like they had code completion support for ruby.

Maybe you need to upgrade your version of IntelliJ or something.
March 29, 2007 at 5:50 AM
Jake Scruggs said…
So the IntelliJ plugin does have some completion. If I type 'd' and hit control + spacebar I get 'def' and 'do' and 'defined?' as suggestions. But it does not suggest any variables available that start with 'd.' Also the suggestions after a '.' are almost always 'no suggestions' This is close enough to useless that I don't really bother using control + space (or the various variations).
March 31, 2007 at 11:58 AM
Anonymous said…
How do you get auto complete to work in textmate?
May 1, 2007 at 4:03 PM
Jake Scruggs said…
Escape key will do auto-complete. It's just going to recommend other words you have in the file, but it's somewhat context sensitive and surprisingly useful.
May 1, 2007 at 4:54 PM
Anonymous said…
Forget IntelliJ, netbeans ruby rocks!

http://www.netbeans.org/products/ruby/

rspec support, autotest support, fast debugging, auto-completion, etc ...
Still in alpha but quite stable and new features every day!
September 11, 2007 at 8:10 AM
TechSaint said…
I will have to agree, rails support in Netbeans has really been nothing short of herculean. The only problems I seem to have are when you add anything other than the Main API (other gems and rdocs), code complete doesnt seem to work well. But for standard ruby and standard rail libraries, it works great. It even has doc snippets during code completion.

Its also platform agnostic (built in java), so it works on a Mac/Windows/Linux/etc. And its pretty fast to boot because you can just download the IDE with rails support and nix the java, c++, and other libraries.

Thanks for the Info. I do a bit of Windows Development too, so I have been looking into moving to Ubuntu and then using VirtualBox (or VMWare if i can afford it) Virtual machines to run Vista/XP for any windows development needs.
December 13, 2007 at 11:30 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's a Good Flog Score?

I've been using Flog to measure the complexity of my Ruby code and I was wondering how others interpret Flog numbers. I'll go first with my opinions: Score of Means 0-10 Awesome 11-20 Good enough 21-40 Might need refactoring 41-60 Possible to justify 61-100 Danger 100-200 Whoop, whoop, whoop 200 + Someone please think of the children (note: these are scores for an individual method) The 20 - 60 range is interesting to me. Sometimes the complexity of what you're doing will justify the score and other times the method is in desperate need of refactoring. The highest Flog score I've seen in the wild was in the 300's. What's you're personal high and what do you think of my rankings? In other news, I've redesigned the look of my blog so if you only see my post through a reader you might want to stop on by, take a look, and tell me what you think.
Read more

SICP Wasn’t Written for You

The number of software luminaries who sing the praises of “ Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs ” (referred to as SICP) is such a long list that you might think only a crazy person would take issue with it. However, to ignore SICP’s problems and continue to blindly recommend it seems just as crazy. SICP was the textbook for MIT’s introductory programming class and was a bit of a departure from other into to computer science textbooks at the time.  Wikipedia sums it up nicely:  “Before SICP, the introductory courses were almost always filled with learning the details of some programming language, while SICP focuses on finding general patterns from specific problems and building software tools that embody each pattern.”  Which sounds awesome, but does essentially say that abstract principles will be introduced before the nuts and bolts of a language.  If you think about that for a minute, you may see where the problems will be. When I was training to be a teacher I took a b
Read more

Point Inside a Polygon in Ruby

Recently my team needed to find out if a point was inside a given polygon and, as usual, we found some code on the internet that did what we wanted. And, as usual, there wasn't much explanation as to what it was doing. Here's the code (after we converted it to Ruby): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 def contains_point? (point) c = false i = -1 j = self .size - 1 while (i += 1 ) < self .size if (( self [i].y <= point.y && point.y < self [j].y) || ( self [j].y <= point.y && point.y < self [i].y)) if (point.x < ( self [j].x - self [i].x) * (point.y - self [i].y) / ( self [j].y - self [i].y) + self [i].x) c = !c end end j = i end return c end end So, you know, it works and I'm grateful to somebody for posting it but we had no idea how it works. So we wrapped 2 tests around it (one where the point is not in the polygon and another where it is
Read more