Sunday, May 27, 2007

Which OS for Ruby on Rails development?

I recently acquired a second hand laptop to allow me to play more with Ruby on Rails without ignoring the family - I spend over an hour a day on trains, so it makes sense to do more than just read during that time.

“My first instinct was to whip out the spare Windows XP Pro CD”
My first instinct was to whip out the spare Windows XP Pro CD I've got at home, but then I figured I should really poke around and see what others had to say about developing on Linux. ThoughtWorker Jake Scruggs has an interesting post comparing Windows vs OSX vs Ubuntu for Ruby/Rails Development. He makes some good points and basically kiboshed the idea of using Windows:
“I’m not going to mince words here -- try to avoid developing in Windows if at all possible ...”
Now most Rails developers I know of use Apple Macs running OSX; for example that was by far the most common laptop at the Ruby on Rails Oceania meeting I attended recently. So it was unsurprising to have Jake sing its praises, especially using TextMate, however I was surprised by this summation:
“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.”
I've been using RadRails for Windows, so this got me interested. A couple of weeks later and I've settled in to using RadRails on Xubuntu 7.0.4 (Feisty Fawn).

Xubuntu is my first real attempt at personally using a Linux distribution as a primary desktop OS. I've had experience using Linux servers (no GUIs), so I figured I could always drop back to the command line if something broke and I've had to once or twice during installations. But overall I have been pleasantly surprised at how civil an experience it has been.

“But overall I have been pleasantly surprised at how civil an experience it has been.”
My main hurdle was getting the new Aptana + Rails IDE setup. That proved to be difficult, with few helpful instructions online. At the end of the day I fell back to the tried and true RadRails 0.7.2 release.

One of the nice things is that with Xubuntu I can run MySQL server, a WebBRICK web server, RadRails, a PDF viewer (with AWDWR open) and Firefox without using more than half of my 512 MB RAM and only occasionally pushing the 1.8 GHz CPU above 25%.

The hardest thing to get used to is the compartmentalisation of functionality between applications. Sometimes that's a minor delay as I find where I need to do something, like the hassle I go through to change my desktop, screensaver and power settings. It's one application in Windows, but three (or four!) in Linux. Other times it's a royal pain, for example when I find that I haven't (yet) installed the right application to do something - but it's not clear what I should install to fix the issue.

My recommendation? The Windows experience is a great one if you have background in it, the Linux one is smoother in some ways (installing gems, finding online help) but in other ways (application interoperability) is more jarring. I am enjoying the experience of Xubuntu on my little old laptop, but I would hesitate before setting up my main work machine the same way.

I have no opinion on the OSX option, but my experiences with Apple Macs have not been universally wonderful - others have compared OSX and Windows XP more graphically and with greater detail than I ever will ...

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous12:35 pm

    I run Xubuntu on my development computer. I want to try out Ruby on rails, but I have to make sure I can get it on my live server first. Server uses WHM/cPanel, so I need to figure that one out yet.

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