Slashdot Mirror
2-Year Study Shows Mac Users Downloading More Open Source Software
AmyVernon writes "We combed through about two years' worth of data on SourceForge, looking at the platforms of the users who downloaded projects, and millions more Mac users are downloading open source projects now than were in February 2010. In the same time, Windows downloads have increased by a much smaller percentage and Linux downloads have actually declined." I wonder how much of this last part can be chalked up to the ever-better download infrastructure that the various Linux distros have. (Note: SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of Geeknet.)
If it's because more *iux developers have moved to Mac, especially on laptops. 10 years ago I knew more "switchers" who switched from Linux to MacOSX for development including myself. Mainly because all the hardware worked and I had the same software stack for the projects I was working on even if the final deployment would be to linux servers.
Every year since I've watched the number of developers using macs increase at conferences so much so that in the past couple years non-mac laptop users really stood out at the three conferences I attend every year.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Also a long time Linux user, I jumped onto the Mac bandwagon as my full time platform in 2005. Best personal computing decision I ever made. On the one hand, Apples default applications are remarkable (Garageband\iMovie anybody?) I also use textedit like crazy. For me the single most important piece of default software has been X windows. If you are running it on Linux I can almost certainly run it on my Mac. I use GIMP frequently. OS X comes with GCC, apache, etc... I also like that I don't really ever have to minimize anything since tiling a bazzion windows on a Mac really is very effective. Then there is built in system wide spell check. Did I mention spotlight? I could go on and on.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
It's not a popular idea around here, but among my hard-core geek tech industry friends, there are several who used to use Linux as their primary OS who then got a Mac. Many still run both Linux and Windows virtualized, but still tend to boot into OSX.
A lot of geeks just hated Microsoft and were not necessarily huge fans of Linux on the desktop. Once Apple went to Unix, and to Intel, and started making nice laptops, it was an appealing option. Other geeks like open source but also still find Linux frustrating with dependency hell or config file editing or lack of some piece of software functionality, and just want an out-of-the-box OS that they feel they can spend less time messing around with so they can spend more time messing around with their code. [Obviously a contentious topic around here, but in my limited experience I have spent relatively less time troubleshooting configuration on OSX than Linux. Yes, yes, OSX supports a limited set of hardware and Linux tries to support everything, but that doesn't change the time commitment to making your stuff work.]
There are also developer geeks who, until Lion (which allows virtualization), practically had to buy a Mac because they wanted to test their software under Windows, Linux, and OSX, on one machine. So it had to be a Mac virtualizing the other two.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Same here. It's been a long time since I had to "go searching" for an app that wasn't already in the distro's collection. And it's been a good deal longer since I last downloaded something from Sourceforge. The only thing that even comes to mind is iscan which I need for my Epson scanner, and it's not hosted on sourceforge.
In any case, I'm glad to see the uptick in Apple downloads, though I suspect that's more a reflection of Linux geeks choosing Apple hardware, rather than the other way around. I don't have a laptop at the moment, But my last laptop was an iBook, and the the next one will probably be an iMac-Pro... because I know that Apple has good, solid hardware, and because the hardware is so tightly controlled, I know that it's easy to write for. If I get an Asus notebook, it's a crap-shoot for which chipset, which graphics chip, etc..
I'll gladly bet a beer that any decent Linux distro will boot "out of the box" on Apple hardware. But I'd be cautious about that bet on some random confabulation of "commodity-PC" hardware.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
There has been a shift toward Debian-based derivatives such as Ubuntu. Historically at least, Debian repos were bigger and didn't require going outside the manager to download an RPM/tgz as much. RPM distros also seemed to be more fragmented into incompatible subgroups, while Ubuntu and several others stay close enough to their parent that simple packages (the bulk of long-tail software) can be exchanged. Things are much closer than they used to be, but if you gather a lot of data you might still see a statistical difference.
I've been saying this for a while... Mac gets access to open source products shortly after Linux gets them and much before the project is ported to Windows.With the ability to run Windows by Boot Camp, VMWare Fusion or Paralells Desktop a Mac user gets access to all the Windows-only stuff and you can't forget the number of applications dedicated to Mac use. In total, it all just works.
The last time I tried to use mac ports (last year?), it didn't work, the site was down or something. And I tried more than once over a period of time. Gave up.
;).
FWIW at work I use Windows for desktop stuff, Linux and Windows for server stuff. And OS X for testing some OS X client stuff.
Many prefer OS X. That's fine with me. OS X doesn't suit the way I work. I typically have 30+ task buttons on my Windows taskbar. OS X's Expose would just be slower for me - would take more steps to switch from one window to a specific window. Yes it does it more stylishly, but no thanks
I'm not surprised if many OSS developers/users are using Macs. The "Desktop Linux" developers often seem like they're sabotaging "Desktop Linux" with PulseAudio and other crap. To those who will reply "It Works For Me", hey the rest of the world says Windows and OS X works for them, and OS X's market share has grown way more than Desktop Linux has in a shorter space of time.
I get the impression that Desktop Linux users are having to switch distros every few years just to have something that works not too crappily.
I find many of these posts very interesting... especially the number of developers getting Macs. I was one of them myself at one point. But I find what intrigues me most is wondering about their histories and past experiences with the os's.
:) ), while I contemplated my situation. Replace the $300 screen on this 'aging' laptop (wow technology moves fast), replace it with a new one (I find just about every laptop I
I am currently 99.999% linux, only using Windows or Mac when testing sites or software. But that's not how things began...
I am currently 32. I like many my age, but not all, had grown up with the Apple II's in my elementary school. My earliest memory of such events was being the 'printer expert' in 2nd grade. When anything went wrong with it, I was asked to fix it. I was an Apple fan, amazed at what I could do with this yellowing grey box on the desk. At one point my father came home with an Apple IIgs which just expanded on my experiences, buying my first modem and connecting to the world via the BBS's around at the time. My first email address was through one of these boards. We later got a Macintosh, I forget the model, but it had all sorts of multimedia capabilities. In high school, I bought my first PC from a friend. He gave me MS DOS 6.22 to use, and later Windows 3.11. I found it all very interesting, and learned quite a bit about the OS after formatting and reinstalling it so many times. Maybe a year later, I found out about Linux from another friend at school. He was very passionate about it which made me so curious about this relatively unknown OS. My first time installing Linux was very painful, but I was determined. Through Windows, downloading a handful of disk images, and then rebooting and loading what I downloaded onto a second partition. After a few times going back and forth, I had enough of the system installed, that I could get myself online through Linux and continue installing the packages there. Compiling the kernel I don't know how many times to get this or that working. Finally the full installation setup with X a week after I had began. From that point on, I had strived to use Linux as my main system. Only problem was I liked using laptops. It took a very long time for Linux to become viable in this arena. I switched from various versions of windows to linux and back again for many, many years. I could never switch fully over for one reason or another. Quite often it was due to lack of software for some task. I keep trying, though I often had a second system setup as a Linux server for various network related tasks. Fast forward to about 4 years ago, I got my first Macintosh since way back. A Macbook Pro with the intel processor. I got Parallels and was able to still do my Windows stuff and play with Linux when I wanted to. 2 years later, I had my motherboard replaced because of the NVIDIA issue. It was at that point that I felt incredibly vulnerable if my system had actually gone down. Was I going to drop another $2,000 on a new Mac replacement if something went wrong? All my software was Mac-only! I had backed myself up against a wall. I began looking for multi-platform open-source free software to replace all of the OSX-only programs I was using. 6 months later I did a full backup of my system in-case anything went wrong during the transition, and leapt back into the Linux community wiping my Mac and installing a recent edition of a Linux distribution. Only a few stumbling blocks since the Macs were just starting to get support, but I had made the switch. One year later, the screen on my MacBook went bad, an internal crack that would cost about $300 for me to replace it myself, more if I had someone else do it. Typing blind, since the screen was completely unreadable, I got myself to another tty console and installed ssh using apt-get. I can't believe it wasn't on there, but now it's one of the first things I do. I was able to access everything on my computer now from my fiancée's laptop, which I had recently switched to Linux (she loves it!