From: zdennis <zdennis@...>
Date: 2005-11-20T14:49:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Best OS for Ruby Dev/Best OS for Ruby Hosting

Rawn027 wrote:
> Which is the best OS to use for ruby development...My vote goes to Mac
> OS X?
> 
> What would be considered the best environment for hosting ruby and
> rails? Mac? FreeBSD? Gentoo?
> 

I've coded for ruby on Windows 2000, XP, Debian, Ubuntu and OSX. For generic ruby code not specified 
on a certain framework or platform-specfic library I find they all work fine (unless you're OSX 
machine only has a one-button mouse).  I use Eclipse as my IDE when running in GUI and nano as my 
text editor when ssh'ing or running a terminal. Eclipse allows you to use any platform and feel righ 
at home in development, since it's the same across the board.

For doing rails work I have recently moved to Ubuntu systems for full-time development although my 
windows xp laptop still gets use on a regular basis. I work with RHEL 4 quality-assurance and 
production servers, so I may be partially bias to running on a linux environment to try to keep a 
closer consistency to the setup that the servers have.

If you do any MySQL on windows due note that for development it may be fine, but MySQL seems to run 
considerably slower on windows then on a *nix box (if you consider running production on windows).

As my *nix know-how has drastically gone up over the past few years I find myself doing quicker work 
in a *nix environment then on windows. Some things I've found that directly and indirectly help that 
are:
  - great virtual desktop support (yes you can get it for windows but it isn't as good imo)
  - tabbed-based console apps, like xterm, gnome-terminal, etc...
  - virtual tty support (alt-f1, alt-f2, etc...)
  - some *nix/bsd distro's have great support for downloading package/applications as they are 
needed. (on windows i found myself googling way to much, it's easier to type apt-get install 
i_need_this_package)

But I'm with Austin...what works for you will be best for you!

Zach