So, the straw that breaks the camel's back has arrived with the latest
Apple madness (not only bashing Java, but even the direction for Mac OS
X with the new Store: Apple has become much more dangerous than
Microsoft in the past, while Microsoft today has been relegated to a
second division company for what concerns its political influence; and
Windows has become a decent operating system). I'm in a moderately
comfortable position, having all the three operating systems on my
laptop, both in virtual machines and in native partitions. I'm already
using Linux a lot for development; so my point is just to re-formulate
the "operating system boot priority" and having the most common ones to
be equipped with the applications I mostly use. Also, there are two
options for Mac OS X: if Oracle or the community or something else will
step in and support Java, Mac OS X will remain in my portfolio, but
degraded from one of the two main operating systems to something that I
merely use to test my Java apps. If Java vanishes from Mac OS X, I've
got no more reasons for keeping it.
So, basically, this is my current situation:
1. Primary general purpose o.s.: Mac OS X
2. Primary development o.s.: Linux
3. Testing only o.s.: Windows 7
4. Data partition (pretty large, mostly for my photos :-): ZFS, accessed
primarly by Mac OS X (open version of ZFS support) and from Linux (by
Fuse). I've never had the need of accessing it from Windows.
And this is the probable future scenario:
1. Primary general purpose o.s.: Windows
2. Primary development o.s.: Linux (*)
3. Testing only o.s.: Mac OS X
4. Data partition: THE BIG QUESTION
My requirement for the data partition is that it's extremely reliable
and self-diagnosing (HFS+ was abandoned two years ago when I found it's
pretty unreliable) and must be accessed by as many operating systems as
possible, from the primary one in the most efficient way. So far ZFS has
been the only viable solution. I consider NTFS reliable as well, and it
could be the choice as Windows becomes the primary operating system. But
I'd really miss the snapshot capability (just yesterday I erroneously
launched a rm -rf on my Mail folder =8-O and thanks to the snapshots I
periodically take I only lost a few hours of email, only with a limited
number of folders). Is there any solution around? I could really
consider BTRFS, but I fear it's not suitable yet for production. And
would be it accessible from Windows?
Also, I'd like to improve my current situation for what concerns VMWare
images (they are not in the shared ZFS partition because it doesn't make
sense to run them on a file system that can be only accessed in a slow
way from some operating systems) and I'd like to place them, if
possible, in a shared partion where they can be profitably run from
every host operating system I'm running.
For the rest, OpenOffice is there, NetBeans is there, I already use
Firefox and Thunderbird, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop run fine on
Windows, blueMarine runs fine everywhere, VMWare does... There are fine
tools for recording screencasts, probably I just need to find a good,
simple movie-editing software to replace iMovie.
I'd like to hear from you.
(*) I feel pretty sorry for Linux. For years I've hoped it to become the
primary operating system, but so far it can't be. Still some integration
problem and, above all, it misses some desktop applications that I need,
such as Adobe's stuff. Honestly, from tests I've run so far I verified
that HFS+ is the slowest thing for Java development, while ext4 and NTFS
seems to be on par. The huge Linux advantage for development is the
plethora of command line tools, that make it still the best option for
developing... but if I find that there's some good integration for
Windows (I have to re-check cygwin), Windows could become the primary
stuff even for development.
--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/people
fabrizio.giud...@tidalwave.it
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