I have been using Linux as a desktop since 1998. I can vouch for how ideal Linux is for RoR dev. It's a natural home for it. I have done loads of RoR projects on Linux, obviously.
I don't have a popular view. I think that an IDE is essential to RoR work (or any development). Proper debugging is always required. I spent an awful lot of time researching IDEs and by far the best was Netbeans, but unfortunately they have dropped support for Ruby in the latest versions! I haven't really found a good replacement IDE. On Linux, vim is ruby-aware. However, debugging and profiling aren't a luxury, they're essential and using text editors just doesn't hack it. My own preference will be to consolidate on Eclipse as it's pretty much the swiss army knife of IDEs and if, like me, you are multilingual, its' your common denominator especially if you combine Rails and Java (GWT anyone?). The problems that you are having with battery life sound very much like it's either your battery/hardware or something terribly wrong with your linux. I use linux on all my laptops. In fact my main dev box is a Dell M1730. Now out of date but it's such a comprehensive setup that I can't readily migrate to an updated machine (and it's powerful enough for my needs to why change?). I have always found Linux to beat Windows hands-down on performance, lightness of overheads and certainly it's not a battery drain! On the rare occasion that I need Windows, I run it under vmware very successfully. Try a fresh Ubuntu (I prefer Kubuntu as I prefer KDE) installation. Ubuntu is brilliant at "just working". A big Apple advantage of course is that it "just works" and it's also unix (BSD), so you get the best of both worlds, but at a premium price tag. On Monday, 18 March 2013 19:46:31 UTC, Michael Armistead wrote: > > Hello, > > I have been learning Rails for several weeks now. I am working through > Michael Hartl's tutorial and other various things. My question is basically > regarding what type of environment to do my development in. First, some > background: > > I have used different linux distros on and off throughout the years, so it > was easy and familiar for me to set up my desktop computer with Mint and > get rvm/rails etc installed and working correctly. No issues there. > > However, I went out and bought a laptop this last weekend; I have never > installed any linux variant on a laptop, so when I did it was startling to > find out how incredibly terrible the battery life / power management > functions were. I was getting ~2 hours of life just doing simple web > browsing. After spending an afternoon tweaking everything (using powertop, > thinkfan etc), I was able to increase that marginally. > > Then, I had someone recommend that I use win7 as my host OS, and then use > a VM for rails development. While doing some research, I came across > Vagrant. I got it set up and installed using one of the boxes made for > rails development, however I have not started using it yet. I guess the > idea is still quite fresh regarding workflow. If I was using a standard VM > with ubuntu or whatever, I would boot it up and do my work inside just as > if it was the host OS. When it comes to Vagrant, I am a little more > confused. > > Am I supposed to start my headless vagrant box, start all my services / > rails server etc inside, but then have Sublime Text 2 on my host OS - and > work out of the shared directory while just performing tests inside of the > VM? > > I use Guard / Spork on my desktop - how do I set this up within Vagrant? I > have read that some people have issues with it. > > Am I going to run into any problems down the line running windows as my OS > for coding / the VM for testing and server? > > Well, I am rambling. This whole idea is just very fresh for me, so I am > just looking for any feedback possible. I want to get my development > environment set up as fast (but as stable) as possible, so I can get back > to learning more rails! > > Thanks everyone, > Michael > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubyonrails-talk/-/dMyEpHqnW8kJ. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
