Rails development Mac OS or Windows

Question

I am currently starting Ruby on Rails development and currently use Windows (XP or 7), but I find lots of cases where gems don't seem to do what they should or its a pain to install and use them under Windows, like twitter-bootstrap seems fine for Mac OS but I had to work out that sass-bootstrap was better for Windows. It just goes on and on, like today I cannot seem to get launchy to do its thing when RSpec testing, although I know that my lack of experience doesn't help.

So should I just get a Mac ? Would getting a Mac give me an easier life ? Most RoR developers seem to use them and most example tutorials seem to assume I do to.

Thanks for any advice

Answer 1

The simplest answer is you can do RoR development on any of the platforms easily.

Personally, I started doing development in Windows, then switched to VirtualBox on windows running Ubuntu. I now have a MacBook Pro and must say it's the happiest environment so far!

Windows - Reasonably straightforward to install rails, but seemed much slower that other enviroments. Lack of simple console with color highlighting was annoying

Ubuntu - Faster than under windows (even when virtualized!). If you don't know linux, it's a lot less fun, steep learning curve for command line stuff and lots of dependencies to resolve

Mac - Best of both worlds, pretty UI for day to day stuff, awesome command line support, Ruby and RoR run super fast on MacBook Pro.

Answer 2

I don't use a mac, I use linux, but I switched from Windows early in my experience with Rails. Using a mac is way better than using windows. The cheap option is to just dual-boot your windows machine with Ubuntu.

Just get off of windows.

See this for more details: Getting Ruby on Rails environment working and installing sqlite3

Edit: VirtualBox is also an option for those whose processor supports it.