nilium

I'm in roughly the same camp as you here. I depend quite a bit on things generally working in a Unix-y sort of way. Not necessarily everything, but POSIX compliance is pretty important for me, since it means I can rely on a wealth of software that's already been made, in particular for command line use. Time Machine, disk encryption, and the applications already available for OS X are excellent as well.

Font rendering is also an important point of OS X for me. Generally speaking -- qua someone judging the OS based on whether I like looking at it every day -- Mac OS has the best font rendering. This in turn makes it much easier to stare at code, a terminal emulator, and many other tons of text all day. This is even better with the HDPI display on the recent Macbook Pros, which makes the screen really comfortable to use.

One of the biggest point for me is that Mac OS comes with bash and a terminal emulator. The flexibility that a shell on BSD, Linux, etc. offers me is far beyond what I could do with the Windows console back when I still used Windows as my primary OS. This is also somewhat more important on Mac OS, as Finder, the file manager (for those who don't know it), is absolute garbage. Windows still has the best graphical file manager I've seen, but I preferred to get around in the shell, so the Windows console was always inadequate.

That's probably changed a lot since then, especially with the advent of Powershell, but I'm still not convinced that Windows is any good for someone who relies heavily on a shell. Piping output into other programs and treating them as little functions to build up bigger things has saved my ass a lot. It's saved me often enough that I don't want to end up on a system that has a passable shell but lacks all the tools at my disposal on Mac OS or Linux. As such, I'm pretty committed to any OS that offers that same level of flexibility, and I've never gotten the impression that Windows could give me that.

Additionally, I also love Apple's APIs, at least Cocoa. The older C APIs are far less friendly, but they work and offer some very powerful tools as well. So, working in Objective-C (or MacRuby) is the way to go for me for a lot of personal projects. This is largely the only thing that keeps me on Mac OS now aside from it simply having all the software I know well.

All that said, it's troubling how much harder it's become to use all of my tools as I'd like. For example, in Mac OS 10.8, the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file, used to set environment variables in applications launched via Finder and such, was deprecated. I can work around this by editing a system file, but it's not a good fix, and I imagine it's only going to get worse. So far as I know, that sort of thing wouldn't happen on Linux, and is largely a result of Apple locking down large chunks of the OS, I think.

So, yeah, Mac OS for me, but only for as long as Objective-C remains mostly unusable on other platforms. That may be a long time, though, so I'm probably in this for the long haul. Either way, for the majority of the work I do -- mainly writing articles and software for my own use -- Mac OS is my preference.

re: A terminal: probably fine, albeit small. Running at 2880x1800 without any scaling isn't terrible, but it would quickly drive your eyes to escape your skull. I can't say for sure what would happen under Linux given only a terminal, but I imagine things would be pretty small until you got it using a different resolution than the native resolution.

Terminal emulators are fine, but I assumed you meant the other kind. Terminal emulators look great, as does every text editor I've used (MacVim, vim in a terminal emulator, Sublime Text 2, TextMate 2, Xcode [looks great, but it's unfortunately still a lousy IDE], etc.).

re: Dual boot, also fine in my case, though I only keep Mac OS and Windows 7 installed right now. Windows 7 in particular is an issue, as DPI scaling only affects some programs (so where on Mac OS you'd get pixel-doubled views or text, on Windows you get windows that aren't scaled at all, such as Chrome). If you have dual monitors, Windows is particularly painful, as DPI scaling is system-wide rather than per-screen. I haven't tested Windows 8 and likely won't until after it's been released.

The best route I've found is to simply set the display to 1920x1200 or lower and scale it up on Windows. Windows 7 just doesn't handle high resolution stuff particularly well -- it's not bad, but things just aren't all there. I expect Windows 8 will be better.

I couldn't say what your options are on a desktopless Linux/BSD system, but I would imagine that there's something you could do, even if that something is just using a larger font.

I did this a little bit earlier, very politely asking them to delete my account and why I wasn't happy with the direction they went with the site. I haven't yet heard back from them yet, but it's probably a slow process.

I don't like that they'd automatically opt me into displaying what I read. That ruins any sense of privacy I have to browse the site (ignoring the cynical and probably accurate view that I had no privacy there to start). Were I curious about something but didn't want it shared with the world, Quora is a dead end. I can opt out, but if this is their idea of the future, they may remove the option.

In the meantime, I tried deleting most of my answers, though Quora doesn't really do so. Instead, changes are kept in a list of edits, which allows you to revert the change. I like that, it's handy, but I can't remove my edit history. My hope is that the changes are lost once the account is deleted, though I doubt they will.

I also dislike that deleting my account, including all data associated with it, requires I e-mail them. It seems absurd to do all this work for your users and provide them no way to easily walk out if they're unhappy with site changes (as I am). If I own the content I publish on Quora, as they claim, then I should be able to completely delete it.

At best, it's a way to prevent accidental account loss. At worst, it's a slimy method of ensuring the service holds onto user-provided data. Sadly, the only site to allow me to delete my account without sending an email thus far was Facebook[1] -- though I'm sure they've held onto a great deal of my junk nonetheless. At least they provided the option, I guess.

[1]: I believe Google also allows this, though I haven't quite gotten to the point of deleting my Google account.

I think his point is that he would love to be the naysayer, play devil's advocate, but in this case believes the product will survive despite a tendency to view social networks cynically.

I've actually been looking for something like this, and Moom seems to do the trick. It's got some nice customization, so I can at least set my own shortcuts for different areas of the screen. It works really well since I don't like straight 50/50 screen splits (I prefer a sort of pseudo-golden ratio layout -- Moom can't do it precisely, but it's close enough).

Pretty good use of $10, I think, unless I suddenly need that $10 for an emergency, like beer or coffee or a raw turkey. So, thanks, even if I'm stuck without a supply of raw turkey for a week.

I will take the sensationalist title as a good sign the post isn't actually worth reading. I'd rather have an honest and informative title, which doesn't necessarily mean boring, than what is an outright lie.

Thanks for providing that quote.

Why not? If it's fun and harms no one, I don't see why one shouldn't create "small useless apps" in her spare time. If anything, you should pat folks like that on the back for trying new things (assuming they're new to the person making them).

I sure missed a lot of those, but at least I got Intercal right. That's probably a bad thing, now that I think about it.

When I consider the way their articles seem to consist mainly of link bait without substance, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them disappear within that timeframe. I could swear I remember a time when folks would point to Forbes as a good publication, but I'm not so sure now. Probably a symptom of focusing on ad revenue rather than editorial quality and journalistic integrity.

Overall, my biggest problem here is that George Colony (the author) doesn't point to any specific evidence for why Apple should decline now. It will decline, and I think it's fair to grant that as an inevitability, but I'm not sure Jobs's death will bring it about. The theory he holds up is nice and maybe handy, but unless he's got some special knowledge of exactly how Apple works (and he may, but then he's failing to show it), it's all speculation. Just seems like guess-work and link-baiting to me.

I use Sparrow on OS X. Had it for about a year, I think. It's really quite pleasant to use.