I started using Linux as my alternative desktop in 2003. I finally ditched the pre-loaded Windows XP with Gentoo Linux in a new Dell 700M around 2005. I preferred KDE3 over GNOME for its integrated user experience, and the killer application KDEPIM. However, the performance of i855GM kept degrading with the kernel rolling upgrade, and the migration to KDE4 is so painful that I began to explore the lightweight desktop environment, such as Xfce, E17, various boxes. And eventually settled in FVWM with OSX_Milky theme. It is really fun, and time-consuming to fine-tune the script/configuration for personal preferences.

In Microsoft, I had one dedicated Windows 7 machine for Outlook, two Windows 2008 R2 development boxes, and several Hyper-V VMs running Windows 2003, Vista, Windows 2000 and NT4 for regression testing.

In Skytap, I am using a brand new MacBook Pro, Snow Leopard as other developers. Thanks to the apple’s flatland aesthetic, the transition for a new user is pretty smooth with only few bumps:

• The fish-eye dock is no stranger.
• So it is with Exposé
• The traffic lights in the top-left corner is less informational, but looks pretty.
• It is hard to reach the top menu bar, especially when I tried to use the 30′ HP ZR30w as my main monitor.

The Good

Everything just works.

The desktop environment is well polished, sleek and aesthetic.

Lots of handy tools, like bash, openssh, grep, find are pre-loaded.

The Bad

I am really frustrated by the window management in Mac: when you click the docked icon or use the application switcher(which appears when you hit Command-Tab), the whole group of applications are brought into the the front while I just want to switch back to the last window I am working on. You have to either right click or click-n-hold the docked icon to select the specific window which incurs too many clicks. How about a fan of snapshots when mouse hovers just like Windows 7 does?

I also dislikes the space. I have been using the similar feature called virtual desktop comprehensively to declutter my workspace, but I failed to get the space working as expected. The space is supposed to be an isolated desktop, if the application instance is not launched in this space, it should not show in the dock or the application switcher, period. The notification from other space may use bouncing dock icon effect or growl to attract your attention.

I can live with the odd behavior of maximize button, but why the window has to be resized from the down right corner? This is particularly tedious if you try to tile and adjust several windows horizontally/vertically.

The default Terminal.app is half-baked. What a shame that it does not support 256 colors capability!

I also miss the Cut/Paste feature in explorer.exe. I have to open multiple Finder windows if I want to move files to various destinations. Using bash seems easier.

The built-in Chinese IME is very primitive, the Microsoft Pinyin IME bundle with Windows 7 is much more useful.

.Trashes is very annoying, especially for a USB drive. I once tried to delete some documents to make more rooms in my Kindle, and surprisingly found the free space does not change at all. As I telneted to the Kindle via USBNetwork, I found the hidden .Trashes folder which held every bits I tried to erase. Finder should allow .Trashes to be opt-out.

Bonus

Here is the list of most frequent used applications:

• iTerm2, an excellent replacement for stock Terminal.app.
• Firefox and Chrome, each runs with a different Google account credential.
• MacVim.
• VMware Fusion, keeps a Ubuntu Linux handy.
• Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection and Chichen of VNC for remote access.
• Adium for MSN and GTalk.

No single Mac-exclusive application in the above list.

Conclusion

The power of Mac is the synergy of beautifully-crafted hardware and intuitive software. No other PC manufacturers has such fine-grained control on user experience. Linux desktop has a edge on customization, but stumbled upon the lack of hardware support, ramification of user experience(GNOME3 vs KDE4 vs Unity) and unpolished design.

Update

Thanks to masklinn’s comment, window resizing, native 256 colors terminal, cut/paste in Finder have been fixed in Lion.

Windows 8 is Microsoft’s answer to the post-pc era: touch takes the central stage; the traditional desktop has to wait to be summoned in the backstage. It is a disrupted transition for desktop users to focus more on content consumption than content production. For old school user, Metro is even less useful than screen.

Though Metro has achieved global recognition in the design industry, it has not won the hearts of customers. It is really adventurous if not reckless to bet the fate of the corporate major cash cow with such uncertainty.

The Drag-n-Pin in the Metro allow user to optimize screen real estate in finer-granularity than the notification model. This is cool, but not new. According to my bumpy experience with awesome in Arch, It is hard to make tiling windows manager works as expected and it is annoying when it just not works. I look forward to Windows team’s solution.

Development Cycles

Microsoft Office follows the traditional waterfall approach:

• The shipping date is decided by the executives to align with Windows release, also correlate to the enterprise IT upgrade plan. Any slippery will cause the turmoil like the delay of Windows Vista.
• The executives also determine several heavily-invested areas as “pillows” for the next release. See Metro for Windows 8.
• The project manager(PM)s will aggressively crafting the specifications for features. Scenario-Focused Engineering(SFE) is adopted to improve the user experience. Engineering team may also involve in for brainstorming and feedbacks.
• The developers then swag, aka estimate wildly, the cost. Dev Manager then summarize the cost report, review the planning, calibrate with other team if integration is required, then start to chop, chop, chop features.
• There is a chance that the survived features get postponed or even canceled at the end of the milestones in case integration failure or regressions.
• Long time stabilization: extensive testing, bug fixes, design change requests.
• Ship it!

I think this workflow makes perfect sense for Microsoft Office, a market dominator with rooted user expectation, just as the Milo Criterion states:

Products must mature no faster than the rate at which users can adapt.

Skytap takes a less formal approach as we are service-oriented:

• Bug fixes and minor improvements are shipped in monthly base.
• The long-last features are usually driven from the marketing side, then consolidated to requirements by developers.
• As testing team compose less than 10% of engineering work force, test-driven-development(TDD) is highly encouraged. Mockups and fixtures are comprehensively used to for cross-component testing.
• Besides testability; deployability, maintainability and serviceability are also planned ahead.
• Dogfooding in the internal staging environment.
• Deploy it!

Programming languages and Tools

In Microsoft Office, client applications are developed mainly in C/C++, a in-house foundation library takes place of STL and boost for historical reason. Server side uses C# and .NET out of surprise.

In Skytap, the backend service is developed in Python, the web frontend is in Ruby. Some services are developed in C/C++ for the sake of performance. We also have some legacy code in Java.

In Microsoft Office Graphics, most developer use Visual Studio for everything, I know some developers (including myself) prefer Vim. There are also some diehard windbg users as well.

In Skytap, most developers prefer Emacs, two guys use Vi/Vim, several use Eclipse, at least one guy uses TextMate.

Hardware

In Microsoft, each developer is equipped with at least two dev box in case the overnight build fails; one mail machine for running Outlook. Two 22″ monitors are hooked up with KVM for console switch. You may occasionally check out the virtual machine from build lab for Hotfix.

In Skytap, each developer is equipped with MacBook Pro 15″ and HP ZR30w 30″ monitor. The dev stack is running in the HP ProLiant server or in the cloud.

Goodies

In Microsoft, you have unlimited access for Microsoft products for your day-to-day work, and MSDN subscription for technology preview.

In Skytap, you have unlimited limited resources to run virtual machines in the cloud.

The two ponds are so drastically different, which pond do you prefer?

By the way, Skytap are still hiring. Feel free drop me a line if you are confident with your programming skill in python/ruby/HTML/javascript/etc and/or your expertise on network/database/distributed computing.

But I still decide to leave because Office no longer owns the stage. Despite Office organization, aka Microsoft Business Division(MBD) in last quarter made more than 6 billion dollars revenues, more than any other organization across the company; Office no longer plays the strategic role in the future road map. The company steers away to embrace cloud computing, mobile and online service.

I am going to join Skytap Inc., a local startup company focusing on cloud offering.

After 7 years emerging world, I decide to move on. I still want the control, but I do not want to spend the whole weekend, plus several weekday nights most likely, just to bootstrap to a barely usable enviroment, then keep tuning for couple weeks to finally get a perfect enviroment. Quoted from Marco:

We may just be past the era in which many geeks were interested in messing around with their computer’s (or phone’s) hardware or software internals.

Arch Linux makes a perfect tradeoff between the flexibility and usablity. Sure, we may end up installing redundant dependencies to hard disk and loading unused bits into memroy, but the overhead is really marginal compared to the massive resources in the modern computers.

Arch takes the LiveCD approach as Gentoo, with a text-based installer to save your some keyboard strokes. The installer is quite intuitive for the new users, but it does not cover all the corner cases. For example, cfdisk used in the installer can not handle any partition that does not end in the appropriate boundary, and it fails the installer. You have to use fdisk to manually delete/new the partition. Also, if the installer exits in the middle, you have to restart from step 1, and the installer does not rollback to the previous status. This is very annoying when you prepare bunch of partitions and the installer fails miserably due to the effect of last vgcreate.

By the way, the network install image fails to support neither wire or wirless network adapters in my Dell Latitude E6410, while Gentoo LiveCD at least support the wire connection. I had to download the Core Image LiveCD and installed the base system offline.

The installation is like shortcut compared to Gentoo, but that just barely quarter of the journey. I rebooted the machine, and saw the familiar grub, scrolling messages, and then the console became blank. I searched the web, and found it was reproeduced in Ubuntu as well; and ultimately this bug. The temporary solution is to disable KMS by feeding console parameter, i915.modesetting=0. It works, but I lose the hardware accerlation in X, and current xf86-video-intel explicitly requires KMS to load.

The appropriate solution is to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.35+. As I plan to use TuxOnIce‘s hibernation anyway, it makes sense to me to upgrade to kernel26-ice using AUR. It took so loooong to compile as yaourt built everty single modules! I would prefer it just syncs the source, and applies the patch for me and let me build the kernel manually.

The rest journey is much more smooth escorted by pacman. With quick installation, I now can try different desktop flavors, gadgets and eye candies for better experience. I will talk about it later. Stay tune.

• Intel totally screwed up i915 module for 855GM video adapter and I only got 30FPS for glxgears
• One less worn-out Dell 700m laptop lying in the PC recycle piles

I think it is time to move on.

How this happens?

When I started this blog four years ago, I was a shameless graduate student to exhibit poor programming skills and stupidities to arouse the attention for the future employer. It’s better to be looked over than overlooked. Things changed a little bit since I left school and start my career in the industry. You have to be professional, if not, at least look professional. Being stupid is the second worst thing than showing stupidity. Bounded by the employee handbook, I cannot publish anything work-related, and the excursion outside Microsoft kingdom, such as Erlang, MongoDB, tornado, have not accumulate proficiency to craft a post with deep insight.

When I introspect the future of this blog, I just recall Steve Job’s Commencement address:

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.