It's not pointless at all. Trying to develop in Ruby or Rails on Windows in a huge pain in the ass. I know, I did it for a year or so. He could have recommended OS X, but the price is a barrier to entry.
I think the biggest problem is the number of gems with native libraries. I switched to JRuby, and felt a lot less pain. Now if only it had a faster startup...
I looked into it and it's definitely interesting. It's just a pity NetBeans doesn't use it (and given the current situation, probably never will). Anyway, thanks for the tip.
Ubuntu on Virtualbox is my preferred method of trying out new languages without worrying about my Windows install holding me back. I blogged a HOWTO on that back in December.
The improved flash performance of Ubuntu 10.04 will hopefully be enough to keep me out of Windows entirely from here on.
Same here I am also trying Ubuntu 10.04 on virtual box.. though hard time fixing the resolution :) still playing around RoR it's nice!!! I am a java programmer... playing around a bit with PHP, CakePHP stuff... but again and again considering RoR... RoR screencast and community is gr8.. so does the PHP manual... but CakePHP I don't like much... very confusing naming convention and it's not working as expected... Still not able to make up my mind to go for CakePHP vs RoR (each time thinking in terms of Facebook vs Twitter :) )...I know facebook not using CakePHP but still they r using PHP..
Rails development on OS X is so nice if you use things like MacPorts and Passenger. Coupled with TextMate I would not want to Rails dev on anything else.
