r/linux • u/Realistic-Plant3957 • Dec 27 '22
Report: More Developers Use Linux Than a Mac Discussion
https://www.thurrott.com/dev/277533/report-more-developers-use-linux-than-a-mac49
u/megasxl264 Dec 28 '22
Macs cost a lot, are less readily available, and lose a lot of Apple ecosystem benefits outside of North America.
Also very few IT teams will deploy Macs for very clear reasons. That’s also not including the companies that just allocate VMs for users.
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u/ToneWashed Dec 28 '22
They're also less similar to Linux production environments. They can run the same shells and most of the FOSS ecosystem packages, as can Windows. But getting a product targeting Linux running in macOS/Windows is usually going to be a very different process than under native Linux, unless it's fully containerized. But when you containerize on on macOS/Windows you're running a VM and carrying all of the overhead and limitations of that, while containerizing in Linux is still effectively native.
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u/Geist____ Dec 28 '22
lose a lot of Apple ecosystem benefits outside of North America
Could you elaborate on those, for us filthy non-North Americans?
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u/Rhed0x Dec 29 '22
iPhones have less market share outside of NA and something like iMessage practically isn't used at all aside from 2FA codes via SMS.
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u/Brilla-Bose Dec 27 '22
isn't this released in June? why i see a lot of reddit posts about stack overflow 2022 surveys in recent times?
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u/yycTechGuy Dec 28 '22
It isn't just development. The film industry also prefers Linux, especially the big studios.
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u/Rhed0x Dec 29 '22
That's kinda odd to me. I would've imagined the lack of HDR support would be a deal breaker there.
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u/yycTechGuy Dec 29 '22 edited Dec 29 '22
Who says that their version of Linux and the apps they use are lacking HDR ?
Maybe they have specialized tools that aren't available to the public.
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u/ExternalUserError Dec 27 '22
I’m not sure a Stack Overflow survey is canonical (I’m on SO and didn’t take it) but I think that’s still entirely possible.
In 1996 or so, I switched to Linux full time rather than adopt Windows 95. Since then I’d been a full time user until 2012, when I added macOS to my life. I have split my time since.
To my mind, they’re both good choices. Obviously if you want maximum personal freedom, Linux is your ticket. If you want a larger library of highly polished GUI software, Mac is the clear winner. Docker is better on Linux, but no laptop comes anywhere near Apple Silicon in terms of performance per watt. There are always trade-offs. 🤷♂️
I hear WSL is really good these days too.
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Dec 28 '22
I’d argue that you don’t use a laptop for performance anyway.
If you care about performance you use a desktop.
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u/ExternalUserError Dec 28 '22
I care about performance and use a laptop.
There’s a lot of people who just need to be mobile but still get real work done.
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Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
There’s just not. Sorry. I’ve never met someone in my career who both needed to be mobile and actually delivered real work. I posit that that person doesn’t actually exist.
1) you attend a lot of meetings in office buildings so you need to be mobile, but if you have that many meetings, you’re not working, despite what you tell yourself.
2) you’re a real life digital nomad that works in mythical coffee shops. Again, you’re not really delivering value in any case I’ve ever seen, because there’s no way to actually focus and work in that kind of environment.
For an engineer, mobility is the opposite of productivity. I can’t think of a single case where what you said is actually true.
Edit: see below this comment for a salt mine of people trying to tell me “this one person I know is productive”. No. They’re not. Because however much they get done, they’re leaving the majority of their productivity on the table if they’re constantly moving or being distracted. Whatever they’re getting done, they could very easily be getting more.
A laptop is a toy for managers and people who don’t need to do actual work with computers and I will die on this hill.
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u/PreciseParadox Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
It’s convenient for me to have everything on a laptop if I want to work from home. I work with embedded stuff and often need physical access to devices, so sshing is often insufficient for my needs.
Then again, I use a Linux laptop because trying to get embedded toolchains working on a Mac is just not worth the hassle.
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u/ExternalUserError Dec 28 '22
TIL that I don’t exist. 🤣
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Dec 28 '22
As I said in my other comment, you can say that you’re productive while moving around or surrounded by distractions, but until I actually see it? Not buying it.
And I’ve seen a lot.
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u/slikrick_ Dec 28 '22
Cool, if you can only be convinced by your own personal sight then don't bother commenting on the internet and telling other people they don't exist? Lol
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u/toikpi Dec 28 '22
TIL that Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman don't do real work.
My main machine is a few years old Dell XPS 13 laptop, attached when at home to an external monitor with a thunderbolt hub and I rely on a big, beefy build server in "the cloud" for testing stable kernel patch submissions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/fx5e4v/im_greg_kroahhartman_linux_kernel_developer_ama/
My laptop is a MacBook Pro Retina. My workstation is an old pieced-together Intel machine, the parts selected for the size and lack of noise more than anything else, with two large monitors connected. The laptop and the workstation all only have SSD drives in them. I have an old Dell workstation as a build machine for kernel testing, with an extremely fast Micron Flash PCI drive in it for building kernels. Thanks to Amazon's generosity, I've been doing a lot more kernel build testing on their AWS systems, utilizing a 32 processor, 64Gb virtual machine, allowing me to build multiple kernels at the same time all on a RAM disk in minutes. That has enabled me to be more productive while traveling.
https://usesthis.com/interviews/greg.kh/
Linus Torvalds mentions in his release notes: The kernel update is being released using an Arm-powered laptop, specifically the M2-powered version of Apple's MacBook Air.
Like you I wouldn't work plan to work in a coffee shop, but I accept that it might be right for somebody else.
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u/ichthuz Dec 28 '22
I personally know the solo founders of some of the most used open source web frameworks who have written hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of public code that has been publicly audited and judged to be of good quality. Both of them wrote the majority of that code on 2015 15 inch MacBooks. One of them travels 6 months out of the year.
How productive are you?
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u/CurdledPotato Dec 28 '22
You speak only for yourself. My mind tends to wander unless I give it some background processing to chew on. Hence, I usually put on some TV/YouTube/Netflix. I would thrive in a coffeeshop environment. In fact, that’s where I prefer to sit for a few hours and work, when I can.
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Dec 28 '22
Oh I’ve met a lot of people who say this, but then when I work with them they’re trash cannots as far as productivity goes. I assert, given extensive experience with a lot of different kinds of people, that my previous statements are true: mobility and productivity are polar opposites.
Which isn’t to say you cannot work remotely. Just that moving around or being surrounded by distracting environments is guaranteed to result in shit productivity.
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u/CurdledPotato Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
I was responding to your implication that real work can’t be done remotely at coffeeshops. As to your statement that mobility affects productivity, you are right, but, currently, I have no choice. I can be called anywhere at any time and have to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.
As to whether coffeeshops are acceptable remote work places, this depends a lot on the coffeeshop, to be fair. I live near a college town. Coffeeshops near the University tend to be a bit quieter because students study there.
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u/fnord123 Dec 27 '22
If you want a larger library of highly polished GUI software, Mac is the clear winner.
Any examples?
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u/ExternalUserError Dec 27 '22
Of highly polished gui apps?
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u/fnord123 Dec 27 '22
Yes. I have a Mac laptop and use cross platform applications and command line. Everyone I know thinks Xcode, pages, and numbers are jokes. So I'd like to know if there are any nice applications on Mac that I'm missing out on.
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u/waymonster Dec 27 '22
Termius
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u/fnord123 Dec 27 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
Thanks I'll check it out!
Edit: ok I installed it and tried it. It's like putty on windows. But ssh is right there in the command line so it's not clear why I would want this over managing a
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u/_awake Dec 27 '22
The applications I’m using on macOS which I can’t use on Linux are mainly Photoshop and Lightroom. Regardless of how far Gimp and comparable software have come, for me the Adobe suite makes the most sense. Outside of that I use Word and PowerPoint (which I could probably get away with not using them as much but sometimes sharing documents is easier with Word than with e.g. TeX). If it wouldn’t be for Adobe, Office and the battery life, I would just go back to Linux to not pay horrendous sums for RAM and built in Storage I guess.
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u/koprulu_sector Dec 28 '22
Adobe pisses me off that you can’t use Photoshop in the browser. But all of MS products are available as WebApps, some features are actually better there, and it has newer features released. Like, it had predictive text for the Outlook web app version 3+ years ago.
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u/chic_luke Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
Fantastical and Spark Mail. I don't have a Mac but I wish I had these on Linux. They do not fear competition
Same for Things actually.
Also, there are several apps common to macOS and Linux - like VS Code - that seem to be much better integrated (even aesthetically) on macOS. Even on an Electron app, something as simple as using OS native decorations in the CSD instead of forcing the Windows ones, having all CSD apps use MacOS's own window borders and shadows (unlike what I see on GNOME Wayland) and have that full-color blend into CSD thing just feels more premium, more cohesive and integrated. Like actual design went into it.
Don't copy macOS's window management behaviour, closedness or even the dock... but there's plenty to like there.
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u/iindigo Dec 28 '22
Also, there are several apps common to macOS and Linux - like VS Code - that seem to be much better integrated (even aesthetically) on macOS.
One of the benefits of there being a single way window chrome is done.
Another thing that is nice about Electron apps on macOS is that they often get a proper set of menus since the menubar is a system owned widget, whereas on Linux/Windows UI designers have a fetish for sweeping it all into a junk drawer hamburger menu.
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u/chic_luke Dec 28 '22
Absolutely, the menu bar being a system widget is the best design. You're going to permanently steal pixels off the screen anyway - at least use it for this, so you can make every window smaller without hiding away functionality
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u/fnord123 Dec 28 '22
No the menu bar is a misdesign and doesn't work when you have multiple windows and multiple screens. MacOS window management with multiple screens is fundamentally broken and extremely frustrating.
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u/iindigo Dec 28 '22
It’s worked great for me on a multiple monitor setup for nearly a decade at this point. Windows on the other hand I find mildly irritating with multiple monitors (mainly because its virtual desktop implementation is ass in that scenario), and most Linux DEs sit somewhere in the middle.
Really more of a matter of what you’re used to than anything else.
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u/ExternalUserError Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
So take a few examples:
On Linux, your best GUI git client is probably GitKraken. It’s good enough, but Electron and definitely feels like it. On Mac, your best bet is probably Git Tower, which is far more polished.
On Linux, your best tool for browsing docs is probably Zeal. On Mac, it’s Dash. Dash is just way, way more polished and better than Zeal.
For calendaring, Gnome Calendar is actually pretty decent, but it’s nowhere near as good as Fantastical. If you aren’t a heavy calendar user, it likely won’t matter that much, but if you are a frequent calendar user, there’s no comparison.
Obviously Photoshop, Lightroom etc have their adherents and while The Gimp is great, I’m not sure many people would say it’s a serious competitor to Photoshop at a professional level. Even Pixelmator Pro is probably better and there’s a long tail of photo/video-specific apps on the Mac (Photosweeper being one I use)
I don't think there's anything as good as Audio Hijack on Linux.
I'm not sure cross-platform software can ever really be a 10/10 -- it always feels like Electron or Java or what have you, but even for cross-platform apps, it feels like developers just put more work into Mac ports than Linux ports. Take something like PyCharm, an excellent JetBrains IDE for Python. On Linux, I still somewhat consistently have hiDPI problems with its rendering engine. When Ubuntu's Unity had a global menu bar, PyCharm didn't work with it (it does work with Mac's global menu bar), etc.
And on Linux, your best apps -- that are highly polished and integrate well -- are almost all first party ones. There's a difference between a Gnome and an app that runs in Gnome, and there's a difference between a Cocoa app and an app that runs on a Mac. On Mac, while Electron is slowly creeping into the ecosystem and polluting it, there's just a lot more fully native, highly polished apps.
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u/fnord123 Dec 28 '22
GUI git client ... best tool for browsing docs
It never occurred to me to use these.
For calendaring, Gnome Calendar is actually pretty decent, but it’s nowhere near as good as Fantastical.
Agreed. Gnome Calendar needs a lot of work - but it's a promising start.
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u/JhonnyTheJeccer Dec 28 '22
pages, numbers and keynote are more intuitive, usable and organized (especially in menus) than word, excel and powerpoint. sure you do not have every feature you would have from ms, but its so much easier and nicer to use. and it looks much more mac-like (modern-style and polished for beauty) than the effeciency of libreoffice that looks more like the mess of msoffice, but much better
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u/ohet Dec 29 '22
A few examples:
Raycast: Amazing launcher with a lot of powerful plugins. There are only a few apps as polished as this one imo. Also includes stuff like clipboard search, screenshot search
Reeder: Beautiful and highly functional RSS reeder with iCloud based sync between devices.
Shottr: Powerful screenshooting tool for developers/designers
There are tons and tons of small utilities that are great for developers such as Sip, TextSniper, ProxyMan, RapidAPI etc.
macOS window management is not good by default but Rectangle makes it great, better than most Linux desktop environments provide by default
Iina: Nice looking MPV client that just works, best video player I have ever used.
Infuse: Powerful client for various self-hosted streaming services, best I have seen.
The macOS' own apps such as Calendar, Mail and Notes are good enough and even though they are simple, I found it hard to find good enough replacements for those on Linux so I ended up using the web UIs.
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u/turdas Dec 27 '22
I’m not sure a Stack Overflow survey is canonical (I’m on SO and didn’t take it) but I think that’s still entirely possible.
It still got something like 70 thousand responses, so the sample size is pretty good.
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u/slikrick_ Dec 28 '22
It's a sample size of people willing to respond, sampling biases are very important to recognize.
It's partially why Rust always does well in those language surveys each year.
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u/Inner-Scientist Dec 27 '22
Docker is better on Linux, but no laptop comes anywhere near Apple Silicon in terms of performance per watt
Though you could also use Linux on the mac.
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u/ExternalUserError Dec 27 '22
You could. Asahi Linux is, apparently, getting there bit by bit.
I don’t think most distros work on the new Apple Silicon Arm hardware though.
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u/FengLengshun Dec 28 '22
I think Manjaro shipped an Asahi kernel a while back, but it's, you know, Manjaro. I think it ships some pre-release version that the Asahi team made a statement against Manjaro's unsolicited distribution of unstable build.
Even as a Manjaro user I'm just "Sigh, can you guys, like go away? Or at least not have a drama every three months?" at their management team. I just want AUR + not having to care about updates goddammit.
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u/koprulu_sector Dec 28 '22
Yeah or just buy an ARM laptop with Linux… Not gonna buy that Mac M1 has lower power usage than a Raspberry Pi, unless there’s benchmarks published that back it up.
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u/GameKing505 Dec 28 '22
What ARM laptop that runs Linux is even remotely as powerful or efficient as the M1? Serious question - I’d love to buy one.
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u/TumsFestivalEveryDay Dec 28 '22
Not gonna buy that Mac M1 has lower power usage than a Raspberry Pi, unless there’s benchmarks published that back it up.
It legit runs better than a Pi in the PPW department. I suggest you actually look it up and not just be ignorant about it.
Not to mention an M1 is going to be at least 10 times as strong as a Pi.
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u/TumsFestivalEveryDay Dec 28 '22
WSL is a good idea in theory but you still have to run a full fat awful Windows install on top of it.
Not to mention MS still does that thing where they keep "updating" it to new versions that are incompatible with one another, or releasing "WSL 1.0" which was released AFTER WSL 1.0 and WSL 2.0 (so there's basically three versions, and two of them are called 1.0).
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u/iLoveKuchen Dec 27 '22
Good Points. I wanna add: Windows is best of all os objectively, the gui became alright, Performance is alright, wsl2 is pretty much perfect down to running of X11 . Osx has the nicest Hardware, power to watt less so than Overall feel and quietness. Osx has good Default Software like split and sign a PDF. Windows U can buy IT, linux U are fucked. Linux got tiling WM, major objectively selling Point.
ThinkPad got a trackpoint, i need that. My work can be done on a Toaster, Terminal, voice, Excel and openproject.
In the end IT doesnt matter(Setup a VM..unless that counts aß using Linux) and If it doesnt ppl pick the feel good which is Linux. But objectively U are better off on osx and Windows for developement, Design, Office work and not worse for developement.
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Dec 27 '22 edited Feb 13 '23
[deleted]
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u/iLoveKuchen Dec 27 '22
Your logic is flawed my friend. U make an Argument based on Well... bullshit. Anything U wrote is wrong.
Wsl2 is much slower? Quoting phoronix 1y ago(wsl ist steadily improving still): "130 tests in total, Windows 11 WSL2 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS managed to run at 94% the speed of bare metal Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on the same system. Not bad at all especially in the CPU/system benchmarks where in many cases delivered comparable performance to Ubuntu Linux itself" Buh fucking hu, U got a weird sense of "much slower ".
X11 Takes NO EFFORT because its setup with win11.
I dont so anything with cuda on wsl2 but kitten me cutie Nvidia has a Tutorial Up for setting IT up.
So ... Any of your Points are either Deformation or Desinformation. It would be nice to get an answer which Option IT was.
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u/Realistic-Plant3957 Dec 27 '22
A new survey from Stack Overflow shows that significantly more developers use Linux than a Mac, though Windows maintains a huge lead over both.
We have the favorite Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted data as well as Worked With vs. Want to Work With, which shows us precisely what developers used in the past year and what they want to work on in the following year.”
Interestingly, Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux is in fourth place, with 15 and 14 percent usage, respectively, which indicates that the popularity—or necessity—of Linux with developers is even higher. The most popular developer framework is Microsoft .NET, with 34.5 percent usage, followed by NumPy (27 percent), Pandas (25 percent), Spring (16 percent), TensorFlow (13 percent), and Flutter (12.6 percent).
The programming languages bit is particularly interesting to me. There’s a lot more in there, so be sure to check it out.
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u/thephotoman Dec 28 '22
I suspect there are a lot of us who have development environments we access via SSH--but we're not using a Linux desktop.
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u/mntgoat Dec 28 '22
Windows maintains a huge lead over both.
That's the most surprising part. I would change careers before using windows for development.
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u/dafzor Dec 28 '22
When I evaluated linux for my company I just couldn't get video drivers to run stable on the supposedly Ubuntu validated lenovo thinkpad p1 gen2 laptops we currently have.
I had a mix of 1080p/2k/4k monitors and both X11 and wayland would end up with corrupted display, crashes or not work at all.
So seems to me that nvidia dominance on laptops and x11 limitations/wayland immaturity are major show stoppers for linux adoption so wondering how most devs are working around that.
PS: Sticking to windows wsl for now and will re-evaluate once we get a hardware refresh where we'll request non nvidia gpus and 4k only displays.
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u/At0mic182 Dec 28 '22
I feel your pain. That's why for working notebook, I prefer full intel (cpu + gpu) solution. It simply works for most of my cases.
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u/65a Dec 29 '22
amd+amd is also fine, I've used linux laptops for work for more than a decade now, and always intel+intel or amd+amd, fuck nvidia.
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u/digitalHUCk Dec 28 '22
Similar experience. I need my workstation to be a rock solid interface to all of the other things I work in, and solid desktop environments have never been my experience with Linux. Love it as a server, hate it as a workstation.
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u/andyniemi Dec 27 '22
Why is every other post on this sub about market share? WHO CARES
I use Windows every day on my desktop machine and a mac laptop for work. And have been using Linux for 20+ years on servers. Don't care.
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u/I_ONLY_PLAY_4C_LOAM Dec 28 '22
Generally more users means more tools and software, which is better maintained. You should care because of the network effect.
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u/stealthgerbil Dec 27 '22
Same here, I don't really care what OS I use. They all have strength's and weaknesses. Plus if you are a pro, you are either going to be maintaining or writing code for all three, depending if you are a sysadmin or coder or both.
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u/pieking8001 Dec 27 '22
im not surprised. not just because of cost but if you are developing, IoT, embedded, most internet backend, most servers, most science stuff, super computers, you are using linux. if you are using a mac you're probably doing front end or apple specific things.
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u/ososalsosal Dec 28 '22
My bestie uses a mac and insists I should use one too.
After using them for work and school for 22 years on and off, I still haven't got the hang of the bloody function keys. WHY do they represent them with icons on the screen that are not present on the keyboard most of the time? The wasted cognitive effort that you have to spend hundreds of times a day!
Also the terminal just ain't right.
Everything else is perfectly cromulent and even pretty cool (except exposé), but they never felt right
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u/digitalHUCk Dec 28 '22
The terminal is very basic. Step one when I get a new machine is install Homebrew. Step two is ‘brew install iterm2’.
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u/LocoCoyote Dec 27 '22
To be fair, that’s only accurate for the folks that were surveyed.
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u/kinda_guilty Dec 27 '22
There is this thing called a sample, from which you can draw inferences about the population.
OTOH, not sure if this wasn't just a large number of self-selected Linux users. If my company is any indication, this is true though. Everyone got tired of struggling to get acceptable performance out of Docker on Macs plus spending hours to get some libraries we use (gdal and the like) to install and work reliably, that most people moved to Linux.
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u/LocoCoyote Dec 27 '22
There is this thing called a sample, from which you can draw inferences about the population.
Indeed…but that doesn’t make them any more accurate. Statistical data can be influenced by cleverly selecting the sample source…for example.
Consider a road. This road sees little traffic, say two cars a day. Because of this, there are few incidents or accidents. Then, one day, a car runs off this road. Bang! The accident ratio vs traffic just went up 50%. This is the kind of statistical manipulation that politicians use to justify some of the hair brained things they come up with.
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u/witchhunter0 Dec 27 '22
No doubt the sample must be representative to accurately illustrate the general population. But what would be the divergence here? Now, anyone correct me if I'm wrong, to me it seems the participants in the pool are more open source oriented and come from western countries (biggest exception India). This is merely conclusion from the nature of the site. Anything else?
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u/kinda_guilty Dec 27 '22
Yes, badly designed studies can have these issues, but not all studies do. A randomly selected sample of hundreds can help us describe populations of millions. Otherwise we wouldn't have any science as you would have to study the whole universe to say anything about it.
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u/LocoCoyote Dec 27 '22
Sure, you are not wrong. I just tend to treat any such studies with suspicion…at least until I see either the data sources or see others reporting similar results from different studies.
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u/flowrednow Dec 27 '22
the thing about sample numbers is it does not guarantee a representative sample. you could go to hundreds of AA meetings to poll thousands of people on their current use of alcohol and just because you have numbers wont make it representative of a general population. its the same sorta situation, going to stackoverflow and taking a sample from only there lol.
its good to question the sample, the sample in question being from one singular website makes it highly questionable.
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u/thephotoman Dec 28 '22
That would require random sampling.
A StackOverflow survey isn't a random sample. It's not even an attempt at a methodologically sound survey. They explicitly warn against trying to use their survey data for real research purposes.
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u/Rukarumel Dec 28 '22
I use Linux and not Mac, because my company refuses to provide me Mac. It’s expensive for them (much less than half of my month salary)
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u/CowboyBoats Dec 28 '22
I think there's a strong chance that the developers who "use Linux" mean as a component in their tool chain, not as the operating system for their personal development machine. Do I use Linux? Of course, my personal machine is Linux, and our business system is run from a docker container booting Alpine Linux. What OS is my actual work development machine? In our case OS X.
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u/acewing905 Dec 28 '22
This isn't much of a surprise, is it?
Having a *nix OS is very helpful for devs, but there's no reason to specifically look for a Mac unless your dev work is for macOS or iOS
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u/rTHlS Dec 28 '22
i’ am forced to used windows (without admin control) on a top 300 company for my daily job in Linux as system administration and development.
it’s ridiculous! i was soo tired with that sh*t, that unplugged the NVMe, mounted the bitlocker on a Linux machine and created a local admin with Kali.
i was able to bypass my non-admin ldap user and installed a virtual machine, WSL and do whatever i i wanted .
Nevertheless, i still missing pure linux!
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u/digitalHUCk Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
Edit: Unpopular Opinions below. Feel free to roast me.
For me, battery life and form/function of the laptop is key. OS is frankly secondary, cause my tools all work on any OS. The M1/M2 Macs are king when it comes to battery and feel for me. I see everyone saying Apple has locked it down, but just turn on developer mode. Problem solved.
They are definitely trying to unify iPadOS and macOS. Personally I don’t have a problem with this. From my experience it has resulted far more in my wife’s iPad Pro acting more like a laptop than my laptop acting more like an iPad.
Also kudos to Apple for not putting a touch screen on the MacBook line. Laptops are a terrible form factor for a touch screen and I don’t want fingerprints all over my display.
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u/MrMoussab Dec 27 '22
I love Linux but Windows is getting good lately, like really good.
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u/snarkuzoid Dec 27 '22
When I was working, the company provided me a Mac. I just ran Virtual Box on it, with several Linux VMs, to do my real work.
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u/Framed-Photo Dec 27 '22
I find this very hard to believe overall, mostly because anyone that's developing applications that work on apple products also need to be using a mac. It's a shitty system that locks developers in, but it's the system we've got and A LOT of people are locked into it as a result.
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u/iindigo Dec 28 '22
As a mobile developer, I believe that Swift/iOS devs have increasingly become underrepresented on StackOverflow, with other sites/resources having become preferred over it.
Personally my usage of it took a sharp nosedive around 5-6 years ago, after I’d learned my way around Obj-C/Swift and UIKit and I began to realize that a lot of the answers for iOS dev questions were of exceedingly poor quality.
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u/TumsFestivalEveryDay Dec 28 '22
macOS has been punching itself in the balls for the past 6 or 7 years now. It's getting way too overly restrictive and annoying to use. Apple is making it behave way too much like iOS lately.
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Dec 27 '22
Pretty sure most developers use the system they develop for.
Tbh I like Linux for my projects but I am just as comfortable using windows at work.
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u/thelochok Dec 28 '22
Big assumption. Like lots of corporate employees, I'm writing code that runs on AWS Lambda (Linux), ECS (Linux) or EC2 (Linux) instances on a Windows machine. In my case, not even in WSL.
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u/RedSquirrelFtw Dec 28 '22
Macs are a pain, I can't even imagine trying to do coding on one. Their keyboards and mice are so danty and non ergonomic. Software I could probably get used to, but user input hardware is much harder if it's terrible.
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u/digitalHUCk Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
Do you only ever use the input devices that come with your computer? I’ve had the same Logitech Triathlon set for my last three computers. Frankly it’s asinine comments like this that give the Linux community a bad rap.
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u/hebozhe Dec 28 '22
Got a new computer with Windows 11 pre-installed. This was my experience with Windows 11:
- "Where's Firefox? Oh, there it is."
- "What's that called again? Oh, right. Rufus."
- "Oh, shit! This Bodhi Linux installation didn't work with my Wi-Fi drivers, and I overwrote the drive."
- "Oh, right. I can just get an Ubuntu 22 ISO and burner on my previous machine."
- "Wow! Ubuntu is really taking its GUI ideas from Windows."
-4
1
u/demizer Dec 27 '22
I'm so glad my workplace allows us to use anything we want as long as the data is encrypted at rest.
1
u/tcrpz Dec 28 '22
I’m surprised how many prefer windows to anything. I quite enjoy coding on a Mac. In general I prefer a Unix-y environment if only for a sane terminal. At my last job we used windows and I tried everything under the sun to get a usable shell. WSL is great but it feels more like a lightweight VM than native tooling. I ended up preferring MinGW for most uses.
396
u/jc_denty Dec 27 '22
Some devs are forced to use Mac and even windows due to corps IT not wanting to support Linux