Mac has the best balance between coding, utility tools and "other work stuff".
Windows probably on par if not more for "work stuff" but falls badly in the coding & tooling department.
Linux is OK ish for coding and utility but falls behind for "other work stuff" and certainly a pain to just keep it updated.
So in our company, everyone in the development & support team uses Mac (except this one guy who insisted in Linux), most in the sales & marketing team use Windows.
> certainly a pain to just keep it updated.
> Linux and it's a lot of pain to setup.
If you're not using Linux, how are you justifying these claims?
> certainly a pain to just keep it updated.
Excluding the boot time for both, MacOS takes between 15 and 45min to update. Linux is a few seconds. I suspect that the only OS that has a more ridiculous update process than MacOS is Gentoo.
This is a thread on Hacker News, not an academic article. You aren’t owed a massive amount of “justification” for these “claims”.
I was using Mac for development due to company policy (compliance). It is by far the worst development experience I have ever had. Brew is terrible. Updates are agonizing. The user interface is awful. Containers are a shitshow.
Sleep is one of those things that have always just worked for me, at least on Linux; in Windows, I've had to deal with random wakeups after some kind of Windows update. That said, with less than 30 seconds from off to IDE I don't tend to use sleep all that often.
Assuming this is a real question and not just an excellent ruse; the answer, in terms of simplest setup would be
1) Install a vanilla default, such as Ubuntu 2) If that fails, buy a vanilla default laptop
To be fair a reason why this is easier on MacOS is they have like 3 laptop options rather than 3000. If your problem still persists, then there is a step 3
3) Become an expert in cli foo
After that fix, you're welcome to either pretend the cli foo was incredibly easy all along, or weep and dream of a gui with two glowing buttons [Cancel] [OK], providing all the configurability you might ever need
WSL 2 is a game changer because it makes all the Linux centric dev tools available to Windows without setting up virtual machines or other such nonsense, even running graphical applications these days. The only major pain point I've run into (that isn't "I prefer Linux") is the lack of IPv6 support within WSL 2.
If you avoid buying Nvidia hardware, Linux generally "just works", unless you use Windows-only software (which macOS also suffers from) or choose to make your life harder by installing Arch or Gentoo. Ubuntu's snap is a pain for power users who want to hack on their Linux system but if all you want to do is develop or do work stuff, it just works out of the box.
There was one developer in our team using Mac. Everyone (>20 people) else were using Linux. Mac was a lot of pain to setup.
Linux is the best balance between coding, utility tools and "other work stuff".
Windows is not even considered for development, it falls badly in the coding & tooling department.
So in our company almost every dev uses Linux (except this one hipster using Mac) & marketing team use Windows
Linux is not a pain to setup.
I am a .net developer and run Debian linux on my work laptop since ages. Keeping the OS and most of the software up-to-date is just "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade". Microsoft has Debian packages for teams, skype, powershell-core, .net (core), azure-cli. Google has Debian packages for chrome. I use a lot of JetBrains' tools and keep those up-to-date using the JetBrains ToolBox. Where I work, we use Google workspace and Slack and I use those through chrome.
Just to be clear, most of my development is currently done on Linux using Rider, but I do have a Windows VM (on KVM) for older projects that run on .NET full.
The issues I come across, are related to our customers. For example when I am on location and need to connect to external hardware. One example is to connect wirelessly to a WiFi Direct display: this does not work for me and I did not investigate if there are drivers available or not. Another example is DisplayLink to use an external display through a dock: this I checked and there are drivers available and I did have it working at some point, but it broke after a kernel upgrade and it's too much bother to fix it again. Also for some customers we can connect remotely to their systems over VPN, but not all VPN solutions are available (or work out of the box) on Linux.
In any case, for my day-to-day work, I don't have any issues at all on Linux and I believe it's very very capable for coding, tooling and other work stuff. I definitely prefer it above Windows and Mac.
That maybe used to be true. But today, Windows is that OS. In one OS, I can freely develop in Windows, Docker, WSL2, including near seamless integration of apps, browsers, and even GUIs. And with VS Code, I basically have any OS except macOS (but who cares?) at my fingertips in a single interface. The dev experience is by far the lowest friction between Windows and macOS.
And Windows has superior support for external hardware. macOS refuses to work well with anything that doesn't have Apple on the box.
Given the option, I rather spend my day on VS than XCode, and C#/F#/C++ than Swift/Objective-C, but to each their own I guess.
And then there is the whole thing about where macOS Server end up.
That's more perception than reality, often from people who simply don't know how to use Windows.
Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and IntelliJ IDEA blow any Linux text editor out of the water for developer productivity.
For Linux workloads there is the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2), which now even supports GUIs with GPU acceleration!
Visual Studio Code can even operate in "remote" mode where it tunnels into a Docker container or Linux server and acts as-if the remote target was the local machine.
On Windows, x86 and x64 Linux Docker containers run in process isolation at full speed, unlike on Macs where there is CPU emulation required.
I’ve since migrated to Mac because I was spending too much time making linux work properly, but I do miss the control I had. I have Windows on parallels and I can’t believe how much of a disaster it’s become. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to it.
For most people migrating off of Windows, I’d recommend Kubuntu. It is KDE Ubuntu, and it feels like Windows used to during its golden age. Also, it’s free. All major IDEs work on Linux so the shift is pretty painless. Really recommend migrating.
But those tools themselves work on Linux.
The inability to get something akin to VT220 terminal access and shell scripts on a POSIX-based system without resorting to a virtual machine (a la WSL2) is a deal-breaker for me. The steps for using scripting languages (e.g. Node, Python, Ruby) is typically entirely different on Windows than it is from all other server and desktop platforms.
For those who can spend their time nearly 100% inside an Electron-based or Java-based IDE however, it matters a lot less whether that IDE is running Windows, MacOS or Linux.
> On Windows, x86 and x64 Linux Docker containers run in process isolation at full speed, unlike on Macs where there is CPU emulation required.
You do realize they didn't require us to all burn our old Intel-based Macintosh computers, right? Apple even still sells Intel-based Macs.
Windows requires emulation to run aarch64-based containers. Except on Windows for ARM of course, where presumably they run full speed but those x86/x64 containers above require CPU emulation.
You can run all of your favourite languages nearly identically to Linux on Windows either via Docker or WSL2.
> Windows requires emulation to run aarch64-based containers. Except on Windows for ARM
Making Windows and Linux the only platforms with ongoing support for both ARM and Intel CPUs, unlike MacOS where Intel support will eventually expire.
Of all things in this comment this one is the funniest, because Emacs was able to do it for years (decades?).
on linux, we spent no more than one hour.
those editors you mentioned are also available on linux nowadays.
if someone needs to test something on windows, there's "windows on aws" (i used it once)
If you're coding in Windows and deploying on Linux, it's not ideal. Sure there's WSL2 which kinda sorta helps for a lot of day-to-day stuff. But often weird errors creep in, my favorite being the MS-DOS EOL instead of the Unix EOL, which breaks Bash scripts, leading to developers saying: "But it worked fine in MSYS!"
I used to love Visual Studio but Jetbrains has caught up to it and then surpassed it years ago. I generally run IDEA and VSCode for code editing and going back to Visual Studio is a real shock, especially with the pleasant memories I've had of using it.
VSCode and IDEA run great on Linux, though, perhaps even better because Windows isn't great with tons of tiny files.
WSL2 is great if you prefer the Windows GUI. It fixed almost every issue I've had developing on Windows outside of Microsoft's data hunger and terrible UI design. Whatever Linux centric tool you can think of, it just runs on Windows now.
If I could use the comfortable and stable Windows 7 UI with the Windows 11 kernel, I'd actually consider going back to Windows. In terms of usability, Windows just lacks polish these days. That said, my attempts to try macOS didn't fare much better, I just couldn't get over the primitive window management and the bad integration with my home/end/page up/page down keys.
GPU debugging, DDK support, ETW debugging, SQL Server integration, GUI designers for Forms, WPF, UWP, MFC, mixed mode debugging across .NET languages and C++, COM/WinRT IDE tooling,IIS integration,...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#pro...
Typical Microsoft. Pretending to be FOSS but there's always some sneaky strings and telemetry attached.
This is absolutely false. Windows is a perfectly fine development environment and has perfectly fine tooling. You just need to embrace powershell, windows tooling, and use cross platform tools. Too many devs put themselves in a corner by relying on posix shell or posix only tooling.
If you do user space programming your host OS should never matter. In my 10 years of programming the only time the host OS mattered was when I was writing Linux drivers.
But overall it's actually worked out surprisingly well because there's something for everyone - developers get *Nix On The Desktop but with an actual support story, and the non-technical users get a happy bubble OS that holds their hand.
Linux code churn and distro fragmentation makes it fundamentally unsupportable in the vast majority of workplaces (outside very controlled server environments/etc - talking desktop use here) and for the vast majority of users. The code churn makes the support story (polish and documentation) impossible and the distro fragmentation means that there's 50 different solutions to the same problem. The Bazaar and the Cathedral doesn't mean the bazaar is better in all situations, a random non-technical business analyst is never going to learn how to build Arch or install Gentoo and a really good streamlined, polished Cathedral Experience is much more suitable to the business environment. That's the fundamental lesson from Linux and Windows and OSX now takes its place in that too. You can keep the good things about Unix-y environments and opt out of the terrible parts of the Linux ecosystem.
Unfortunately, like BSDs, that's not what Docker is built around. Docker assumes a Linux kernel, and Linux kernel ABI is not the same as Unix kernel ABI. That's the biggest problem. Same as FreeBSD Jails or Solaris Zones... they're a decade ahead of docker in terms of capability, security, performance, and polish, but Docker is where the mindshare is. I can't install a jail from a registry with a single command and that's not where the support/development time is going even for the people who have engineered those alternative docker-registry solutions for jails.
The only "fast" option for non-linux kernels besides full virtualization is to thunk the calls to your own kernel to patch around the differences. Obviously that didn't work out with the Windows kernel, it's just too different, but FreeBSD/Solaris have implemented this functionality for a long time as part of "Branded Zones". But everyone is enthusiastically rebuilding the wheel around ubuntu (specifically - not even linux generally) so that's not going to happen.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxJails
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/
(the freebsd handbook is a great example of the kinds of documentation that rarely gets written for linux distros - other than commercial ones - because of the overwhelming code churn and the inevitable bit-rot that entails in the rest of the user experience. It's way more fun to write a new audio pipeline or init system than to document it fully, everyone knows it.)
https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/it-infra...
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/817-1592/gchhy/index.ht...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers#Branded_zon...
(and note the Solaris stuff almost entirely applies to OpenSolaris/Illumos as well, you don't have to use commercial solaris to get Branded Zones.)
Anyway, apropos of nothing, but with the newfound attention on OS X from developers and power-users, it'd be really nice if Apple released a M1/M2-based "toughbook". Completely against their design aesthetic but I think a lot of people don't really like the idea of wafer-thin apple laptops and would like something that can take some bumps without shattering. Power users are becoming a more core demographic for macbooks and it'd be nice to see them cater a little more.
