Ask HN: Windows vs. Mac for Development

8 pointsuptownhr1y ago1 comments

I started out in windows then went to linux then to a Mac. I remember windows being pretty bad and linux being great but bad in other areas of life. Mainly non developer related applications being poor. I think it's much better today but still not a comparison to apple or windows.

Windows, still the winner in games and is neck and neck to Mac in apps. Probably up or down depending on the user.

Now, today I ask how much has Windows improved for developers given the 10+ years they have been investing back into the community. VS Code, Github, sub-shell etc ... These are all things I know about, but since they have come out, I've been out of the windows eco system and have not seen a good comparison today vs mac.

Anyone have any recent experiences going back to windows? or any reference articles of people doing a recent comparison?

1 comments

watersb1y ago

I bounce between Linux (servers, devops), Android (Kindle Fire), iOS (iPhone), Windows (help family members with their computers, my test bench computer), and MacOS for my primary platform, development.

I keep one test mule beater PC, running Windows and Linux, for dealing with problematic hardware. For example, this evening I was trying to set up a Windows PC as a games machine for someone, but needed to wipe the SSD for a clean install. If I were better at Windows I might know how to recover from a wedged Windows update that crashes everything at boot. I would be able to dive into Pre Boot Environment and tool around in PowerShell until I could fix the problem. But I don't. I do, however, know how to wipe a drive and start over. But I don't trust Windows disk management tools. I can't see partition layouts etc. I rebooted into an Ubuntu live image, ran sedutil-cli from a Bash shell to reset the drive's encryption key. Boom.

Windows has gotten more interesting with the Subsystem for Linux, cross-platform .NET and development.

Windows has always supported developers, developers, developers. Their origin product was a programming language.

It's still an awful platform to keep running, though. When I manage to break it, there's no fixing it. I don't know how, and I have never managed to learn.

I keep to a crazy BSD-like Linux distribution that has taught me what to tweak when I've managed to break it. The macOS BSD nature of tweaking config files has not gone away. Essentially most of the configuration is represented by files, often text files.

The Mac is getting ever more difficult for development. I use it anyway.

I suppose it's not a meaningful comparison, without a specific use case. Are you developing machine-learning models with CUDA? Mac would be in your way. Optimizing scientific kernel with Intel AVX-512? No such Mac.

I still wouldn't be productive with Windows as my only platform. I use the Mac because I can dig in when it matters, and I can use polished applications for creative work like Adobe suite or Affinity or Blender. Or Keynote.

Visual Basic is pretty great. I never got as comfortable in Interface Builder. HyperCard, though.

You should be doing all your development in HyperCard.

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