Comment by jaredklewis
9 hours ago
At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers.
So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.
I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.
This. I ran Linux at work until last year, when it was finally disallowed. I went with locked-down Mac over locked-down Windows.
The hardware for a Linux laptop right now is not great. Especially for an arm64 machine. Even if the hardware is good the chassis and everything else is typically plastic and shitty.
That is a surprising sentiment. Most dell and Lenovo laptops work just fine and are usually of reasonably good build quality (non-plastic chassis etc.).
arm64 is however mostly bad. The only real contender for Linux laptops (outside of asahi) was Snapdragon's chips but the HW support there was lacking iirc.
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What happened to all the love for Framework?
The honeymoon of Lego-brick replaceable USB ports is over?
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>>At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac
I work in video games, you know, industry larger than films - 10 out of 10 devs I know are on Windows. I have a work issued Mac just to do some iOS dev and I honestly don't understand how anyone can use it day to day as their main dev machine, it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.
It makes sense that you use Windows in a video game company. We use windows as well at work and it's absolutely awful for development. I would really prefer a Linux desktop, especially since we exclusively deploy to Linux.
Weird .. macOS is still completely open is my experience. Can you give an example?
I compile a tool we use, send it to another developer, they can't open it without going through system settings because the OS thinks it's unsafe. There is no blanket easy way to disable this behaviour.
We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation and starting with Tahoe that started to fail - we discovered that it's because of SIP(system integrity protection). We reached out to apple, got the answer that "we will not discuss any functionality related to operation of SIP". Great. So now we either have to disable SIP on every development machine(which IT is very unhappy about) or re-sign the clang executable with our own dev key so that the OS leaves us alone.
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>it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.
The people using them typically aren't being paid to customize their OS. The OS is good for if you just want to get stuff done and don't want to worry about the OS.
I work as a consultant for the position, navigation, and timing industry and 10 of 10 devs were on Windows. Before that I worked for a big hollywood company and while scriptwriters and VP executive assistants had Macs, everyone technical was on Windows. Movies were all edited and color graded on Windows.
Webshitters don't "engineer" anything, it's insulting you would insinuate that.
Anyone who watched the Artemis landing yesterday would have been keen to notice all the Windows PCs in use at Mission Control — nearly all hosting remote Linux applications.
Not a Mac in sight.
They were using VLC on Windows in space.
If all the Macs in the world disappeared tomorrow, everything essential would somehow continue unabated.