More developers now use OS X than Linux | Hacker News Reader

More developers now use OS X than Linux

9to5mac.com

50 pointsoneeyedpigeon83 comments

FWIW, I'm a developer on a macbook largely because I would like a portable UNIX-y system that doesn't suck. With drivers that work consistently, and UI (hardware and software) that feels like it was actually tested by an end user.

I had a debian thinkpad while in graduate school that did what I needed it to do, but still ended up being extremely finicky after a few years (especially WIFI and power management). Despite always wanting to do work with computers, I've accepted the fact that I really don't want to have to play sysadmin on some personal machines, and am willing to pay to have them just work.

edit: one extra note, regardless of what platform I am developing with, my deployment target is typically some form of Linux HPC cluster, so I don't know if the OS X vs. Linux argument is particularly clear cut. I use both (and windows), but in very different ways. I don't have a clear incentive to pick one platform for everything.

> FWIW, I'm a developer on a macbook largely because I would like a portable UNIX-y system that doesn't suck.

This is pretty much why I switched to a MacBook too.

Windows is a workable desktop OS, and it has great software support for things other than developer tools (I can also play games, for example). Unfortunately, its lack of UNIXness means half the open-source software world (at least, the portions I care about) doesn't work well with it, and this is a pain.

Because I wanted something UNIXy, I switched to Ubuntu (more than once), but the desktop experience isn't great (in particular, both my graphics and my sound were broken) and non-developer application support is poor (few games I wanted to play were supported or worked, not to mention other things).

OS X, on the other hand, has a solid desktop experience, sufficiently UNIXy underpinnings for development purposes, and has good enough application support for my needs.

I do have the option of switching over to Windows on this thing, but tellingly I haven't in the two years I've had it. (I do have a Boot Camp partition for Windows, but it exists for the sake of a single game. Everything else I want to do can be done in OS X.) While using Windows or Ubuntu it usually took less time than that before I got fed up and switched OS yet again.

My experiences aren't representative, of course. I don't just do web app and systems programming on my computer. If I did, I'd probably be fine with Linux. But sometimes I also do things like browse the web (including watching YouTube videos and using web pages which have WebGL), dabble in game development (Unity's editor doesn't run well under WINE), edit videos (there's no good Linux video editor), play games, and so on.

I'm also someone who doesn't like dual-booting. I don't want to have to deal with two completely different operating systems with their own user interfaces, and have to stop one activity and reboot if I want to do a different activity. I don't want to have to deal with the mess that is trying to share files between different OSes.

What games work on OSX but not on Linux? A few years ago OS X had better game support than Linux, but in my experience, Linux now has better game support than OS X, due to Valve's steambox push and Apple's OpenGL stagnation.

I'm not sure what they are, but there are 2,449 of them on Steam. 6,451 titles for "Mac OSX"; 4,002 for "SteamOS + Linux".

Historically yes, OS X had much better support. Is there any way to pull the stats out for games released in the last 12 months?

Not easily. I make it 598/367 in Mac's favour for 2016, but that's not really a lot of data.

Maybe there are a lot of Spritekit based games out there?

I used Windows forever but had Linux and UNIX around since I was a kid. It was just more pleasant to run Windows daily at work with things like corporate WiFi, email, and traveling to clients' offices. At Ubuntu 10 I tried for 6 months to go full Linux, no Windows and I at the 6 month mark I caved and dual booted. At the 9 month mark I was back to Windows but now absolutely couldn't stand the like hideousness of the command line experience.

I bought the cheapest, newest MacBook I could find on Craigslist and gave it a while since I hadn't ever experienced Macs on a daily basis outside of school settings. Loved it instantly and haven't looked back.

Before Vagrant and VirtualBox all of my development truly was local. My Java still compiles local and the Tomcat server runs in my IDE, so I'd say I develop directly in OS X.

My other languages though (PythON, PHP, mostly) are written from the same IDE connected to Vagrant VMs because I don't want to have 25 instances of nginx/Apache running simultaneously and have a /hosts file longer than it already is.

This seems like very thinly veiled blogspam around http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...

You're right. To give them their due, 9to5mac do clearly credit the source, but they add little analysis, and the page is, frankly, terrible. I actually regret submitting this now (the original stackoverflow source is far superior) but this is how I was alerted to the data, via my RSS feed. Sorry.

More StackOverflow survey respondents use OSX than Linux. It's unlikely that StackOverflow survey respondents constitute a representative sampling of all developers.

I think it might come close, though. I mean, yes, there might be some percentage of Linux users that get all their answers from good old mailing lists, but surely the bias should not be that big?

There's a pretty big discrepancy between the popular technologies on StackOverflow and the TIOBE index (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index), so I think there's a significant possibility of bias. I think there are a set of technologies for which StackOverflow is seen as a good resource and other technologies for which StackOverflow has much less useful information and that results in some bias by virtue of self-selection.

I only gave a cursory glance, but I don't think the discrepancy is that vast. The most significant difference I saw was the growth trend and position of Javascript. That said, I think you're right in that StackOverflow's demographic doesn't represent the wider marketplace - web development, particularly of the .NET and Java varieties, as well as DB development is probably over-represented on SO.

We were just talking about this in the office. We all use linux (one uses a Mac - temporary iOS developer...) and we work across the "full stack" from embedded to web.

When working on embedded, C, Postgres, or pretty much anything that is completely UIless we get most of our information from short to the point blogs, with 1/3 or less from SO.

When working on web (php, node, css/js/popular framework) or mobile we pretty much exclusively use SO. The blogs and documentation here are full of stupid terms and too much text.

The other cases I was thinking of were Python and R. Both of which I found were SO heavy, and whose blogs seemed awfully similar to the front end stuff.

It's probably the closest we have though, unless you have another source in mind?

If you want statistics that make a minimum of sense, you need a representative sample. "Anyone who was willing to respond" is not representative, which is why any internet survey where anyone can respond is garbage.

To create a representative sample, you need knowledge on your population. For survey on the general population of a given country or state, the census data is used. You know what percentage of your population is in a given age bracket, their occupation, their gender, their family situation, etc. and you build a sample with the same proportions.

Thanks for explaining what a representative sample is, I think we're all a little better off now. I think the question still stands though: does anyone have a more representative survey than the Stack Overflow one?

I wonder how many of them are web devs that picked up OSX thanks to getting into the biz via some mutated media studies course.

Well, I'm a web dev who picked up OSX about 5 years ago, having used Windows in the industry for about 10 years, after I'd used Windows/Linux for 3 years before that during my Computer Science degree. So I guess I don't fit that particular stereotype, and I doubt that many people do (I've never met one).

This smells of biased fanboyism. Firstly Windows users make up of 50% of the graph, so why doesn't that get any interest? And secondly the difference between OSX and Linux is 4.5%, from a small sample group, not newsworthy at all.

I expect more people dev on OSX simply because of wanting to design for IOS, and being locking into the OS to do so.

I wouldn't suspect such fanboyism on StackOverflow's part (they conducted the survey).

Apart from that I believe you're largely right. I had to switch from Windows to OS X for this reason exactly.

I'm an Android dev joined a Xamarin team recently, and you can't work on the iOS version lest you have an OS X machine. As far as UX goes, I'm not too pleased with the transition.

>small sample group

56,000 respondents is a small sample?

Yes actually, that is a small sample.

The random variable `X = # of developers who use OS X` is a binomial distribution (a developer either uses OS X or doesn't, each developer has an equal probability of using OS X [1], and the experiment is the survey). To achieve an error bound of B for a binomial distribution, then we need n = 1/B^2 experiments. Solving for B, we get B = sqrt(1/n). Thus, the error bound of this experiment is theoretically B = sqrt(1/56,000) ~ 0.004.

I'm by no means a stats guru, so correct me if I'm wrong. But that seems like a pretty good error rate to me.

The criticism that StackOverflow isn't a good representation of the general developer community still might be valid. I honestly don't know enough about its demographics to make any educated opinion about that statement.

[1] I make this assumption because there a finite set of jobs. Even if a developer's job requires them to use Windows, they had an equal probability of another developer of having a job that allowed them the freedom to choose their platform/required them to use OS X.

>Even if a developer's job requires them to use Windows, they had an equal probability of another developer of having a job that allowed them the freedom to choose their platform/required them to use OS X.

In almost 40 years of experience, I never had the choice to chose the OS.

No, but a bigger problem is that the group is self-selected I think?

It probably is, and that is a problem.

The sample size is enormous. The self-selection bias makes it unreliable regardless of how large the sample is.

I'm doing straightforward web development on OSX, and I know others that do too. I'm not looking for an argument, but I like the build quality, the UNIX command-line and, to a small extent, the overall UI and ease-of-use of those few 'consumer'-type applications that I use. I'm not saying the benefits are enormous but, for me, I've judged them to outweigh those of Linux/Windows.

>This smells of biased fanboyism

>http://9to5mac.com

Look at comments about the post. Someone wrote that "OSX" is perfect Linux. Nice joke. If anything OSX is wasted BSD. There is nothing but fanboyism on this page.

The point of that comment is that OSX gives developers the tools that Windows simply don't do very well like the console and package manager. It's not that OSX is Linux, but to many developers, it serves the same purpose.

What package manager does OSX give developers?

I wasn't aware OSX had one. Not an official one from Apple, anyway.

There are third-party package managers, but that's not the same.

I have notice that many millennials seem to equate GNU/Linux with UNIX.

Yep. Very common.

Looking at my peers (CS graduates last year) only a handful of us (out of ~100) know the differences and histories, and all of us will happily accept linux=unix in general conversation.

I think the bias is exactly the reverse of what you're saying.

I expect a large part of those 50% still on Windows to be corporate devs, accessing StackOverflow during work hours on an OS they didn't necessarily have a say on. Many of them will be using OSX or Linux at home : if anything, the non-Windows figures could be underestimated.

BTW StackExchange is a Windows / .NET shop, not exactly prime suspects for Apple fanboyism. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a...

Yeah, I am on Windows here.

Since I became a 100% laptop user, my GNU/Linux usage has been constrained to VMs, server and a small netbook I use to travel. But zero Mac OS X around me.

Love the OS with its NeXTStep roots, but could never get myself to pay the 1000 euros difference to get a Mac that would be somehow comparable to e.g. Thinkpad W510 in terms of available CPU/discrete graphics.

Also for better or worse, my Windows roots go all the way to Windows 3.1/Win 16, so those skills are quite valuable in the enterprise. And I enjoy the love C++, .NET and Java have on the platform anyway.

iOS is the only thing that might force me to eventually get a Mac, but so far Android and Windows Phone already keep me busy enough.

Do you use VMs for developing server side? I haven't had a great experience with Virtualbox and VMWare yet, and VPSes are 150ms away, unfortunately...

Since we use programming languages with rich runtimes like Java and .NET, POSIX compatibility usually doesn't play a role.

When it does, we use VMWare with Ubuntu or Red-Hat distributions.

nah it's because desktop Linux UI still sucks, and probably always will

>I expect more people dev on OSX simply because of wanting to design for IOS

iOS alone does not explain OS X's popularity. I know several people who develop using OS X and have never dealt with iOS[0], including myself.

[0] One caveat here: I actually have developed for iOS, but never on OS X. That was on Windows.

In large companies, OSX is also a more readily available option than linux. For example you can have a regular Mac setup with Office, the proper VPN software, ...

In my company for example, you will get assigned a Windows machine, unless you convince your boss to get one of the "creative people" machine (designers, typesetters, ...), which is OSX. Linux, sure you can. But not on a laptop ( so if you want to work from home that's OSX or Windows), and you will need to use a VDI to use the corporate software including office.

Even if you like Linux better, that's a lot of hurdles.

Yes, comparing Linux and OSX in this graph does seem to be a less interesting data point than some of the others.

In 2013 Linux and OSX made up ~38 percent of users. Now they are at ~48% while Windows has declined.

Both Linux and OSX usage have continued to grow. To me that is the bigger story here.

Highly misleading clickbait. The implication is that people actually develop on OSX, but the actual question was what people use for their desktop OS. The difference lies in those who use OSX essentially as a terminal, from which they connect to their actual Linux development environment in a VM or on a remote machine. Like hundreds of other people where I work (Red Hat) I work full time on Linux from a non-Linux laptop. I've done it from Windows (before RH), I've done it from OSX, and now I'm doing it from a very sweet Chromebook Pixel. I haven't actually programmed on a Mac since the System 7 days, but 9to5mac would spin it as though I was among the (really very few) developers who have abandoned Linux for OSX as a dev platform. That's quite dishonest of them.

Not that I'm arguing that it isn't a misleading title, but when you say "Like hundreds of other people where I work (Red Hat) I work full time on Linux from a non-Linux laptop.", how many of those are using Macs? I wouldn't personally consider working this way because of the cost; if I wanted to run Linux, I would purchase a much cheaper laptop to do it on. Are there really that many people that work on Linux full-time but are willing to pay 3-4 times more just for superior build quality?

Yeah i am surprised they are going for Linux in a VM on Mac rather than Linux on a Thinkpad, as Lenovo even accommodates RHEL on them.

It varies a lot across the company. The great majority use very boring company-provided laptops running Linux natively, but a significant number use personally owned machines - usually Macs. Over on the JBoss side, it seems to be all Macs all the time. However, that doesn't mean the development is actually happening on the same machine as code editing or web browsing. Even with a Linux laptop, there's often a need to run a very specific version of RHEL for all testing. If you're running Fedora, that's not going to cut it, so the habit everywhere is to use VMs or machines in a lab somewhere for the actual work.

> Like hundreds of other people where I work (Red Hat) I work full time on Linux from a non-Linux laptop

Yeah, that's not worrying at all... /s

As is often asked when this comes up on mailing-list threads about this, why does it matter what somebody uses as a terminal? It only matters what the target machine is. I can debug that target using a Linux laptop, an OSX laptop, a phone, an X Terminal (remember those?) or even a teletype, and it doesn't matter. Much debugging of production code is likely to be remote to a server in some closed data center anyway. Millions of embedded developers do the exact same thing, debugging on one platform while using another as an interface. Anyone who can't debug that way has crippled themselves. Except for those who are directly working on desktop code (e.g. the GNOME folks), good programmers are still good no matter which OS their ssh sessions are running in.

ETA: I'd be more worried about developers using brands that have been known to bundle BIOS- or firmware-level spyware with their systems, and those tend to be exactly the same brands on which people are most likely to run Linux natively. Would you rather have someone using the "wrong" platform in terms of cosmetic issues, or in terms of security?

Damn it people are hung up on that superfish thing, when it never showed up on the Thinkpad line.

And beyond that, do the term dogfooding mean anything at all these days?

Yes, it does, but dogfooding doesn't have to mean every single one of thousands has to eat every last ounce of the dogfood. After the first hundred people hit the same wifi-driver issue (for example) there's little value in having hundreds more lose productivity to it while they work on completely different things. Do you forego all products not made by your own company, or is this just another example of random RH-bashing? Diversity increases robustness, and compatibility testing is as important as any other kind. Creating a monoculture, which would make our environment very unlike any of our customers', serves nobody.

OSX also beat out Linux in the same survey last year too, so this isn't even news..

More developers that answer surveys on Stackoverflow. This skews very strongly away from non-native english speakers.

The participation of Chinese, Japanese, Russians and Latin Americans on this survey is just ridiculous. You can see also a clear web & mobile bias on the survey page:

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

In fairness, the programming world as a whole has a bias against people without strong English abilities.

Given that the respondents are StackOverflow users that skews the numbers right from the start. The large sample size is irrelevant. It's mildly interesting data but I wouldn't draw any conclusions about the atate of the industry from it.

The diagram is a bit misleading as it separates out Windows users by OS version, although they are still the majority, not Mac users.

I've worked in both the open source world and the closed source (dot net) world. In my very humble opinion, the dot net world just doesn't need the amount of online help that the open source world needs at least not from StackOverflow. Dot Net and it's kin tend to have very good help out of the box and extensive documentation. This is very much unlike in open source where honestly, it's not even possible to install an operating system without having another computer available online.

Again, I'm not dissing open source here. I've learnt a whole lot from it. But there's many, many things that are lacking in open source, which when seen from the other side seem extremely basic and fundamental to creating good software.

Not really sure the strange and inaccurate comment about needing another computer available online to install an open source OS really adds much to your argument here.

Java also has excellent out of the box documentation. Tools which are developed commercially often have better documentation whether the source is open or not, and where there is good documentation Stack overflow usually becomes a last resort rather than a useful reference. Either way it's something I look at for specific questions, not as some kind of community where I go to answer surveys

I'm not sure I understand what to take away from "Priorities Change With Experience [0] Everything becomes more important the older we get? New developers are just so happy to have a job that nothing is important? It's just a strange looking chart that doesn't seem to really make much sense. Nothing matters, and then a decade later everything matters more?

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#prio...

Link to the survey: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

I'm admittedly sitting in the enterprise but I don't seriously believe a third of all developers are using Swift. This definitely feels like cheerleading.

I can't even work out where they've drawn that conclusion from; maybe it's not even based on the Stackoverflow dataset, but something that 9to5mac has obtained from elsewhere. To be fair, they do say "In mobile development ... Swift is now used by almost a third of developers"; I think it might just be poorly written.

Not for long. This will be my last Macbook, because frankly, its too expensive, and there are great, simply great, Linux laptops out there, which after all will give me all the same power, all the same.

I attribute my dis-interest in what has been a decade of OSX adoption (after a decade of Linux/Unix), as a result of having to think, too many times, about the sandbox, the API rules, brew update && brew upgrade && brew doctor, and so on.

I'm with you, OS X just seems to always be in the way of getting stuff done now a days, there was quite a long time where OS X just stayed out of your way, that's no longer the case. I have also had my share of hardware issues - wifi/blue tooth radios that stop working after two years(just gotta replace the logic board), displays that stop working to name a few. The sad fact is that the amount of Apple annoyances/frustrations now reminds me of of Microsoft which is the reason I switched to begin with.

Out of curiosity what hardware are you maybe looking at?

If all goes well, I'll switch to something like this:

http://www.razerzone.com/store/razer-blade-stealth

As long as it feels as comfortable as a Macbook, with decent performance, I'm willing to switch completely.

I find dual-booting Linux and Windows gives me most of all possible worlds. I gave up my Apple Developer status because of the lock-in to just the Apple system. Frankly, Swift looks almost the same as Kotlin, which I picked up first (but have since dropped for LFE, Lisp Flavoured Erlang).

My feeling as well. I went all-in on the Mac in late 2001 and have bought several Macs since then. I am now feeling like Linux/Windows dual-boot fits me better than OSX. I'll be replacing my aging MBP w/ a laptop that supports this. Not sure what yet though.

I currently dual-boot an Alienware 14 2013. I know you can get similar specs cheaper, lighter, but I like the LEDs. It's like having a tricked out Cadillac (weight). Dell is sending somebody to my hotel room in Hong Kong this Tuesday to install a new screen and keyboard per my 3-year service contract. It has a decent GPU still, and all works in Elementary OS or Mint, even the LEDs, but I have to boot into Windows to change the styling. I would also recommend System76, or the new 13“ Dell Inspiron Dev Edition with Linux already installed. $100 cheaper than the Windows version. For dual-boot, but the Win version and install Linux. I pretty much stay in Linux except for the occasional work in Windows.

I recently switched to OS X from a decade of Linux on cheap notebooks. I've enjoyed the Mac as a luxury, and have even enjoyed the apps; but this will probably be the last one, and for similar reasons.

I felt the same way, especially wrt battery life, until the 2015 Chromebook Pixel came along. For $1000 I have a beautiful screen (touch but I don't use it that way), better battery life than my MBA, portable, rock solid in every way. With Crouton I get a real Linux environment running alongside ChromeOS, only an alt-tab away, complete with clipboard sharing between the two. That MBA was my gold standard for three-plus years, haven't missed it for one moment.

What great Linux laptops are you refering to?

I would guess he's talking about buying a windows laptop and wiping it to install Linux. Paying extra to wipe off and replace a dated Linux installation instead seems a bit pointless

I've got my eyes on this:

http://www.razerzone.com/store/razer-blade-stealth

I don't care about the Windows license - frankly, after a decade of ignoring Windows, it might be nice to buy Windows, try it out, and have it alongside Linux. No big deal.

The real thing, of course, will be getting my OSX environment virtualized for the switch...

Out of personal curiosity, which laptops are you referring to? I have been looking and have not been very impressed by most of the laptops that I have seen.

I've answered elsewhere, but for your ease I repeat it here - I've put this on my list:

http://www.razerzone.com/store/razer-blade-stealth

A Stack Overflow poll is not representative of what developers use. Otherwise you'd have to believe that most developers code on Notepad in Windows. Indeed, people who learn to program, the target audience of Stack Overflow, often code in Notepad. I did too, before I switched to Emacs. And these days I only end up on Stack Overflow via occasional googling, and certainly wouldn't participiate in their polls.

Well, Apple forces you to develop for iOS in XCode, right? And startups get deals on Macbooks... So this really is not so much remarkable as inevitable.

According to the report, at least 71.2% of all development is happening inside Windows or a Windows VM (Visual Studio and Notepad++ are Windows only). Sounds like a lot of folks are using Macs to host a Windows VM, which I see all the time. If you include a small portion of Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, Xamarin then you're probably approaching 80% of all development being done on gasp Windows.

This really depends on what kind of developers your're talking about here.

web developers? core software engineers? core system level engineers? algorithm engineers?

People should really check out the new Thinkpad T460s - actual upgradability, looks spectacular, carbon fiber , brilliant Linux compatibility. Takes the new Samsung 960 Pro NVME and works brilliantly.

The last geeky conference I went to, Github's Atom conference, I saw virtually nothing but Macbooks. I've even seen a presentation by Microsoft given on a Macbook.

Can we now have native Docker support, Apple? Pretty please? :)

Facepalm.

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