If it's for web developers, why does it only run (for now) on Windows? What developer, who works on the web, uses Windows?
Almost all developers in corporate America use WIndows. If you work outside of silicon valley at a company with more than a few dozen people, chances are you're probably (but not certainly) using Windows.
Your original point is fair tough, it should be cross platform from day 1.
I prefer Windows for it's mix of flexibility and stability. I do not prefer the Mac OS because I find it to be a generally terrible OS that is completely inflexible compared to Windows. (I call it the Mac OS because they pretty much ruined NeXTSTEP by smearing the disgusting Mac OS UI on top of it.)
Being forced to use a Mac myself, I know a ton of things about how limiting this OS is. You can't even run 2 instance of the same app on OS X, so for instance if you're editing 3 or 4 projects with Xcode and one of them crashes, the whole app has to be restarted.
I could go on about how bad the Mac OS is, but I actually have to go work on my newest web development/mobile app project wherein I use Windows for most of the actual work and only touch my Mac/Apple devices for testing.
Flexibility is certainly debatable depending on your point of view. Personally, I only want flexibility within the realm of stability and speed. For instance - Windows does not let you switch window managers the way you can in Linux. But that's not the kind I'm interested in. I am more concerned with things like:
- Will it run on most hardware without much hassle?
- How easily can I customize the file browser to do things like adding new context menu actions (based on node type or other state) via third party modules?
- How stable are my customizations?
- Can I generally put things where I want them easily, without fighting against some overarching design opinion?
All of the Linux software that I use regularly runs in a terminal and Linux runs absolutely great in a guest VM on any type of host. If I run Windows in a guest VM, it's slower and GPU intensive apps suffer. If I really, really needed to work on an iOS or OS X app while traveling and I could only bring one device with me for some reason, I would certainly bring only my Macbook Pro. Luckily, I don't have that problem!
Looking forward, Windows will soon have Ubuntu running on the Windows kernel. If that works out, I can have the best of both worlds without keeping any VMs running. The closest I can get to this in Linux is with Wine, but that sucks worse than Cygwin does on Windows IMO.
I'm not an OS X fan – far from it, really – but that is not a limitation of OS X. That's a limitation of Xcode. I have launched multiple instances of the same app on OS X; via right-clicking on their icons, I think.
Sure you can. Pass the -n flag to /usr/bin/open, e.g.:
open -n /Applications/Xcode.appIt's fine for running multiple instances of the simulator if that's all you need to do. You'll be sorry if you try to actually work with code though. Settings will be overwritten, caches will be corrupted and some things won't work. The problem is that OS X isn't designed with this in mind at all and you're actually working against that design when you do this.
So we have lots of bubbles everywhere!
The people responding certainly aren't ignoring the fact that at least some web devs use Macs...so you can't really apply the same label to everyone here, can you?
http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...
OS X: 26.2%
Windows: 52.2%
Since I do a lot of .Net stuff my work is done on a Windows machine for obvious reasons. The rest of my front-end work is usually done on my Linux box.
Most corporate places I've worked at are Windows shops. Even in those big corporate places, there are only around 1% who use Macs.
Which would they prefer to work on? I haven't seen any stats.
It's generally older, more conservative or more back-end focused shops that are on Windows (.NET, Umbraco), but even those often move to macs or want to. Viacom, for example, uses Rails for it's European sites and all developers in the office use macs.
Smaller startups tend to have mac-users for front-end development and a mix of windows/linux/mac for back-end guys.
And of course my experience here on HN gives me the impression that most front-end stuff is mac-centric.
All that said, the big qualifiers are wealth and web. I know quite a few web guys who use windows because they can't afford a mac, and I know many developers who use windows or linux because they don't do front-end web development. But in my world (The Netherlands) the vast majority of web developers use macs, to the point that it's kind of a 'thing' to see a web developer use anything else.
Also, a little random anecdote doesn't help. It's intuitive to believe that most web developers use OS X / Linux, at least inferring from the fact that developer tools like Node or Vagrant came to OS X / Linux first, if not Linux first.
The HN guidelines ask you not to call names in arguments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your comment would be much better without that bit.