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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

You're so filter bubbled that it hurts. Maybe just another random anecdotal data point helps: Most developers I know use Windows.

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You too seems too bubbled. Maybe just another random anecdotal data point helps: Most developers I know do not use Windows.

So we have lots of bubbles everywhere!

I have a Linux box and a Windows machine.

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.

Most of my development is cross platform. I switch every day from Windows, to Mac, to 64 bit Linux, to Linux on ARM and then back around every 4 days of work. I also test every day on iPhone, iPad and 3 different Android systems.

Agreed. I think the real bubble is junior devs that care passionately about which OS they use, like it really matters.

I think Stack Overflow Developer Survey provides a good picture of what is used more.

For the lazy:

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

OS X: 26.2%

Windows: 52.2%

To be fair, this figure includes all developers, rather than just web developers. But Windows is probably still the majority if you include the whole world, as opposed to those working at startups in rich countries.

Isn't that for all developers though, and not just for the web?

No, I'm not bubbled, because I'm well aware that in other places and subcultures, it's considered insane to prefer Windows for dev.

I've been on OSX for five years but this year switched back to Windows 10 with a new surface book. Yes took some adjustment, but now I find it just fine for building python webapps with posgresql backends. Cygwin using mobaxterm pro is nice, all the jetbrains IDE's work fine on windows, and even powershell ISE is interesting.

Surely the person who stated that they were basically unaware that web developers use Windows are ignorant though, right?

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?

Most developers I know use windows, most of them don't know what SASS is though. I think its fair to say that the majority of front end developers prefer OSX.

According to the SO survey, 50% of developers are on Windows, although there's no filter for web developers. However, the survey is biased towards English-speaking countries, which tend to be richer.

Which would they prefer to work on? I haven't seen any stats.

While I can't support this with figures, which I'd love to see by the way, my experience working as a consultant at a number of companies, from startups to big media conglomerates in Europe, is that for web, there's definitely a preference for macs, however slight.

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.

agreed, I haven't seen any states, I am just basing it on my personal experience in the UK. I use Windows in the Day and OSX for personal projects. Wonder where that puts me?

I think both this criticism and its parent are too quick to judge because the website says "coming soon", but your comment just veers it off to a neurotic direction. At worse, they got revealed too soon on internet forums.

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.

> You're so filter bubbled that it hurts

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.

I agree, thanks for calling it out and my apologies to toomanythings2. I'm not sure why I thought that was necessary.

Is there any data regarding to this? Does github, npm, etc. release any web stats? Atom collects some telemetry I guess, it might provide good insights. Anything public?

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech... gives a good indication; over 50% of respondents use a version of Windows, vs 26.2% OSX. Mind you, that comparison is a bit skewed given how it counts Windows differently (broken up in versions) compared with OSX (which has been OSX for like ten years)

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