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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Ha! I switched to Mac so I could have pipes, grep and bash. I personally believe a big reason for the Mac resurgence has to do with the switch to UNIX. I was on Windows using Cygwin for years before anyone I knew was using a Mac. Then OSX came out, and all of a sudden all the academics I knew switched to Mac, and a couple years later most of the professional programmers I knew had switched.

The great thing about a Mac is that I get to have my user level UNIX without having to know anything about the system level UNIX. I don't need to be a sysadmin to run the thing. I get grep and pipes without having to know all the crazy commands to tweak networks settings and display timings and boot scripts. When OSX came out, that was the state of Linux, you couldn't be just a user of it, you had to know way too much to get it running.

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> I personally believe a big reason for the Mac resurgence

Mac resurgence is more of a perception than reality. In 2016, Apple sold ~18.5M Macs, down from the previous two years [1] and off more than 10% from last year.

Granted that the Mac numbers are falling at a slower pace than the PC market as a whole, but resurgence is probably an over-characterization.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/state-apples-device-sales-1940...

I think the resurgence refers to the market share Apple gained since the OS9 days.

In this context, I think "Mac resurgence" refers to the Mac coming back from the dead over the past 20 years, not recent sales figures.

The other comments here are absolutely correct -- I was referring to OS9 vs OSX, on a 10-20 year time frame. OSX ushered in new waves of adoption that outshines previous numbers by an order of magnitude.

Given that Mac has gone from well under half a percent market share to over 7% today, I'd say "resurgence" is an under-characterization, relative to what I was talking about. ;) OS9 never had the market share that OSX has, so it's less coming back, and more dominating like it never did before.

Agree! A real relief to get a proper Unix shell after getting by with Cygwin.

As soon as I could install MySQL and Apache on OS X I had to have it. I no longer needed an internet/SSH connection to code.

Have you tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux?

Not OP, but I'm genuinely interested in how this experience is. What do you think of it compared to using, say, iTerm2 on OSX? I've been thinking of switching back to a Windows PC since I haven't been very impressed by OSX in the last couple of years.

I've been using it since it's release to the fast insider ring and at work since it's release to the slow insider ring. It does everything I need to do. Build C++ with GCC or clang. ssh client works fine (have not tried ssh server, but supposedly supported). Python, Perl work fine. Have had some UI issues with the console, but those have been fixed on the fast ring.

The team behind WSL is also very responsive to issues reported at github.

It's quite impressive. Ex Valgrind runs out of the box in last Insider versions.

I haven't tried it yet, but I am looking forward to it.

> The great thing about a Mac is that I get to have my user level UNIX without having to know anything about the system level UNIX. I don't need to be a sysadmin to run the thing. I get grep and pipes without having to know all the crazy commands to tweak networks settings and display timings and boot scripts.

Luckily, that is basically true for modern Linux as well.

basically

Alright, I'll bite. What's missing?

I ask as I type from my Dell XPS 13" DE (aka Sputnik).

It's mostly hardware support still. As an example, try using a Baytrail/CherryTrail laptop with Windows 10. Now try in Ubuntu. Oh you need Linux 4.11. Oh that's not out yet, so you need to run a bleeding edge kernel directly from git. Even Ubuntu 17.04 is supposed to ship with 4.10 so you'll have to wait until Ubuntu 17.10 before your hardware might be usable.

Yeah, but that's not really an argument for macOS, given Windows is not even Unix and OP mentioned macOS.

This and I was also under the impression that Ubuntu was experimenting with Bay Trail/Cherry Trail support in 16.10:

> http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/10/14/ubuntu-16-10-images-r...

Seemingly confirmed here:

> http://linuxiumcomau.blogspot.com/2016/10/running-ubuntu-on-...

Where this guy updated to say that current ISOs of 16.10 should work...

> Whilst two ISO sets of various Ubuntu flavours for both 16.04.1 and 16.10 releases are provided, I recommend first trying one of the 16.10 ISOs as these are the most recent and incorporate the latest kernel, patch sets and fixes based on previous releases and feedback. In particular, the Yakkety 16.10 ISO kernels support micro SD cards (although with some limitations), includes a patch for I2C bus, has improved RTL8723BS wifi and bluetooth support and most recently I've included support for full disk encryption on Lubuntu and fixed the home directory encryption for all flavours.

OpenSource tends to have a lag time to hardware by nature...but I do believe there was some exaggeration here.

Before blaming Linux devs for lack of support of new chips I would first check how Intel is cooperating with them by releasing proper documentation in due time.

As a counter-example, try buying a Baytrail/CherryTrail laptop with Windows 10. Now try to install OS X. Oh, you can't since it's not a Mac.

All the time the argument is given that OS X has much better hardware support than Linux, which is just not true. It might be true for OS X on a Mac compared to Linux on unspecified hardware. However, if you constrain the hardware choices even half as much as you do for OS X, that's not the case anymore.

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