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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

The problem from me switching to Windows from Mac is iOS development tools.

Ubuntu on Windows is really great.

It's absolutely laughable that Apple forces people to buy a Mac in order to compile iOS applications. My company recently started using Xamarin, and to our surprise we can't run automated builds for iOS on our Linux servers. It's really weird. We don't have any macs anywhere, so it looks like we're going to have to get an overpriced mac just for this single build.

We used second hand Mac minis for this. For around $150 we could compile the iOS apps that we developed on Windows.

Via something like TeamViewer we could see the result on the mac and automated builds were done via TeamCity.

>> It's absolutely laughable that Apple forces people to buy a Mac in order to compile iOS applications.

It also allows them to control the development environment which makes for a much better experience than say, Android dev.

I just want some command line tools that perform a build. They exist for Mac. There ought to be a Linux port. I don't care about development experience.

Since iOS is still essentially macOS, albeit a heavily customized version, making iOS tools work on Macs ought to be wayyyyy easier than releasing them for an ecosystem as different as Windows. They may benefit from developers buying machines but the Mac market is still much bigger than developer purchases. Many iOS technologies are either identical or similar to Mac SDKs, enticing developers familiar with their machines to create Mac versions. Mac versions are useful for development too: even if you are targeting iOS for example, it is often possible to create a "Mac game" of your iOS game and test it way more efficiently by running directly on the Mac without a simulator.

This approach is not "absolutely laughable", it's actually just about the smartest thing they could do.

We use Xamarin. For most code changes the iOS testing is absolutely trivial, since it uses the exact same code running against other platforms. All I want is to compile, it's understandable that they want to keep their IDEs mac-only.

Well, fair enough. But it's really the last holdout of the Ballmer-era platform lock in going. Even MS makes a load of dev tools for Mac and Linux now.

I'm not saying they need to port XCode to Windows. What I am saying they could and probably should do is make it easier to CI iOS apps on Linux (some of the build tooling, as a start) and maybe even allow OS X to be bought & installed trivially on VMWare etc - even as a "developer edition". It would make so many Devs lives easier rather than all these ridiculous and unstable Mac mini hacks everyone ends up doing for iOS dev. I genuinely don't think a OS X for VMWare would tarnish the brand or margins. It's just a EULA change!

Agree, use it often too and a good alternative I also use often is: https://git-for-windows.github.io/

It gives you a Bash shell with hundreds of useful utilities you used to get only in Cygwin.

Though the most complete is the new Windows Ubuntu system.

+1 for Ubuntu on Windows.

Really solved my main issue with Windows, the horrible console prompt.

https://conemu.github.io/ + bash worked pretty well

I've always had the issue of WSL taking a long time to start up (5+ seconds) and had assumed that it was WSL taking up that time. Doesn't seem to be the case, as after switching to conemu, everything is much more speedy and tolerable. Thanks for the suggestion.

or better, gnome terminal with https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv

Would you explaining in more details what you mean with Ubuntu on Windows? VirtualBox or some other setup?

Windows Subsystem Linux. Initially it was only Ubuntu, but has expanded to other sisters as well.

It is not virtualization. It is native Linux in Windows.

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