Hacker News Reader

Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

"if we can comfortably do development without a MacBook"?

What kind of premise is that for a question? You think this forum consists only of devs using Macbooks?

In OPs defence: if they work in one of the main tech hubs then pretty much all they will likely see people using is MacBooks. I guess a better way to have phrased the question is “do development on a laptop with a cloud based operating system rather than a traditional OS”

Thinkpads are very popular

Last time I attended a developer meetup here in Berlin I saw more ThinkPads than Macbooks...

Yeah, I think in Germany it's more like 50/50 for small companies with a big trend to 90% Apple with freelancers and 90% Thinkpad/Dell for bigger companies.

> if they work in one of the main tech hubs...

In Silicon Valley. Everyone else uses Windows.

You should pop to London sometime

And you should look at market share numbers and maybe visit every other place in the world sometime.

I'm so deeply confused right now that I thought this thread was a joke but now I'm thinking its not.

I'm in the state that shall not be named on the other side of the world from California but when I go to tech meet ups, 90% of the room is running Ubuntu/Linux Mint or some other variety with a sprinkling of Macbooks.

Is it seriously that different? What do the Starbucks around that area look like?

edit I should point out I'm only going to web development meet ups.

Based on my business trips to the SF Bay area, it's seriously Apple land over there.

Pretty much all MacBook Pros. Maybe 15-20:1 these days over devs on Linux machines from what I've seen.

It's funny because growing up as an Apple user in the mid 90s it was reversed. And we didn't have a package manager like Homebrew on OS 9. It's so much easier to be a Mac dev today than historically.

My MBP runs linux, as does the MBP of every other developer at my office (there are also 2 dells running linux).

Companies think devs want macbooks. I see it advertised in job posts all the time, "New Mac books." Most devs I know either hate them (myself included) or don't really care. Most of the ones that hate them are running Ubuntu/Arch in Parallels or some other VM. I do most of my stuff in Docker containers.

I would love to be running Linux on it but the IT department in most places I've heard of won't let you replace OSX. Places that also offer Windows laptops for devs won't let you put Ubuntu on it either.

So I use my MBP with it's stupid emoji bar and an escape button that can crash at work and my System76 laptop at home/everywhere else.

I'm so conflicted about my favorite development machine. I use Windows/HP laptop at work, but I own a Mac at home. I love them both equally it feels like. Windows seems to have universally more tooling available for download, while the Mac just feels smoother and has nice tooling built-in (such as access to a decent terminal from the start).

Windows is out of the question for a lot of devs that live in the Unix shell. Sure, I could run a Linux VM or dual boot, but those aren't very pleasant experience.

FYI, Windows 10 also has WSL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

Yeah, but it is insanely slow

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wsl-febr...

https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/7knl...

Strange. I’ve never noticed that.

It's fine for casual use and CPU- or network-bound tasks. But anything involving lots of filesystem operations (like, heh, building software) is just a mess. The project I'm working on right now is a biggish C tree using cmake/ninja that still builds in 3-20 seconds (depending on configuration) on my dual core laptop but takes 90+ on a quad core skylake under WSL.

But for the simple case of "I need to ssh around or pull some files with curl or check something out from github or whatever and I don't have my linux box" it works great.

WSL + Git Bash on Windows works wonderfully.

I decided to dual boot my WSL Windows install with Arch, now I never go back to Windows. Arch is 100% what I need in a developer machine, and 70% of a decent recreation machine, while Windows is the other way around. Turns out I care more about my dev experience than gaming.

I use MacBook at work and Windows at home.

> Unix Shell

Cmder[0] is what I use, it supports all commands that I use on my work MacBook. If I need something Linux-specific like imagemagick, I just use WSL[1]. Some say it's slow but it runs fine. Maybe it's the fact that my PC is like 10x more powerful than my MacBook Pro because it's standard desktop computer with water cooling.

Bottom line, as someone who is using both every day - Windows is fine, it's not 2010 anymore.

[0] http://cmder.net/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

In my experience it's fine if you're using the stock terminal app on macOS and then go back to windows, but if you use anything like iTerm then cmder will drive you mad.

Yeah but the rest of the Mac will drive me crazy so it’s a good trade off IMO.

If I had to use a Mac all day I would miss all of the simplicity of using Windows for things like browsing files, managing application windows, having buttons with actual labels, etc. I would miss being able to operate the entire OS with just the keyboard, which is impossible on a Mac.

Just full-screening a VMware or Virtual box with your favorite Linux distro is a much better experience than what else has been mentioned so far, and I still hate it. I wish stable Linux laptops were a thing. Currently I have to use a bash script to detect headphones, turn brightness up/down, and my suspend/lock has inconsistent and strange behavior. On the other hand, it's still a whole world better than the shitware and random unannounced update restarts windows 10 forces you though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com