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Comment by KptMarchewa | Hacker News Reader

>why the vast majority of developers prefer to develop on Windows

Was that ever true?

It was true then and it's true today. Certainly not in HN or at 8-person startups nobody's ever heard of, but the vast majority of developers work on boring business software in Windows.

Why is it at every tech conference you see a vast preponderance of Mac's? Are conf goers not representative?

1. They're probably not representative

2. You probably notice macs more because of their uniform branding, compared to a mish-mash of different looking other laptops.

3. Is it not enough to watch and listen to a keynote without pulling out a laptop?

4. The Mac may be a "lie".

4a. Dual booted, is it running macOS, Linux, Windows, *BSD?

4b. Is it running a VM (or more than one)?

4c. Is it used as a very expensive terminal with SSH to a different *nix OS or a remote desktop system?

At various times, all those have been true of mine.

> Why is it at every tech conference you see a vast preponderance of Mac's? Are conf goers not representative?

The prevalence of MacBooks at tech conferences is in my experience a very US-centric thing. I rather associate ThinkPads with tech conferences.

I dunno, I kinda dislike Macs. At least Windows has the decency of not even pretending to be Unix-like. Other than the fact that it has a bash-like shell, and some token support for Posix APIs, the Mac is just as proprietary and opaque (I'd argue even more so) as Windows. At least Linux allows to poke around its innards and explore with nothing but a terminal.

Yeah and they have doubled down on things like the command key that inhibit adoption by wannabe former Windows users. NIH, or just plain cultural stubbornness prevents them from allowing the system to welcome new users. The Mac differences are not superior and it feels crusty and sub-par to me. However, the Mac doesn't track...so it wins. I bounce back and forth between Mac and Windows daily. I hate them both really.

> … Other than the fact that it has a bash-like shell, and some token support for Posix APIs…

Strongly recommend reading this response by Terry Lambert on getting OSX to POSIX compliance.

https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

Do they prefer or are they not given a choice?

As someone who has worked in large budget games for much of my career (where windows is everywhere) most of them prefer it.

As a counter point outside of gaming, I used to work for a Fortune 250 100+ year old banking firm, and you were given no choice. Heck it was a miracle if you could get a developer machine that was more powerful than your business users got.

> large budget games

no linux support on those games right? then there would be no option to use linux.

To be fair if you’re using a game engine such as Unreal I’d expect most of the game-specific programming to be against that (as an SDK) and it’ll abstract the platform specifics for you. Linux compatibility work, if even required (as in the builds produced by the game engine don’t work out of the box) would be separate from the actual game development work and can be assigned to Linux-specific engineers with their dedicated Linux machines.

I haven't worked in game Dev but I'd imagine that each person would want/require a copy of the game (dev-build, etc) that they could probably test their aspect of development in, which is highly likely going to only run the platform of which they're developing for.

Developing something for like Sony or Nintendo might be more OS agnostic in the developer's seat, but then it relies on the tools working on those OS's.

Windows is never really a choice, it's more "I choose X, which only works reliably on windows"

The games market for Linux is tiny. Usually not worth the cost for developers.

I assume someone would prefer developing on whichever machine they normally use.

I have been a windows user for a long time and recently started working on a mac to write some iphone code. It is agonizing, but presumably not because there is any problem with macs, but just because the systems are different. Using the cmd key instead of the ctrl is the most obvious difficulty, but I can't say that makes macs better or worse.

One thing that really got me while using the mac is I was adding a file to my project and I double clicked on a folder to navigate into it. Coming from a pc this is what you would do. You also do that on a mac in other places. But here it inserted the folder into my project. I won't get into what happened when I deleted the folder from my project.

Using a system you are not familiar with sucks, whether it is a mac or a pc.

Other than this, is there something I don't know that makes developing on a mac so much better?

Now? Maybe not, even though it's hard to find exact numbers for that.

From 1995 until 2010, at least? For sure.

It was a crushing majority, even.

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