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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

A while ago my site was linked from HN, and nearly all visits were from HN. Here are the OS stats of HN readers I collected:

    iOS 36%
    Mac 23%
    Android 20%
    Windows 17%
    Linux 4%

The Mac vs. Windows stats was a shocker for me. Among technically oriented crowd of HN users Mac has 35% more users than Windows.

I really shouldn't be surprised though. Mac hardware is topnotch and equivalent quality Windows laptops - if you can find one - cost hundreds of dollars more and run slower. As a developer, the only reason to use Windows today is if you need Visual Studio for .NET development.

I use Windows 11 at work. I have Windows 10 on my personal laptop and see no reason whatsoever to upgrade to Windows 11. All Microsoft seems to be doing is, bump up Windows version number whenever Apple bumps up MacOS version number, and make some minor changes (even if it makes the product worse) to justify the new version number.

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> All Microsoft seems to be doing is, bump up Windows version number whenever Apple bumps up MacOS version number, and make some minor changes (even if it makes the product worse) to justify the new version number.

Spot on. I'm surprised I haven't seen this talked about more. First Microsoft skipped 9 so that they could be at the same number as Apple (X/10), called it the "last version of Windows ever" (probably because, at the time, Mac OS X was seen as the last "version" of Mac OS, and would just be dot releases until the end of time). When Apple finally bumped up from X to 11, you could almost feel Microsoft go "B-b-but 11 is one more than 10! We can't let Apple have the higher number!" And in the same breath they: Apple-ified their window corners and (some of their) icons, nerfed the Start menu, showed a complete misunderstanding of the difference between a dock and taskbar by trying their damndest to turn the latter into the former, and around the same time even offered a Spotlight-esque file search in the form of PowerToys (no complaints about PowerToys, though, it's great).

Everything I listed there paints a clear picture of Microsoft having zero vision for Windows (that's nothing new, I suppose) and simply following Apple's lead, but doing it worse.

It's really unfortunate, because, while Windows is certainly my least favorite OS, I do appreciate it for what it is and want to see it succeed. Windows 10's design language had finally matured -- it sucks to see them all but throw in the towel on ever having a clear, singular vision for Windows.

Oh wait, your surprise is that the Mac numbers are slightly higher than Windows? I was instead surprised that they aren't 2x or 3x that. I don't know any developers who use Windows willingly.

I assumed many developers would prefer Windows because you can now run real Linux inside Windows. If your server code is going to run on Linux it helps to also have Linux on your laptop.

> you can now run real Linux inside Windows

Sorta. Not that I use Windows much but from comments here on HN I inferred that the first windows subsystem for linux was decent ish. But then they launched WSL 2 that runs a VM behind the scenes with Linux in it and that limits what you can do with the rest of the OS.

Someone with actual experience please correct me if i'm wrong...

WSL is certainly not perfect. If we're just comparing default shell experiences though, WSL's environment destroys the default MacOS one. Default GNU tooling, updated bash version, a real package manager... Microsoft knows what developers want when they install Linux, and they did a nice job with the mis-en-scene.

Personally, using a Mac or Windows device is a sign that I'll be using VMs for development anyways. With WSL, that VM is tightly integrated with my host system - on MacOS it's a window into a different computer. Nowadays I'd prefer to avoid both OSes wherever possible, but I'd probably err on the side of using Windows for development simply because you can install Ubuntu with one click.

I second this. WSL2 is very well integrated. You just open a terminal and have your Ubuntu (or Debian or whatever you set as default) environment ready to go. Even though it's running in a VM, whenever I start Tomcat, I can access it from the Windows side using http://localhost/... It's that well integrated. VS Code opens my projects inside WSL as if they were local.

On the contrary, I don't use a VM to do dev work on my mac, and it's TERRIBLE. Despite what people like to parrot, the mac shell is NOT linux compatible, is filled with tooling that literally cannot be used to make a modern application, and gets really really pissy if you try to do anything different.

Brew and macports have to basically start the world from scratch again on a mac to get something resembling a good work environment, and it's STILL terrible. Every single time my work laptop updates anything, I basically have to rebuild those environments again because Xcode overwrites anything I may have configured back to defaults, defaults which were deprecated and non-viable for a secure product like a decade ago. I run into issues with the included version of SSL like twice a month, all because apple refuses to do the leg work to manage the licensing for more modern versions.

Meanwhile in windows world, I can download a nearly full version of ubuntu with one click, run it as if it lives on it's own box, and yet still use tools that jump the layer between windows and linux to make it seem like it's not even there. It's pretty powerful. In some ways, the single best linux installation is the one you get on windows. It's so seamless I use powershell, CMD, and the linux shell interchangeably on my computer.

Nix was the only thing holding my sanity together when I was using Mac last. Maybe it was just the Apple Silicon transition, but Homebrew did not have parity with it's x86 version which led to wildly complicated scripts just to get dev environments arranged similarly. Not the sort of thing you want to deal with regularly.

I recommend giving it a whirl if you're at your wit's end with Mac packaging: https://nixos.org/download.html#nix-install-macos

Eh, it takes like 1 hour to setup a solid dev env on Mac.

I used to run Ubuntu for work (dell xps) but the hardware quality was infuriating. My model literally came apart (hinge detached).

I'd much rather spend the hour on dev env than spend a week without a laptop because of poor quality control

I use Nix on both Mac and Linux, so my developer environments get automatically packed-in with my Git repos when I push them. It takes maybe 30 seconds to pull the repo and open a shell with either OS, but only MacOS consistently complains when doing normal stuff. I suppose all of this comes down to personal preference, but my experience has leaned in favor of using desktop Linux when the task permits.

FWIW, Canonical's Multipass has given me a great WSL-ish experience on macOS.

There were 3 major pain points for me:

* USB access is more difficult than just plugging something in.

* Debugging tools like perf, RR, etc were either unsupported because they needed hardware counters or required custom builds (no system headers in apt to help either).

* The VM takes a lot of disk space.

The rest of the experience was fairly smooth. WSL2 can access the entire filesystem through /mnt/<drive letter>/. Windows -> WSL is a bit janky, but it works. GPU access is supported. Network access works. You can use a remote X session to get GUIs working, though you need to be comfortable with linux. Unfortunately having DISPLAY set caused pip to hang for long periods due to [1], but apparently that's been resolved.

All in all, it mostly replaced my windows usage by the end. It's also a great workaround for legacy IT environments where the system is configured with Windows and only Windows.

[1] https://github.com/jaraco/keyring/issues/531

The problem with using windows isn't that you can't run Linux software, the problem is using windows. A lot of developers would prefer to run Mac or Linux, and only use windows for compiling when necessary.

Unfortunately, Windows Windows is just the worst of the major OSes today. Windows still has the most market share and the most support, and there are still things it does better than Linux. But Linux and Mac are still better options in most cases.

I do, but that's because I've used windows all my life growing up. That and Linux (and WSL2)

Though with windows going the way it is I'm probably going to use it only for my gaming rig, and do development on a laptop like Framework running a linux distro

I use Windows but I never see any ads because I customize my Windows installation with some tools that you set up once every few years.

Unfortunately because the HN crowd never uses Windows they don't know you can do that and think we're all forced to play Candy crush on boot up or something. Anyone with a modicum of computer skills knows how to remove the ads and other annoying shit.

What I'm more surprised by is Linux being at 4%.

Seems high? or seems low?

Seems quite low.

Windows is bad and getting worse but dealing with apple isn't exactly a pleasant alternative... i'd rather rip my teeth out...

The UI of windows keeps getting polluted with things I have to dismiss (once), but the kernel continues to get better than it was, in ways that make things way better as a gamer and much more palatable as a hobby dev. I'd rather have a windows computer and WSL for work than the shitty mac I use, and I write python for a living where windows is straight up unsupported except by third parties.

Take a look at window's Bluetooth API sometime. It's documented poorly and a lot of it simply doesn't work. Windows 10+ has the worst Bluetooth implementation of any operating system.

Microsoft just released a developer preview for audio sinking. They're advertising a feature to play audio from a Bluetooth device through your PC. Everyone else has had this feature pretty much the entire time. Windows is the only one that didn't have this feature. Windows 7 had it, though.

The driver implementation is much worse than it's ever been, and the built in UI is barely functional. It's got the absolute bare minimum to make it work and nothing else.

The state of Bluetooth on Windows today is frankly an embarrassment. It's a significant regression from windows 7, and it's put them way behind Linux and Mac.

Worst of all it's been like this for years and Microsoft hasn't done anything.

I'm a developer, and I've been fighting Bluetooth for the last three weeks. Windows updated the Bluetooth stack the other day, and some slight behavior change broke our software overnight. It's been frustrating to say the least.

Gaming is objectively worse on everything past w7 because of forced dwm triple buffering...

Apple's better IMO unless you have to actually interact with Apple the company in, like, any way.

I can attest. One of my friends was making fun of me yesterday because I have a precision with a 40 core Xeon, 256 gigs of RAM, tons of peripheral inputs and Pcie ssd sitting on my desk.

And instead I am docking my M2 MacBook Air to the 4K monitor to do 90% of my programming... I only turn the desktop on when I need to check or compile something on windows.

Only 4% Linux? I guess I've always suspected HN has a surprisingly high number of Windows users but not to this extent.

Linux is not the draw it was in the Windows Vista/8 eras but still a big draw.

I guess the Mac laptop draw is bigger at the moment.

But I can not imagine running my home computer on a closed OS.

Keep in mind this was for GPs website, meaning the visitors are self selecting based on what the context of the link is.

Wouldn't it depend on the content of the article?

I switched recently from Windows to MacOS and I have to say. This thing feels like a Linux OS that has decent app support. For an Apple product it's surprisingly open (not as much as Ubuntu for example), but still a lot better.

The fact is UNIX based also helps a lot of the development process. Microsoft added WSL which helped but doesn't beat having the actual thing.

Finally, the M1 chips are pretty damn good.

> For an Apple product it's surprisingly open

Now try running 32-bit software :)

I don't need to run 32-bit software, atleast for now.

>As a developer, the only reason to use Windows today is if you need Visual Studio for .NET development.

What do you mean by developer?

Lots of embedded systems and industrial automation development is Windows-only, as a random example. Not everything is webdev or mobile. Lots of vertical markets have development environments which are essentially Windows-only.

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