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Comment by misternugget | Hacker News Reader

I think that is on the roadmap too, but possibly further down.

You know Windows is the most common development platform? If it were me I'd prioritize it

The Zed team disagrees. Here is what they say in the github discussion on the issue: (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5394)

"We will let you know when windows support is under development. The Zed team isn't taking feedback on when we start on windows support, nor why we didn't start with windows.

The amount of people on each platform isn't relevant, as it starts with the base assumption that more people = better to the Zed team. Growth driven development unlikely to lead to a resilient, high quality product long term."

Haha, well they will get lots of feedback they don't want to take.

A company like Jetbrains can do this to an extent due to existing products fueling long term R&D efforts before they bare fruit. Interested to see how this outlook holds up as the runway burns and investor pressure increases from that cool 12.5m they raised last year.

From what I can find, the used OS of software developers is 61% windows, 46% Mac so this argument has no weight on the considerations the team should make Å— it’s essentially a toss up.

Even if it weren’t a toss up and significantly more devs used windows, deciding to target windows based solely on OS market share is one of the worst things a small dev team with finite resources could do. It’s just not a compelling argument at all.

Gotta respect that they know what they want.

I think linux + osx combined is probably developer majority. I'm assuming most Windows development is .NET or Unity based. Over the past nine years, I've worked primarily with Node, Ruby, and a smidgen of Java and no employer has issued Windows machine. It's in sharp contrast with the start of my career where I was in VB6 and C# where I only worked with Windows environments. Could be confirmation bias, though.

Windows is a great platform for developing any language or platform, not just .Net. Personally I think it blows macOS and its dated tools out of the water in any category

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t...

Stackoverflow found that Linux and macOS is the slight majority for professional use and the minority for personal use with developers (with the caveat that the total professional use of all categories is >100%)

Just curious what tools are you missing on MacOS or Linux that are found on Windows?

I have been on MacOS the last 8 years or so but before that was all Windows and Linux. I prefer MacOS now but curious what I am missing. My colleagues that are using Windows machines all use WSL with dev containers so really just using Linux under the hood.

My experience is that pretty much everything is cross platform these days. I don’t do .Net or game dev though. Just Go, Java and some NodeJS these days.

> so really just using Linux under the hood

Yeah, but with Windows GUI along with fractional scaling, device, and etc support haha. I've developed on both bare Linux and for years in Linux VMs. Saying Windows+WSL is "really just linux under the hood" does this setup a massive disservice. It makes me smile every time I type WSL into the terminal lol.

Yeah Linux desktop environments are a bit of a mess but OP specifically called out MacOS as well. Once you add Rectangle it is a solid DE in my opinion. Also it is Unix/linux compatible so kind of the same beast with good GUI/hardware and *nix terminal.

Was just curious what Windows only tools I am missing out on.

Fair. But I will say that OSX is superficially similar to Linux to many people.

I agree. Long time Linux engineer who prefers Windows to OSX as a desktop OS. Currently use a Windows workstation with WSL and VSCode as a daily driver. I feel this currently gets me the best of both worlds(Windows/Linux).

It is, but barely (windows is @ 61%, macOS is at 46% based on the numbers I found). And even if we ignore that, number of potential users is far from the only factor you’d consider when choosing the first platform to target for a new project. And then, ignoring that as well, just because an OS has more potential users in total, that doesn’t mean it has more potential users of your editor.

There’s lots of reasons to not choose windows as a first release platform, and it being ‘the most common development platform’ isn’t a compelling one, especially for a small team with finite resources.

Even when I am forced to use Windows, I develop on Ubuntu inside a Virtual Machine.

About 80% of the developers at my company do the same. Only a few are happy with just Windows.

So, I would prefer if they prioritize Linux and leave Windows as the last one.

Is there some place I can subscribe to the Windows release notification?

Maybe the tracking issue for Windows support: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5394

Possibly https://www.google.com/alerts?

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