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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

> Because even though the world of non-programmers uses Windows, the world of programmers decidedly do not use Windows. I think if you were to analyze what people use in the vast world of startups, corporations, open source projects, and other places you'd find it's inverted with 95% of programmers not using Windows.

My personal observation is quite different - this is clearly written by someone who lives in his bubble.

Most obviously: most corporations do use Windows. Also for technology startups outside of the "web application operator" type (here it depends a lot on the local culture), many use Windows: often because this is what the customers use, and the software/service of the startup has to be compatible with the ecosystem of the customer.

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I work for a mid-size publicly-traded software company that makes software development tools.

There's a clear dichotomy internally in choice of operating system. Corporate, project managers, and people managers use Windows. Developers and technical people use Linux (and we used to support Mac OS but that was recently dropped). Recently Corporate IT decided to move on-prem services to a Microsoft-hosted SaaS cloud, which caused some pain for the majority of employees but there was some kind of kickback or discount and some line in a spreadsheet was tortured to reveal the right numbers, so the deed was done.

Of our customers, about one third run our product on Microsoft Windows and two thirds on Linux. We certify both but only Linux gets dogfooded and support for Windows customers tends to be higher. The only people who ran our product on Mac OS when it was available were students and hobbyists and small startups whose license fees wouldn't keep our office lights on long enough to walk to the coffee machine.

I second that. In most large orgs I worked, non-tech people used Windows, but macOS wasn't uncommon. But as for developers, we often had a choice. Many people would just take macOS or Linux, but I know some developers who would use Windows because they somehow learned how to deal with its quirks.

> most corporations do use Windows

Not really.

They put it on desktop with packaged software. The software they develop themselves run almost exclusively on Linux.

Speaking as someone who happily lives in the mac engineering bubble and has very little interest in leaving said bubble…

We tend to dramatically under-estimate the market share of Windows in engineering.

I have no trouble believing that most companies run Windows and develop on Windows. I just don’t particularly want to work for these companies.

Microsoft itself doesn't recommend that you deploy software on Windows servers anymore. It's something that is supported, not recommended.

A lot of engineers who use windows aren’t programmers. This is because a lot of custom engineering packages that require windows, especially since they were developed 20 years ago when windows was dominate.

But programmers have many more choices, and visual studio shops aren’t very common anymore, at least in the developed world, and I would bet countries like Russia and China as well.

Quite a lot of programmers use windows, because they require less maintenance and there is no reason not to.

Are you sure any of the three major operating systems require much maintenance these days?

At least for linux, I would assume that it hugely comes down to how much of a personal statement the OS is to developers.

I use Arch btw.

Well, yes, "Linux" is not well-specified. When one installs Arch, they hopefully know what they want, and it's something else than just a low-maintenance casual desktop OS. :)

Mac’s don’t require much maintenance either, and last longer then Lenovo things. When I worked tech in Beijing already a lot of programmers used them, even in changping around Lenovo’s big R&D office.

You don’t have to be a Visual Studio shop to use Windows machines, just like you don’t need to be an Xcode shop to use Macs.

Sure, older tools are also feasible on windows. But if you are going with clang or GC, why bother? I guess you could do java dev on windows as well as other platforms.

There’s also the whole world of Java software and engineering which all pretty much Just Works on Windows.

What do those ellipses mean?

    When Shute uses three dots it means, "Use your own imagination. Conjure the scene up for yourself." (pause)

    Whenever I see three dots I feel all funny.

~ https://inkscrawl.blogspot.com/2005/01/whenever-i-see-three-...

~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfKvOlSJ77o

That's a great response. I unfortunately still just perceive end-of-phrase ellipses akin to a blank stare.

Or as a passive-aggressive suggestion that you're incorrect in whatever is being responded to.

Definitely no (positive) funny feelings.

There's only one, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#In_writing

I've developed software on Windows for Windows when working in a bank. It's pretty common.

Tell me which bank so we can all avoid it.

Almost all

You're gonna have a bad time

I notice that's in the past tense. I'm old enough (as in, used Borland Delphi) to remember if you developed small business software, you were almost by definition a windows developer.

But that was a long time ago. Along came Google whose master plan looks to have been to turn the web browser into the business platform of choice. Seemed like insanity at the time. Yet here we are. Browsers have since become masters at playing video, can handle interactive voice, and can talk directly to the GPU. Now Microsoft wants you to use Excel of all things in a a web browser and has dropped the Windows native version of Outlook in favour of the web one packaged as a desktop app. Seems like Google made it's vision work.

I know there are some heavyweight applications out there like video editing and Engineering CAD with finite state analysis that need raw metal performance. But they are few and far between, and aside from them - who is doing Windows native development any more? Certainly not the firms that make accounting packages - the abandoned Windows long ago. For those that are left - are they going to survive the transition to ARM and RISC-V?

POSIX / Linux / BSD / whatever applications - they continue to be as strong as ever. They drive embedded at one end, and the servers at the other. That sort of development is easiest to do on the the target platform, and since it dominates now Windows had to emulate that platform if it wanted to keep the developers. Which is how we got to WSL.

But Windows native app development - that seems like it belongs to a bygone era. Now even Microsoft develops own apps target Electron, not Windows.

> But Windows native app development - that seems like it belongs to a bygone era. Now even Microsoft develops own apps target Electron, not Windows.

I indeed have the impression that some industries (e.g. banking, insurance, development of engineering tools (e.g. CAD applications), PC gaming, ...; observe that at least banking and insurance are two financially quite powerful industries) have a lot more love for the "Microsoft ecosystem" (Windows; in banking and insurance also Microsoft Office) than Microsoft actually does. Thus, in these industries Windows (and Microsoft Office) is used and Windows software is developed despite Microsoft's actions and stance.

> I notice that's in the past tense.

Yes, but that's because I moved companies. The bank in question still uses Windows.

> I know there are some heavyweight applications out there like video editing and Engineering CAD with finite state analysis that need raw metal performance.

WASM and WebGL etc (or whatever the newest developments are called these days) are there to make working in the browser faster.

Btw, if you have beefy enough servers, it's not the 'weight' of your application that's the problem, but the latency.

> For those that are left - are they going to survive the transition to ARM and RISC-V?

Just recompile, or use the automatic translation of binaries that comes with your OS.

Having audited quite a few mega-corps, and seeing their CMDBs in detail, "the amount of RHELs is too damn high" to use the meme. I can't speak to percentages as I didn't keep specific track of those numbers, but from memory/impressions, the RHELs were at least 30%-40%.

As a developer in a corporation, yes, the software I develop runs on Linux servers. But we don't develop in the server - my work computer is a "desktop with packaged software" and as such runs Windows.

They do, *really*

>the world of programmers decidedly do not use Windows

Who do you think writes all the Windows software? There are hordes and hordes of people writing code on Windows for Windows all their lives. Server/web software aside, there are huge layers of windows-only software.

This is a ridiculous article because the author did not even bother to check the stackoverflow developer survey. Majority of developers use Windows. I use Linux, but just because I use Linux does not mean that I have to be delusional about it. Programming != {webdev,AI}. What operating system game developers are going to use? What operating system business GUI application developers are going to use? Win32 is still the most stable API out there.

And even if you, for some insane reason, decide to pick Linux and fight its technological challenges, in the end only a tiny percent of users is going to use your product. Yet they will be responsible for generating over 50% of the bug reports. To make matters even worse, most of them will come from Arch Linux users, providing absolutely useless debug traces because they use a distro notorious for not shipping the debug packages.

Majority of developers who use StackOverflow enough to fill out the survey, thats a bias already, and a massive one at that.

You have disproportionately more beginners using it than more seasoned professionals. Hell, I barely use it, and I have questions every day - I just look up the documentation instead.

This is like saying most people love overpriced dropshipping, just because an advertisement company tracks how many of the people who click on ads buy dropshipped garbage. Its a massive bias.

There's an even bigger hole in it than that: his list of languages completely overlooks Java. The language that prides itself on portability, has been taught in universities for decades, is widely used in industry and which every component needed including the compilers and runtimes can be fully installed and updated on any machine, graphically, just by installing the free version of IntelliJ, which conveniently works the same way on every OS. It meets almost every one of his requirements.

Here's a report of the actual experience one game developer had with bug reports on Windows vs. Linux, suggesting that having Linux support is useful: https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...

Agree, most of the ABAP developers at SAP or in the partner/SAP consulting companies do use windows, as the SAP GUI (business GUI app) runs the best on windows, the Unix-like version written in Java miss some critical features that makes it unusable for engineers.

The bubble is quite big though. Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook typically offer developers laptops with a choice of Linux / Mac (but not Windows).

Windows for development is really a common choice if you make video games, hospital, school software or desktop stuff. But even there there are exceptions. It's unfortunately a common choice in some, esp. American companies where the product is intended for Linux, but they would still hand out Windows laptops to the employees because of their bad / backwards IT that only knows ("knows" is an exaggeration here...) how to work with Windows. So, it often comes to that an employee gets this decrepit system, but then works on Linux anyways, but the experience is worse because they need to jump through some hoops to get to the system they actually work with.

Anyways, any claims about what "most corporations" do smells like LinkedIn posts promoting a technology, where the claims are usually made w/o any research but also any way to disprove the claim. Just don't go there.

Google does offer Windows laptops, including to engineers. I had one for a while. It made a perfectly adequate thin client to my Linux workstation and made debugging in Windows browsers significantly easier.

They didn't during my time. But my department didn't do anything that had to do with Web... also, we got into Google through acquisition, and the company originally started with developers working on Linux and rarely Macs. The IT wasn't really very selective about it, so there was a guy who wanted a Windows laptop, and they gave him one since they had licenses for the HR / sales etc. people, but he quickly gave up the idea.

So, by the time we became Google, nobody really thought about it as a viable option.

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