Comment by nocman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nocman | Hacker News Reader

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> At least here in the US, the majority of developers daily drive macs on their desktop.

Not according to statista.com (I am not a registered user, but it looks like you could register for no cost, in order to check the source):

https://www.statista.com/statistics/869211/worldwide-softwar...

Windows is the majority OS for development, with Unix/Linux and Mac being close to equal, but both considerably less than Windows.

This is also consistent with the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/):

Under the "Operating System" heading it says:

  "Windows is the most popular operating system for developers, across both personal and professional use."

[edited to include Stack Overflow survey]

They said "in the US". The data you have provided says "Worldwide" which doesnt prove the point about the US.

fair point, however I suspect that if you narrow the scope of the data to the US (even the data from those surveys) it will not change the results much.

Out of curiosity, I'm looking for data that is limited to the US, and will respond with results if I find them.

JetBrains makes their survey data available here ( https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/ ):

Based on my calculations from that data (extracting only the US responses, based on their entries for 'os_devenv', I get these numbers:

- Linux: 45% - Windows: 58.9 % - Mac: 51.2 %

That is conclusive enough for me to say that Windows is still the most common daily driver for developers in the US. I'm not one of those developers, as I don't use Windows as my primary development platform.

I suspect this may be a case where people tend to think that because most developers they know use a particular OS for development, that must be true everywhere.

I would not be surprised, for instance, to find out that the numbers of developers primarily using Macs at some big tech companies is much higher.

[edited for formatting]

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