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Comment by setheron | Hacker News Reader

Very sad half the comments are asking for MacOS app. The rise of development on MacOS for server development when the final target is Linux will cause long term harm to the newer generation of engineers

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And the unreasonable hostility towards macOS will have zero affect because in the end the best product wins.

Did the rise of Windows cause long term harm to past generation of engineers? I doubt it since now Windows, which had a gigantic market share, still was forced to implement Linux "compatibility" for developers.

There are three popular operating systems for the modern developer and it's not unreasonable to ask for a build for all of them when presenting a project to a developer focused community.

The rise of a MacOS sort of monoculture certainly affected those developers that were still on Windows. It drove me off of Windows, a system that I otherwise appreciated just fine. I never cared much for MacOS, though, so I went to Linux, but there I'm also constantly feeling the pain of so many developers being on MacOS, as there's so many incompatibilities between the two. So, in the end I guess I prefer things that run everywhere, which this Parrot thing may be in reach of, it being Electron? In that sense I guess I support the ask for a MacOS version. But boy, could the MacOS crowd just stop throwing their weight around?

Edit: Examples:

* Tools that are only available on MacOS (remember the days when tools were only available on Windows)

* I write a BASH script which then doesn't work for the MacOS coworkers

* Tools that are supposedly platform- independent have Linux-specific errors that get no love because their developers don't care about Linux

I think it's a little much to expect most small outfits to user test on every single Linux distro though. There are tons of programs that may run fine on something like stock Ubuntu, but bring it to another flavor and all of a sudden nothing works.

Why? I mostly code on Mac and deploy on Linux (or FreeBSD). Never really encountered a situation where programming a web app on Mac has caused issues when deploying to the server.

What about issues with CPU architecture?

When you write web code you should never have to worry about that. Actually, if you write any user space code, except drivers, you shouldn't have to worry about that. If you have to worry about it, reconsider your tooling very seriously

i've had issues with aws lambda and compiled ai models, because lambda varies hardware and cpu architecture from one container to another

i can imagine this happening if a team has a myriad of hardware/os flavors and different server setups.

Yes, when you write web apps in x86 assembly, it gets tricky.

I'm still on OS/2 Warp.

for x86 or PowerPC?

Talking about rabbit-holes. I used to have prototype OS/2 PowerPC 64-bit hardware from IBM before they killed the project. I should have kept that early EFI-based system. When the EFI boot sequence would panic, you would get an error message of "Danger Will Robinson".

man OS/2 Warp on PowerPC should be really secure because no one is writing malware for that combination!

AWS Graviton is ARM.

My experience is that having a team with mixed platforms has helped reduce deployment woes, with the rare platform-specific bugs getting worked out beforehand.

Nowadays there are automated pipelines that build artifacts for different archs and platforms; this shouldn't be a particular issue.

Or maybe some of the newer generation will take time to update Linux to be more competitive with macOS for developers. Could be a long term win for Linux fans.

Linux is good for development, but Apple hardware is pretty damned nice.

Now if Framework laptops were available in Norway, I'd probably rather have that, even if they're not as powerful.

Also, depending on where you work, there might be restrictions in the choice of platform. Usually limited to Mac or Windows.

I asked Framework that repeatedly, but no progress. I think they might be violating EU Regulation 2018/302, which is rather common, mostly due to ignorance. The problem is that it is rather hard to enforce such regulation to non-EU/EEA companies. You can still send your wishes to support@frame.work.

Update: you can buy from Norway now, but you need to get it shipped to a different country. You need to select a different country and then chose a billing address different from the shipping one. The message that the website displays on not being able to order from Norway is misleading, and it looks like no email to Norwegian customers has been sent with respect to this possibility. Not perfect, but they got better.

https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/what-countries-and-re...

Not sad at all! Mac has excellent hardware, excellent reliability, excellent day to day performance. Im not a fanboy, but it won for (IMHO) clear and obvious reasons. Of course folks want a mac app. No comment on the “harm” bit.

It is always amazing to me people who will chastise people for using Macs.

It is by far the most robust hardware and 15 years later Windows laptops may finally be catching up.

My first programming job was LAMP so I had a Linux desktop and loved it. Later I got a new job that gave us laptops, but they were quite beefy.

I had a Dell laptop with an Nvidia GPU and an Intel iGPU... After updating my OS my gpu was the only way to use my laptop, which made the battery die in under an hour and of course it was much hotter.

I tried numerous driver installs, proprietary, open source, reinstall OS, different OS... Nothing got it working again on a newer version of the Linux kernel.

Went to the Apple Store bought a MBP and have never had an issue since. Not one dead laptop, in 10 years, I plug in my USB C dock and go.

2 years later, what happened to one of my coworkers? Same exact thing. He spent 3 days trying to fix it and basically had a workaround that crashed occasionally.

I get paid to produce working software not configure my OS, and people wonder why Macs are so popular?

Macbooks have been nice since M1 era, but the Intel Macbooks between years 2013-2020 were hardly robust. My partner's 2014 MBP Retina's screen plastic film started peeling off, which was a known design flaw of those models. Later the ones with butterfly keyboard were notoriously unreliable, with keys getting stuck.

Personally I haven't had much trouble with Linux on modern Thinkpads. Very little to configure manually, as long as you pick the right distro. Even a Dell laptop at work with Linux isn't causing me much OS-related issues, although battery life sucks.

Well, no. The 2015 MBP is a well known workhorse that stretched many people professionally up to the M1. I would absolutely agree that the 2016-2020 Intel MacBooks were rough though.

I switched to old ass thinkpads like the x120e which I absolutely love, and ssh into a server much more powerful to do my work.

Every company can have its issues, I think it's more about how many issues there are and what the company did to address it.

My 2013 4GB RAM MacBook Air is still running great, and is used for browsing in my household. Currently writing this on an M1 Air that is phenomenal as well.

Now install Linux on it.

I agree, people don't realize the value of not depending on a single company to do their work. We can see this problem even more with LLM code generators.

Nowadays everything runs on docker anyway

You'd never see a Windows developer work in MacOS or a iOS developer work in Linux but Linux developers (server side) routinely work in MacOS

Unnecessary abstraction

Counter-argument: it could be risky to dev on and deploy to a single monoculture.

But empirically, I've been developing on macOS (etc) and Linux (often simultaneously), and deploying to Linux (Debian, RHEL/AL), Solaris (etc), and FreeBSD ... for more than 20 years.

Aside from package management tooling differences, package naming, and package content splits (e.g. pkg vs pkg-dev) -- all of which are equally inconsistent between Linux distros -- I cannot recall a single issue caused by this heterogeneity.

> iOS developer work in Linux

I dream of the day Apple releases official docker images. Building for iOS is the only reason I have to touch a Mac.

All SNES games should have been developed in Mario Paint or it was an unnecessary abstraction

Define "unnecessary", please.

> [...] or a iOS developer work in Linux

In the past I did a lot of successful work on iOS apps from a Windows system, thanks to Xamarin and a mac sitting on a shelf, acting as the remote system.

Also, please, remember what "cross compilation" mean.

Really? In the modern .Net world (originally .Net Core) it's very common for devs to use Windows machines to write code whose CI pipelines and deployed environments are all Linux. I've seen a handful of issues with things like path separators and file system case sensitivity, but we're talking about 3 or 4 minor problems in 6-7 years that I've been using it.

Hey, some of us have moved to Macs by now :)

(also yes, people keep asking "what about linux" and think it's bad when you say there is literally nothing extra to consider in 95% of situations, sigh)

I'm actually going to switch to Mac as a pilot for our team at some point this year! I don't expect any issues, I already use Rider and have done plenty of .Net stuff on my personal machine which is a M3 MBP. Really IMO the only question marks will be around using Parallels when we need to occasionally work on a legacy .Net Framework app.

How about a real-world example of the harm you're clutching your pearls over?

Besides, most devs doing web development on Macs are also using Docker, which is always Linux.

conjecture?

Most people scraping sites aren’t writing anything low-level enough to care about the particular flavor of Unix-like OS it runs on.

I’d argue that there’s no correlation at all between the two.

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