Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?
Clarification: the operating system where e.g. your IDE runs on. Not the deployment target.
Results from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055031
Results from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055031
I find CMake intensely offensive, just the whole worldview of every tool demanding you learn some DSL to do basic things when I have a 4K monitor and just want to select a bunch of cpp and h files to build, but I've since been forced to swallow this bitter pill for work reasons, and I guess it's time to give tools based on it another go.
MacOS is just the sweet spot of great desktop + great unix-style devbox.
However, I went back to linux on my personal laptop (nixos on my case) and I am pleasantly surprised how many things now just work.
The only thing that still annoys me is the laptop not sleeping properly and therefore using too much battery power when idle.
It has made great strides on the last two or so years.
On top of that I've been locked out of my machine and Apple ID and they just kept sending me emails that in some weeks they were going to reset my password, and they sent me those emails for 2 months before I got access to my apple id and machine again, proof[1].
They just kept not obliging the "2 weeks" (which is already mad when I've given you my secret password and I've verified my email and phone already).
And they did not respect the two weeks 3 times in a row!
That is beyond disgusting and Apple has never got a single $ from me since, I only own a MBP I use on the move because a client has sent me an M3 Max with 48 GBs so it made no sense to at least not use it.
And if I need to format it, it's not even my problem.
Me too, but Tahoe is hideous. I hope they revert back to something sensible, or I'm going to move to Linux full time.
NixOS has a declarative configuration that is simply key=value for most use cases. Whatever you configure stays configured, and you can also rollback when doing dramatic changes e.g, migrating from Xorg to Wayland takes 2 min and changing 1 LOC in your configuration.
On my Debian or Ubuntu dev systems, even with 10+ year old hardware, I'm always one apt dist-upgrade away from having one of the best development environments in the world. On macOS, once my hardware gets "old enough" (as defined by Apple), I'm left in the dust. No more OS updates, no more Xcode versions, no more SDKs. I can shore up some development capabilities using Homebrew, but Homebrew itself perpetuates[1] the treadmill.
No thanks, I'll stick with Linux, where I can tinker to have the OS work the way that is best for me, instead of what Apple thinks is best for me.
MacOS only offers HiDPI for certain resolutions. There is a free OSS program that unlocks HiDPI for other resolutions: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay
I just tried disabling HiDPI at 2560x1440, and it looks quite bad! With HiDPI, I'd say it looks similar (if not better) than Windows.
It's hard to find good before/after shots. The difference is much more dramatic in real life:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/10oy6xo/i_use_switchre...
Why Apple decided to not support low dpi is beyond me.
I find it astounding that this has somehow been normalized.
Apple doesn’t care as long as they move inventory, apparently.
My IDE is Windows (VSCode or Cursor); but I'm also using ChatGPT in the browser and various Linux command line tools (connecting through Windows Terminal to WSL Redhat).
There should probably be a fully hybrid option in the poll.
> Clarification: the operating system where e.g. your IDE runs on
If you're developing on a Linux VM that you connect to via a browser tab opened from your Windows laptop, you're developing on Linux for all intents and purposes.
That is, Windows was not doing enough for you so you switched to Linux for dev tasks.
By the same token, if your IDE is running in WSL, for all intents and purposes you're developing on Linux. A virtual machine, sure, but the virtualized OS is a Linux variant. Because installing the IDE on Windows itself was not doing enough for you.
I program on Windows + WSL 2 e.g. and I have no idea how to develop on windows and barely used powershell in my life, but I know the ins and outs of Linux.
I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right, I'm merely stating that we have different definitions and AFAICT there's no ISO standard saying what qualifies as developing on Linux and what not.
I'll throw out my unpopular opinion/experience here, too: I haven't liked any "desktop experience" I've seen or used for a Linux distro, and they all look and feel very similar to me: foreign, basic, and difficult for me to tweak and produce with. I greatly dislike the React stuff both on the web and in Windows, and use Classic Shell, which I'm satisfied with. Windows is easy to customize and almost everything can be tailored without even needing a reboot, many even with registry options already made and just waiting for a bit to be flipped.
It helps my puny, smooth brain, too, to just think of Windows being graphical and Linux being text-based; helps me remember what I'm doing.
Cloud based development and browser hosted environments would certainly be worth measuring. I imagine the numbers are tiny compared to other platforms.
Arduino IDE probably counts as something with decent numbers. Wokwi also makes for an interesting candidate in that area.
+2 years slugging in a vm.
Developing with out bash is just unnecessary work.
My productivity has more than doubled. easily. I manually type passwords half as much and when I do that is to access Microsoft services.
2fa wastes a huge amount of time.
Because nothing that needs 2fa is scriptable.
This is by far the best option to isolate and easily create development environments that I found.
I connect to the containers from VS Code running on Mac OS.
While I of course agree modern Mac laptops are great and Apple's silicon efforts have been superb, just seeing one makes me think of work and not pleasure now, somewhat ironically how I also felt about beige IBM boxes in the early 90s...
I've never had to deal with the BSDs or Macs. If a customer was willing to pay for me to come up to speed on either of them I would consider it, but I have no interest otherwise.
I am slowly coming up to speed on Haiku, and now that most of my application and development software runs on Haiku and its hardware compatibility is much better, I'm looking to eventually move from Linux to Haiku for my primary workstation.
Basically all the bonuses of Windows re: gaming, with a great developer experience (like Linux/OSX).
The prime annoyances are:
- exposing a port to the entire LAN (for local phone debug) is non-trivial
- I imagine Android or phone dev might be a bit harder re: simulator, luckily I don't do this
- dev that spawns native windows would by default spawn through some WM layer with X11 or something (and they are laggy)
There are so many things that are just plain worse on Windows when it comes to coding: messing with WSL, constant driver updates, every Windows link opening in Edge etc.
Haven't tried Linux for a while but maybe it's time.
I retired the last Windows machine last year.
Firefox on Linux, though, is not working very well. It keeps hanging during long typing inputs. No CPU or disk usage, just stuck. And it uses so much memory that the OOM killer sometimes kills it.
I was never a Linux fanatic. It's just that I considered an operating system with ads unacceptable. I rather liked Windows 7.
Most people seem to pick a Mac as their thin client, since ssh works well natively on it, it runs MS office, and the Windows laptop options are never the “nice” Windows options for some reason, but various flavors of plastic hate boxes that get 1/2 the battery life of the Macs IT offers.
Firmware build times can be comically bad. Most firmware builds are heavily optimized and you often build the same codebase dozens of times with each build optimized for one particular hardware configuration of many. You then get to deploy to a legion of test devices (also managed by machines you remoting into) and see which special snowflake you managed to break this time (it somehow is never the one you sanity checked your changes on during development :-D).
It's common to throw (a lot) of compute at the problem, and at some point it's way nicer if the 100+ cores you're cranking to 100% CPU for a few min are somewhere you're not sitting next to. It's also nice that those resources can be shared among many devs so they don't sit idle most of the time.
So, you end up with the thin client pattern. It's usually practical to build locally as well for a few particular targets, which might be a random dev board at your desk. But if I have a remote build system with a few hundred cores cores and a few dozen TB of ram, why would I not just use it instead of using my laptop?
Athough firmware and hardware is such a huge, varied field many people likely have different experiences. Brining up a big custom SoC is way different than bringing up a board with an FPGA and all off-the-shelf stuff.
What's "far more than ssh to some remote server" mean to you? It's always fascinating how different everyone's experiences are.
This way, my development environment remains stable and portable and the thing I use to read email and surf the web is whatever. It works for me.
I mostly work on my desktop which is Windows + WSL 2 with Ubuntu and use a MBP on the move.
I’ve never been able to get used to default Linux key bindings, and never been able to customize them to feel quite right.
our customers all run linux in production too, so it's very easy and natural to develop and test the software in its usual environment (although i wish my laptop had eight times the ram to match).
my ide is linux: https://plan9.io/cm/cs/upe/
Mac is too expensive, Windows 11 is cruel and unusual.
My primary complaint so far: The green color LED on the magsafe connector is not the same green as the LED on the caps lock key. This wouldn't have passed the Steve Jobs approval.
I bet you would love the Mac Mini M4 though. (I've spent some time perusing your site during the numerous times it's been posted here.)
Use MacOS Sequoia (15.x) for at least the next year though.
Have you ever tried Krita or Pinta?
Slackware.
It's in the FAQ.
IntelliJ + WSL in Terminal + Docker.
VS Code is good enough for 90% of grunt work, and Emacs will give you 110% more, but at the end of the day, you live in your editor not your OS (or maybe it’s just me).
> Clarification: the operating system where e.g. your IDE runs on.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-computer-...
If you'd take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html