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Comment by mogoh | Hacker News Reader

> There is a perception that Swift is only a good language for Apple platforms. While this was once true, this is no longer the case and Swift is becoming increasingly a good cross-platform language.

How good is the developer experience on a non-Apple platform really? Linux is my primary platform and my perception is, that allmost all of the swift eco system is for Apple. Libraries, tools, documentation, IDEs, tutorials, etc. all assume, that you use an Apple.

Can someone tell me who does not use an Apple-device and uses swift?

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My experience is that it is very frustrating. Apple's documentation makes no mention of what works on Linux and its limitations, so you just have to guess or work it out with trial and error.

I tried to write a websocket client: https://willhbr.net/2023/08/23/the-five-stages-of-swift-on-l... Then tried again 2 years later: https://willhbr.net/2025/10/13/the-6-2nd-stage-of-swift-on-l...

Sounds like a language not to waste my time on.

I should spend my time writing actual code and ship stuff, not debugging or finding holes in someone else's product.

It’s not. The Apple devs will tell you it’s a great time on Linux, just like the MS people will tell you the same for C#.

Rust wasn’t designed for any specific platform and you can tell. The ecosystem on Linux especially is fantastic.

> Rust wasn’t designed for any specific platform

I suspect that Mozilla being the primary developer and sponsor for many years actually meant that compatibility with all major platforms was prioritised; Mozilla obviously care about stuff working on Windows, and run lots of builds on Windows + I imagine a number of Firefox developers (if not drive) at least own a Windows machine for testing Windows-specific stuff!

I call out Windows because I think generally software people go for Mac > Linux > Windows (although Mac > Linux may be slowly changing due to liquid glass).

Is liquid glass really that bad? I left Mac years ago due to other annoyances. It was my daily driver for a decade and change. But I couldn't get used to the iOSification and the dependence on apple cloud services for most new features. When I started with macOS jaguar it was just a really good commercial UNIX. It got even better with Tiger and leopard.

But the later years I spent every release looking at new fancy features I couldn't use because I don't use apple exclusively (and I don't use iOS at all, too closed for me). So almost no features that appealed to me while usually breaking some parts of the workflow I did use.

While I did hate the 'flat' redesign after Mavericks that on its own was not really a deal-breaker though. Just an annoyance.

I'm kinda surprised liquid glass is so bad people actually leave for it. Or is it more like the last drop?

> Is liquid glass really that bad?

No, but every release of MacOS has a noisy minority declaring it, or some features of it, as the end of Macs. Some people will genuinely hate it in the way that nothing can be universally loved, some people will abandon Macs over it, most people don't feel strongly about it at all.

Maybe there's some people out there that love it, even.

I can barely tell the difference between the Mac I use that's been upgraded, and the Mac that hasn't due to its age, because I'm not spending my time at the computers staring at the decor. The contents of the application windows is the same.

> Is liquid glass really that bad?

I don’t like it, but I think the claims of mass exodus are unlikely.

It feels a lot like the situation when Reddit started charging for their API: Everywhere you looked you could find claims that it was the end of Reddit, but in the end it was just a vocal minority. Reddit’s traffic patterns didn’t decline at all.

Liquid Glass really is that bad. Not because the visual design is especially bad (not my cup of tea but it's okay); but because all of macOS is now incredibly janky. Even Spotlight is a janky mess now with lots of broken animations.

> Is liquid glass really that bad?

It's unfinished. For example, the more rounded windows would require that scrollbars or other widgets are more inset and things like that. The system doesn't seem to handle this automatically, so many apps look broken, even Apple's first party ones.

I ship a lot of .NET on Linux these days, works great

This. We ported a huge component, an ASP.NET server hosted Windows to Linux (/w Docker). We did the initial migration in a couple of days, and only after a couple of months, we basically managed to bring all production installs to Linux.

It only took a year, and everyone works exclusively with devcontainers, and we allow devs to experimentally pick Linux and Mac laptops.

Arguably the dotnet sdk now works better on Linux than Windows. For example, Windows Containers are "supported" only the marketing checkbox sense.

I tried doing compiling a few of my Mac CLI tools to Linux. These days, it's faster to run them through an LLM and get quite excellent Go at the other end, and _that_ is much easier to cross-compile.

I have been looking at the new Android support (don't have the link handy) and it's tempting, but I know Kotlin and always developed for Android with a bare Makefile and the JDK, so I don't need any fancy tooling...

Yes, in my experience the Apple bias exists in all the articles and how-tos you read in a way that can trip you up.

It’s been years now but I wanted to create a Set with weak memory in its keys. Everything I read said “oh just use NSHashTable” and I dutifully did (it’s in Foundation) and then when I tried to cross compile it didn’t exist outside of Apple platforms. It’s not as if the import made it clear I wouldn’t be able to use it, but I couldn’t.

Swift has swiftly to manage the Swift compilers to use (equivalent of rustup) and LSP works pretty well. Most of the (open-source) libs that Apple does are cross-platform. I personally take care to make sure my personal libs work on all platforms as well, including Windows(!) (anecdotal, I know…).

All in all it’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting better, with intent to continue in that direction.

This! Also, for new APIs Apple reduces (or does not provide) Objective-C documentation.

I really tried to love Swift, but in the end I ended up with 1 project using Swift/SwiftUI, and all the other apps I started to write, I rewrote in Zig or Rust, because the Swift compiler kept giving me vague error messages with no hint which Swift file was the culprit or/and which line/column the error was.

YMMV

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