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Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers.

So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.

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I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.

This. I ran Linux at work until last year, when it was finally disallowed. I went with locked-down Mac over locked-down Windows.

The hardware for a Linux laptop right now is not great. Especially for an arm64 machine. Even if the hardware is good the chassis and everything else is typically plastic and shitty.

That is a surprising sentiment. Most dell and Lenovo laptops work just fine and are usually of reasonably good build quality (non-plastic chassis etc.).

arm64 is however mostly bad. The only real contender for Linux laptops (outside of asahi) was Snapdragon's chips but the HW support there was lacking iirc.

They give us Dell Linux machines from work. They suck so bad and we have so many problems. Overheating, camera is terrible, performance is bad relatively to the huge weight of the device. Everything is a huge step down from Macs.

Whenever I see Linux people comparing Linux and Mac I'm amazed at the audacity. They are not in the same league. Not by a mile. Even the CLI is more convenient on the Mac which is truly amazing to me.

How is the Mac CLI more convenient? There isn't even a package manager in the box, they ship loads of old outdated tools too. Plus there's the whole BSD/GNU convention thing you have to watch out for.

I don't find my ThinkPad running Linux overheats, nor is it particularly heavy. And performance is comparable to the similarly priced MBP at the time. Camera sucks, but compared to my Surface so do the Macs...

Prefer my Konsole setup on KDE and I use both interchangeably all day tbh. Camera yea. The irony is heating issues become less of an issue with arm.

We are lucky in that we can choose our machines (within reason, and no real support if things get broken) and run an arch flavour.

I use thinkpad x1 carbons and have nearly 0 issues. The hardware is not quite as nice as a macbook but it does the job and is nice enough.

Recently an article on HN front page was about a guy who had to file down his MBP because the front edge of it was too sharp and resting his wrists on it hurt his hands. At least two people in the comment section noted how the sweat on their hands over time caused the sharp edge of the MBP chassis to pit and it caused it to turn in to a sharp serrated edge that actually cut their hands.

You can say other laptops are "plastic and shitty" all you want, but Apple's offerings aren't necessarily the best thing out there either. I personally like variety, and you don't get that from Apple. I can choose from hundreds of form factors from a lot of vendors that all run Linux and Windows just fine, plastic or not.

>>At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac

I work in video games, you know, industry larger than films - 10 out of 10 devs I know are on Windows. I have a work issued Mac just to do some iOS dev and I honestly don't understand how anyone can use it day to day as their main dev machine, it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.

It makes sense that you use Windows in a video game company. We use windows as well at work and it's absolutely awful for development. I would really prefer a Linux desktop, especially since we exclusively deploy to Linux.

I work as a consultant for the position, navigation, and timing industry and 10 of 10 devs were on Windows. Before that I worked for a big hollywood company and while scriptwriters and VP executive assistants had Macs, everyone technical was on Windows. Movies were all edited and color graded on Windows.

>it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.

The people using them typically aren't being paid to customize their OS. The OS is good for if you just want to get stuff done and don't want to worry about the OS.

Weird .. macOS is still completely open is my experience. Can you give an example?

I compile a tool we use, send it to another developer, they can't open it without going through system settings because the OS thinks it's unsafe. There is no blanket easy way to disable this behaviour.

We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation and starting with Tahoe that started to fail - we discovered that it's because of SIP(system integrity protection). We reached out to apple, got the answer that "we will not discuss any functionality related to operation of SIP". Great. So now we either have to disable SIP on every development machine(which IT is very unhappy about) or re-sign the clang executable with our own dev key so that the OS leaves us alone.

If it's being sent to another developer then asking them to run xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine on the file so they can run it doesn't seem insurmountable. I agree that it's a non-starter to ask marketing or sales to do that, but developers can manage. Having to sign and then upload the binary to Apple to notarize is also annoying but you put it in a script and go about your day.

But Apple being "completely open", it is not.

If SIP is kicking in, it sounds like you're using the clang that comes with Apple's developer tools. Does this same issue occur with clang sourced from homebrew, or from LLVM's own binary releases?

Yes, it kicks in even with non apple supplied clang(most notably, with the clang supplied as part of the Android toolchain, since we sometimes build Android on MacOS and having to re-sign the google-supplied clang with our own certificate is now a regular thing every time there is an update released).

> We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation

I am curious what you are doing

We use Unreal Build Accelerator which injects a custom dlib into clang to intercept the compilation process and distribute it to worker machines.

I’m curious why this needs to be code injection and not, like, a shell script?

Because...it's official behaviour that is fully supported by clang? If you want to add a hook on compilation start, it's literally the documented way - you include your own dlib with necessary overrides and then you can call your own methods at each compilation step. Not even sure how you'd do it with a shell script? You need to have knowledge of all the compilation and linking units, which....you have from within Clang.

What's the interface this uses? I don't think I am familiar with it

There's a very good explanation in this presentation :-)

https://static.linaro.org/connect/yvr18/presentations/yvr18-...

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