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Comment by alphadevx | Hacker News Reader

If you are a hacker would you be running a Mac? I'll stick to Linux and OSS, thanks.

For me there was a time where I wanted stuff to just work, to get good battery life on my laptop and still have a Unix. I went Mac OS X for a few years (X years ago).

A few years later I switched back to Linux. Much better Java support. Better window manager. Multiple desktops (yes, I had something like that on the Mac, but it was weird). Much better file manager. Much faster (than either Windows or Mac OS).

I still love Apple hardware and their attention to detail regarding battery life, but you can pry my Gnome, I mean MATE, desktop from my cold dead hands. And Linux Mint at least has the Windows battery life (seems to be the only distro that does), so that's kind of ok.

Macs have by far the best build quality for the price, with great displays and hardware as well. They can run most all of the dev tools that you can run on Linux(yeah there is always going to be that one person yelling about X specific thing that doesn't work as it should).

Recently I'm doing iOS dev and you have to use a Mac unless you plan on emulating. iOS strikes me as a platform that so-called hackers would like, seeing as how mobile is a fairly new frontier with unique and undiscovered uses, and Apple is always putting out new iPhones with interesting new hardware and APIs, unlike boring old CRUD webapps and desktop apps which have been stale for years. I was just blown away this week with the amount of insane stuff you can do using GPU hardware acceleration on the newer (5+) iPhones, its like everyone is carrying these little powerhouses around in their pockets. Though I guess you could also say that the closedness of the platform and ecosystem would be repellent to hackers, I personally don't get my panties in a bunch about this, I just like making cool stuff.

Why? Did you know that you can write code under Mac OSX too?

Hacker ethos to me is supposed to be about free computing, sharing, open sourcing you code, building communities etc. Closed source platforms like OSX and Windows are in conflict with that ethos in my opinion. Nothing to do with writing code, more to do with sharing it.

Ah OK that makes sense. I suppose there is an argument about how open the hardware you build on is (do you have access to Intel's CPU designs? etc.), but that's another argument...

I would be careful dismissing all users of OSX/Windows as not hackers though. I make my living writing software for both (it means I can eat if I don't share my code), and also use Linux outside work; does this make me not a hacker when I write under OSX?

Regarding communities, there also appears to be rather significantly large communities associated with both Windows and OSX development platforms. It would be naive to believe otherwise.

Good hardware, consistent experience, lots of development tools. I moved from Linux to Mac simply because it lets me focus on work and less on fiddling around.

I would obviously have liked to use a completely open OS as well, but it's not like there's a lack of community on OS X.

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