If your primary use-case is delivering developer conferences, Macbooks are a pretty compelling option. Linux multimedia has been comparatively quite bad, and at least you reserve the right to complain when a Macbook breaks last-minute.
For pure development stuff, though? You're torturing yourself on MacOS. For every pretty menubar you enjoy, there's a dead POSIX zombie underneath your floorboard or an encroaching platform limitation coming from the top-down. Then you have to deal with the fact that MacOS is by-far the least stable software target of the Big Three OSes, and managing your libaries/software without third-party software is a nightmare. By the time you install all your package managers, Emacs/Vim plugins, browser-of-choice, three or four versions of bash and Git, Via Xcode, most people ask themselves why there isn't a better way.
Ultimately everyone's experience is anecdotal, but survey says that developers are turning over a GNU leaf...
> If your primary use-case is delivering developer conferences
Ah yes. All developers that go to developer conferences are there to deliver those conferences (whatever that means).
> For pure development stuff, though? You're torturing yourself on MacOS.
And you're saying that with the full knowledge and authority because?...
To reiterate. I've been developing exclusively in MacOS since 2008 in a variety of programming languages for a variety of things.
> there's a dead POSIX zombie underneath your floorboard or an encroaching platform limitation coming from the top-down.
Demagoguery.
> and managing your libaries/software without third-party software is a nightmare
wat
> By the time you install all your package managers, Emacs/Vim plugins, browser-of-choice, three or four versions of bash and Git, Via Xcode, most people ask themselves why there isn't a better way.
wat
I spend about as much time installing this as you spend installing the same on... well, any machine. Because most of that doesn't come preloaded with Linux either. I do agree that XCdoe Commandline Tools are a joke. But how many times a week do you install them (and other tools)? Zero? I can spend 5 extra minutes on my setup once every four years or so.
No idea what the FUD is about "several versions of bash and git", I use a single git and zsh (which is now default on MacOS).
And yes, I stopped using emacs a long time ago (which I used for three years... you guessed it: on MacOS [1]) and switched to a proper IDE.
It's just tiring. MacOS was my daily driver up through Mojave, but there came a point where the smoothness of the user experience wasn't worth the limitations of the software. There are hoops I can jump through to make Docker faster, or mount my NTFS drives, or even use Linux inside MacOS, but all of it feels redundant. Everything I use MacOS for exists on Linux, too; why was I using MacOS?
Maybe I'm scarred or spurned or something. MacOS has not been kind to my workflow over time though, and going back to using Monterey for work was an exercise in frustration.
> Everything I use MacOS for exists on Linux, too; why was I using MacOS?
So. MacOS wasn't for you, and you extrapolated it to "if you are on MacOS, it doesn't work". Well, it keeps working for me (and a great number of other developers)
For example, over the past 6 years across two jobs I haven't used Docker except for running some tests (bringing up and tearing down MySQL databases or using Google's pubsub emulator). So while it is slow, it hasn't been slow enough for me to care. I haven't had the need to mount NTFS drives. I havent' had the need to use Linux inside MacOS (and the few times I needed it in the past decade VirtualBox has been enough).
On the other hand... I needed to set up a Linux VM on a NAS to run a small family website I built in Elixir + Phoenix. I'm deifnitely rusty in Linux but ooh boy. Good luck getting a relatively recent release onto a system which insists that everything must come from a packge manager and installed via sudo for the entire system. Thank god for asdf, but it was still a pain and a half (because asdf builds everything from source and figuring out the names for the required libs is a masochistic sort of fun).
Look, the original thing I took issue with was the tired "Mac just works" routine. MacOS has changed, and it's much more opinionated now than it was 5 years ago. If your workflow didn't break, that's fine. Even still, MacOS needs a lot of modification before it's ready for development. It's a fine OS if you want to touch up photos or edit video for a living. For professional programmers, I am adamant that Linux is a more consistent experience than dealing with the issue du-jour in MacOS.
> Even still, MacOS needs a lot of modification before it's ready for development.
Just like every single OS. Your linux box doesn't come with most of the things you listed pre-installed and preconfigured: your vim/emacs plugins, your browser of choice, git, your speicifc versions of libraries etc. etc.
Edit: BTW there's a reason there are so many tools like pyenv, or SDKman, or asdf that first appear on Linux and then get ported to other systems. Because the rosy development paradise that is Linux is everything but.
> For professional programmers, I am adamant that Linux is a more consistent experience than dealing with the issue du-jour in MacOS.
Linux has it's own share of issues du jour that impact actual use of the operating system. And most of the issues I have with OS very rarely come down to the problem with the development tools/environments/what not. Hell, I switched to M1 as an experiment about a year after it came out... and everything just worked (big thanks to those who made stuff work under M1, but even non-converted tools kept working).
And I've personally seen many people switch away from Linux to MacOS precisely because they found the overall experience of being in MacOS better. Because even if you "just" develop stuff, you still want your machine to have all the human stuff: from reliable hibernation/sleep to good touchpads to crisp displays to media support to ... yes, "touch up photos or edit video" (not necessarily for a living).
For pure development stuff, though? You're torturing yourself on MacOS. For every pretty menubar you enjoy, there's a dead POSIX zombie underneath your floorboard or an encroaching platform limitation coming from the top-down. Then you have to deal with the fact that MacOS is by-far the least stable software target of the Big Three OSes, and managing your libaries/software without third-party software is a nightmare. By the time you install all your package managers, Emacs/Vim plugins, browser-of-choice, three or four versions of bash and Git, Via Xcode, most people ask themselves why there isn't a better way.
Ultimately everyone's experience is anecdotal, but survey says that developers are turning over a GNU leaf...