
More developers now use OS X than Linux - oneeyedpigeon
http://9to5mac.com/2016/03/18/os-x-versus-linux-developers/
======
thearn4
FWIW, I'm a developer on a macbook largely because I would like a portable
UNIX-y system that doesn't suck. With drivers that work consistently, and UI
(hardware and software) that feels like it was actually tested by an end user.

I had a debian thinkpad while in graduate school that did what I needed it to
do, but still ended up being extremely finicky after a few years (especially
WIFI and power management). Despite always wanting to do work with computers,
I've accepted the fact that I really don't want to have to play sysadmin on
some personal machines, and am willing to pay to have them just work.

edit: one extra note, regardless of what platform I am developing with, my
deployment target is typically some form of Linux HPC cluster, so I don't know
if the OS X vs. Linux argument is particularly clear cut. I use both (and
windows), but in very different ways. I don't have a clear incentive to pick
one platform for everything.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> FWIW, I'm a developer on a macbook largely because I would like a portable
> UNIX-y system that doesn't suck.

This is pretty much why I switched to a MacBook too.

Windows is a workable desktop OS, and it has great software support for things
other than developer tools (I can also play games, for example).
Unfortunately, its lack of UNIXness means half the open-source software world
(at least, the portions I care about) doesn't work well with it, and this is a
pain.

Because I wanted something UNIXy, I switched to Ubuntu (more than once), but
the desktop experience isn't great (in particular, both my graphics and my
sound were broken) and non-developer application support is poor (few games I
wanted to play were supported or worked, not to mention other things).

OS X, on the other hand, has a solid desktop experience, sufficiently UNIXy
underpinnings for development purposes, and has good enough application
support for my needs.

I do have the option of switching over to Windows on this thing, but tellingly
I haven't in the two years I've had it. (I do have a Boot Camp partition for
Windows, but it exists for the sake of a single game. Everything else I want
to do can be done in OS X.) While using Windows or Ubuntu it usually took less
time than that before I got fed up and switched OS yet again.

My experiences aren't representative, of course. I don't just do web app and
systems programming on my computer. If I did, I'd probably be fine with Linux.
But sometimes I also do things like browse the web (including watching YouTube
videos and using web pages which have WebGL), dabble in game development
(Unity's editor doesn't run well under WINE), edit videos (there's no good
Linux video editor), play games, and so on.

I'm also someone who doesn't like dual-booting. I don't want to have to deal
with two completely different operating systems with their own user
interfaces, and have to stop one activity and reboot if I want to do a
different activity. I don't want to have to deal with the mess that is trying
to share files between different OSes.

~~~
bryanlarsen
What games work on OSX but not on Linux? A few years ago OS X had better game
support than Linux, but in my experience, Linux now has better game support
than OS X, due to Valve's steambox push and Apple's OpenGL stagnation.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I'm not sure what they are, but there are 2,449 of them on Steam. 6,451 titles
for "Mac OSX"; 4,002 for "SteamOS + Linux".

~~~
bryanlarsen
Historically yes, OS X had much better support. Is there any way to pull the
stats out for games released in the last 12 months?

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Not easily. I make it 598/367 in Mac's favour for 2016, but that's not really
a lot of data.

------
gabemart
This seems like very thinly veiled blogspam around
[http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#tech...](http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#technology-desktop-operating-system)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
You're right. To give them their due, 9to5mac do clearly credit the source,
but they add little analysis, and the page is, frankly, terrible. I actually
regret submitting this now (the original stackoverflow source is far superior)
but this is how I was alerted to the data, via my RSS feed. Sorry.

------
dhd415
More StackOverflow survey respondents use OSX than Linux. It's unlikely that
StackOverflow survey respondents constitute a representative sampling of all
developers.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
It's probably the closest we have though, unless you have another source in
mind?

~~~
eloisant
If you want statistics that make a minimum of sense, you need a representative
sample. "Anyone who was willing to respond" is not representative, which is
why any internet survey where anyone can respond is garbage.

To create a representative sample, you need knowledge on your population. For
survey on the general population of a given country or state, the census data
is used. You know what percentage of your population is in a given age
bracket, their occupation, their gender, their family situation, etc. and you
build a sample with the same proportions.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
Thanks for explaining what a representative sample is, I think we're all a
little better off now. I think the question still stands though: does anyone
have a more representative survey than the Stack Overflow one?

------
hacker_9
This smells of biased fanboyism. Firstly Windows users make up of 50% of the
graph, so why doesn't that get any interest? And secondly the difference
between OSX and Linux is 4.5%, from a small sample group, not newsworthy at
all.

I expect more people dev on OSX simply because of wanting to design for IOS,
and being locking into the OS to do so.

~~~
madmax96
>small sample group

56,000 respondents is a small sample?

~~~
jacobush
No, but a bigger problem is that the group is self-selected I think?

~~~
madmax96
It probably is, and that is a problem.

------
notacoward
Highly misleading clickbait. The implication is that people actually develop
on OSX, but the actual question was what people use for their desktop OS. The
difference lies in those who use OSX essentially as a terminal, from which
they connect to their actual Linux development environment in a VM or on a
remote machine. Like hundreds of other people where I work (Red Hat) I work
full time on Linux from a non-Linux laptop. I've done it from Windows (before
RH), I've done it from OSX, and now I'm doing it from a very sweet Chromebook
Pixel. I haven't actually programmed on a Mac since the System 7 days, but
9to5mac would spin it as though I was among the (really very few) developers
who have abandoned Linux for OSX as a dev platform. That's quite dishonest of
them.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Not that I'm arguing that it isn't a misleading title, but when you say "Like
hundreds of other people where I work (Red Hat) I work full time on Linux from
a non-Linux laptop.", how many of those are using Macs? I wouldn't personally
consider working this way because of the cost; if I wanted to run Linux, I
would purchase a much cheaper laptop to do it on. Are there really that many
people that work on Linux full-time but are willing to pay 3-4 times more
_just_ for superior build quality?

~~~
notacoward
It varies a lot across the company. The great majority use very boring
company-provided laptops running Linux natively, but a significant number use
personally owned machines - usually Macs. Over on the JBoss side, it seems to
be all Macs all the time. However, that doesn't mean the development is
actually happening on the same machine as code editing or web browsing. Even
with a Linux laptop, there's often a need to run a very specific version of
RHEL for all testing. If you're running Fedora, that's not going to cut it, so
the habit everywhere is to use VMs or machines in a lab somewhere for the
actual work.

------
diego_moita
More developers that answer surveys on Stackoverflow. This skews very strongly
away from non-native english speakers.

The participation of Chinese, Japanese, Russians and Latin Americans on this
survey is just ridiculous. You can see also a clear web & mobile bias on the
survey page:

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016](http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
In fairness, the programming world as a whole has a bias against people
without strong English abilities.

------
skywhopper
Given that the respondents are StackOverflow users that skews the numbers
right from the start. The large sample size is irrelevant. It's mildly
interesting data but I wouldn't draw any conclusions about the atate of the
industry from it.

------
elcapitan
The diagram is a bit misleading as it separates out Windows users by OS
version, although they are still the majority, not Mac users.

------
thunderbong
I've worked in both the open source world and the closed source (dot net)
world. In my very humble opinion, the dot net world just doesn't need the
amount of online help that the open source world needs at least not from
StackOverflow. Dot Net and it's kin tend to have very good help out of the box
and extensive documentation. This is very much unlike in open source where
honestly, it's not even possible to install an operating system without having
another computer available online.

Again, I'm not dissing open source here. I've learnt a whole lot from it. But
there's many, many things that are lacking in open source, which when seen
from the other side seem extremely basic and fundamental to creating good
software.

~~~
takno
Not really sure the strange and inaccurate comment about needing another
computer available online to install an open source OS really adds much to
your argument here.

Java also has excellent out of the box documentation. Tools which are
developed commercially often have better documentation whether the source is
open or not, and where there is good documentation Stack overflow usually
becomes a last resort rather than a useful reference. Either way it's
something I look at for specific questions, not as some kind of community
where I go to answer surveys

------
blakesterz
I'm not sure I understand what to take away from "Priorities Change With
Experience [0] Everything becomes more important the older we get? New
developers are just so happy to have a job that nothing is important? It's
just a strange looking chart that doesn't seem to really make much sense.
Nothing matters, and then a decade later everything matters more?

[http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#prio...](http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#priorities-change-with-experience)

------
huuu
Link to the survey: [http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016](http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016)

------
darreld
I'm admittedly sitting in the enterprise but I don't seriously believe a third
of all developers are using Swift. This definitely feels like cheerleading.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I can't even work out where they've drawn that conclusion from; maybe it's not
even based on the Stackoverflow dataset, but something that 9to5mac has
obtained from elsewhere. To be fair, they do say "In mobile development ...
Swift is now used by almost a third of developers"; I think it might just be
poorly written.

------
fit2rule
Not for long. This will be my last Macbook, because frankly, its too
expensive, and there are great, simply great, Linux laptops out there, which
after all will give me all the same power, all the same.

I attribute my dis-interest in what has been a decade of OSX adoption (after a
decade of Linux/Unix), as a result of having to think, too many times, about
the sandbox, the API rules, brew update && brew upgrade && brew doctor, and so
on.

~~~
bogomipz
I'm with you, OS X just seems to always be in the way of getting stuff done
now a days, there was quite a long time where OS X just stayed out of your
way, that's no longer the case. I have also had my share of hardware issues -
wifi/blue tooth radios that stop working after two years(just gotta replace
the logic board), displays that stop working to name a few. The sad fact is
that the amount of Apple annoyances/frustrations now reminds me of of
Microsoft which is the reason I switched to begin with.

Out of curiosity what hardware are you maybe looking at?

~~~
fit2rule
If all goes well, I'll switch to something like this:

[http://www.razerzone.com/store/razer-blade-
stealth](http://www.razerzone.com/store/razer-blade-stealth)

As long as it feels as comfortable as a Macbook, with decent performance, I'm
willing to switch completely.

------
Grue3
A Stack Overflow poll is not representative of what developers use. Otherwise
you'd have to believe that most developers code on Notepad in Windows. Indeed,
people who learn to program, the target audience of Stack Overflow, often code
in Notepad. I did too, before I switched to Emacs. And these days I only end
up on Stack Overflow via occasional googling, and certainly wouldn't
participiate in their polls.

------
hashkb
Well, Apple forces you to develop for iOS in XCode, right? And startups get
deals on Macbooks... So this really is not so much remarkable as inevitable.

------
CyanLite2
According to the report, at least 71.2% of all development is happening inside
Windows or a Windows VM (Visual Studio and Notepad++ are Windows only). Sounds
like a lot of folks are using Macs to host a Windows VM, which I see all the
time. If you include a small portion of Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, Xamarin
then you're probably approaching 80% of all development being done on _gasp_
Windows.

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meeper16
This really depends on what kind of developers your're talking about here.

web developers? core software engineers? core system level engineers?
algorithm engineers?

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sandGorgon
People should really check out the new Thinkpad T460s - actual upgradability,
looks spectacular, carbon fiber , brilliant Linux compatibility. Takes the new
Samsung 960 Pro NVME and works brilliantly.

------
mchahn
The last geeky conference I went to, Github's Atom conference, I saw virtually
nothing but Macbooks. I've even seen a presentation by Microsoft given on a
Macbook.

------
tzaman
Can we now have native Docker support, Apple? Pretty please? :)

------
plugnburn
Facepalm.

