Of course shipping a very outdated tool with your OS is an issue. And the fact that you need to use 3rd-party package managers to update/replace it is also an issue.
But if you want to contend that anything that is solveable via customization/3rd party packages is a 'total non-issue', then I fail to see how you could argue that Linux isn't superior to MacOS in every single way.
It's not an issue even if you say it is. Takes 1 minute to setup brew on a fresh Mac, third party or not who cares when it's open source, apt is also open-source and in the same sense a third party someone develops, you just get that with the base Debian like systems, if we start counting the minute wasted to setup brew then you waste more time to install Debian in the first place, Macs come pre-installed.
It literally is an issue, and the fact that you're pointing out a potential solution should make that obvious to you. Many software companies (including FAANGs) have basically given up trying to support building/running most of their software on mac for these exact reasons, and they have really tried - dedicating hundreds of experienced engineers to the problem.
I call BS on the FAANG statement. I work at FAANG and 80% SWEs use MBPs, actually if we go by literal meaning of FAANG company list, they do not even focus on desktop software and are mostly web companies and the tooling is all backend where SWE machines do not do any heavy lifting.
You work at FAANG and you can run your entire stack on MacOS? Which FAANG?
Or you mean, you work at FAANG and you can run your web application which is 0.01% of the stack on your mac?
> they do not even focus on desktop software and are mostly web companies and the tooling is all backend where SWE machines do not do any heavy lifting.
The web frontend/ui is a relatively small portion of the development that goes on at typical FAANG. And the reason the macs 'do not do any heavy lifting' is because they literally can't - most of the complex backend systems, low low level/high performance code, etc can't be run on macos.
The complex backend code isn’t going to work on your little laptop either. This is a stupid position to take, because people care more about whether they can spin up a development environment, not run all the code that goes to production.
> The complex backend code isn’t going to work on your little laptop either.
Of course it will if it's a linux laptop. Companies even give exceptions for linux laptops for exactly this reason.
> This is a stupid position to take, because people care more about whether they can spin up a development environment, not run all the code that goes to production.
You think being able to run the code you're working on is not a requirement for a good development environment? Or you think nobody writes this code, it just magically appears in production when you deploy your html page? Lmao.
> Many software companies (including FAANGs) have basically given up trying to support building/running most of their software on mac for these exact reasons
Why would Amazon or Google waste a single minute trying to get software to build on Macs that are targeted to run on Linux servers?
Just because your machine runs Linux and the server runs Linux doesn't mean the code is going to work on your computer. How are you supposed to test failover on a cluster that kicks in when hitting 100k QPS? It's just not practical to run the whole stack locally on your machine.
You're completely wrong. I worked at Amazon (AWS) for years, yes developers generally use macs, but they generally cannot run their entire stacks on mac. Most of the actual software people work on is run on remote linux (AL2) ec2 instances after syncing the code from mac.
Running the entire AWS stack on macos is literally impossible at this point because major pieces aren't even built for macos (and can't be without major rewrites).
No one is going to run the entire AWS stack on their Mac when it’s targeting Linux.
Amazon “suppprting” Macs mean outside developer support like AWS CLI, CDK, SAM, Amazon Chime, etc.
Of course we all spun up Isengard accounts when we needed a lot of CPU horsepower or to run some dependencies instead of running something locally. Why wouldn’t you? You worked at the only company that never had to worry about a large AWS bill.
Also all of the internally written MDM tools also supported Macs.
> No one is going to run the entire AWS stack on their Mac when it’s targeting Linux.
You literally just claimed everyone at Amazon uses macs for development and runs their code on their macs. This is not the case for the vast majority of code written at Amazon.
> Amazon “suppprting” Macs mean outside developer support like AWS CLI, CDK, SAM, Amazon Chime, etc.
Nobody said anything about 'amazon "supporting" macs' and what that means except you, just now, when you moved the goalpost.
> Of course we all spun up Isengard accounts when we needed a lot of CPU horsepower or to run some dependencies instead of running something locally.
What? Using remote development environments/ec2 boxes is literally the default at AWS and it has nothing to do with 'CPU horsepower'. Most of the ec2 instances used for development are far less powerful than a macbook pro.
I’m trying to understand what point you are trying to make? If you are going to run software on Amazon Linux, why would Amazon waste time trying to get software to run natively on Macs?
When a developer puts a laptop in their Amazon issued backpack, what type of laptop do most of them use?
But if you want to contend that anything that is solveable via customization/3rd party packages is a 'total non-issue', then I fail to see how you could argue that Linux isn't superior to MacOS in every single way.