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by zxcvcxz 3682 days ago
This appears to be only for OS X. I use to be a big OS X user, but have come to find Linux is a far superior development platform for me.

From a comment on reddit: Most developers who use OSX do not develop for OSX/iPhone, but instead deploy 100% of their code to Linux VMs on EC2 or Digital Ocean. Their toolchain is usually 100% OSS terminal-based tools such as Vim/Emacs, tmux, clang/gcc, PHP/Python/Ruby, zsh/bash; all of which are available via Linux package managers (and have better support on Linux). While homebrew is nice, it's package selection is much smaller than APT/DNF/Pacman, and it's source-based so have fun waiting for LLVM to compile...

Eventually I realized I was basically a Linux user and I was trying to make OS X work like Linux. According to stack overflow dev surveys they show Linux experiences a 10-fold increase in usage amongst developers compared to it's typical rate of usage on the desktop. This also drew me toward Linux. OSX only experiences a two-fold increase in usage amongst developers and Windows actually experiences a large decrease in users compared to their desktop monopoly. Right now I'm developing React native applications completely in vim.

If this application ever comes out for Linux I'll definitely install it and give it a try. Only being on OS X makes it inaccessible for most developers.

2 comments

This is actually a pretty interesting perspective. I hadn't really thought about how I basically use my Mac like a shiny silver Linux box. But it is so very nice and shiny... well anyway...

Deco is an Electron app, so it should build for Linux without too much trouble. None of us are Linux experts, so we'd be very happy to take any pull requests for Linux support if you have the expertise. As an indicator of demand, we have 2x the beta signups for Windows as Linux though, so we're currently prioritizing Windows support.

I've evolved into using a Mac for shiny browsing, iTunes, document reading but I've never gotten homebrew etc. to work correctly so I got a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro and dual-booted Linux for these exact reasons. It will be interesting to see if Windows 10 with Ubuntu bash captures any developer mindshare. It can be truly best of both worlds; the software the rest of the world uses plus all the developer tools in the command line.