[pmontra]

> If only 10% of those users are developers

They are not. That would mean that more than 10% of the people sitting on chairs in companies are doing software development. That would fail to take into account jobs that don't have a chair, every PC outside an office and even non technical jobs in sw development companies.

Let's check some facts.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s...

Number of jobs: 1,114,000

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001

All employees, end of 2014: 140,402,000

It's less than 1%, still much more than I would bet on. However I think that this figure is lower globally and Windows is sold globally. Hence, much less than 1% of PC users are software developers (Windows, Mac, Linux, anything) and having Windows the larger share its stats are close to the global figure.

[WayneBro]

I think his primary point was that there are more developers on Windows than on any other OS.

Did you find any data relevant to that point?

I tend to think that it's true. There are more developers on Windows. Way more.

[AnonymousPlanet]

There are the regular surveys from Stack Exchange http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech... that has OS X, Windows, and Linux pretty close together, with OS X coming on top.

[pmontra]

All versions of Windows together are 22.5+20.8+8.4+0.4+0.1 = 52.2 %

OSX has 26.2, Linux 21.7.

They sum to 100.1. There should be some inconsistent rounding somewhere.

If the figures are representative of reality it's true that Windows is less popular among developers than it is among the general public.

[AnonymousPlanet]

Ah, I was on mobile and it made a very different impression there for some reason. Thanks for pointing it out.

[marcosdumay]

It's probably not true.

If 1% of the desktop users are developers, that's the same as 50% of the Linux users, and a really big share of the Linux users are developers (really, I expected it to be more than 50% what, clearly isn't true). That's also circa 12% of the Mac users, and I bet a biggest share of them are developers than the Windows ones.

[emodendroket]

> That's also circa 12% of the Mac users, and I bet a biggest share of them are developers than the Windows ones.

That seems unlikely.

The fact that there are a number of programs without real non-Windows equivalents (games, emulators, various commercial packages) probably does suggest a lot of people doing Windows development.

[marcosdumay]

It means that WayneBro conclusion up there is nonsense. You can't claim there are so few users of other OSes that it's impossible that most developers are on them.

It does certainly not mean that there are no Windows developer. That would just be repeating the same flawed argument, but twisted on the direction where it's the most flawed.

[WayneBro]

Meh. That stack overflow survey is definitely flawed. My conclusion is based on the fact that most businesses run Windows and as a consultant, I visit many many many enterprise shops. None of them are running Macs or Linux.

The people here on HN live in a bubble.

[pmontra]

I'm probably in another country on another continent (Italy) but web development, both back end and front end, is a Mac business here. There are some Linux laptops (me too), many Linux VMs on Macs, very few Windows. But we're developing for Linux servers so why should we be using Windows? Every time I get to work junior devs out of university with Windows laptops I advise them to install a Linux VM or be prepared to suffer and google alone how to fix things there.

People are using Macs because it gives them a preconfigured and stable Linux like environment, almost 100% compatible with the server. Windows tend to have different toolings and different quirks. It doubles the effort. In my experience it's OK if you're using Java, which mostly hides the OS and it's obviously a must if you go with .NET. Basically only large companies use those two technologies, and not all of them. Everybody else is on scripting languages, JS, PHP, Python, Ruby. Btw, Java is almost always deployed to Linux too.

So, it could be a bubble but it's a large one.