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by nix23 2159 days ago
>But well most developers aren't actually using Linux.

What??

3 comments

Well, most aren't. The huge majority of developers use Windows and many use OS X.

In any major dev conference in the US/Europe OS X is almost 50% or more (and almost 80% on the presenters side), while Windows has tons of "silent" users (e.g. not the kind to make noise on blogs/HN/etc, but like 90% of devs anyway, working in enterprise, etc).

Even on Stack Overflow poll, which attracts less of the kind of "silent" enterprise devs more likely to use Windows and "bland" environments like .NET and Java, it's 45% Windows, 27% OS X and a little less of that (26%) Linux.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/stack-overflow-developer-s...

It's funny to see your observations about Stack Overflow, because it was co-founded by an ex Microsoft guy (Spolsky) and I remember in early days there it had quite the .NET community which was probably not coincidental. I think they also run the site on .NET.
They do and very efficiently, it was at one point a bunch of high end servers - they called it out as an example of going deep not broad for scaling.

I remember reading they had 256GB of RAM on DB servers when that seemed like an absurd amount to me.

I'm guessing he might have meant OCaml devs? Most development shops I've worked in used Linux servers to host their solution, and mostly Linux/Unix based tools and dev environments (people who preferred Windows as their desktop usually ssh'd to Linux boxes to work).
Most developers, there is a lot of places to get this information but if you look at the stackoverflow survey, which is a survey large enough to be relevant, you get some data around 25% of developers using Linux.

We're talking about as their computer, not servers tho, everyone uses Linux for server

53% Use Linux:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

>Linux and Windows are the most common platforms that our respondents say they have done development work for this year. We asked about container technologies like Docker for the first time this year, and Docker was the third most broadly used platform.

But:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

This is the distinction between the platform for which the work is being done and the platform the work is being done on. You can develop for Linux servers from other platforms.
Thanks, peoples from HN would not have understood that, big thumps up!
Thanks for the answer! I have a followup question: if the server is Linux, that means the app itself (or the "solution") is Linux based, which means that an OCaml solution would have to compile (or cross-compile to) and run on Linux, which means that ARM64 on Linux is relevant :)

Unless of course most OCaml devs don't target Linux.

Sure it's relevant, but again like Eduardo said, most devs don't have Linux ARM64 dev machines, they don't use it on a daily basis, they don't have experience with it.
> everyone uses Linux for server

And here I am deploying .NET and C++ solutions on Windows Servers, strange definition of "everyone".

Chill dude, 'everyone' doesn't mean 'literally everyone on the planet', it's a figure of speech :-)
This is unrelated, but your karma is 2020.
Lol. Not sure if that's a good thing :-D
"Everyone" means most in casual conversation.

You maybe had it confused with the universal quantifier ∀ in a math/logic context, but it's not the same :-)

Which still doesn't apply, when Linux based servers are about 50% of server market.

https://www.t4.ai/industry/server-operating-system-market-sh...

Come on, everyone knows the old trick of using paid shipments to pretend Microsoft have a large share of the server market. It conveniently discounts all these free installations of Linux.
I wouldn't think so, from what I've read OCaml has pretty poor windows support.
They at least aren't using Linux on ARM laptops/desktops, which has been a year away for around a decade now.