[coldtea]

>OSX and its tooling are just ridiculous. I have no idea to this day how macs became the premier development environment.

Because:

(a) it's quite easy to set things up with brew, macports, and/or Nix

(b) because Python is shitty everywhere anyway, and Python isn't the be-all end-all of development work.

(c) because you get a full-featured, working, coherent, take-it-or-leave-it desktop that stops one way of endless tinkering and procrastinating available in Linux to get things "just right"

(d) because it's still a UNIX with a full support for unicy tools, not a hack like WSL or WSL2.

(e) because it has good hardware (mostly - BS keyboard-era aside) and good resale value

(f) because you get to enjoy most/all the proprietary tools you like too (from MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, to whatever)

(g) because in 2020 Docker, remote environments, etc, make many "local dev environment" points moot anyway

[ohazi]

I think it's more inertia than any of these things.

The entire point of this thread is that (a) is false -- see grandparent and the xkcd joke. It's not easy. It pretends to be easy, but is usually broken in some crazy way instead. Apt is also easy, but it actually works more often than not.

(c) was relevant in 2006, when the novelty of OS X was that it was a UNIX that you could actually use as a daily driver. This is what initially got developers to move to Mac. But it's been fifteen years, and all jokes aside, the "year of the Linux desktop" for developers was probably around 2012. Linux may still have issues, but they're not worse than the hoops you have to jump through to make today's macOS behave.

Trendy tech companies are still buying macbook pros for their employees because that's what's been trendy for the last decade, not because they actually ask new hires what they prefer. Practical tech companies do, and at places like that you usually see a mix of macs and thinkpads.

[coldtea]

>(c) was relevant in 2006, when the novelty of OS X was that it was a UNIX that you could actually use as a daily driver. This is what initially got developers to move to Mac. But it's been fifteen years, and all jokes aside, the "year of the Linux desktop" for developers was probably around 2012. Linux may still have issues, but they're not worse than the hoops you have to jump through to make today's macOS behave.

I've used Linux for close to 20+ years, and Unices more, and never had to jump through any major hoops to make macOS behave.

What would those be (talking about something major, not "I can't get my favorite window manager to replace the macOS window management" -- the non-tinkering-friendliness is part of the allure to me and from what I read others too)?

On the other hand, Linux on the desktop never fails to dissapoint me in one way or another because of the need of tinkering, half-sketched apps for many things I want to do (especially anything multimedia and/or document related), driver issues to get things working (sound, compositor, 3D, bluetooth, sleep, etc), and so on. And judging from the everpresent "just use <name of another distro>" in the relevent forums, it's not something others don't have.

Thus I prefer to stick to Linux on the server and Docker, or for setups where I have investigated the hardware in advance, and only mean to use basic things (e.g. happy with just some terminals, emacs/vim, i3, and some mp3 playing).

>not because they actually ask new hires what they prefer.

Those that do found that hires generally prefer Macs. That's how they have ~ 50% of the dev surveys on Stack Overflow whereas they're just 10% of the general market...

[ImaCake]

>was relevant in 2006, when the novelty of OS X was that it was a UNIX that you could actually use as a daily driver. This is what initially got developers to move to Mac. But it's been fifteen years

My anecdata for this is that I bought a MacBook in 2020 for precisely this reason. I am not a programmer, mostly my use case is bioinformatics and processing large datasets. Native terminal is better than WSL (although WSL is good now) and macOS is much more reliable than linux ever has been for me.

[krona]

b and g are mutually exclusive, though?

[coldtea]

Not in any logical sense (e.g. violating any Logic rule). They just cover different use cases.

(b) makes the "macOS is particularly bad for development because I found Jupyter/Python deps difficult there" argument moot, as messed up Python dependencies are the case in Windows and Linux as well.

And (g) says that Docker and co has superceded manually setting up Python environments for many (not necessarily all or even most) devs, mitigating concerns about managing multiple local versions different deps/libs/language versions to work with different projects (since you can now do that in different, isolated, virtual environments which are mini-OSes in themselves).

So (b) basically amounts to: "It's not macOS which is makes Python deps shitty, they are inherently shitty".

And (g) basically amounts to: "Since Docker and co make local development dep issues mostly obsolete, even if macOS was bad at local deps, it wouldn't matter as much today anyway as virtualization levels the field".

And of course, with the field levelled by (g), if you go for virtualized dev envrironments, you still get all the other benefits like e, f, c, and d.