[forty]

Admittedly I haven't tried Windows and MacOS a lot, but I still don't understand why people insist on using MacOS for doing Linux development. I think it must be pretty rare to have devs doing MacOS development not using MacOS or devs doing Windows development not using Windows, but for Linux backend there seem to be a consensus that running VMs is a good idea.

Why is that? Are people doing stuff on their computers I'm not even aware we can do because I use Linux? Or am I working slower because Linux is not the right tool for development? At work I have a feeling that a lot of time is lost to have the Linux devs tools (docker in particular) working properly on other OSes (MacOS and WSL), and docker especially (and those new Mac M1 which suddenly are even slower with all the existing docker images because of course our CI is not building ARM images...).

[sz4kerto]

> Are people doing stuff on their computers I'm not even aware we can do because I use Linux?

Yes, that’s mostly it. Fractional display scaling, good battery life, switching between audio devices that might be wireless or connected to a thunderbolt dock, seamless copy/paste, this kind of stuff. Some of it works on Linux too with some work but the question is what’s more economical. No system is perfect, honestly. It’s much easier for me to use Docker on a non-Linux system (or use a local or remote VM) than fix bluetooth audio.

[forty]

In my experience MacOS users seems to have as much trouble with screens and thunderbolt dock as I do. We had to try nearly all double screens thunderbolt docks on the market and I think we lost hope to find one that works reliably out of the box with those 3 OSes.

I cannot say for battery life, people tend to be connected to power all day here, so that's probably not the reason.

Not even sure what is seamless copy/paste sorry.

But okay, admittedly I don't do anything fancy with my audio devices, or my screen scaling, that must be probably it

[musicale]

I also have issues plugging and unplugging external USB-C displays; I've found that I have to plug them in in reverse order in order to get them to be recognized.

Be that as it may, macOS has some cool display features from Sidecar (plug in an iPad and it becomes a poor man's Cintiq) to the upcoming Universal Access (seamless mouse/keyboard control over multiple devices including drag & drop and cut & paste.)

Seamless copy/paste means that multiple Apple devices can share the same clipboard, so you can copy on one devices and paste on another. Drag and drop is even cooler since you can drag something off an iPad and onto a Mac or vice-versa.

[nine_k]

For some reason, Macbooks are considered sexy. No wonder; Apple produces fashion accessories that double as pieces of advanced technology. To my mind, their only outstanding quality is battery life.

Then, MacOS is bundled with these machines. It's very opinionated and highly integrated; little needs adjustment, or cab be adjusted at all. For some people, it's a relief.

Last but absolutely not least is that many companies standardize on few vendors and few models, ideally, only one vendor. Apple gladly fills this niche, admittedly offering good technical support, and enthusiastic sales force. As an engineer, you're not given a choice; I've been in such situation several times.

[musicale]

Before the butterfly keyboard disaster at least, Apple laptops were known for their excellent industrial design and usability. I'm not a huge fan of the screen notch (though arguably you're not losing anything from it) but the current MacBook Pro has an amazingly bright screen and terrific speakers (and they also fixed the keyboard.) An underrated feature of Mac laptops is that their integrated mics aren't terrible.