[AaronFriel]

I've followed a different path, but I've come to the same conclusion. Along my path, picking up languages like Haskell or Node early on meant using Linux. So since high school I've always had _a_ Linux machine available, but preferred to use Windows as the user interface.

Two thing I can say for any naysayers who use a Mac and do devops, backend development etc.:

1. Are you sure your environment that matches your deployment environment? Do you have confidence your server code runs the same on an Apple Silicon Mac as the (very likely) x86-64 and Linux environment your users use?

2. Have you ever noticed how shell scripts on Mac often... don't work the same on Linux? The way to fix that is of course use Homebrew, and, while brew has gotten leagues better, the quality pales in comparison to even Debian testing, Ubuntu main, or Arch and others.

As a devops engineer for many years, #2 was death by a thousand cuts. If I could, I'd have replaced every Mac user's userland with GNU coreutils from brew without their permission.

To square the circle of preferring Linux systems and Windows' UI, I've done just about every approach you can imagine to make that work, from syncing folders via rsync, to ssh or nfs mounted filesystems. I've used Virtualbox and VMWare and Hyper-V to locally run the Linux environment. There have been a few different X window managers and remote desktop tools, but none of them have been great.

WSL1 is where things really began to turn around - what an interesting project to make the NT kernel work as a Linux kernel. It didn't quite pan out, but that was OK.

WSL2 made major changes to how WSL worked, and now I can now run Kubernetes, Docker, 3d applications, machine learning (stable diffusion), have a real Linux shell and userland.

WSL2 is a true game changer for quality of Linux development on Windows. Being able to `docker run` Stable Diffusion or Llama or what-have-you is incredible.

I can imagine a PopOS - or another vendor-backed Linux OS - might persuade me eventually to shed Windows. In the meantime, I don't feel like I'm making any compromises.

[minimaul]

> 1. Are you sure your environment that matches your deployment environment? Do you have confidence your server code runs the same on an Apple Silicon Mac as the (very likely) x86-64 and Linux environment your users use?

I’d argue that a lot of us are developing SaaS etc and the browser is our main touch point, so this isn’t necessarily as relevant.

[shortrounddev]

I often run into the issue of forgetting to set node affinity in my deployments and my x86 backend not running on an ARM server we have for some reason (nothing we do requires ARM, so idk why we have those nodes)

[hparadiz]

Your shell scripts on Linux don't even work the same way as the docker image based on ubuntu. Resolving those issues is just part of the job.

I recently had this issue where my version of SSH was too new compared to that the servers were running and I was getting issues about the cryptographic algorithm being mismatched.

[bombolo]

> I recently had this issue where my version of SSH was too new compared to that the servers were running and I was getting issues about the cryptographic algorithm being mismatched.

I think that when your encryption algorithm gets removed, after having been deprecated, is really time to upgrade instead of commenting on ycombinator.

[hparadiz]

Tell my old job not me lol