It's pretty frustrating to read so much about a thing, only to find out it's only supported on a niche platform that I don't have access to.
The fact that that isn't totally the case is a great thing to hear, and I would love to have learned this fact sooner. It would go a long way for Zed's team to at least mention it on the Downloads page.
Just every developer friend I know, uses Mac for coding. It is ubiquitous. In a BigTech company I once worked, there were virtually no guys having Win or Linux on their laptops, so we often even didn't test our internal tooling against those platforms, as almost no one used them...
Zed guys know their audience. It is developers, not gamers or office clerks.
Probably those are students + hobbyists + maybe Windows game developers? Or my anecdata is just not representative.
Maybe Zed considered it is worth targeting only Mac audience, as it gives much higher rate of people who would actually buy their editor (i.e. the rate of professional users, who code for living, is higher)? That is my guess, I don't have any data to back it up.
Sounds like selection bias at work. Developers are the most likely to choose both, a platform/OS to use for work, and a workplace where other people choose/encourage the same platform/OS.
If the people I was working with didn't bother to test their tooling on Linux, then I would be the one person on the team testing for (and porting to) Linux, and that would definitely motivate me to work elsewhere.
Web development doesn't bind you to a specific platform. And modern desktop apps are overwhelmingly Electron (i.e. based on a web stack). It is just simpler to develop than native, and gives you portability out of the box.
And if you're a mobile developer, you must have a Mac, because the proper tooling for iOS does not exist on other platforms. So even if you target multiple mobile platforms, you'd develop it on a Mac.
I think there is sort of a Pareto distribution, like 20% of apps generate 80% of the money or something like that.
Quick googling confirmed it: "Spending on iPhone users accounted for 68.13% of all consumer spending on mobile apps, while Android remained with a 31.87% share of app spending worldwide in 2024".
So while it is 30% in users count, it is 70% in spending. If you want your app to generate money, you'd have to make an iOS version, otherwise it would be irrational.
Same logic applies to desktop apps. It is irrational to spend resources on a native version if you can get to market faster and cheaper with a web-based thing. So from the first principles, today's successful and popular apps must be coded like that. Surely, there is still a lot of legacy...
It's fine. Every time Zed gets a mention on here someone finds it incredibly important to post the words "Mac only" without checking, even when, as with this thread, the topic has absolutely nothing to do with running Zed or what operating systems it can run on.