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by sertraline 699 days ago
This is a ridiculous article because the author did not even bother to check the stackoverflow developer survey. Majority of developers use Windows. I use Linux, but just because I use Linux does not mean that I have to be delusional about it. Programming != {webdev,AI}. What operating system game developers are going to use? What operating system business GUI application developers are going to use? Win32 is still the most stable API out there.

And even if you, for some insane reason, decide to pick Linux and fight its technological challenges, in the end only a tiny percent of users is going to use your product. Yet they will be responsible for generating over 50% of the bug reports. To make matters even worse, most of them will come from Arch Linux users, providing absolutely useless debug traces because they use a distro notorious for not shipping the debug packages.
4 comments
atq2119 699 days ago
Here's a report of the actual experience one game developer had with bug reports on Windows vs. Linux, suggesting that having Linux support is useful: https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...
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lionkor 699 days ago
Majority of developers who use StackOverflow enough to fill out the survey, thats a bias already, and a massive one at that.

You have disproportionately more beginners using it than more seasoned professionals. Hell, I barely use it, and I have questions every day - I just look up the documentation instead.

This is like saying most people love overpriced dropshipping, just because an advertisement company tracks how many of the people who click on ads buy dropshipped garbage. Its a massive bias.

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mike_hearn 699 days ago
There's an even bigger hole in it than that: his list of languages completely overlooks Java. The language that prides itself on portability, has been taught in universities for decades, is widely used in industry and which every component needed including the compilers and runtimes can be fully installed and updated on any machine, graphically, just by installing the free version of IntelliJ, which conveniently works the same way on every OS. It meets almost every one of his requirements.
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friscas 699 days ago
Agree, most of the ABAP developers at SAP or in the partner/SAP consulting companies do use windows, as the SAP GUI (business GUI app) runs the best on windows, the Unix-like version written in Java miss some critical features that makes it unusable for engineers.
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