[EatFlamingDeath]

I sincerely don't understand how devs that use macOS put up with this crap. I remember getting a Macbook M1 from the company I used to work for and the battery life was amazing, but as soon as I needed to install Xcode I just gave up. It's unbelievably bad, fuck that.

[cosmic_cheese]

At the risk of nitpicking, Xcode isn’t explicitly necessary unless you’re looking to target iDevices specifically. A minimal llvm/clang toolchain can be installed with a terminal command or Homebrew.

And “unbelievably bad” is how I feel when trying to get various projects built from source on any platform all too often. If I’m lucky the maintainer has made a point of getting up and running a matter of running a couple commands but all too often there’s a mountain of assumptions about the user’s environment that cause the build to fail, sending me down rabbitholes. At least with SwiftPM Xcode projects, building is usually as simple as opening the project and hitting ⌘R and doesn’t involve a side trek to Mordor.

[ein0p]

It's not even necessary for iDevices. I have successfully built, signed, and deployed simple apps without Xcode at all, using Bazel. I think CMake has support as well.

[xandrius]

We put up with that because it could be better but it's not too bad.

The IDE itself is pretty good and personally I prefer it over Android Studio.

[zadokshi]

People who complain about Xcode have never had to use android studio ;)

[OptionalDonuts]

iOS dev here doing KMM. Android Studio (and IntelliJ) was a breath of fresh air after working so long with Xcode. I get anxiety when I have to go back to Xcode but that was partially because of the app I had to work with for a previous company.

[bolognafairy]

You didn’t “get anxiety”.

[OptionalDonuts]

I'm not sure what the purpose of this reply is. Is it an English use of the word. Do I say "experience anxiety"?

If it's my reaction to the use of Xcode then I've associated a stress response and get anxious which is partially why I left my job. The tool was also, in my experience, not a smooth or enjoyable developer experience.

[eric__cartman]

Android studio became great after I upgraded from 16 to 48 gigabytes of ram. Thanks for that, Gradle!

[keyle]

I've just reinstalled a PC with windows and coming from macOS and about 10 years of XCode, I certainly prefer the mac camp over the absolute smouldering hot garbage of a wasteland that the windows ecosystem is.

Just the BIOS settings nightmare I had to get through for it install Windows properly was beyond belief. I guess OEM installs have won. But building your own hardware like "back in the days", oh the sweet sweet old days, what a nightmare.

My BIOS even has AI in it (WTF).

Even Microsoft holds its own debloating list [1]! How bad is that?

I tried to clean windows right after install and that took much longer than setting a brand new mac. And the macOS doesn't cost $150, for ad-riddled cortana/AI nightmare feeding my clicks to random houses and shipping with minecraft and king.com games!

At some point, "both camps" have to agree to disagree but there are lot of rose tinted glasses everywhere.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/windows-dev-box-setup-scripts/b...

[eviks]

> tried to clean windows right after install and that took much longer than setting a brand new mac

Because you can't debloat a Mac since bloat is part of a protected system partition, so time saved?

[keyle]

find me what you'd want to remove from the protected system partition, and then don't look at Windows, which has one too ;)

[eviks]

First, it wouldn't help you since you're the one with this one-sided comparison of bloat you can remove being preferable to bloat you can't.

Second, Windows doesn't have it in the same crypto-protected-risk-breaking-boot way, there are well documented ways on debloating Windows both before and after an install.