[chistev]

How is it that Windows always dominate these Stack Overflow developer surveys, but people talk like Mac is the one that's ubiquitous among devs?

And I hate these big accept cookies pop ups or whatever they are called that impede use of a website unless you accept. I couldn't find an option to reject all cookies.

[jchw]

Mac users talk like Mac is ubiquitous among whatever niche they're in. That's a trope as old as the Year of the Linux desktop.

[camdroidw]

I remember my "Linux friend" sent me an excited email when WSL was announced, signalling that somehow this meant that Microsoft has conceded. My response: "Finally the year of Linux on desktop". I think that was his last email ;-)

[jchw]

The most interesting thing to me is that some people actually prefer the WSL2 experience over using Linux, not just because of the Windows desktop, but because of the WSL2 experience itself.

I think Distrobox gives you the same basic experience but it's even a bit nicer as it's even lower overhead and doesn't have the weird memory management issues that WSL2 has. But this is really interesting to me; Microsoft clearly struck a nerve with the WSL2 workflow. It's more than just a workaround for the fact that some stuff doesn't run or doesn't run well on Windows, which is counterintuitive.

You can also get the same basic experience on macOS using Orbstack, which I highly recommend in general. (Though there are alternatives that are not subscriptions, but I only use macOS under duress at work, so I don't personally pay for it.)

[fabian2k]

Stack Overflow is a bubble, but Hacker News and other dev-focused online places are probably an even larger bubble. There's a lot of software developed that isn't particularly visible, and where the developers are not as active online as the ones here.

[lenerdenator]

The "sexy" development stuff (FOSS web frameworks, LLMs, etc.) have a habit of happening on Macs.

Not all of it, mind.

[lostmsu]

> "sexy" ... web frameworks, LLMs ... on Macs

Oh my, I don't even know where to start on this one. If programming is sex, web programming is submission. Sure it sounds fun, but not for regular people. As for LLMs I can't imagine a situation where I'd want to run them on Macs and ditch my Nvidia graphics.

The real reason is that Windows users are just not very loud.

[chistev]

>The real reason is that Windows users are just not very loud.

And why's that?

[lostmsu]

I dunno. I work on my PC. At some point I feel like 64GB RAM is not enough. I open Amazon and order another 64GB. Some other time I think if I upgrade my CPU my IDE experience would be better. Depending on the generation, I either order another CPU or get a whole new PC altogether (these days I also redistribute my GPUs between the old and the new one).

And so on. I assume everyone else with PCs does the same. So when I go to web forums I don't usually talk about that.

[rofrol]

Total for Linux when distros combined dominates Windows

[politelemon]

It's simple and observed over a number of years. HN is an echo chamber. Mac users drown out and shout down other users here. Other users go elsewhere for discourse. As a case in point look at the other replies to your comment.

On a separate note it's sad to see that Ubuntu has fallen behind.

[coldpie]

uBlock Origin has a Cookie Notices filter which blocks those. NoScript worked for this one, too.

[ChrisRR]

For some reason excited young devs learning javascript are convinced that they need a mac