[rdl]

Everyone technical I see in silicon valley, with maybe 5 exceptions, is on Mac laptops. A fair number of serious devs have Linux workstations to go along with their Mac laptops.

People who do some other stuff (heavy email users, some video/audio people) do sometimes use Windows (it's weird, but I think the Windows audio stuff is better for realtime now than Mac).

(the exceptions are people with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Linux laptops)

I'd be pretty comfortable as a Silicon Valley employer only supporting Macs for office automation, and then either Mac or Linux for development workstations. If someone really wants Windows, s/he can support it independently.

The harder problem is phones -- there are people who are religiously attached to iOS and to Android, and you basically need to support both. There are pretty good MDM tools to cover both at the same time, but it does mean you can't push enterprise apps unless you do crossplatform development.

[one-man-bucket]

At my company, small cms company bought a few years ago by older larger media company, recruiting in Stockholm, we're offering new employees a Mac or Linux laptop, but there is a lot of hinting that "you'd probably be best off picking a Mac", and a few new hires have opted for the latter because of reasons that to me sound like they think it's the "company DNA" or something.

I'm not religious about platform choice, but I'd hate to see a future where developers are pidgeonholed with regards to their tools

Edit: currently 13 of 15 of our devs use Mac

[rdl]

Yeah -- by OA I mean machines for handling email, spreadsheets, etc. Cross-platforming documents kind of sucks still.

A reasonable compromise is Mac laptop for office tasks, and a VM for development, and then a desktop development machine. If someone is super mobile as a developer, I could see a Linux laptop as an option.

The annoying thing is that if you really want security, you are basically stuck with Windows 7 or Windows 8 now, at least for desktop/laptops, and iOS or BB for phones. (Windows and platform management has gotten better -- OS X is actually the least secure OS in a major corporate environment today, due to lack of security and management tools. It's still decent for unmanaged use vs. Windows or Linux.)

In an environment processing highly sensitive information (say, a law firm working on M&As, or a print shop handling annual reports), where the tools aren't that essential to work, you could have a legitimate "you must use only our locked down systems" argument. I wouldn't really want to work in a place like that, though.

The long-term solution in high security environments is probably a mobile-based OS for desktop/tablet/mobile use, and then virtual desktop into either a super locked down existing desktop OS, or some new environment. For a lot of stuff, locked-down tablet/mobile (or ChromeOS) connecting to SaaS apps could probably do it.

[StavrosK]

I use a mac too, but it's running Linux. Do you mean OS X, or the machine?