Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 139 posts

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#81

Post by petcat »

jsheard wrote: post #79
petcat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't consider Chrome the "operating system" that I am primarily developing on, even though it is really the VM under the hood. Windows is really the one facilitating running the Chrome application, or the Linux WSL application.

To be way too pedantic, if WSL2 (and therefore Hyper-V) is enabled then Windows actually boots into bare-metal Hyper-V first, which then launches the Windows kernel as a VM under itself, side-by-side with the WSL2 VMs if any are installed, so if the lowest level facilitator is what counts then you're really developing "on Hyper-V". I don't think that's a very useful distinction though.

Well I'm extremely pedantic, so I'm going to say that UEFI is the real operating system!

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#82

Post by ryandrake »

petcat wrote: post #14

I never found anything better than the latest macOS machines. I ran ubuntu for years and then switched back to mac just because I don't have the time to tinker and fiddle with stuff in Linux that just randomly makes the computer run hot, or a monitor to not work, or fonts looking awful. MacOS is just the sweet spot of great desktop + great unix-style devbox.

I agree with this in general, but the major downside of macOS is it obsoletes itself quickly unless you are willing to keep spending money and staying on Apple's hardware/OS/Xcode treadmill.

On my Debian or Ubuntu dev systems, even with 10+ year old hardware, I'm always one apt dist-upgrade away from having one of the best development environments in the world. On macOS, once my hardware gets "old enough" (as defined by Apple), I'm left in the dust. No more OS updates, no more Xcode versions, no more SDKs. I can shore up some development capabilities using Homebrew, but Homebrew itself perpetuates[1] the treadmill.

1: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#85

Post by QuiEgo »

I think laptop of your choice as a thin client to Linux box in a data center is super common.

Most people seem to pick a Mac as their thin client, since ssh works well natively on it, it runs MS office, and the Windows laptop options are never the “nice” Windows options for some reason, but various flavors of plastic hate boxes that get 1/2 the battery life of the Macs IT offers.

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#86

Post by pixelpoet »

user432678 wrote: post #73
pixelpoet wrote: post #4

Finally bailed Windows this year after a lifetime of MSVC, couldn't be happier with the decision. I'm actually kind of grateful for Windows 11 being so impossibly shit and forcing so many people to finally make the switch! Now I use Arch, btw.

Mind me asking what do you use instead of MSVC?

Somewhat reluctantly, VS Code; but I'm checking out CLion as well and not hating it as much as I did last time.

I find CMake intensely offensive, just the whole worldview of every tool demanding you learn some DSL to do basic things when I have a 4K monitor and just want to select a bunch of cpp and h files to build, but I've since been forced to swallow this bitter pill for work reasons, and I guess it's time to give tools based on it another go.

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#87

Post by happytoexplain »

namblooc wrote: post #76

I'm surprised at the small number of Windows users. At my workplace every computer has Windows installed and we didn't really have a choice about it, although I never asked. Also, as a fullstack web developer, I don't really see why I would prefer one over the other, since they all support VSCode and I can write code on any one of them. But then again, I exist inside of an echochamber of Windows users so I'm pretty c…

I was surprised in the opposite direction - I thought Windows would be <5% for dev. Big, cheap contracting agencies skew the Windows number up globally, and even just in the US, but this is just HN users so I expected a much smaller representation.

Re: Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?

#89

Post by stefantalpalaru »

petcat wrote: post #14

I never found anything better than the latest macOS machines. I ran ubuntu for years and then switched back to mac just because I don't have the time to tinker and fiddle with stuff in Linux that just randomly makes the computer run hot, or a monitor to not work, or fonts looking awful. MacOS is just the sweet spot of great desktop + great unix-style devbox.

[dead]
Post reply on HN