Golly gee, I can barely hear you all the way up there on your pedestal.
I used linux for a good long while. Started with Ubuntu, then on to Mint, then Arch as I became more of a "power user". But you know what? Sometimes I don't want to put in manual effort to get things to work, even if that means I lose some customization. Over my years with linux, I've had driver issues with displays, with the network manager, with mounting remote drives... Basically any interaction with the hardware was a solid kick in the groin. Since switching to a Macbook, everything has been smooth sailing.
And especially nowadays with homebrew and docker, all the tools I need are available on a Mac, and it's a more integrated experience, and IMHO it looks better. But if you like linux and it works for you, that's also fine by me. To each their own.
Funny that. I use Linux because it just works, macs are a pain and windows is just laughable.
What annoys me about the last decadeish of Mac developers is the terrible prevalence of things like "curl|bash", custom pacakage managers, unversioned software etc.
This could just be the company I work for, but as far as I'm concerned software is not released unless there is a collection of software and instructions on installing. Deb, rpm, even a rat all is fine. Anything that downloads something from a random website is not.
Now obviously Mac developers don't enforce this attitude, but it does seem to correlate.
I used to run Linux before switching to Mac, around 10 years ago. Recently got a Dell XPS 13 and installed Ubuntu (then Mint).
Installing stuff on Ubuntu I used a couple of PPAs. How is this any different than curl|bash? You just trust some repo blindly.
Also, please refer me to this magical distro that just works cause I have seen these before going back to Mac:
- HiDPI scaling does not just work. There are weird issues here and there.
- Closing the lid does not reliably put the laptop to sleep. Sometimes when it does, opening it does not just wake it up.
- Once in a while, the OS completely forgot that it had a Wi-Fi device. I just restarted and it returned.
I don’t have time to test workarounds, read logs, try different distros and shit like that. I never once had to think twice before tossing a MacBook into my pack because it might still be awake?
I love Linux on servers, used o love it on my desktop but that was high school / college days. I had too much time to tweak things just perfect.
Using linux has slight advantages only for devops, and even then why would they need it if they can spin up an ec2/run a docker container/use vagrant. Mac OS offers superior UX to linux (unless you invest heaps of engineering hours into setting it up your window manager & env to a usable state). More modern distributions like Mint or Elementary OS might offer somethnig on par, but even then the simplicity and ubiquity of Macs fade their benefits.
The only reason to use Linux is for extra op security, but that's not what programmers main concern usually is.
