I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I use linux on a PC (my own build) and my VPS and one of my laptops.
None of the physical machines I've owned were bought with Linux on. I've installed various distros over the years and rarely had any problem with hardware.
On the laptop front I generally use Dells or Thinkpads which are known to be a bit more Linux-friendly than some makes/models, but I've run Debian and Arch on HPs and Sonys with very little trouble.
If you want to go fully free-software you'll almost certainly run up against issues with wifi chipsets. This is because the manufacturers don't want to let people use their hardware with free software, not because of any technical limitations. You can get by with a USB dongle in a pinch.
Most people who use Linux though don't really care too much about free software philosophy and will install a bunch of non-free stuff on it immediately. If you're in that camp, you'll probably have a straightforward installation experience and not too many hardware issues.
There are forums heaving with people who've had the same problems before and found solutions already, so that's probably not a blocker.
And you can always test an OS out against your hardware with a live bootable USB drive - this doesn't affect the existing OS unless you choose it to.
Or you can play around with the OS inside a VM like VirtualBox.
Through bootcamp or virtualisation? Won't be able to use bootcamp on the new ARM macs when they come out. Not sure how well the performance will be using virtualisation.
I use linux on a PC (my own build) and my VPS and one of my laptops.
None of the physical machines I've owned were bought with Linux on. I've installed various distros over the years and rarely had any problem with hardware.
On the laptop front I generally use Dells or Thinkpads which are known to be a bit more Linux-friendly than some makes/models, but I've run Debian and Arch on HPs and Sonys with very little trouble.
If you want to go fully free-software you'll almost certainly run up against issues with wifi chipsets. This is because the manufacturers don't want to let people use their hardware with free software, not because of any technical limitations. You can get by with a USB dongle in a pinch.
Most people who use Linux though don't really care too much about free software philosophy and will install a bunch of non-free stuff on it immediately. If you're in that camp, you'll probably have a straightforward installation experience and not too many hardware issues.
There are forums heaving with people who've had the same problems before and found solutions already, so that's probably not a blocker.
And you can always test an OS out against your hardware with a live bootable USB drive - this doesn't affect the existing OS unless you choose it to.
Or you can play around with the OS inside a VM like VirtualBox.
Dells and Thinkpads seem to be quite popular with developers. If I was not a Mac user I would probably get one of those two makes.
I know several devs running linux on Macbook Pros.
;-;
Through bootcamp or virtualisation? Won't be able to use bootcamp on the new ARM macs when they come out. Not sure how well the performance will be using virtualisation.
Even the recent Touchbar MacBooks are hard to get running with Linux. There are all sorts of driver problems.