I have always been of the opinion that only hipsters/startups program in Mac or Linux. It is my experience that major companies (HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and the like) provide Windows machines to developers.
Well, what do you feel about these results?
Which factors could be driving MacOS and Ubuntu numbers to be so similar between work and personal use? Is this an indication that I'm right and only freelancers/startups/hipsters use these? My reasoning behind this would be: The numbers refer to the same PC, meaning the developer bought it, so it is a personal PC, but they also use it for freelance work. Am I right on the money?
Ok, enough oxygen on the flames of the OS feud. Honestly, what do you think is driving these numbers?
Top comments (11)
We're 150 year old business, we provide Macs and Linux machines to our developers, our QA and anyone else who wants them.
Personally I'd use a Mac over pretty much anything as we run everything these days on AWS Linux and so Windows tends to be a bit annoying to context switch (though GitBash etc are mostly used by our Windows users). I'd imagine it's the cost effectiveness of Linux remote instances that is driving the uptake for others.
When you say "anyone else who wants them", does this mean it is opt-in? Do compnay have Windows by default, but you can switch? Or how is it?
Yes it's opt in for "non-devs", not really advertised, we just ask what people prefer, most will choose Windows, between 8-10% choose Mac, no one chooses Linux - for devs we offer the choice openly and it's 5% linux 30% Mac and 65% Windows.
When I started working on Mac due to iOS development a decade ago I didn't much like MacOS, but its grown on me and the its just so stable, the last time I had the equivalent of a BSOD what more than 6 years ago, and it's only happened twice since 2011. Office is great on a Mac these days, and we've moved most of our services to the Cloud so apart from running two different group policy enforcement solutions right now, it's not too much of an issue - I will finally get around to using only one system from next year I hope!
One other thing: for devs our build environment and test runners are fastest on Mac, running around 20% faster than the similarly priced Windows PCs. None of the times are big enough for that to make a material difference in anything except locally run e2e tests, which are long anyway.
My question would be how in the world the numbers are the exact same.
There is a low chance of 31.8% being the same number for personal and pro for Mac, but it's even stranger that Ubuntu would be the same way.
We don't know if they are 100% exact. We only know they are the same +/- 0.1%.
But indeed, that's my point: Ubuntu and Mac users seem to be using their home PC for work. So the idea that enterprises do provide Mac/Linux for work doesn't seem real.
Yes, but it's still very strange that they would be so close.
I see your point though.
I'm a freelancer, I use a Linux laptop, and it's the same machine for mostly everything. As an employee that I used to be, I used Windows, then Windows again in another company, then switched to Linux, as I learned our office admins did not support, but tolerated, dual Linux setups. Docker and git were much faster on Linux.
Yet another company had ditched all windows machines before I joined, so I had a Mac mini at work, running MacOS + Parallels so that we could use our inhouse Windows software, at the same time I had another Apple machine, an old Macbook discarded by my former employer, as a personal laptop. When I came back to my former company, I requested a Macbook as a work laptop because I found it was faster and had superior hardware while weighing less than the equivalent Lenovo Windows/Linux alternative. Weight was very important as I used to travel a lot by train.
I still have, and occasionally use, the discarded Macbook and it has served as backup machine for my family, friends, and business partners. I also have another backup/testing machine, an old but also still working Lenovo laptop with both Windows and Linux, just in case.
If I remember correctly, I must have stated that I use Linux for work and leisure, but you can see, that the reality is a little more complicated.
There two major things in my point of view.
First, in my experience, software companies mostly provided developers with Linux/Mac machines (rather the latter) — and they were not only startups. At the same time, the situaton was opposite for companies for which software development wasn't the main focus (almost 100% of them used Windows). I find it reasonable, as software professionals know that Windows suites developments needs purely (I don't want to start a fire but that's what it is, just the experience) and those who are not into software dev directly don't consider it something important.
That's also quite true IMO, on a personal level.
Second, the SO survey is hugely overrated (as any dev survey basically) and blindly trusted. The community is too narrow and too opinionated to take the results as something to make conclusions from. Some of them (I neither participated nor read it directly this year tbh, it's too lame, only through the lens of community blog posts focused on some specific aspects, like programming languages) are really quirky.
All in all, I see the results of the OS comparison here as not very meaningful (even though they actually match my own experience, but I know it's quite one-sided).
Hello, and thanks for dropping by. This is an interesting topic.
I'll list the companies I have worked for, and spoiler, they all provided me with Windows PC's:
I consider the ones in boldface to be strongly in the software development game. I have never worked for Microsoft, but I can only assume the standard is Windows as well. Sure, they must have some Macs around for testing or specialty cases.
With this, I'm saying that my experience with software companies is the opposite of yours.
I agree, and I don't even read all of those annual survey results anymore. The JetBrains developer ecosystem survey seems even narrower and it's no surprise that they have more Java and Kotlin developers as they seem to provide the most popular tools for that community.
The surveys also become more annoying when every company tries to use them to push their own AI products and services and try to trick people to tick the aspired answers, and if they don't, interpret the findings accordingly unless they were completely contradictory.
I found it more interesting to do my own subjective data visualization instead. Here it is:
State of my stacks stats 2024
Ingo Steinke, web developer ・ Jul 26
I wonder what effect the recent Crowdstrike outage has on Linux adoption.