Ask HN: Why did OS X win out over Linux for so many developers?

It&#x27;s the best possible bridge platform for *nix development.<p>POSIX enough that tools and environments work pretty well without a mountain of hacks and workarounds (e.g. Cygwin).<p>Mac enough that the user experience is coherent and consistent across the overwhelming majority of applications. (e.g. drag n drop, key bindings, media interop, etc.)<p>Popular enough to have native MS Office in orgs where that&#x27;s still a hard requirement.<p>I tried to force myself to go full Linux by swapping out my Macbook Air for an X1 Carbon Gen 3 running KDE Plasma 5. The environment was nice and customizable and I was able to get pretty comfortable with it, but the instant I wasn&#x27;t using a qt5 &amp; KDE 5 frameworks application, the user experience fell apart. Couldn&#x27;t set my key bindings the way I like in GTK apps because the GTK&#x2F;GNOME teams apparently gave up entirely on accels files and key-themes. Media interop was pretty much non-existent, and there were lots of annoying little bugs (e.g. resizing a window would drop its focus leaving in a context where there was no active window and I&#x27;d have to click back in it.)<p>I still use Kubuntu 15.10 on a 12-core Dell T5500 w&#x2F; 48GB RAM for running larger distributed systems simulations&#x2F;tests, and it seems about a hundred times more usable than the Windows 7 machine my job originally provided, but when I want to move fluidly between development, making arch diagrams, writing docs, or creating conference decks I can&#x27;t escape how much better the complete experience is on my Macbook.<p>Also, LibreOffice Impress somehow managed to make a UX more bewildering, broken, and obtuse than PowerPoint, which I&#x27;d previously thought to be impossible. Viva la Keynote!

It seems the migration to laptops as primary dev box was the biggest driver.<p>The linux driver issues were much more severe when running linux on a laptop (power management, CPU C-states, etc). I need dependable wifi, sound, video and other driver updates... I got absolutely tired of wondering wondering if X, network, and&#x2F;or sound was going to work after each and every minor update.<p>Apple was&#x2F;is the only vendor shipping a &quot;working&quot; system in laptop form for a reasonable price.

- OS&#x2F;hardware integration &quot;just works&quot; out of the box, with occasional hiccups on major OS updates. Overall, very little wasted time.<p>- Trackpad and MagicMouse are generally well above the mainstream.<p>- Good iOS interoperability.<p>- Excellent screen, battery life, weight and finish.<p>- Most unix dev tools&#x2F;apps run well. Homebrew.<p>- Aesthetics. Yes, it counts.

Through 15 years I was working on OS X, Windows up to Windows 7 and Linux (KUbuntu, Mint, Arch). In the end Arch Linux won.<p>There is no argument about the fact that OS X &#x2F; Windows are much easier to use by people who start their jurney. However at some point cons are simply overtaking all the pros.<p>Although I disagree with some other commenters that Linux is hard to use on laptops (linux went through long way - &quot;normal&quot; people can enjoy it just like pros). I also do not agree comments about sharp look or battery life - I personally use Samsung Ativ 9 and find it way way more aesthetic than mac book. No problem setting up Arch on it. No waste of time to make things working.<p>And none of my devs is using OS X. They went through long way themselves and probably know better than me. My observation is that Macs are much more popular in US so since I&#x27;m based in London my view may be biased.

Corporate procurement practices and policies definitely come into play, as well.<p>With Linux, there isn&#x27;t a consensus laptop model that everyone will request. One ends up with a lot of one off business cases, vendors, service contracts, etc.<p>With Mac, you have a consistent upgrade cycle, one service contact, and no fragmentation of OS distribution usage, etc.<p>TLDR; It&#x27;s easier to say &quot;I want a macbook pro w&#x2F; cinema display...&quot; and &quot;we hired another developer, please re-order a mac dev setup&quot;, than any similar Linux setup.

Hmm, I&#x27;ve been using Gentoo on desktop, laptop and servers for over 10 years.<p>My Mac devs make work around in our code (geared towards Debian servers) so it runs in MAMP. Linux all the way through is a win.<p>As far as having to edit config files to make things work: I think it&#x27;s good to know what&#x27;s under the hood.<p>We get recent CS grads who know very little about how computers work. Linux might force you to learn the fundamentals but, I argue that is a good thing.<p>And, my Gentoo desktop (primary dev box) has been happy for a decade - through upgrades to hardware and software. Cheap &amp; stable. What&#x27;s not to love?

The hardware is pretty solid, you can literally beat up someone with a MBP, and 8+h battery life when coding (on the shell, not phpstorm&#x2F;idea)... nothing even comes close to it.<p>And it&#x27;s reasonably enough unix-y (and modern if you use macports to install current versions of core tools) to allow daily work on OS X instead of Linux.

It gave users unix with a visually consistent desktop environment right out of the box. Also, the hardware integration makes it easy to just get started right away without fiddling for days.

One obvious thing is OSX runs on top of a BSDish architecture. So while using Macos 9 or Windows could be painful in some respects, OSX has a shell etc. similar to Linux already.<p>Prior to Ubuntu, this was a no-brainer, setting up things like a wireless adapter could be a trial. I run Ubuntu on a System76 laptop and have been happy with it. I like being able to get the source for everything I use and be able to patch it.

There are lots of great techical reasons already discussed, but I would like to add one factor to consider: the &quot;mercedes effect&quot;. Apple devices do have a certain status associated with them. Combine that with many startups like to showcase their developers in videos working on dual monitor 27&quot; imacs and macbook pros.<p>Food for thought.

OSX is a lot more refined and the GUI programs available for developers are more rich. If you&#x27;re switching from Windows, you&#x27;re likely to find more of the programs you&#x27;re familiar with or alternatives. Also Mac hardware is often found in Universities which gets students familiar with the environment.

My understanding is that the OS X EULA does not permit OS X to be run on non-Apple hardware or in a virtual machine that is not also running on Apple hardware.<p>So if you want to test on OS X (including Safari) then you need at least one Mac.<p>Sharing a single Mac for testing could be enough, but given a team of more than a few devs and it may become a bottleneck.<p>You can run Windows and Linux VMs on a Mac - without breaching any EULAs.<p>For web devs who care about Safari, Macs become almost mandatory.<p>Note, I do not own or develop on a Mac. I primarily work on a desktop simulation software written in Java. I found the Mac love professed by other devs I know somewhat bewildering for a long time. I was only when I dabbled in some web development with a Rails app that I realised how much pain came from browser differences across platforms. Now the strong preference for Macs made more sense.

Not sure what it is exactly but the retina display doesn&#x27;t play nice with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.<p>Webcam drivers also broke when apple switched from a USB Webcam implementation to pci or something.<p>Power consumption on osx is probably a half or third of 14.04 LTS.<p>I founded a company and need MS Office (unfortuantely), Fusion 360 for CAD work (FreeCAD didn&#x27;t quite cut it) and once things got rolling the number of Skype calls picked up.<p>I still dual boot and prefer Ubuntu, but now I am 90+% in osx.<p>Before this computer and startup, I had been using Ubuntu for 6 years and loved it. Looking forward to going back one day, but for a while, I&#x27;m going to be on osx.

I have done .NET programming on windows for 3-4 years and felt the programming environment was pretty neat. The frustrating part was windows upgrades and the OS eating up all resources and the frequent need to upgrade the machine.<p>I switched to Linux(redhat and then ubuntu) for the next 8 years and loved vim and programming tools that linux had to offer. The resource utilization was never a blocker. The frustrating part was wireless drivers and machine hanging up because of them.<p>I recently shifted to OSX and installed iTerm&#x2F;vim and all that. There have been no issues with wireless hardware and resource utilization. However, setting up production-like environment, which runs on Linux is a huge pain. Running a dual-boot ubuntu is also not as seamless and there are quite a few display driver issues. My take:<p>- If you have just started programming, start with Linux (if you haven&#x27;t fought enough to compile drivers for your machine, you are one bit less of a real programmer)<p>- If you are doing a lot on the server side which largely is Linux driven, then you better use Linux to understand systems and deployment.<p>- If you are using eclipse, then you better shift to OSX because no other hardware-os combo at that price can let you code in peace.

I could guess that the bar for entry to develop via OSX is a bit lower than on Linux.<p>While Linux Distros like Ubuntu make it really easy to set up a developer system (with localhost web, languages and database) it is even easier on OSX via MAMP: install MAMP, configure with a GUI, ready to roll.. Linux you might be tweaking some config files to get the optimal setup.<p>On Linux you are partially a dev-op not only working on your code but also learning and tweaking your OS, services, etc. for one reason or another.<p>Another factor is there are some shinier tools on Macs, (i.e. the Adobe lineup, and a easily installed Sublime Editor) And many that went to learning institutions will be comfortable more with Dreamweaver&#x2F;Photoshop&#x2F;Illustrator than Eclipse&#x2F;GIMP&#x2F;Inkscape.<p>I took the Linux route, even though I already owned a Mac, I felt on Linux I was closer to the metal where Mac OSX had too many safety rails (both for the user and many publisher&#x27;s safety)

Why? Because far too many developers are distracted by technical baubles instead of prioritizing the long term freedom. We are losing the War On General Purpose Computing, and apple - having convinced a generation of programmers to develop for their closed platforms - has done a lot of damage to computing freedom.

Seems to be the case in US. I work for a small dev shop and everyone else is using OS X, except me. I&#x27;m running Linux Mint 17.1 (Mate Desktop) on a Toshiba Satellite w&#x2F;4K screen, SSD, and 16GB ram. Love it. And I like PC style keyboards better than Mac keyboards :)

I know the only reason I use OSX for work is because we have an iOS app. If we didn&#x27;t have that I, and probably half the other developers, would be rocking some flavor of Linux. You can write software for 99% of users on OSX (with a windows VM, anyways).

For me at least, I made the switch to OS X simply because of software support. There wasn&#x27;t a good Linux equivalent for Sequel Pro; there&#x27;s no git gui tool on Linux that matches SourceTree (which my team was standardizing on for its gitflow integration); etc.<p>And damn, the hardware is just nice. If I could run Fedora on a MacBook Pro, that&#x27;d be my ideal setup. Or if OS X wasn&#x27;t so terrible at customization -- the number of sketchy hacks I&#x27;ve had to install to get my setup how I like it is just depressing.

There&#x27;s still no good linux laptops* that come with Linux as the main OS. MacBook Pro blows away all the compeition.<p>*I&#x27;ve seen poor reviews of System76s stuff.

I have worked on Windows, Linux, Mac. Nowadays Mac-only:<p>- least amount of hassle, 95% it works - very good piece of hardware - great number of OS-X only tools<p>expensive, but it&#x27;s the tool of my craft so I&#x27;m willing to pay for it

On the hardware side, Repairability, same hardwares and less waiting time to repair than competitors which are too fragmented and far less hardware defective.

Because Apple products are very popular. What laptop&#x2F;pc comes with Linux preinstalled?

Works out of the box.<p>Most dev things work exactly the same as on linux.<p>You can use photoshop

For the same reason so many developers use javascript in the back-end - misapplied laziness.

Ain&#x27;t nobody got time for that [Linux]!