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Comment by sgk284 | Hacker News Reader

Most tech companies (doubly so in the Bay Area) develop on Macs and deploy (servers) on Linux. There'd be little pressure to develop a Linux client since most devs are spending their day on a Mac.

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Everyone at my work (a big company) has Linux desktops. Granted we wouldn't use Zulip, or anything else hosted externally for that matter, but this does create a large demand for other types of software running on a Linux desktop from us, e.g. IDEs.

Google Drive doesn't even work on Linux. Linux Desktop will never be more than a VM host or Web Browser host.

I've been using linux on workstation for last 6 years. I have to run VM with Windows, only when i have to interact with some Microsoft product directly. It may not be ideal solution for every use case, but it works.

> Google Drive doesn't even work on Linux.

Completely true.

> Linux Desktop will never be more than a VM host or Web Browser host.

I did mention this on a developer-specific context. AFAIK, most developers tend to use Linux nowadays - at least in all the companies I've been in during the last 10 years, windows users have always been a minority.

(YES, I'm perfectly aware that this is not true for average users, or anything outside IT).

Zulip can be hosted internally, and there is a desktop Linux client in addition to running fine in the usual zoo of Linux web browsers.

That's probably not true[0]. In my experience you would often endure belittling or sheep calls, even bullying, if you walk into the office with a MacBook or an Iphone. We've customers where it's not even allowed to store corporate secrets on non-linux os. But that are highly professional financial or insurance dev corporations.

[0] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

I'm confused about what the linked dataset is supposed to show as it doesn't seem related. In any case, I've certainly noticed ancedotally that MacBook usage is quite high.

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