Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

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> I really don't understand why developers use macs at all.

I don't want to single out your comment, but there's been a lot of this lately (and every time this discussion comes up).

There's no one true version of a 'developer' or a 'pro.'

Broadly speaking, people will be most productive with the tool they know best. And the 'real' pros can be productive with just about anything.

For myself, I consider myself a developer too, but my workflow is probably very different from your workflow. My main machines are a MacBook Pro (2012) and a hefty HP workstation (64GB RAM, dual Xeons) running Ubuntu. There are things I use the Mac for that I'd struggle to do on the HP, and vice versa. But that's just me... But the idea that there's 'one true dev' or 'one true platonic ideal' of a development machine, is just crazy. And that's why I think a lot of this recent Apple criticism is missing the mark (especially when there are plenty of things to criticise Apple for, if that's what one wants to do).

My preferred toolchain and stack just works better on a native linux box because it doesn't need virtualization overhead when I'm on a linux box. Those efficiencies add up pretty quickly. Since I mostly do backend dev work macs have never worked for me as they should.

To address your point about this being a recent trend I actually noticed the mismatch when I first moved to the bay area 5 years ago. It seemed weird to use a mac as a dev machine and then deploy to a ubuntu box in production. There was always some issue that came up because whoever was doing the deployment didn't verify things in a VM first and then had to do some firefighting on a production box.

This wouldn't be a problem if workplaces gave you the option of getting a linux box or a mac. At most places you don't have a choice. All the IT management software is built for a mac so you get a mac.

Seriously??? In that case the real problem is pushing directly from a dev machine to prod. It is simply crazy not to use a staging server. I bet that even if the Dev machine has the same OS as prod a lot of shit happens when not using a proper staging server (been there seen that). So the production problems that you experienced are completely unrelated to the OS on the dev machine. They are simply caused by the wrong deployment process.

We can go around circles for days. The fundamental issue still stands. You are losing time and spending effort working around OS mismatches because your dev machine and your production servers do not line up. Adding a staging server moves the problem one level higher. You will still spend however long it takes to fix whatever mismatch was caused by the differing environments.

I develop on windows and deploy on Linux. I have done that for more that 10 years and I never found a problem that wouldn't have happened if I developed on Linux. And obviously I always deployed first on test, then on stage and only at the end in production. What kind of problems did you see that happened because of developing on Mac OS instead of Linux? The only ones that I can think of are all caused by a wrong deployment process.

Try setting up a virtualenv on windows, linux, mac and then tell me there are no issues. Sometimes the versions won't even line up for some libraries because whatever works on windows will not work on linux will not work on mac. Same with ruby gems and npm modules that require compilation.

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