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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Windows has always been a viable alternative to MacBook Pro running macOS.

If it wasn't for our iOS projects, they wouldn't be even around the office.

Not if you are developing for linux. macOS greatly simplifies that over windows. Of course you can develop for linux on windows but the third party tools that you need to do that are much more complicated and clunky.

Ive seen Linux devs on MacOS fall down several traps of thinking their NetBSD based MacOS is equivalent to Linux. One common pitfall I see is with filesystem access. Mac, by default, has case insensitive filenames (like Windows), opposite of Linux. Yes Mac supports case sensitive, but it is not the default and apparently a lot of apps dont take this into account and fail spectacularly when case sensitivity is turned on (I can't provide any examples, I dont use Mac, its just anecdotal from reading online).

This was a while ago, but when Steam was first introduced on macOS, it did not play nice with my case-sensitive HFS+ partition.

When I first set up my Mac, I thought case-sensitivity would be a good idea just in case I ever had to copy files from another case-sensitive file system. I never did need the case-sensitivity, but I did have to repartition to get Steam working. It thought me a good lesson about switching away from defaults "just in case."

The ones I've seen doing linux dev from within macos these days are using docker.

What third party tools do you find you need to do Linux development on Windows? Is there a hole that WSL and Hyper-V don't cover for you?

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft on Windows.

Look at loopback mounting for FS. Please provide an API for that. Fuse support officially would be good.

Also the availability of kernel headers, config tools cross compilers and the scripts compatibility.

When developing for Linux, use Linux.

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