One different example may is the gnome shell desktop. Many of us who use it have basically overcome the win95 approach of desktop design. There is as far as I know no equivalent on windows or Mac. And a port would not be possible as you can't replace their window managers.
Then there is the whole Linux standard toolset, that yes works on windows these days, but obviously feels very foreign and doesn't integrate well to the system.
It's not only a matter of porting software when some things are so fundamentally different
Because it’s a lot more work, and because it’s next to impossible to create a great cross platform app with a native feeling UI.
And who do we have to thank for that? Perhaps there's some business out there that made a chocolate-themed UI toolkit that was notoriously proprietary and unworkable, so much so that it drove the industry into a software drought that only let up when x86 was fully standardized?
Maybe I'm just spitballing here.
I might’ve been able to fudge Figma to do what I needed, but even that wouldn’t have been ideal, with how it’s designed for collaborative prototyping more than a generic digital vector graphics editor. Aside from that, I don’t like using Figma simply because they don’t publish specs for their file format and try to lock you in (as opposed to Sketch, which uses a publicly documented file format that has plenty of converters).
Cornerstone (macOS Subversion client) is atrocious, God help you if you created a sandbox in the wrong place, deleting it could wipe out your repository. Tortoise (Windows) is so much better.
As a Windows developer recently porting my code to macOS, I am underwhelmed. I expected to be blown away.
Think about how many Mac enthusiast podcasts, websites, and blogs there are. Windows should have many more of these, but they don't. And Linux enthusiast sites are very technical and low level. There's no writing about being a Linux user that isn't also about being a developer.
Where are there no companies like the Omni Goup, Cultured Code, and Panic turning out great applications for Windows? In theory, the market is an order of magnitude bigger yet the reality seems to be that there are fewer Windows users willing to pay for great software. Is it because Windows users are not on that platform by choice?
Desktop Linux users are definitely there by choice, yet they too seem to be unwilling to pay for software.
There are such companies! For video games. Video games and B2B/business-productivity software is where the money is on Windows. Your buyers are PC gamers or businesses.
There are also lots of unsophisticated low-needs users who are on Windows at home because it's what was cheap at the big box store, and/or they learned in the earlier PC days to shop based on spec numbers back when those mattered much for basic home users, and the Apple section of the store doesn't look very interesting if you shop that way.
AFAI can tell (from watching relatives fitting this profile, which is... all of my relatives, plus many relatives of friends) the only way to make money off them, since the death of actual boxed software in stores (which they did used to sometimes buy!), is to be Microsoft and use Win10 to spam them until they buy (maybe not even realizing what's happening or, once they've paid, what they bought or what it's for or how to ever use it—yes, really) or be a straight-up malware scammer type. The problem with those users, if you want to sell them software, is they basically just want/need a browser, MS Office, and perhaps something to play the unorganized folder of pirated MP3s of 50s-90s music the unsophisticated-user side of the family has been passing around for 20 years. They may want something to organize photos and such, but they'll never figure out how to use it right even if you show them how, unless it's high-lock-in, very automatic ("AI" tagging and such), and probably cloud-based (so, likely some Web crap, not desktop software, oh and because advertising and hoovering up user data to train AI is an endless money spigot if and only if you already have massive scale you'll likely be competing on price with "free", so, have fun with that).
> Desktop Linux users are definitely there by choice, yet they too seem to be unwilling to pay for software.
Developing for Linux means receiving support load for all its desktop brokenness (driver problems [mostly video drivers]; issues with any basic hardware+software systems your software relies on to work well for all but the most basic operation, like audio for example; xorg/wayland/DE instability) and every crazy configuration out there.
Sure you can say "fuck off, we support exactly and only [a couple major desktop distros] with the default config that you get if you keep clicking OK on the OS installer and then not changing anything, and only on [list of hardware], report on any other set-up and you will be ignored" but you're already on such a tiny platform that you can hardly afford to annoy/turn-off/generate-vocal-anti-fans-among users. So instead... you develop for literally anything else, or maybe toss out some electron garbage to Linux as an afterthought.
Linux is expensive per-user and doesn't bring you that many users to begin with. Plus, yeah, there may be less willingness to pay for software.
It just seems strange that with a billion desktops, there aren't a few million who would buy software like OmniFocus or Things if it existed on Windows.
And yeah, desktop Linux is messy.
Linux userland tools in the last 10 years are incredible; it’s not easy to draw a direct line between that and the Mac, but I’m relatively certain there is correlation.
I’m talking about castnow, youtube-dl and a whole slew of other software which integrates proprietary things. In the 00s things like those were almost all running exclusive to windows.
I'd say it was the other way around, and it also bleeds into Windows. For example (of course): git.
Yet, still waiting for a Git GUI for Linux.
I switched to a m1 mac last year after nearly 4 decades of low level x86 work, incl. drivers, rootkits, and the like. These days I code in higher level languages such as rust or, ehm, python, and the mac offers a fine experience. Ironically, what pushed me over the fence was the pandemics; most of the video conferencing stuff causes windows laptops to sound like vacuum cleaners.
Most stuff we produce are *nix compatible. I’m no great hacker but everything I wrote to make my life easier is shell based.
I think Windows with ASL will have the same impact, with more and more *nix compatible software being produced.
Now it's a bit better with Swift or web applications using Electron.
Then Electron sent many of us back to vi in search of lost CPU cycles.
-- A JavaScript Dev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806843
vi might have visual on the name, but only for those in the Bell Labs silo
Objective-C was embraced by the developer community in such a way that they quickly deprecated Java Bridge and eventually got rid of Java development costs altogether.
I also remember having to wait a long time whenever the JVM was starting. It was annoying when a website did contain a Java applet because my web browser would be stuck until the JVM was ready.
XCode also did Java back then.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ja...
It's a lot easier to justify buying an Apple product with an excuse than to realize that relentless advertising is what caused people to give Apple money.
There was a clear gap in the market for a unix system that was up and running with minimal fuss, apple capitalised (accidentally happened upon) this.
They by definition market their product and win sales. Sales funded Linux and a lot of OSS beyond what hobbyists could possibly have done, an inconvenient truth.
People who want to support their own installation of Linux or FreeBSD do so without considering a commercial OS and a few of them constantly shitpost about how anyone could possibly not make the same choice as they do.
I was 14 years old in 2005 and knew nothing about programming, but was able to get Linux installed in a few minutes.
There is a real reason, but the part of the brain that makes the decision is different than the speech part of the brain.
The marketing company won.
This is a Major red flag.
Speaking of cheap plastic. "Cheap keyboard" ring a bell?
After my freshman year of college ended, in the summer of 2006 I replaced my desktop (which was dual-booting Windows XP and FreeBSD) with a Core Duo MacBook, which was just released two months before. It felt great using a Unix machine where I didn't have to worry about driver support, and where I can run Unix applications and various proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office without dual-booting, emulation, or virtualization.
I've stayed a Mac user since, though lately I'm in the slow transition of switching away; I just replaced my 2013 MacBook Air with a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 running Windows 10 (I love WSL!), and I plan to replace my 2013 Mac Pro with a Ryzen 7 or 9 build sometime in 2022 or 2023, which will most likely run FreeBSD. In the interim I've installed many Linux and FreeBSD systems for work and for play.
More just an anecdotal opinion but to me the iPad and iPhone (the ecosystem effect) and Apple's marketing are really what gave them the leg up on the personal computing level. I still remember those "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads pitching the PC as the uncool choice. That's a powerful message to people and they must of thought it would work otherwise they wouldn't of run that ad - if not to dev's the general public. Individuals were buying them locally as home machines way before companies really allowed them for work because of this marketing and the easy integration to their other consumer devices - at least that's what I saw locally here (not US).
If it never got popular on the consumer end and I couldn't manage my office docs and such on it, while I may use it at home, many workplaces and therefore the mainstream dev may of never adopted the Mac. What I use at "home", is what I want to use when I come into the workplace. There needs to be a critical mass before most workplaces (where many dev's work) to adopt it and therefore develop an ecosystem around it (e.g. your favourite IDE's, tool chains, etc)
This accident also allows for what-ifs, had Apple been successful with Copland or bought BeOS instead, none of which UNIX friendly.