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Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

OP writes:

> I am talking about a distro, that you don't have to configure anything for. A distro that handles things like external devices screen recording without weird glitches.

I don't read this as a plea for better HIG? This is HN, so I'm assuming most of us live in the terminal anyway. I'll never understand why people prefer MacOS for development. From my experience, it is clearly worse in pretty much every respect (package management, container support, configurability, just to mention a few things).

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Mostly because we have no viable option.

Most work places want to have one device for all staff. So the IOS team and the Android team and Marketing and API and JS team, all need one common system.

Windows is out for the Rails/Elixir team, and IOS team need Macs. Marketing and Sales teams could live in Windows or Mac's

The only Venn diagram match is Mac. Low powered or high powered, Mac is the answer.

Honestly... Package Management is really good for IOS/Rails/Android dev. I personally never use containers at work, and I don't change the configuration on my Mac. Out of the box, it works.

The ios being exclusive to MacOS is an Apple made problem though. So you're paying double in hardware cost because of some decision by Apple that no other platform may compile for ios.

> The ios being exclusive to MacOS is an Apple made problem though. So you're paying double in hardware cost ...

You're right, it is. However knowing that doesn't change it.

I don't believe that you're paying double the hardware cost though. To get a halfway decent non-Apple laptop you need to be paying close to the same price anyway. The current Macs (especially Apple Silicon ones) really are much better quality than virtually (perhaps literally) anything you can get for half their price.

I don't know about double for the hardware.

A new Lenovo cost about 3k, and a new Mac costs about that too.

The Lenovo comes with windows (so rails and elixir dev's can't use it)

Mac didn't decide not to support rails, or lock rails devs out of other OS's.

Which is rewarding them for their choice to put you into the situation in the first place. So in a way they're right to do it.

> This is HN, so I'm assuming most of us live in the terminal anyway. I'll never understand why people prefer MacOS for development.

I've been a developer for over 3 decades, doing multiple languages/ecosystems across the full stack. I code in the evenings too. I'm pretty much a stereotypical geek.

I also do general, consumer, non-techie stuff too.

- If I only did development then yes, Linux is the obvious choice.

- If I only did consumer stuff then Windows is the obvious choice.

- However MacOS has the best combination for both sides of that equation and second place on both aspects is better for me than the combination of first and last place that both Linux and Windows offer.

(I do still maintain a separate laptop with Windows 10 and Linux Mint though).

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