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Comment by _gabe_ | Hacker News Reader

If you toggle that response to "All Respondents" instead of "Professional Developers" Windows goes up to 45%. Plus, 3% of users are using windows subsystem for Linux. So 48%. Whereas Mac and Linux are both at 25%. Even for developers, Windows is still the clear majority.

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If you look at desktop os share from tracking general web use rather than surveying people on a dev-focused site windows is 75%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

Interesting. So 50% Unix and 48% Windows (and 3% are targeting Unix anyway). That's quite a swing over the past 20 years - there was a time where aside the occasional web developer with a Mac, everyone was on Windows. Leaving out Linux, the interesting part has been how much market that Apple has chiseled away.

Cloud workloads mean UNIX has effectively won the server room for classical deployments, however UNIX !== Developer.

There are plenty of other workloads and platforms to target.

Desktop, mobile devices, IoT, medical, game consoles, infotainment, unikernel, serverless....

Mobile is almost all IOS and Android... and mostly but not all devs use Macs due to xcode.

The only places that Windows seems to persist are developer markets where tooling choices are limited to Windows (games, medical, embedded) or corporate standards dictate tooling.

> Mobile is almost all IOS and Android... and mostly but not all devs use Macs due to xcode.

Indeed and trying to use UNIX for mobile apps won't bring you far.

> The only places that Windows seems to persist are developer markets where tooling choices are limited to Windows (games, medical, embedded) or corporate standards dictate tooling.

The remaining 99% of the market where UNIX GUIs don't matter.

I use macos to make mobile apps every day. Last I looked its bsd unix.

Also ios and android are unixes too.

How much UNIX do you think powers your beloved XCode implementation based on AppKit and Objective-C?

Android uses the Linux kernel, nothing on the userspace is UNIX. Tomorrow it can use Fuchsia's Zircon and no one will notice.

I cannot find any reference to Objective-C, Swift, UI Kit, CoreData, Metal, OpenGL ES,... on POSIX standard specification.

"POSIX has become outdated", page 6

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/issues/login_fall1...

it's very interesting to see Windows at less than 50%

20 years ago that would have been 95%+

and its market share for developers is way, way, way less than its share on desktop (which was my point)

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