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Comment by BossingAround | Hacker News Reader

Arguably the best OS? For what? For browsing the web, video editing, etc.? Maybe. For development? Jesus, macOS doesn't even have native container support. All the devs I know with macOS then either get a second Linux laptop, or spend a lot of their time SSHd into a Linux server.

For dev (at least backend and devops), macOS is not that great.

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I don't know what you are talking about, I'm a back end engineer, and every company I've worked for during the last 12 years gives out MacBook pros to all devs. Even the game company that used C# and Mono gave out MacBooks (and dual booted them, which of course you can't do any more; I never bothered with Windows since our servers were written in Scala).

Not all teams run tons of containers on personal computers. All our servers are running on AWS. I rarely ssh into anything.

I like the fact that OS X is based on UNIX, and not some half-assed bullshit bolted onto Windows. I still have bad memories of trying to use Cygwin 15 years ago. Apparently WSL is an improvement, but I don't care.

Mac runs all the software I need, and it has real UNIX shells.

Yeah it's funny for all the hoopla I've heard over the glory of MacOS having a REAL UNIX TERMINAL, WSL works better in practice simply because it's running an actual Linux VM and thus the support is better.

Still, I just don't think it's that burdensome to get containers running on MacOS, it's just annoying that it happens to work worse than on Windows or Linux. Ignoring the hardware, the only real advantage to MacOS development is when you're targeting Apple products with what you're developing.

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