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Comment by casey2 | Hacker News Reader

This is just petty tribalism. How is this different than Red Hat devs using macbooks or whatever.

Reasonable people can recognize the right tool for the job. If the productivity didn't grow it would be a bad idea to organize society around capitalism. If your goal is getting shit done at scale, you can't rely on "There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law."

You want them to use, what? jitsi? neomutt? iRedMail? DEEPSEEK?!? LOCALLY?!? GET REAL! These are serious developers for Petes' sake!

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> How is this different than Red Hat devs using macbooks or whatever.

I'd argue Red Hat using Macbooks to be somewhat worse (unless those Macbooks are running Fedora somehow, of course); that'd be equivalent to the Mattermost devs using Teams, or the GIMP devs using Photoshop ;)

During the brief time I was at (a subsidiary of) IBM, one of the standard laptop options (and the one I ultimately picked) was a ThinkPad running RHEL; pretty sure it even shipped with Boxes and a script to spin up Windows VMs to cover the “I need to run this proprietary program that won't run in Wine” angle. If Red Hat's own OS in their parent company's standard config ain't good enough for them, then that seems like a problem they should be hard at work fixing.

Red Hat employees can use Fedora on their MacBook. Fedora Asahi Remix [0].

Unfortunately in the business world you often have to use tools that others outside of your company uses. I would never choose to use Oracle Database but since the client uses it then I must setup a development / QA environment for it.

I don't know of any Microsoft Access Database solution that runs on non-Windows OSes. Any time I interact with one I need a Windows VM. Would love a command line client like sqlite3 so I don't have to use such a bad GUI.

[0] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/

most redhatters used Fedora/RHEL on ThinkPads, Macbooks were in super minority

we used FOSS before Google, but had to switch (there was some pushback internally)

not sure what happened after IMB took over.

I'm not sure if it was so rare, perhaps it depended on your role or location. I suppose developers in engineering used MacBooks less than those of us who worked in consulting, where they were quite common for customer work. We had a choice, though, and there was no judgment about which work tool we preferred.

I'm not sure on what's going on today, I left the company around the IBM acquisition.

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