My experience with traffic coming from Hacker News has been that the majority comes from OS X.
I've been using Linux for many years now and I'm still investing time daily sharpening my tools. It's an investment that continues to pay exponentially increasing rewards. Nearly all of the remote computing resources I use in my job are running Linux. That probably is true for most HN users. Is Linux really that much more difficult to use on the desktop? I find getting all my laptop hardware running smoothly is one of the easiest system administration tasks I face. And I only face that task once in a blue moon when I upgrade laptops.
Not sure how any of the various Linux package managers are more "standard" than brew on OS X...
1. http://www.onthelambda.com/2013/10/14/the-state-of-package-m...
Come on now, it's not 2005. Ubuntu runs smoothly on just about everything I've installed it on and I usually end up having to do more tweaking on Windows 8 than Ubuntu. As far as OS X goes, it's not perfect out of the box either, especially for anyone coming from a different environment who needs to tweak it to meet their standards.
I mean, compare: http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/ with: https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop (ok, you could also buy an Asus laptop or something that would be nice looking enough, and cheaper than a novena laptop).
Another point, is that when you're at home, with a linux laptop, you can spend two days configuring the wifi. But when you're going out to a conference, MacOSX shows its worth.
Oh, and for several MacOSX versions now you can map the modifier keys as you wish, in the System Preferences / Keyboard panel.
MacOSX is not entirely proprietary. Darwin is open sourced (in large part). And as developers, we use a lot of free software on MacOSX, starting with emacs, and all the linux tools you can get from MacPorts or Homebrew. Right, because between ourselves, the BSD tools provided by Apple suck.
But actually, it's the econony, stupid! ;-)
As a Linux hacker, I much prefer to earn the money I need to pay for taxes, internet, electricity, food and shelter (oh, and clothing, sometimes you get to go to conferences), developing applications on a unix machine like MacOSX, or iOS, rather than on MS-Windows. (Yes, there's also Android, but java...)
So don't make a mistake, the main workstation is a Linux box, and even while developing MacOSX application, most of the code is written from the Linux box, even if it's compiled by Xcode on the MacOSX system nearby. Because, honestly, Linux is much more ergonomical! (if only because you really can configure it as you wish (and also strangeley, the keyboard feels much more responsive with linux than with MacOXS, let alone MS-Windows)). Anyways, remember, the Network is the computer! But most customers are still MS-Windows users, or MacOSX or iOS users, (or Android users right). So while you keep Linux close to the heart, you have to have a MacOSX system to earn your living.
(And there's also the possibility to run MacOSX on a Virtual Machine on Linux, but let's be honest, it means that legally you still have to own Apple hardware).
OS X has plenty of problems, see: http://www.imore.com/os-x-mavericks-problems-drive-me-nuts-h...
I've personally experienced many of these my self. OS X is cool, but I wish the fan base would stop acting like it never has any bugs or issues. OS X does get bugs, OS X does crash, OS X can break, OS X does not always 'just work'. Just go to discussion.apple.com and look at all the issues everyone is having. OS X is a great OS though, but it's not infallible.
- The battery life is very, very good and combined with the screen (Retina 13"), made it perfect for me.
- It's still a POSIX environment so I can still use most of what I had from Linux without issue.
- It doesn't require as much maintenance as Linux. I don't have to fiddle with things to get it to work the way I want, it already does that.
- The hardware support has been great whenever I've had issues.
What maintenance does Linux require? The only thing I can think you might be implying is that there are bugs caused by updating that cause system issues frequently and this is simply untrue. Software updates have been known to cause issues on all systems, and I can find plenty of results on google showing OS X having issues after updates. Linux, in my experience, is the "set it and forget it" operating system. OS X is great though, just not for everyone (personally the environment doesn't have the capabilities I look for in an OS).
It's even worse when the Nvidia drivers don't automatically recompile for the new kernel. I've had many upgrade that resulted in no functional X-Window session so I had to use the terminal to download and recompile the video drivers.
I realize that's a problem with binary blobs rather than open source drivers, but it's also a reality.
OSX comes with the best hardware and you can develop in any programing language... not the same for Windows
And you can, with a bit of effort, run Linux on a MacBook. Yes, it's not for everyone, and it took a good 10 months from the last MacBook Air release before I could run Linux natively on it (without VMWare), but for those of us who really like Linux, it's worth it.
I totally get that the effort is not worth it for lots of people, though.
That's funny. After using a mac for several years, that's my biggest gripe about working on most linux boxes. OS X separates text viewing and editing functions (C-f, C-k, C-a, etc in eamcs parlance) from system functions (S-c :: copy, S-v :: paste, S-w :: close window). In Linux, ctrl-A will either get you a cursor at column one, or select everything. I wish it were easier to define these actions system-wide the way OS X does.
a) Battery life. For the most part, shoehorning Linux onto a PC is going to negatively affect battery life.
b) Despite being a bit of a "hacker", I have a day job and don't want to spend too much time tinkering with my OS. OS X is more polished than Linux and is less likely to go wrong.
I'm guessing that while most HN'ers aren't in exactly the same situation as me, they have more important things to do (i.e. working on their ideas) rather than wrangle with Linux.
I'm sure people will immediately chime in and say that Thinkpads work well with Ubuntu or that System76 does the job, and I'm sure it does, but the experience of running OS X on Apple hardware is simply unmatched.
People are saying they have to spend a lot of time configuring Linux but in my experience that's not the case (obviously once it's installed in the case of Arch, which for me is a worthwhile investment).
I do admire the polish of OS X's desktop though.
Now for hackers, you already get a long way with the built-in BSD commands, but one word : http://brew.sh
>the experience of running OS X on Apple hardware is simply unmatched.
Eh. Seems a lot of people on HN believe this, but it's not always the case. Just a quick visit to discussion.apple.com will show all sorts of issues people have with the OS including bugs like http://www.cnet.com/news/some-lion-users-plagued-by-black-sc... which is a bug in the OS.
Edit: just some things I noticed in the short time I used OS X: The gmail integration is buggy. I didn't get messages on time, and I have to either quit the app or take Mail offline and then online again before new mail will start streaming in. Sometime I couldn't get it to quit.
The 'quicklook' thing seemed really slow, which seemed to be a problem a lot of users had.
Multi-monitor support isn't that great. I had multiple windows on multiple desktops for some reason and it just felt weird.
I had issues with audio stopping and not working again until I did a reboot.
In some apps scrolling was really rough.
Apple seems to think I should unitask on a single monitor. That's not how I work, so it's not for me.
Once you've done that, you could install Linux or Windows or FreeBSD on it, but if you don't have an overwhelming requirement, you'll keep it on Mac OS.
And if you're like most hackers, you have one work laptop and you carry it around everywhere, and it's your primary machine.
Personally, I don't carry a laptop back and forth: I have a Linux desktop at the office, and a Linux desktop at home, and a Mac laptop for travel and moving around the house.