Too true. MacOS is the one place you can get a UNIX toolchain in a stable environment. If something works on my Mac, it works on my coworker’s Mac. If something works on Ubuntu but you’re using Nix… Uh, YMMV.

I love Linux, but if you’re gonna use it as a desktop OS, you pretty much accept that you now have a part-time job keeping up on Linux news to deal with the fact that each component of your system is in a perpetual state of “deprecated support for The Old Way, and experimental support for The New Way”.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Our Mac colleague is literally the only one in the dev team having constant troubles, constantly spinning up VMs to get stuff working.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, if you have a mixed dev team then I’m sure the odd ones out are gonna have the most trouble.

My point was more that if you have a team of all Macs or a team of all Linux, I’m much more confident in stuff working on everyone’s machine in the Mac scenario.

Even if you stretch it to “the Mac users get to customize the hell out of their machines, and the Linux users only do the minimum to get a fully functional dev environment”, I think the Macs end up in a more consistent state.

[–] sqibkw 3 points 2 weeks ago

Yep, it's mostly just about consistency across the dev team. This is coming from someone with multiple Linux machines for personal use and hobby projects:

At my first job, devs all had Macs. There was the occasional guy with Linux but he was always had trouble because all the scripts and dev tools were made for Mac, so he had to constantly be rewriting and modifying them to work on his machine, and wasted time doing so. Nobody used Windows for development since it wasn't Microsoft, lol.

But, when the Apple Silicon Macs started appearing, that's a different story...

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