Ask HN: Why did OS X win out over Linux for so many developers?
It&#x27;s the best possible bridge platform for *nix development.<p>POSIX enough that tools and environments work pretty well without a mountain of hacks and workarounds (e.g. Cygwin).<p>Mac enough that the user experience is coherent and consistent across the overwhelming majority of applications. (e.g. drag n drop, key bindings, media interop, etc.)<p>Popular enough to have native MS Office in orgs where that&#x27;s still a hard requirement.<p>I tried to force myself to go full Linux by swapping out my Macbook Air for an X1 Carbon Gen 3 running KDE Plasma 5.  The environment was nice and customizable and I was able to get pretty comfortable with it, but the instant I wasn&#x27;t using a qt5 &amp; KDE 5 frameworks application, the user experience fell apart.  Couldn&#x27;t set my key bindings the way I like in GTK apps because the GTK&#x2F;GNOME teams apparently gave up entirely on accels files and key-themes. Media interop was pretty much non-existent, and there were lots of annoying little bugs (e.g. resizing a window would drop its focus leaving in a context where there was no active window and I&#x27;d have to click back in it.)<p>I still use Kubuntu 15.10 on a 12-core Dell T5500 w&#x2F; 48GB RAM for running larger distributed systems simulations&#x2F;tests, and it seems about a hundred times more usable than the Windows 7 machine my job originally provided, but when I want to move fluidly between development, making arch diagrams, writing docs, or creating conference decks I can&#x27;t escape how much better the complete experience is on my Macbook.<p>Also, LibreOffice Impress somehow managed to make a UX more bewildering, broken, and obtuse than PowerPoint, which I&#x27;d previously thought to be impossible. Viva la Keynote!