More developers use Linux than Mac, according to 2022 StackOverflow survey
I switched to Mac in summer of 2021--right to an M1, never had an x86 Mac--after running desktop Linux in various flavours for the previous 23 years: RedHat 4.0, then Mandrake, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch. It&#x27;s fair to say I&#x27;ve been a developer for that long, too, if you take seriously the notion of a 10 year-old mucking around with C socket code on a 486.<p>Pluses and minuses, but overall very happy with the switch.<p>- Biggest con: I miss the raw efficiency, unparalleled speed and superior ergonomics of my i3wm bushido, and will never match that in any conceivable fashion on OSX (yes, I&#x27;ve gone through the whole Yabai&#x2F;Amethyst&#x2F;etc journey, and ended up ditching it all and just going back to vanilla. Those half-hearted efforts at a tiling window manager just kept hard things hard and made easy things hard, too.)<p>- Biggest pro: better hardware (which I realise isn&#x27;t an OS attribute), never having to care about how my computer works or fix much of anything, lots of seamless and turn-key behaviours that just make sense (particularly vis-a-vis suspend and multi-monitor stuff), and (surprisingly to some), it&#x27;s refreshing to be able to inhabit a common universe with other computer users and talk about the same sorts of stuff.<p>Nobody really ever understood my Linux gibberish while I had only a distant idea of what a &#x27;Finder&#x27; was that went back to System 7.5.5. It&#x27;s nice to have more friends.<p>- Biggest misconception going into OSX: that one actually has to use GUI stuff for much of anything. Nah. The browser, iTerm2, VS Code, and Mail is where I live, same as under Linux. Mostly just the first two.<p>- Biggest misconception about desktop Linux from Mac users: that it requires so much care and feeding. I ran Arch, of all things, with its continuous rolling releases, from 2016-2021 and although the initial setup had a long tail and was ultimately an investment of a few days, nothing I can remember ever broke for me afterward -- not on desktop, not on laptop.<p>Mac users tell me they&#x27;re sure things did break for me, and that I just internalised my Linux trauma. No, they really didn&#x27;t. It was shockingly stable. It was just kind of mediocre in other ways that start to have more meaning only after you&#x27;ve spent enough of your life tweaking your desktop experience.<p>Edit: I didn&#x27;t look at the survey in detail, but I hope they make a distinction between desktop use and server use. Sure, I use Linux for development. I&#x27;d even say predominantly. I think of my MacBook as a nicer GUI for all my Linux work.