Re:More developers now use OS X than Linux
by bryanlarsen on Friday March 18, 2016 @10:12AM
(#11311873)
What games work on OSX but not on Linux? A few years ago OS X had better game support than Linux, but in my experience, Linux now has better game support than OS X, due to Valve's steambox push and Apple's OpenGL stagnation.
Re:More developers now use OS X than Linux
by oneeyedpigeon on Friday March 18, 2016 @10:36AM
(#11312042)
I'm not sure what they are, but there are 2,449 of them on Steam. 6,451 titles for "Mac OSX"; 4,002 for "SteamOS + Linux".
Re:More developers now use OS X than Linux
by bryanlarsen on Friday March 18, 2016 @11:26AM
(#11312373)
Historically yes, OS X had much better support. Is there any way to pull the stats out for games released in the last 12 months?
Re:More developers now use OS X than Linux
by oneeyedpigeon on Friday March 18, 2016 @03:01PM
(#11314038)
Not easily. I make it 598/367 in Mac's favour for 2016, but that's not really a lot of data.
This is pretty much why I switched to a MacBook too.
Windows is a workable desktop OS, and it has great software support for things other than developer tools (I can also play games, for example). Unfortunately, its lack of UNIXness means half the open-source software world (at least, the portions I care about) doesn't work well with it, and this is a pain.
Because I wanted something UNIXy, I switched to Ubuntu (more than once), but the desktop experience isn't great (in particular, both my graphics and my sound were broken) and non-developer application support is poor (few games I wanted to play were supported or worked, not to mention other things).
OS X, on the other hand, has a solid desktop experience, sufficiently UNIXy underpinnings for development purposes, and has good enough application support for my needs.
I do have the option of switching over to Windows on this thing, but tellingly I haven't in the two years I've had it. (I do have a Boot Camp partition for Windows, but it exists for the sake of a single game. Everything else I want to do can be done in OS X.) While using Windows or Ubuntu it usually took less time than that before I got fed up and switched OS yet again.
My experiences aren't representative, of course. I don't just do web app and systems programming on my computer. If I did, I'd probably be fine with Linux. But sometimes I also do things like browse the web (including watching YouTube videos and using web pages which have WebGL), dabble in game development (Unity's editor doesn't run well under WINE), edit videos (there's no good Linux video editor), play games, and so on.
I'm also someone who doesn't like dual-booting. I don't want to have to deal with two completely different operating systems with their own user interfaces, and have to stop one activity and reboot if I want to do a different activity. I don't want to have to deal with the mess that is trying to share files between different OSes.