I know the pro-Apple bias is high here at HN, but this is just sad.

Almost all developers in corporate America use WIndows. If you work outside of silicon valley at a company with more than a few dozen people, chances are you're probably (but not certainly) using Windows.

It's interesting to see what assumptions people make and how they make them. You assumed your parent had a pro-Apple bias and that they wanted a Mac OS X build, while I felt solidarity with them because I was looking for a Linux build. The only OS the parent mentions is Windows, though.

Bayesian reasoning. You and him had different prior beliefs. It's quite justifiable because we live with incomplete information about the world.

I work outside California for a web company with 40 devs. We use Ubuntu for prod and dev. Even the (few) Mac guys run Ubuntu VMs. The windows guy (singular) does too.

We're not talking about developers developers developers, we're talking about web developers.

Personally I usually select my os based on the applications I intend to run on it, but for "web" development all I need is a text editor, so really any of them will do. Linux is nice to work in, but Windows will probably support the wireless card in my laptop.

I consider myself an experienced web developer with 10+ years of handling web projects from all angles. My primary OS is Windows. OS choice is really irrelevant nowadays.

Your original point is fair tough, it should be cross platform from day 1.

More developers use Windows than any other desktop OS. More people use Windows than any other desktop OS.

I prefer Windows for it's mix of flexibility and stability. I do not prefer the Mac OS because I find it to be a generally terrible OS that is completely inflexible compared to Windows. (I call it the Mac OS because they pretty much ruined NeXTSTEP by smearing the disgusting Mac OS UI on top of it.)

Being forced to use a Mac myself, I know a ton of things about how limiting this OS is. You can't even run 2 instance of the same app on OS X, so for instance if you're editing 3 or 4 projects with Xcode and one of them crashes, the whole app has to be restarted.

I could go on about how bad the Mac OS is, but I actually have to go work on my newest web development/mobile app project wherein I use Windows for most of the actual work and only touch my Mac/Apple devices for testing.

I truly respect your opinion, but I laughed at "I prefer Windows for it's mix of flexibility and stability". I can understand stability to some point, but flexibility? Come on, I assume you're a web developer, have you ever used the Linux/OSX console? It cannot be compared to anything related to web development on Windows, really.

Thank you. I do use bash/dash and other shells regularly both on Linux and OS X. If I need my Windows desktop apps to work on the same files as I'm working on with my shell, then I just share the directory one way or another.

Flexibility is certainly debatable depending on your point of view. Personally, I only want flexibility within the realm of stability and speed. For instance - Windows does not let you switch window managers the way you can in Linux. But that's not the kind I'm interested in. I am more concerned with things like:

- Will it run on most hardware without much hassle?

- How easily can I customize the file browser to do things like adding new context menu actions (based on node type or other state) via third party modules?

- How stable are my customizations?

- Can I generally put things where I want them easily, without fighting against some overarching design opinion?

All of the Linux software that I use regularly runs in a terminal and Linux runs absolutely great in a guest VM on any type of host. If I run Windows in a guest VM, it's slower and GPU intensive apps suffer. If I really, really needed to work on an iOS or OS X app while traveling and I could only bring one device with me for some reason, I would certainly bring only my Macbook Pro. Luckily, I don't have that problem!

Looking forward, Windows will soon have Ubuntu running on the Windows kernel. If that works out, I can have the best of both worlds without keeping any VMs running. The closest I can get to this in Linux is with Wine, but that sucks worse than Cygwin does on Windows IMO.

> a ton of things about how limiting this OS is. ... if you're editing 3 or 4 projects with Xcode ...

I'm not an OS X fan – far from it, really – but that is not a limitation of OS X. That's a limitation of Xcode. I have launched multiple instances of the same app on OS X; via right-clicking on their icons, I think.

> You can't even run 2 instance of the same app on OS X

Sure you can. Pass the -n flag to /usr/bin/open, e.g.:

   open -n /Applications/Xcode.app

Ever tried it? I would not recommend it, especially with Xcode but generally for most OS X apps.

It's fine for running multiple instances of the simulator if that's all you need to do. You'll be sorry if you try to actually work with code though. Settings will be overwritten, caches will be corrupted and some things won't work. The problem is that OS X isn't designed with this in mind at all and you're actually working against that design when you do this.

most: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...

It says "coming for Linux & Mac." No reason for the developer to have to push all at once or any other platform first. Can't wait to try it on OSX!

Most of Accenture digital, Infosys, etc. Also, did you know that Microsoft also has developers?!

A lot of people use Windows for web development... Your statement doesn't seem vary enlightened. OSX isn't the king you think it is.

You're so filter bubbled that it hurts. Maybe just another random anecdotal data point helps: Most developers I know use Windows.

You too seems too bubbled. Maybe just another random anecdotal data point helps: Most developers I know do not use Windows.

So we have lots of bubbles everywhere!

Surely the person who stated that they were basically unaware that web developers use Windows are ignorant though, right?

The people responding certainly aren't ignoring the fact that at least some web devs use Macs...so you can't really apply the same label to everyone here, can you?

I think Stack Overflow Developer Survey provides a good picture of what is used more.

For the lazy:

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...

OS X: 26.2%

Windows: 52.2%

To be fair, this figure includes all developers, rather than just web developers. But Windows is probably still the majority if you include the whole world, as opposed to those working at startups in rich countries.

Isn't that for all developers though, and not just for the web?

I have a Linux box and a Windows machine.

Since I do a lot of .Net stuff my work is done on a Windows machine for obvious reasons. The rest of my front-end work is usually done on my Linux box.

Most corporate places I've worked at are Windows shops. Even in those big corporate places, there are only around 1% who use Macs.

Most of my development is cross platform. I switch every day from Windows, to Mac, to 64 bit Linux, to Linux on ARM and then back around every 4 days of work. I also test every day on iPhone, iPad and 3 different Android systems.

Agreed. I think the real bubble is junior devs that care passionately about which OS they use, like it really matters.

No, I'm not bubbled, because I'm well aware that in other places and subcultures, it's considered insane to prefer Windows for dev.

I've been on OSX for five years but this year switched back to Windows 10 with a new surface book. Yes took some adjustment, but now I find it just fine for building python webapps with posgresql backends. Cygwin using mobaxterm pro is nice, all the jetbrains IDE's work fine on windows, and even powershell ISE is interesting.

Most developers I know use windows, most of them don't know what SASS is though. I think its fair to say that the majority of front end developers prefer OSX.

According to the SO survey, 50% of developers are on Windows, although there's no filter for web developers. However, the survey is biased towards English-speaking countries, which tend to be richer.

Which would they prefer to work on? I haven't seen any stats.

While I can't support this with figures, which I'd love to see by the way, my experience working as a consultant at a number of companies, from startups to big media conglomerates in Europe, is that for web, there's definitely a preference for macs, however slight.

It's generally older, more conservative or more back-end focused shops that are on Windows (.NET, Umbraco), but even those often move to macs or want to. Viacom, for example, uses Rails for it's European sites and all developers in the office use macs.

Smaller startups tend to have mac-users for front-end development and a mix of windows/linux/mac for back-end guys.

And of course my experience here on HN gives me the impression that most front-end stuff is mac-centric.

All that said, the big qualifiers are wealth and web. I know quite a few web guys who use windows because they can't afford a mac, and I know many developers who use windows or linux because they don't do front-end web development. But in my world (The Netherlands) the vast majority of web developers use macs, to the point that it's kind of a 'thing' to see a web developer use anything else.

agreed, I haven't seen any states, I am just basing it on my personal experience in the UK. I use Windows in the Day and OSX for personal projects. Wonder where that puts me?

I think both this criticism and its parent are too quick to judge because the website says "coming soon", but your comment just veers it off to a neurotic direction. At worse, they got revealed too soon on internet forums.

Also, a little random anecdote doesn't help. It's intuitive to believe that most web developers use OS X / Linux, at least inferring from the fact that developer tools like Node or Vagrant came to OS X / Linux first, if not Linux first.

> You're so filter bubbled that it hurts

The HN guidelines ask you not to call names in arguments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be much better without that bit.

I agree, thanks for calling it out and my apologies to toomanythings2. I'm not sure why I thought that was necessary.

Is there any data regarding to this? Does github, npm, etc. release any web stats? Atom collects some telemetry I guess, it might provide good insights. Anything public?

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech... gives a good indication; over 50% of respondents use a version of Windows, vs 26.2% OSX. Mind you, that comparison is a bit skewed given how it counts Windows differently (broken up in versions) compared with OSX (which has been OSX for like ten years)

Most devs that are using C# for their backend.