It's not been a ride without bumps to run Linux on this thing (though it's quite easy now) -- but the uniquely wonderful display made the struggles worth it for me. Meanwhile Apple just doesn't really offer anything that sets them apart.
Around maybe the start of 2017 this became fortunately unnecessary, with the stock F26+ distro kernels driving everything but the touchscreen these days. So up to that point it's install and forget.
Currently I build jakeday's kernel source tree (which he builds binaries from for Ubuntu) on Fedora to have the touchscreen working as well, as Intel never mainlined the driver for it. If you're running Ubuntu, just throwing jakeday's kernel PPA in there should do the trick.
r/surfacelinux is probably the best community resource for this enterprise.
Other then ruby devs who uses macs?
I'd think Lenovo would be far more popular
A lot of people see Mac as "close enough" for any Linux based development, and will build on a Mac and deploy to a Linux based server.
In terms of Lenovo, they were usually pretty popular, although I lumped these in with the "cheap devices" as I would often see far more Ideapads than Thinkpads, because they were cheaper for the employer.
My 2011 one is still working fine but the minute it breaks, well, prepare to be replaced. The Macbook Pro is a heavy behemoth in comparison. And no function keys. Do not want.
That said, I've switched to a WSL environment (native Linux on Windows) and it has handled everything I've thrown at it so far, including make scripts, GUI apps, etc.
Here's one line from my current project:
"build-intl": "npm run build-intl-translations && npm run build-intl-locales",
I might be wildly wrong on this one, but I'm a big fan of writing "git add . && git commit -m "Commit Message" && git push origin master", and I noticed that in a Powershell window I had to use the vertical bar instead of double-ampersands.
Of course, you could always install Linux, and then things would be fine. I've tried it in the past and I've always run into annoying driver issues. I'm not the sort of person who wants to spend hours trying to figure out why my laptop won't go to sleep when I close the lid. It takes too much time away from playing with Haskell.
Anecdata: While most in our team are using Macbooks, I'm seeing an increasing amount of people using a Lenovo X1 Yoga. I made the switch as well last month. However, that might just be a consequence of what our employer offers: The X1 Yoga is simply the best dev machine one can buy in the internal store (not counting Macbooks, I'm not aware of their current lineup).
Disclaimer: I own no Microsoft products.
I like the iPad, and I like the idea of using it as a basic client for cloud-based work, but I think a lot of people take for granted how complex the tooling they use in day-to-day work is.
Warning: I didn't count, the following is just what I think I see. In my current job a little more than 50% seems to be using Windows on decent hardware. The rest seems to be split equally between Mac and Linux (again on decent hardware) with coding PMs and backenders preferrimg Linux and coders with design responsibilities preferring Mac.
In the Linux world, I've only seen a handful of Surfaces, and one guy using a Surface Book with a VirtualBox VM for Debian (my preferred setup too). The average dev still seems to be largely on the Apple train, which is understandable as the MBP is still a fantastic device.
Outside of the development world, I see a few Surfaces in the wild, but nowhere near the amount of Macbooks I see. It's definitely grown/growing though, probably because the Surface is a legitimately good machine in a sea of alright to mediocre machines. I'd say that for every twenty Macbooks I see in the wild, I see one Surface, which is pretty good. In terms of TV, that's probably about the same too, since Apple machines seem to be everywhere on TV and in the movies.
Disclaimer: Proud Surface Book owner.