Active Directory. Well, AD and a bunch of applications that are critical to the business only operating and supported on Windows. But the other OSs don't have anything as good for management of the environment as AD is.
Not sure there is another solution though. OAuth and various cloud logins etc isn't, yet.
Uh, yeah, that's kinda my point. Outside of SV, pretty much every client is, and for this reason.
I work for a Fortune 100 company (not in SV, or even California) with 70,000 employees. At least 50% (it's probably higher) of computers here are Macs. When I go to a meeting, the table is a sea of Mac laptops with the occasional Windows laptop here and there. And these aren't meetings with developers, I'm talking about sales, business, training, etc. people.
For my friends who do get macs from their workplace, it’s because they are 1 of just 20 employees and they don’t have anyone in IT, let alone a department or any policies.
UNIX derived OSes tend to be relegated to the server room, accessed remotely and live on their own network.
I can believe that this is a true statement inside the reality distortion bubble around SV, but here in the real world I'll need to see some evidence.
And when I think of the companies I worked for in London they were also increasing the Apple quotient of desktop/laptop machines.
Yes, this is anecdatum but I really can't tell you how strongly integrated Windows is at my company and we're still seeing adoption of Apple computers.
Regardless of that, Sysadmins and Developers tend to get to choose their OS at most sensible companies. (Every company I've worked for, barring the current, has allowed Linux; most even encouraged it)
That's simply untrue. Every large org I work with has unified auth with ad and a secondary package like centrify. It's trivial to get working.
And that's ignoring all the linux appliances and embeded Linux flavors (think lights out management) that support AD out of the box.
I've counted the different kinds of windows in Win7 control panel: there are ten of them. Ten distinct methods of organizing stuff in a window, all in the settings section of the OS, and that's not including third-party additions. There are navigational widgets that don't occur anywhere else in the OS (sidebars with links, iirc).
Also, all the hours lost in wandering through the control panel due to its awful localization…
These days, I'm pretty sure control panels can be used as a litmus test as to whether the GUI authors have a grip on UI design.
The "good old" control panel doesn't even look categorized well.
Plus why do they have to have a microscopic return key on laptops?
(Of course, the Natural/Sculpt series barely scrapes the ‘ergonomics,’ what with the slanted key layout inherited from typewriters, the flat board made for extendable fingers instead of jointed ones, the too-low wrist pad.)
As for the special keys, I'm not sure what that's about, since I'm using pretty much the same number of hotkeys as I did in Linux and a bit more than in Windows. I'm also using Alfred for many commands, which are made in English instead of obscure semi-random keys.
Also, you can use whatever keyboard you want. I don't see how this is an issue at all... And what microscopic return key are you referring to? The return key on my MacBook is nearly the same size (maybe a half-centimeter shorter) than my full-size desktop keyboard.
The combination of VSCode, cquery, and clangd can provide code completion and navigation that I think is finally on par with IntelliSense, and it scales to large projects. VSCode's GDB integration is tolerable for debugging.
Linux has some definite advantages too. For one thing the filesystem is just blazing fast, which really helps with git. Various other things are faster too, like I'm writing an OpenGL app and creating a GL context is much faster on Linux. Also I've been trying out https://zapcc.com which made my builds five times faster, no joke. I'd almost move to Linux for that alone.
But once it's working, cquery is an absolute game changer for C++ development. It feels like a completely different activity than it did before.
3 or so years ago, I tried to set up a dev environment on Windows just see how good it can be then but gave up in 1 hour knowing it'll just slow me down bad.
I have no idea why most of people I know around still use Windows (and funnily 1 guy uses Linux)