Have a look at JetBrains' developer surveys. Windows is consistently the most used OS.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/#Main_on-whic...

Windows: 61% Linux: 47% macOS: 44%

There are literally dozens of us!

No, really, when all of my development happens over SSH or inside Docker anyway, it doesn't really matter which is the "outer" OS. I'm happy with Windows.

Mac is a small slice of the software engineer market, and mostly in the web-app/mobile space.

every single FAANG (and many middle tier companies too) distributes macbook pros to its devs.

Just because there is no viable enterprise-ish Linux computer that fits those environments. Sadly :(

Definitely not true since (at least at FB) you can also get an auxiliary laptop (Thinkpad) with Linux (Fedora). Just that no one wants them.

It really depends on the company. In my limited experience I can say that only FAANGs will probably allow such an environment. Other big corporations aren't quite there yet.

And yet that doesn’t constitute even close to the majority of developers.

It’s pretty common among game, .net, and Java EE devs. For me as a Python/Node/Cloud dev it was kinda a nonstarter (it all theoretically works, but has all kinds of little bugs and caveats) until WSL was stable. Since then it’s been perfectly viable for anything I’m working on, and I was able to use it exclusively for dev work for about 6 months. I have a Mac laptop too, but my desktop is too beefy to not use as my daily driver. Still, I prefer Linux for development work.

<raises hand> I've consistently developed Unix (then Linux) server software on WindowsNT since 1996.

I develop Linux software on Windows using Visual Studio / C++. It lets me build and debug my servers on Linux machines remotely using nice IDE and tools. Also use CLion from Jet Brains the same way