It's kind of amazing how our beliefs are still mostly formed by our surroundings. Even in the age of internet where information is plenty and free.

I still read often in HN that "most people use iPhones" and "almost no dev uses Windows".

Makes me question if my own beliefs have these enormous misconceptions too.

Someone on Twitter was upset that people they follow were following someone they disagree with. I pointed out that it's healthy to make yourself aware of dissenting opinions, and that following someone doesn't mean you align with every one of their beliefs and opinions.

They seriously couldn't fathom the idea of intentionally following someone they didn't agree with.

So not only are people aware of their filter bubbles, they guard them like it's the responsible thing to do.

Cult members need something to hate to reinforce their identity.

Question you should. For decades I've been trying very hard to avoid such statements because what do I know about "errybody" or "most people". I find it very off-putting when someone uses these levers in a conversation

Stackoverflow isn't only for web development though, they are areas were Windows is still popular, I 100% agree on that.

Even Microsoft themselves recognise it indirectly, that's the whole reason why they built WSL.

> they are areas were Windows is still popular

those areas where Windows is still popular account for a tiny percentage of the devs who responded to that survey. The majority of responders define themselves as backend, frontend or fullstack developers - which are web development roles https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#developer-roles-dev-ty...

TL;DR nowadays, most developers are web developers.

PS the reason why the total of all responses is more than 100%, is that this was a multiple selections response.

That "over 100%" is more significant than you think.

If you use windows primarily, there's a very big chance it's the ONLY operating system you use.

If you use MacOS or Linux, there are most likely windows machines sitting around too.

In my case, I have a windows laptop from work in addition to a macbook. I'd check both boxes, but I've only opened that windows machine a handful of times for esoteric windows issues.

If this idea held true just 50% of the time, then real use of windows would actually be somewhere around 25% and that's assuming a 100% overlap between the Linux and MacOS people (a bad assumption).

Another telling point is the tiny sliver of WSL responses. MS Server is so incredibly unpopular that even the majority of Azure instances have run on Linux for years now. Writing on Windows without WSL then deploying to Linux is a recipe for disaster.

A question where the reader has to infer a lot is a bad question. They should have asked about how much a particular OS is used.

> WSL is there for a reason though

to be clear, I'm not disputing that in some areas of web dev, Windows is less supported than Linux, I'm just saying that a significant percentage of web devs use Windows, whether or not an open source project decides to keep this into account is obviously not up to me to decide, and I can understand why some projects, especially smaller one, might decide to focus on Unix/Linux in the initial periods.