Don't forget the first-party container runtime. Even Windows has one (or, er, three?). I am mostly responsible for maintaining our local development stack scripts, and Colima (to be clear, a heroic project) and MacOS are a continuous source of problems (full time problems when M1 first launched, down to at least 2-3 issues a month). I was helping a coworker with getting scripts working on Windows/WSL and how much effort was it? Download it and run it - no changes. How much effort was it when I migrated to Ubuntu (hurrah Intune for Linux)? All I had to do was disable Colima in our scripts.

The GP comments throws shade at Windows. Honestly? Probably still a better developer platform than MacOS. Working on MacOS is full of not-work.

For lack of a better term, I've been a full-stack programmer for 27 years. I ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years. I've run MacOS for about 8 now. And, always, Windows, of course, because companies. I've developed extensively for PHP, VB, C, ASP, VB.NET, C#, some Python, a tiny bit of Java, and (my fave) Ruby on Rails. My main projects of the last 10 years use a large C# program which I compile to run on Mac, Linux, and Windows. So, I've been around the block. A couple times. I'm typing this from a Mac. When I've wanted a "container," I've used a real VM. I just installed Docker desktop last week for some new work in machine learning. YMMV. TACMA.

> When I've wanted a "container," I've used a real VM.

I mean, sure, that's great for you. Maybe you've just never visited a block where you can't reasonably use a VM to replace containers, such as a good amount of shops where local environments approximate production (i.e. containers).

> I just installed Docker desktop last week

All I can say is, "good luck!" DD is by far the worst container runtime for MacOS.

i've found some luck with OrbStack by kdrag0n

How dare there be choices?

I’m a developer - I do a huge amount of work on Sql Server and .Net.

Unless I need to update some Sql Server CLR Procedures, all my development is done on my Mac using the Jetbrains suite or Azure Data Studio.

So it obviously works for many of us.

You do you, we’ll do us.

no I know it works, I just got a m2 pro 32GB mac mini to do diffusion and GPT related stuff and found that all the apis are broken and the neural engine actually has no real support for any of the interesting generative ai programs yet. doing my best to port things over but having to rely on the free labor of homebrew developers is grating

I can't imagine not. Productivity on Windows is atrocious - I can't even launch an app without seeing an ad. And what is this Cortana and why does she want to help me so much?

It works all ways. Let people like what they like. No one is forcing you to do anything on a Mac.

windows is equally as bad if not worse for me than macos. in no way would I suggest you use that.