Ignoring prices, Mac is definitely the second best option after Linux for Linux-y development flows. None of my issues were huge, but still enough to ask for a Linux laptop for a replacement.
Sure, if you just use Linux for dev, with a Windows hypervisor, you won’t notice the difference.
We devs also have a serious issue of performance blindness, because generally work and test on pretty beefy machines. Windows 11 is undeniably heavier on the system than Linux, and Mac hardware flies anyway. If your dev machine is beefy enough, you won’t really notice though.
It obviously depends on the environment, but if I am supposed to develop tools that, in theory, can fuck up everything, then I also need access to everything (on my machine). There’s no point in testing, if the elevated access rights on the server suddenly surface a fuckton of extra bugs.
Heck, I need admin just for the basics of installing developer tools and opening web ports.
They tried to lock our stuff down once. After a couple of days of absolutely zero work being done because all our tooling was missing, and the poor IT guy had to somehow learn how to install every tool we needed and taking forever, we just got sudo rights.
Cool, and then there’s NEVER any problems with different paths? With back and forward slashes? With the limit on path length? With missing permissions on the file system requiring weird workarounds?
Most importantly, your server is likely not Windows, yet you test on Windows, and that’s never ever been a serious source of issues?
And don’t say WSL. That’s like saying the fix to using Windows is to use Linux, but fiddlier. Not to mention you still get issues with the mounted file system.
Hey, Claude isn’t actually used there anymore. Anthropic had some insanely basic red lines, and the Department of War wasn’t a fan. All the murdering efforts are now done by OpenAI.
What exactly are we talking about? Doing Windows related development on Windows is roughly as decent as doing Linux related development is on Linux (or Mac).
It’s just that because like 90% of servers are Linux, 90% of development benefits far more from being developed on a Linux-y system.
For example, the Windows filesystem is very different. Over and over I’ve had issues with permissions being different, with paths being inconsistent (this happens esp. with WSL) and with limits on path length.
You can develop on Windows, but having the test env closer to the real env takes care of so many little headaches.