So, I recently switched from a windows laptop (XPS 13) to a macbook pro and my friend has been bugging me about whether I'll ever go back. He is a wannabe frontend developer and wants a windows laptop. No matter what I tell him, he seems to have tunnel vision. What are your thoughts on this? And what is your personal experience with Windows vs Apple for development?
(Pls don't kill me, it's my first post on devrant, thnx)

My experience of developing on a mac involved having to force reboot due to hangs. This was about once a day.

And welcome to devRant!

My thoughts:
Windows is better then Apple

To be fair my experience of developing on Windows is:
Step 1: install a Linux vm
Step 2: use the functional build tools of the vm

I’ve been developing on a Mac for 6+ years at this point. Very rarely have any issues. There are a mix of windows and Mac users on my team, Mac are by far more stable and easy to use.

We’ve had 3 hardcore windows users who were asked to try a Mac for a few weeks (after their machines died surprise surprise) none of them requested to go back. All agreed it was better, just had the usual “what’s the Mac equivalent of X” questions.

Listen, Mac is fine, and it works as good as Linux, yes I said that, why? Most of the people hating on Mac, don't even use Mac, they see random articles and assume stuff. Sure, linux has packet managers to install stuff, and we dont, but u can install brew or macports which works as equally as good as other Linux packet managers. Not only this, u can even run Linux stuff with x windows (most stuff). I develop in Mac and it works more than fine, I also use Linux. And both are equally good. It's just that Linux is more customizable.

BTW there are paid softwares that Uninstall apps from Mac since there is no default way. To support Mac open source community I have developed this, u can give me some feedback tho

https://github.com/hrik2001/...

I don't like Mac since its all about nickle-and-dime for every little thing, especially newer versions.

You need to dongle everything, also open source looks not to be present much there (excluding Java apps), and its looks like its all about "you want X? Then pay to have X or use lite version of X which is heavily limited".

Also, I don't like how apple centric it is. You wont see many apple apps on windows (or god forbid linux). Their warranty is bad, they will use all tricks in the books to void your warranty. They don't release schematics like other companies do forcing repair shops to use unlicensed/hacky ways to fix components for which apple would charge you an arm and a leg, and they use lots of tricks to lockup your mac if you try to repair it yourself.

All those things leave a bad taste to me whenever I use mac. :/
I like long term solutions, and apple does not seem to want to do that.

"Mac open source community" is a nice little oxymoron

@atheist they have open sourced their latest coding language and all the build tools

@arekxv I have been a developer on Mac for years and have had to pay nothing for App Store apps I like, newer versions of OS or office style software (mac’s is now free). Probably every second thing I have installed is open source.

Not sure what most of your comment is based on. Sounds like irrational hatred to me.

@practiseSafeHex EXACTLY, EXACTLY, SOMEONE SPOKE

@practiseSafeHex If you look at the text more closely, you would see "looks not to be" which is not a hateful statement but an observation.

I don't "hate" Mac, I just don't think it's a Developer Savior and god of laptops and OS's which people seem to believe, and its not for me, as there are way better and more open source alternatives to it and from companies which actually care for something a bit more than milking every cent from you.

Also, please name some of those free apps and say which of them are truly free (no ads, no lite/demo versions). I would like to check them out (also I would like to see that free office style app too).

@arekxv “milking every cent” oh for Christ sake. Their laptops are expensive yes, not horrifically so unless you custom build.

Shocking secret that all these “lite” apps and paid apps ... Apple didn’t set the prices and nobody forced you to use them. And your not even forced to use the Mac App Store, I can download Atom, Vscode, Gimp etc from the webpages just like any other platform.

Office software:

- Keynote = PowerPoint: free with every Mac
- Pages = word: free with every Mac
- Numbers = Excel: free with every Mac

OS: free upgrades for the past 5 / 6 years.

@practiseSafeHex

They've open sourced the language and also look to be open sourcing bits of the core library so I guess that's commendable. I spent a year developing a commercial video processing app using their library provided encoder/decoder. Working with that I encountered a lot of bugs (reported to apple, I think 1 got fixed 2 years after reporting, no other comment from them...). There was also a significant lack of documentation. Most of my stack overflow points come from asking then answering questions about how it works. At the time none of this stuff was open source, so I worked out through experimentation and the reverse engineer-ability of objective C. This took a lot of time and caused significant frustration, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm a little sceptical...

@aidana what if a sweet, lovely and cute XPS13 approaches you with Linux on it?
I ordered mine with Ubuntu preinstalled in december '16, and it is the best laptop for development, I have ever tested (512GB, 16GB, QHD touch). The battery life is >8.5h for browsing and programming. 😉

Personally I find MacBooks rather clunky and the OS too restricted and it is not opensource.