this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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The guy doesn't want Windows but is ok with Mac. That's... not how it works. At all.
I think you’d find that many devs would opt for a Mac over Windows.
Hate both, but I'd run Windows over Mac any day (and I develop in both regularly since I have projects that require Windows and Mac, and will for a long time). But some of this is probably due to having to use the steaming pile of crap that is Xcode.
Why would you be forced to use Xcode? I’ve been a developer (just not Swift) for years and have never used Xcode.
Swift.
There really aren't any other valid options for building native iOS apps.
Luckily, we don't really do much native iOS dev anymore, so I'm just maintaining 3 apps, and not building anything new.
I only have to fire up the Mac for a few days every few months.
I don't know anyone who uses xcode for anything but ios dev
That's only thing I use the Mac for. Everything else is in Linux or a Windows VM (for Windows desktop apps that can't be done outside of Visual Studio).
Then why use Xcode? Mac is essentially BSD under the hood so basically any Linux CLI tool works fine, and GUI applications work reasonably well with XQuartz or whatever it’s called these days.
There's really no other reasonable way to build iOS apps. AppCode was a thing, but was retired a few years ago.
Ok… but we’re comparing Linux, Windows, and macOS. Talking about something that can only be done on one of them is kind of pointless. You said “I’d run Windows over Mac any day” and then shat on Xcode. That makes it sound like you prefer Windows because you hate Xcode. From my perspective - the context of things that could also be done on Windows - the solution is obvious: don’t use the tool you hate.
I work at a full MacBook shop and literally nobody uses xcode 🤷♂️ weird reason to be against it
It's really the only viable option for iOS apps.
To be fair, I pretty much hate everything about the Mac, but Xcode is about the only thing I use it for, and it just gets worse with every release.
Mac is the compromise option
It's a compromise if I'm not paying for it.
Still I hate that the basic, like copy, search... Use a different key. I can rebind them, but it's at each keyboard config and makes it annoying when trying to learn new ones
Explain why.
Both are big tech, donate to fascists, closed source, and a cancer to this society, the tech world, and open source.
Most developers I've seen in the field don't care about any of that. They care if the OS is stable and they can run their programs.
I'm not saying they shouldn't care more, they absolutely should, but they don't
I care if an OS can manage the running applications and their windows in a reasonable way, which MacOS cannot.
There are also enough people in tech who don't know about Open Source.
The percentage increases as you go away from the software domain
Yeah, but only one of them uses UNIX
Feathers are beautiful, but they can be devices of torture too
on the one hand, mac is often virtue signaling for hipsters, on the other hand it is a unix system, so... it often works that way.
Mac is based on Linux now
There’s a big difference between UNIX and Linux, and BSD can be very different from even other UNIX distributions. I believe macOS’ userland (definitely not the kernel) is based on FreeBSD 4.2.
The Darwin kernel is based on BSD... sort of. It's a monstrosity hybridization of an ancient version of BSD and the Mach kernel.
Given the history of A/UX, I'd be surprised if System V didn't have an oar in the water too.
If by “Linux” you mean “Unix/BSD” and by “now” you mean “for the last quarter century”, then yes. So, no.
Linux is a BSD fork now.
Mac OS is my favorite Linux distro.
I have it and I use it daily and I absolutely hate it. The latest MacOS Tahoe is an abomination.
It's unstable, it sleeps monitors connected over USB-C while in use, Bluetooth audio pairing randomly doesn't work, the virtualisation engine is crash prone, X11 integration magically stopped working a year ago and nobody seems to care.
Permissions are impenetrable, sshfs and fuse requires a kernel module and repeated reboots and permissions to be enabled.
I'm forced to have an OS update, requiring a reboot, to support a new model that I'm not running.
There's no native package manager so applications just throw their shit all over the filesystem and the alternatives, Homebrew, Anaconda and MacPorts each have system breaking problems.
So .. no. It absolutely sucks.
And here's the kicker, it's still better than Microsoft Windows.
:)