4 ms·
I pick the OS first, but most of the tools that I use are cross platform. If I did need applications that were only available on one, I would likely use a VM. O
by jsight 10y ago
I pick the OS first, but most of the tools that I use are cross platform. If I did need applications that were only available on one, I would likely use a VM. Of course, if the main applications that I needed (maybe ones that I use 80% of the time) were only available on one, that would be different.
I think his advice is perfectly reasonable, it just doesn't apply to everyone. I bet that it applies to a lot of people in a technical audience, though.
- pdimitar 10y agoAren't you people EVER gaming though, programmers or not? I am doing it a lot less compared to only 5 years ago but I want the opportunity to be there the second I figure I want to game a bit, and no, dual-booting is not a way of addressing this at all. Elaboration: when I have 3 Chrome windows, 2 work VMs fired, a separate Chrome window for the work services, several consoles outside of the VMs, and a live Twitch stream running on the TV hoooked to my PC then no, I am not willing to reboot only to play a game.
- dingaling 10y agoFrom a web search the best-selling PC game in history was Diablo III with 5.15 million copies sold. That's barely a blip given 2.5 billion people online. Gaming is a niche activity.
- dllthomas 10y ago> Gaming is a niche activity. Define "gaming". There is a sense in which the best selling PC game is almost certainly solitaire.
- nicolapcweek94 10y agoAccording to Wikipedia [1] the top selling PC game is Minecraft, with 24 millions sold, followed by World of Warcraft that got to around 14 million subscribers, while Diablo III is in third place with 12 million copies sold... Sure, that's still not much compared to 2.5 billion, but that's also 5 times what you said. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games
- cptskippy 10y agoAccording to World Bank, the earth's population exceeds 7 billion people and 65% of those people are between the ages of 15 and 65. So let's say there's 4.5 billion people of driving age on the planet. The Toyota Corolla is the best selling car of all time and has only sold 37.5 million units. By your measure, driving is clearly a niche activity as well.
- tinodotim 10y agoLeague of Legends has over a 100 million monthly players. Overwatch 20 million. CSGO and Dota 2 around ~15 million / month, each. So... adds up ;)
- viridian 10y agoLeague of Legends has over 100 million active players a month. Dota 2 has around 39 million. Steam has over 125 million active, with 9 million concurrent users during peak hours. The free to play games market is enormous.
- coldpie 10y ago> Aren't you people EVER gaming though, programmers or not? Frankly? Not much. What gaming I do do is either on the PS4 or is indie gaming, which largely works on Linux or Wine.
- pdimitar 10y agoLast several months I probably have like 4 hours a week at maximum. My point is, I want all the games in my Windows 10 machine to be there and ready the moment I figure I want to get into them. Convenience > all, including for some of us the programmers. =)
- gpderetta 10y agoAfter many years away from gaming, I built a linux-based gaming machine recently. A surprisingly large number of games, from GOG and Steam, work natively on Linux today; many others (most dx9 games) works near flawlessly under wine. I had actually planned to setup GPU bypass on the box and run Windows in a VM, but I have more games now to last a long time, and I haven't actually bothered.
- module0000 10y ago> Aren't you people EVER gaming though, programmers or not? Yes, maybe on my phone once in a blue moon? Otherwise, that went out the door(at least for me) sometime in my 20's.
- pdimitar 10y ago36 here, and a well-paid programmer too; still gaming occasionally although it's times less compared to in the past. I suspect you're not in the majority, having in mind the statistics about adoption of user-level OSes. :P
- Nullabillity 10y agoWoW runs fine under Wine. Most games worth bothering with do, and/or have a native port available.
- criddell 10y agoAFAIK, macOS runs more software than any other operating system simply because you generally can't run macOS in a VM (I believe you can iff you are running on Apple hardware). So that's probably the safest choice.
- ChoGGi 10y agoI'm not sure about Sierra, but El Capitan works fine under VirtualBox/VMWare (you do need to be running an Intel CPU).