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> Because even though the world of non-programmers uses Windows, the world of programmers decidedly do not use Windows. I think if you were to analyze what peop

> Because even though the world of non-programmers uses Windows, the world of programmers decidedly do not use Windows. I think if you were to analyze what people use in the vast world of startups, corporations, open source projects, and other places you'd find it's inverted with 95% of programmers not using Windows. My personal observation is quite different - this is clearly written by someone who lives in his bubble. Most obviously: most corporations do use Windows. Also for technology startups outside of the "web application operator" type (here it depends a lot on the local culture), many use Windows: often because this is what the customers use, and the software/service of the startup has to be compatible with the ecosystem of the customer.

marcosdumay 2y ago
> most corporations do use Windows Not really. They put it on desktop with packaged software. The software they develop themselves run almost exclusively on Linux.
- epgui 2y ago
  Speaking as someone who happily lives in the mac engineering bubble and has very little interest in leaving said bubble… We tend to dramatically under-estimate the market share of Windows in engineering. I have no trouble believing that most companies run Windows and develop on Windows. I just don’t particularly want to work for these companies.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Microsoft itself doesn't recommend that you deploy software on Windows servers anymore. It's something that is supported, not recommended.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    A lot of engineers who use windows aren’t programmers. This is because a lot of custom engineering packages that require windows, especially since they were developed 20 years ago when windows was dominate. But programmers have many more choices, and visual studio shops aren’t very common anymore, at least in the developed world, and I would bet countries like Russia and China as well.
    - watwut 2y ago
      Quite a lot of programmers use windows, because they require less maintenance and there is no reason not to.
      - owl57 2y ago
        Are you sure any of the three major operating systems require much maintenance these days?
        xprn 2y ago
        At least for linux, I would assume that it hugely comes down to how much of a personal statement the OS is to developers. I use Arch btw.
        owl57 2y ago
        Well, yes, "Linux" is not well-specified. When one installs Arch, they hopefully know what they want, and it's something else than just a low-maintenance casual desktop OS. :)
      - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        Mac’s don’t require much maintenance either, and last longer then Lenovo things. When I worked tech in Beijing already a lot of programmers used them, even in changping around Lenovo’s big R&D office.
    - oefrha 2y ago
      You don’t have to be a Visual Studio shop to use Windows machines, just like you don’t need to be an Xcode shop to use Macs.
      - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        Sure, older tools are also feasible on windows. But if you are going with clang or GC, why bother? I guess you could do java dev on windows as well as other platforms.
  - Hugsun 2y ago
    What do those ellipses mean?
    - defrost 2y ago
      When Shute uses three dots it means, "Use your own imagination. Conjure the scene up for yourself." (pause) Whenever I see three dots I feel all funny. ~ https://inkscrawl.blogspot.com/2005/01/whenever-i-see-three-dots-i-feel.html https://inkscrawl.blogspot.com/2005/01/whenever-i-see-three-... ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfKvOlSJ77o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfKvOlSJ77o
      - Hugsun 2y ago
        That's a great response. I unfortunately still just perceive end-of-phrase ellipses akin to a blank stare. Or as a passive-aggressive suggestion that you're incorrect in whatever is being responded to. Definitely no (positive) funny feelings.
    - epgui 2y ago
      There's only one, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#In_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#In_writing
- eru 2y ago
  I've developed software on Windows for Windows when working in a bank. It's pretty common.
  - compiler1410 2y ago
    Tell me which bank so we can all avoid it.
    - szundi 2y ago
      Almost all
    - speed_spread 2y ago
      You're gonna have a bad time
  - rstuart4133 2y ago
    I notice that's in the past tense. I'm old enough (as in, used Borland Delphi) to remember if you developed small business software, you were almost by definition a windows developer. But that was a long time ago. Along came Google whose master plan looks to have been to turn the web browser into the business platform of choice. Seemed like insanity at the time. Yet here we are. Browsers have since become masters at playing video, can handle interactive voice, and can talk directly to the GPU. Now Microsoft wants you to use Excel of all things in a a web browser and has dropped the Windows native version of Outlook in favour of the web one packaged as a desktop app. Seems like Google made it's vision work. I know there are some heavyweight applications out there like video editing and Engineering CAD with finite state analysis that need raw metal performance. But they are few and far between, and aside from them - who is doing Windows native development any more? Certainly not the firms that make accounting packages - the abandoned Windows long ago. For those that are left - are they going to survive the transition to ARM and RISC-V? POSIX / Linux / BSD / whatever applications - they continue to be as strong as ever. They drive embedded at one end, and the servers at the other. That sort of development is easiest to do on the the target platform, and since it dominates now Windows had to emulate that platform if it wanted to keep the developers. Which is how we got to WSL. But Windows native app development - that seems like it belongs to a bygone era. Now even Microsoft develops own apps target Electron, not Windows.
- HenryBemis 2y ago
  Having audited quite a few mega-corps, and seeing their CMDBs in detail, "the amount of RHELs is too damn high" to use the meme. I can't speak to percentages as I didn't keep specific track of those numbers, but from memory/impressions, the RHELs were at least 30%-40%.
- worewood 2y ago
  As a developer in a corporation, yes, the software I develop runs on Linux servers. But we don't develop in the server - my work computer is a "desktop with packaged software" and as such runs Windows.
- high_na_euv 2y ago
  They do, *really*
sertraline 2y ago
This is a ridiculous article because the author did not even bother to check the stackoverflow developer survey. Majority of developers use Windows. I use Linux, but just because I use Linux does not mean that I have to be delusional about it. Programming != {webdev,AI}. What operating system game developers are going to use? What operating system business GUI application developers are going to use? Win32 is still the most stable API out there. And even if you, for some insane reason, decide to pick Linux and fight its technological challenges, in the end only a tiny percent of users is going to use your product. Yet they will be responsible for generating over 50% of the bug reports. To make matters even worse, most of them will come from Arch Linux users, providing absolutely useless debug traces because they use a distro notorious for not shipping the debug packages.
- lionkor 2y ago
  Majority of developers who use StackOverflow enough to fill out the survey, thats a bias already, and a massive one at that. You have disproportionately more beginners using it than more seasoned professionals. Hell, I barely use it, and I have questions every day - I just look up the documentation instead. This is like saying most people love overpriced dropshipping, just because an advertisement company tracks how many of the people who click on ads buy dropshipped garbage. Its a massive bias.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  There's an even bigger hole in it than that: his list of languages completely overlooks Java. The language that prides itself on portability, has been taught in universities for decades, is widely used in industry and which every component needed including the compilers and runtimes can be fully installed and updated on any machine, graphically, just by installing the free version of IntelliJ, which conveniently works the same way on every OS. It meets almost every one of his requirements.
- atq2119 2y ago
  Here's a report of the actual experience one game developer had with bug reports on Windows vs. Linux, suggesting that having Linux support is useful: https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_having_just_58_sales_over_38_of_bug/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...
crabbone 2y ago
The bubble is quite big though. Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook typically offer developers laptops with a choice of Linux / Mac (but not Windows). Windows for development is really a common choice if you make video games, hospital, school software or desktop stuff. But even there there are exceptions. It's unfortunately a common choice in some, esp. American companies where the product is intended for Linux, but they would still hand out Windows laptops to the employees because of their bad / backwards IT that only knows ("knows" is an exaggeration here...) how to work with Windows. So, it often comes to that an employee gets this decrepit system, but then works on Linux anyways, but the experience is worse because they need to jump through some hoops to get to the system they actually work with. Anyways, any claims about what "most corporations" do smells like LinkedIn posts promoting a technology, where the claims are usually made w/o any research but also any way to disprove the claim. Just don't go there.
- wffurr 2y ago
  Google does offer Windows laptops, including to engineers. I had one for a while. It made a perfectly adequate thin client to my Linux workstation and made debugging in Windows browsers significantly easier.
  - crabbone 2y ago
    They didn't during my time. But my department didn't do anything that had to do with Web... also, we got into Google through acquisition, and the company originally started with developers working on Linux and rarely Macs. The IT wasn't really very selective about it, so there was a guy who wanted a Windows laptop, and they gave him one since they had licenses for the HR / sales etc. people, but he quickly gave up the idea. So, by the time we became Google, nobody really thought about it as a viable option.
bregma 2y ago
I work for a mid-size publicly-traded software company that makes software development tools. There's a clear dichotomy internally in choice of operating system. Corporate, project managers, and people managers use Windows. Developers and technical people use Linux (and we used to support Mac OS but that was recently dropped). Recently Corporate IT decided to move on-prem services to a Microsoft-hosted SaaS cloud, which caused some pain for the majority of employees but there was some kind of kickback or discount and some line in a spreadsheet was tortured to reveal the right numbers, so the deed was done. Of our customers, about one third run our product on Microsoft Windows and two thirds on Linux. We certify both but only Linux gets dogfooded and support for Windows customers tends to be higher. The only people who ran our product on Mac OS when it was available were students and hobbyists and small startups whose license fees wouldn't keep our office lights on long enough to walk to the coffee machine.
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
  I second that. In most large orgs I worked, non-tech people used Windows, but macOS wasn't uncommon. But as for developers, we often had a choice. Many people would just take macOS or Linux, but I know some developers who would use Windows because they somehow learned how to deal with its quirks.
jojobas 2y ago
>the world of programmers decidedly do not use Windows Who do you think writes all the Windows software? There are hordes and hordes of people writing code on Windows for Windows all their lives. Server/web software aside, there are huge layers of windows-only software.

marcosdumay 2y ago

> most corporations do use Windows Not really. They put it on desktop with packaged software. The software they develop themselves run almost exclusively on Linux.

epgui 2y ago
Speaking as someone who happily lives in the mac engineering bubble and has very little interest in leaving said bubble… We tend to dramatically under-estimate the market share of Windows in engineering. I have no trouble believing that most companies run Windows and develop on Windows. I just don’t particularly want to work for these companies.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Microsoft itself doesn't recommend that you deploy software on Windows servers anymore. It's something that is supported, not recommended.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  A lot of engineers who use windows aren’t programmers. This is because a lot of custom engineering packages that require windows, especially since they were developed 20 years ago when windows was dominate. But programmers have many more choices, and visual studio shops aren’t very common anymore, at least in the developed world, and I would bet countries like Russia and China as well.
  - watwut 2y ago
    Quite a lot of programmers use windows, because they require less maintenance and there is no reason not to.
    - owl57 2y ago
      Are you sure any of the three major operating systems require much maintenance these days?
      - xprn 2y ago
        At least for linux, I would assume that it hugely comes down to how much of a personal statement the OS is to developers. I use Arch btw.
        owl57 2y ago
        Well, yes, "Linux" is not well-specified. When one installs Arch, they hopefully know what they want, and it's something else than just a low-maintenance casual desktop OS. :)
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      Mac’s don’t require much maintenance either, and last longer then Lenovo things. When I worked tech in Beijing already a lot of programmers used them, even in changping around Lenovo’s big R&D office.
  - oefrha 2y ago
    You don’t have to be a Visual Studio shop to use Windows machines, just like you don’t need to be an Xcode shop to use Macs.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      Sure, older tools are also feasible on windows. But if you are going with clang or GC, why bother? I guess you could do java dev on windows as well as other platforms.
- Hugsun 2y ago
  What do those ellipses mean?
  - defrost 2y ago
    When Shute uses three dots it means, "Use your own imagination. Conjure the scene up for yourself." (pause) Whenever I see three dots I feel all funny. ~ https://inkscrawl.blogspot.com/2005/01/whenever-i-see-three-dots-i-feel.html https://inkscrawl.blogspot.com/2005/01/whenever-i-see-three-... ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfKvOlSJ77o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfKvOlSJ77o
    - Hugsun 2y ago
      That's a great response. I unfortunately still just perceive end-of-phrase ellipses akin to a blank stare. Or as a passive-aggressive suggestion that you're incorrect in whatever is being responded to. Definitely no (positive) funny feelings.
  - epgui 2y ago
    There's only one, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#In_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#In_writing
eru 2y ago
I've developed software on Windows for Windows when working in a bank. It's pretty common.
- compiler1410 2y ago
  Tell me which bank so we can all avoid it.
  - szundi 2y ago
    Almost all
  - speed_spread 2y ago
    You're gonna have a bad time
- rstuart4133 2y ago
  I notice that's in the past tense. I'm old enough (as in, used Borland Delphi) to remember if you developed small business software, you were almost by definition a windows developer. But that was a long time ago. Along came Google whose master plan looks to have been to turn the web browser into the business platform of choice. Seemed like insanity at the time. Yet here we are. Browsers have since become masters at playing video, can handle interactive voice, and can talk directly to the GPU. Now Microsoft wants you to use Excel of all things in a a web browser and has dropped the Windows native version of Outlook in favour of the web one packaged as a desktop app. Seems like Google made it's vision work. I know there are some heavyweight applications out there like video editing and Engineering CAD with finite state analysis that need raw metal performance. But they are few and far between, and aside from them - who is doing Windows native development any more? Certainly not the firms that make accounting packages - the abandoned Windows long ago. For those that are left - are they going to survive the transition to ARM and RISC-V? POSIX / Linux / BSD / whatever applications - they continue to be as strong as ever. They drive embedded at one end, and the servers at the other. That sort of development is easiest to do on the the target platform, and since it dominates now Windows had to emulate that platform if it wanted to keep the developers. Which is how we got to WSL. But Windows native app development - that seems like it belongs to a bygone era. Now even Microsoft develops own apps target Electron, not Windows.
HenryBemis 2y ago
Having audited quite a few mega-corps, and seeing their CMDBs in detail, "the amount of RHELs is too damn high" to use the meme. I can't speak to percentages as I didn't keep specific track of those numbers, but from memory/impressions, the RHELs were at least 30%-40%.
worewood 2y ago
As a developer in a corporation, yes, the software I develop runs on Linux servers. But we don't develop in the server - my work computer is a "desktop with packaged software" and as such runs Windows.
high_na_euv 2y ago
They do, *really*

sertraline 2y ago

This is a ridiculous article because the author did not even bother to check the stackoverflow developer survey. Majority of developers use Windows. I use Linux, but just because I use Linux does not mean that I have to be delusional about it. Programming != {webdev,AI}. What operating system game developers are going to use? What operating system business GUI application developers are going to use? Win32 is still the most stable API out there. And even if you, for some insane reason, decide to pick Linux and fight its technological challenges, in the end only a tiny percent of users is going to use your product. Yet they will be responsible for generating over 50% of the bug reports. To make matters even worse, most of them will come from Arch Linux users, providing absolutely useless debug traces because they use a distro notorious for not shipping the debug packages.

lionkor 2y ago
Majority of developers who use StackOverflow enough to fill out the survey, thats a bias already, and a massive one at that. You have disproportionately more beginners using it than more seasoned professionals. Hell, I barely use it, and I have questions every day - I just look up the documentation instead. This is like saying most people love overpriced dropshipping, just because an advertisement company tracks how many of the people who click on ads buy dropshipped garbage. Its a massive bias.
mike_hearn 2y ago
There's an even bigger hole in it than that: his list of languages completely overlooks Java. The language that prides itself on portability, has been taught in universities for decades, is widely used in industry and which every component needed including the compilers and runtimes can be fully installed and updated on any machine, graphically, just by installing the free version of IntelliJ, which conveniently works the same way on every OS. It meets almost every one of his requirements.
atq2119 2y ago
Here's a report of the actual experience one game developer had with bug reports on Windows vs. Linux, suggesting that having Linux support is useful: https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_having_just_58_sales_over_38_of_bug/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...

crabbone 2y ago

The bubble is quite big though. Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook typically offer developers laptops with a choice of Linux / Mac (but not Windows). Windows for development is really a common choice if you make video games, hospital, school software or desktop stuff. But even there there are exceptions. It's unfortunately a common choice in some, esp. American companies where the product is intended for Linux, but they would still hand out Windows laptops to the employees because of their bad / backwards IT that only knows ("knows" is an exaggeration here...) how to work with Windows. So, it often comes to that an employee gets this decrepit system, but then works on Linux anyways, but the experience is worse because they need to jump through some hoops to get to the system they actually work with. Anyways, any claims about what "most corporations" do smells like LinkedIn posts promoting a technology, where the claims are usually made w/o any research but also any way to disprove the claim. Just don't go there.

wffurr 2y ago
Google does offer Windows laptops, including to engineers. I had one for a while. It made a perfectly adequate thin client to my Linux workstation and made debugging in Windows browsers significantly easier.
- crabbone 2y ago
  They didn't during my time. But my department didn't do anything that had to do with Web... also, we got into Google through acquisition, and the company originally started with developers working on Linux and rarely Macs. The IT wasn't really very selective about it, so there was a guy who wanted a Windows laptop, and they gave him one since they had licenses for the HR / sales etc. people, but he quickly gave up the idea. So, by the time we became Google, nobody really thought about it as a viable option.

bregma 2y ago

I work for a mid-size publicly-traded software company that makes software development tools. There's a clear dichotomy internally in choice of operating system. Corporate, project managers, and people managers use Windows. Developers and technical people use Linux (and we used to support Mac OS but that was recently dropped). Recently Corporate IT decided to move on-prem services to a Microsoft-hosted SaaS cloud, which caused some pain for the majority of employees but there was some kind of kickback or discount and some line in a spreadsheet was tortured to reveal the right numbers, so the deed was done. Of our customers, about one third run our product on Microsoft Windows and two thirds on Linux. We certify both but only Linux gets dogfooded and support for Windows customers tends to be higher. The only people who ran our product on Mac OS when it was available were students and hobbyists and small startups whose license fees wouldn't keep our office lights on long enough to walk to the coffee machine.

dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
I second that. In most large orgs I worked, non-tech people used Windows, but macOS wasn't uncommon. But as for developers, we often had a choice. Many people would just take macOS or Linux, but I know some developers who would use Windows because they somehow learned how to deal with its quirks.

jojobas 2y ago

>the world of programmers decidedly do not use Windows Who do you think writes all the Windows software? There are hordes and hordes of people writing code on Windows for Windows all their lives. Server/web software aside, there are huge layers of windows-only software.