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Mac os hasn't just worked for developers for a long time.

They missed the entire container revolution with docker. I still come across Devs using Mac's that are afraid of docker because it's too confusing and black box. (It's Linux in there right?)

At work we have a rather overengineered method of proxying to our production services for security reasons. Mac users are currently constantly having to deal with abstraction layers on top of abstraction layers to make things barely reliable. I just use a systemd unit file and haven't looked at it in years.

Homebrew tool, while great for more obscure things, it should really only be a fallback, not the default. It's basically a confusing and black box version of the AUR.

BSD/apple ways of doing things are just annoying. It's fine for the average user. But for Devs that want to do things in the same way they do them on their server it's just another hoop to jump through.

The sad thing is that moving every Dev in the company over to Linux would probably be worthwhile long term, but I really don't think they have the willpower to relearn things even if they are that much better.



>Mac os hasn't just worked for developers for a long time

I dunno, I'm a developer (Python, Java, some JS, shell, Docker, Vagrant) and it has worked fine for me.


There is no half decent email application or calendar on Linux. That alone is a showstopper for many.


Does Thunderbird not count? That satisfies email + calendars for me on both Linux and Mac.


Thunderbird is sadly not on par with the Mac alternatives. It has heaps of longstanding problems, and I didn’t even know it had a calendar.


I can’t say that I’ve had any issues with Thunderbird, other than reconfiguring hotkeys is a pain.

There is a caldav addon that allows syncing with remote calendars. I use that to coordinate calendars on my computers and iphone.


Notes longstanding problems, but isn't aware of calendar feature that has been around for a decade?

Thunderbird had some big hi changes over that time, you might like it.


I evaluated it less than a year ago, and it froze after about 30-60 seconds. This happened about five years ago as well, when I evaluated it last time. It turns out to be the global search that somehow just... freezes the whole program while indexing.


no exchange. there is owl but I did not find it satisfying


To be honest, outlook for mac isn’t particularly great either. It is not much of a step up from outlook web access, which is what I ended up using on linux after trying all the mail clients. Evolution with the ews plugin came close, but required a ton of configuration and the tasks integration was never quite right.


> To be honest, outlook for mac isn’t particularly great either.

I've never used Outlook for Mac, but there's the Apple Mail.app on the mac which works great with Exchange. I'd choose it over Outlook on Windows every time.


The BSD way of doing things is fine, see FreeBSD and how nice it is to use it (until you start X, at least).

The issues are 100% due to Apple's lack of care for developer concerns.




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