Source: JetBrains’ “The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2023” survey
Not a surprise for those with containerised workloads. Mac is a nightmare for that. Every single dev team with mac that I’ve been on has struggled with it. Heard all these things and more:
- We can’t use Docker Desktop due to licensing!
- podman doesn’t work, but colima does
npm installtakes forever!- Why can’t it find the docker socket?
- This only works on x86
- The port-forwarding didn’t work
- XYZ works in the dev-container but not when deployed
Recreating a problem you encountered with your container in a x86 linux VM in the cloud on a mac with apple silicon is no fun either.
And good luck with custom hardware on a mac. Working from home with stuff that was plug and play on linux simply refused to work on mac. Ergonomic mice, keyboards, USB-C docks, high-quality webcams, USB headsets… Either you’re in the Apple ecosystem or you’re gonna have a bad time.
If an employer doesn’t allow me to install linux on my dev machine, then I move on.
I agree with everything but the “This only works on x86”. I’m not saying that everything runs smoothly on arm, but I think it really is the future. Either that, or risc-v. I doubt riscv will garner a mainstream adoption anytime soon though, but one could only dream.
I’ve seen a shift to Linux from Mac for a few years now, and definitely in my companies. I cannot speak for anyone else but my trigger was the “iOS-ification” of MacOS and the changes made to the hardware interface on MBPs. Once my Mac battery started to “football”, I switched back to ThinkPads but this time running Linux as my daily driver. It’s been great.
EDIT: I’ve been working with Linux since Red Hat Halloween, but I have never used it as my main everything computer until now.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown by region on that statistic. I would say I work with about 80% Americans and 20% Europeans and Linux is definitely more popular amongst the Europeans. That said, a couple of my American colleagues have also switched from Macs to Linux, but not many people on my team use Jetbrains products (VS Code is more popular here). Overall, I would guess that Linux is more popular in Europe, South America, and Asia, while Apple is more popular in the US, but that’s just a pretty rough speculation.
I would love to finally switch to Linux, but it’s basically unusable for any kind of gamedev…
Ah how come? I’ve had to build simple stuff in unity for university, I’ve not run into issues.
I’ve tried switching to Fedora several times, but I never managed to get it to working conditions. Unity Hub was regularly crashing, I got a bazillion of errors related to unsupported type of media files we’re using for ingame videos, and only during the time I was trying to troubleshoot the issue, Unity has crashed several times.
I suppose that if I was starting a new project, I would just go with Godot and on Linux, but a project that has been build for the last few years on Windows, and is planned to only be build for Windows for now, it adds unneccessary risk to the whole development. Just the fact that I would have to dualboot just to test whether builds work as expected is additional bother, and I suppose you will eventually run into issues with something not working the same on Windows as it did on Linux.
Also, isn’t there the whole issue of DirectX not being supported on Linux?
And since gamedev is usually a lot more resource-intensive compared to other development, you can’t really containerize it.
From my experience, just getting Unity to run on Linux has a plethora of issues. When I tried running our project we’ve been developing on Windows for the past few years, I couldn’t even compile it. Apparently, Unity on Linux doesn’t support some kind of media file formats we use for cutscenes. While I was trying to resolve it, Unity crashed few times.
And then there’s the hug problem with “works on my machines”. We’re targeting Windows, Windows is still major market share for gaming, and me being the lead programmer, I can’t afford not being able to build and test a build on the OS we’re targeting.
Even if the differences between build targets are minor, there’s still a posibility that something will just work differently on Linux than in does on Windows. And then you have the whole DirectX issue - IIRC, you can’t use DirectX on Linux, so we would have to develop the game for Vulkan or something else, which adds another problems to deal with for other programmers in our team, who don’t use Linux.
And then you have consoles. Do the SDKs for Sony, Switch or XDK even support running on Linux?
You said: (Linux) “unusable for any kind of gamedev…”.
That’s nonsense.
You raise valid points, but they do not support your conclusion that: (Linux) “unusable for ANY kind of gamedev…”.
You know that, though. You were hyperbolic, I know that, too.
By the way, you should try Godot. You’ll be surprised.
