On 21 Aug 2014 01:13, "Adam Batkin" <adam@batkin.net> wrote:
> People (rightfully) spend a lot of time comparing with Mac because Mac has risen very quickly from almost non-existence to a disproportionate percentage of the developer community. So what did Apple do correctly to attract so many developers (most of whom are deploying to Linux) that perhaps we can improve upon, to bring them back, or bring new people in?

When I bought a MacBook, which was 2007, it was because the UI was prettier, features like multi-monitor support and sleep just worked, I was happy to use iTunes to sync with my iPod/iPhone, which also just worked, and since there was no package repository (that I was aware of) it felt I was freer to install the latest versions of whatever software I wanted instead of using whichever version was packaged as part of my distro.

For me none of those points still hold sway, and I spend far, far more time using Linux now (on a Dell laptop) than I do using my Mac. I prefer GNOME Shell's look and feel over OS X's, multi-monitor works fine for me (with my laptop on the right and my external display designated the primary) and Fedora's versions of software I'm interested in are sufficiently up-to-date for me. Sleep is something I don't use, partly because I still don't trust it to work properly (yes, I should check) but mostly because I'm just as happy to shut-down every evening and power-up every morning. Using an Android phone or tablet is nicer on Linux than on OS X, which is no surprise.

Macs are a significant investment, so if one assumes that Fedora now has sufficient feature parity to tempt OS X users (which it does for me, but I can't speak for anyone else), one should still expect a few years' lag before those users' Macs are old and slow enough to justify a new machine and a switch-over. Realistically I think that no matter how good Fedora is, people won't be pulled from OS X for it; they'd need to be pushed by some lack in OS X; that's just inertia, not a lack in Fedora. Switching to another OS involves tedious back-ups, exports and imports of data, etc. that needs quite a compelling justification.

Oh, one other possible reason Macs are so popular for developers these days: iOS apps. If you want to have some "fun" and possibly make some money building them then surely building them on a Mac is the way to go?

Personally I think it's useful to consider what OS X and Windows do, and whether Fedora can do better, but if there's any competition it's between Linux distros. If we want more users we should go after Ubuntu and Linux Mint users first.


R

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"Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning..."