Do you feel it? The tectonic plates of developer sentiment slowly shifting below your feet. It won't all come in a wave. It is the gradual investment in tools like this that over time amount to a viable alternative to the MacBook Pro running macOS. WSL, Open source .NET, Investing in making Edge work like Chrome (more important to developers and consumers than your ideological quandries with Google owning the web will ever be). The last few years have been great for MS
Microsoft has had an enormous developer base for decades. Their changes aren't beating competitors, they're simply staunching the flow away from the Microsoft stack. Claiming it as a victory when Microsoft cedes that the enemy has won in a variety of ways is...an odd victory dance. Quite a wave.
I use a Windows 10 desktop for 1/2 my work. The other half I use macOS on a MacBook. They're both great (and the latter is fantastic for virtually any sort of work, whereas with the former I am constantly encountering Windows-specific limitations that demand that I fire up a Hyper-V instance --- WSL is very limited in a variety of deadly ways).
I get the impression that there's a lot of disagreement amongst developers regarding Microsoft's true intentions. I see three main clusters at the moment:
(1) Those who consider Microsoft to be reasonably trustworthy based on recent behavior.
(2) Those who will need Microsoft to continue its current behavior for a longer period before they're ready to trust.
(3) Those who consider Microsoft's current behavior to be at best a partial improvement over the past, or at worst a charm-offensive meant to distract from their ongoing bad behavior. E.g., Windows 10 with unavoidable snooping, and ongoing stealth patent attacks on Linux.
Not if you are developing for linux. macOS greatly simplifies that over windows. Of course you can develop for linux on windows but the third party tools that you need to do that are much more complicated and clunky.
Ive seen Linux devs on MacOS fall down several traps of thinking their NetBSD based MacOS is equivalent to Linux. One common pitfall I see is with filesystem access. Mac, by default, has case insensitive filenames (like Windows), opposite of Linux. Yes Mac supports case sensitive, but it is not the default and apparently a lot of apps dont take this into account and fail spectacularly when case sensitivity is turned on (I can't provide any examples, I dont use Mac, its just anecdotal from reading online).
This was a while ago, but when Steam was first introduced on macOS, it did not play nice with my case-sensitive HFS+ partition.
When I first set up my Mac, I thought case-sensitivity would be a good idea just in case I ever had to copy files from another case-sensitive file system. I never did need the case-sensitivity, but I did have to repartition to get Steam working. It thought me a good lesson about switching away from defaults "just in case."
You may be new to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" [1]. Everything looks great during the embrace phase. In fact, everything looks even better during the extend phase. Industry has a short-term memory for this tactic and it does seem to be going in Microsofts favor at the moment.
I'm curious to see how they will act once they regain sufficient market share. Will the old MS appear and will they implement the extinguish phase?
The "Microsoft has changed" is a well coordinated marketing ploy, probably their biggest achievement of the last 10 years. And these days it's actually pretty hard to distinguish the shills from the fanboys that genuinely believe that they changed.
There's something about computing that makes us want to cheer for these big companies as if they are sports teams, no matter how many times they screw us.
But for the uninitiated the biggest problem for some time has been that Microsoft was and still is a big patents troll. They also continued fighting open standards such as the OpenDocument format, even under Satya Nadella. To their credit they did join the Open Invention Network, but it's still unclear what parts of a Linux OS are covered and what aren't. The FSF rightly asked for clarifications on whether the multimedia components are covered and to my knowledge there have been no clarifications thus far.
> "Investing in making Edge work like Chrome (more important to developers and consumers than your ideological quandries with Google owning the web will ever be)"
That's incredibly naive. First of all they aren't "making Edge work like Chrome", that's an overstatement, the new Edge is going to be only a shell on top of Chromium and nothing more.
Microsoft adopting Edge is either them throwing the glove and admitting that they can't develop a browser, or them pulling another embrace, extend and extinguish. After all, as we've established already, they don't really like that users have a choice when it comes to the browsers they use. This is important to mention, because even for the Chrome fans out there, Edge switching to Chromium provides the perfect opportunity to disallow alternatives on top of Windows. This is just a possibility mind you, when it is far more likely that Microsoft will simply place Edge on life support.
In either case, whether they end up contributing to Chrome's ecosystem, or not, consumers lose for a myriad reasons. And heralding this move as something good is ignorance for
the whole history of computing.
MacOS X has definitely not "always" had DTrace - it shipped in 10.5 along with the "Instruments" front-end. It's true it is becoming distinctly less useful on OSX though - a shame as I use it extensively as an (application) development tool. This might make me take a slightly more serious look at Windows for laptops in future.
It is true for everyone. DTrace source was released in Jan 2005, and Mac OS X 10.4 was released in Apr of same year. So they must have ported it immediately and ship it in the next release (10.5)
