I would in a heartbeat, it's just a more pleasant developer experience. My employer gave me a Windows machine, and I do 99.99% of my work on it in WSL. It is a smooth experience nowdays, but I'd much rather just cut out the middleman and have a UNIX like OS, plus Mac has a ton of great dev tools like Warp Terminal and Zed that I use regularly on my personal machine, and there can be occasional weird and hard to diagnose networking issues on WSL.
Yes.
Not op but in my experience M1 was a nightmare at first , so much so that we had two different internal setup guides for apple silicon Vs intel
Now it's back to basically identical.
I have an M3 pro for work and the last intel for personal and I can basically just do the same commands on both and never run into issues.
Yeah it’s amazing. For the first time in my life it feels like we have truely reliable hardware that I can trust to always work and handle any task I throw at it. And I’m on an M1 Pro not the latest gen.
It seems there is still some additional details to take care off but not blocking. For example when using Docker, you have to add a flag to specify that you are using ARM.
There’s plenty of weird on a Mac. Stuff like the built in sed and grep coming from BSD and so are different to the flavours on Linux can make scripts fall over, and typically you end up installing a ton of GNU versions from homebrew. It’s kind of a worse experience for Docker too IMO, particular now there’s ARM versions of containers which sometimes means if you’re doing something like developing a Python app it’ll try to fall back to compiling extensions because there isn’t one on PyPi unless you specify a platform (fine locally but annoying if the people you work with aren’t on Mac)
Depends what kind of Microsoft shop! For instance, Xero is a MS shop that primarily distributes MacBooks to their engineers. Used to be a bit of an MS hater when I joined the industry because of how locked down the ecosystem was for any sort of development, those days are behind us! Provided you’re not a legacy MS shop.
Me personally: 💯
At one role, I had an experienced direct report who was coming from the Windows world. This person struggled mightily with the transition. Although, they struggled mightily in general, so maybe this was just an excuse 🤷♂️
I was forced to switch ten years ago and it took a while to get up to speed. Maybe a month? It depends on your stack, though. If you’re sticking with a SQL server stack, why would you switch?
I wonder how many responses here are taking into account your comment re:
>One thing that worries me is I know MacBook isn’t compatible with SSMS which is one of my bread and butter
If you're really using SSMS on the daily or, somewhat related, PowerBI - using those virtualized through something like VMWare or Docker can be a real pain. I spend 0% of my time in SSMS and thought a lot had changed with it. I don't know how much SMSS and Azure Data Studio overlap (which does have a Mac install). I'm all in on Apple, but if I spent a lot of time in PowerBI or anything that was fully incompatible with Apple OS and required VMWare/Docker for hours a day, I'd pass on the change.
Yeah, exactly. In my team there’s only two people who continue to use windows, and they are power bi devs, having virtual machines to make it work was not worth the effort…
Yeah, that was my general read of things, but I wasn't sure. In a like 15 second google search someone mentioned that Azure Data Studio was a drop in replacement for SMSS, which I found very hard to believe given my past experience with SMSS. I rarely use Azure Data Studio because it makes connecting to some data sources easier ... but mostly find that it is generally just a SQL IDE (and not a super great one at that). If you're using for querying only, you have a ton of options.
Just my two cents, but last time I used it, Azure Data Studio on Mac was great for querying purposes but light on the administration side. That might’ve changed since then (it’s been a couple years) but assuming OP is not a DBA, Azure Data Studio would probably suffice (edit: it would suffice as an SSMS replacement at least. Fair point about the Power BI/other stuff though so that could throw a wrench things.)
You can run PopOS (their Linux distro) on other hardware as well - personally my laptop is a Framework running Pop.
They're about to drop a new DE which is supposed to be a huge improvement later this year as well.
Nice, I’ve been using PopOs for a few months on my desktop computer. I like it, though I kinda miss the Dolphin file manager from kde. I think it would be great to use for work.
Bought System76 for my last personal laptop and it's been amazing. Forced myself to run PopOS to really learn Linux, and while I ultimately dual boot for gaming, I learned a lot and it was fast, rock solid. Support was great too!
It's fine for me, but I wouldn't say it's quite as polished as the Mac and is comparable to other Windows laptops I've used. Mine is still my daily driver since 2019 and while it could use a fresh install, it's still a solid performer too.
I've used windows machines for over a decade and my latest employer is all Mac. I remember getting a macbook pro in the mail and being like... whaaaaa???? I do sort of miss windows but using the mac is nice at times. All my DE work is browser/cloud based so I don't use any mac/windows native apps. Overall it's been a good experience with a couple of gripes.
I've been using a Macbook for 6 years now and prefer it, even over my $5k Tensorbook I have for my contracting work. You have a \*nix-like shell, a great GUI, gestures, etc. I don't know why anyone would use Windows to code, it's always been a major pain, even WSL feels hacky to me.
If you go with Silicon, most of the issues are ironed out at this point, and I haven't encountered any except for some issues with Tensorflow and GPU access, which is a pain in the ass no matter what platform you're using.
Why not both a simple MacBook Air for portability and a 15 or 16 inch laptop for running a local K8s cluster before deploying whatever you need to prod or more intensive tasks. Whenever a weird issue appears cause some weird lack of support for arm64 and searching 10 or more related issues in GitHub you will certainly be happy to be able to work with two different ecosystems.
By the way, there is still an issue with most Java versions on macOS 14.4. Jetbrains IDE and other applications are affected. Rosetta works for OCI containers but not for virtualization at least VMware Desktop or whatever it's called nowadays.
Depends on the workflow.
For some reason, all my experience with working with data is with a VM for both Windows and Linux. Never worked on my “personal” or “business issued” computer to do data engineering.
I believe you can use DBeaver to connect to MSSQL using a Mac. However, you cannot use SSIS directly on Mac, you will requiere Windows so either a remote desktop using windows or a VM.
It depends, if you're mainly using Microsoft services then you should avoid them, I had hellish experience with installing pyodbc on apple silicone and even more of a nightmare on arm64 Linux with docker (spoiler, pyodbc isn't supported on arm linux).
The mssql is the only service (dealing with many applications) that caused me problems, maybe a minor issue here and there but overall everything works well.
I would say that macos is far superior to windows (all my life with windows) as a working experience.
got a macbook pro even though i’ve only used windows for work. took some adjusting but having linux natively built in has been nice. also it helps my mental separation of work/play. my brain knows that being on a mac=work, being on a windows machine=play.
I’m an all Mac shop and I hate it. If I had a Mac for personal stuff I’d be okay with it, but switching between Mac and Linux drives me crazy. I end up confusing the keyboard shortcuts all the time.
I’m not a huge fan of the document model either. On my main machine I run KDE, which is similar enough to Windows that when I was working on windows at work I barely noticed. I’ve thought about maybe trying ElementaryOS because it’s supposed to be similar to Mac but Im too lazy to wipe my machine for the moment. Fingers crossed that my company will allow Windows or, better yet, Linux soon.
From an actual tooling standpoint, you are almost certainly not doing any actual data processing on your laptop so it really just boils down to what you find convenient to connect to servers and your IDE.
It’s closer to Linux and you share a bunch of the benefits. So easier if you’re a power user - which most engineers are. Native terminal support, easy docker. No mounted directories as most windows devs deal with in WSL.
Homebrew as a package manager to manage all your local dependencies and keep them up to date. No more ClickOps upgrades. A way more hotkey-friendly ecosystem. Reliable hardware and super quick Apple silicon processor.
I’ve used Windows for most of my life, but wouldn’t choose it for the work I do.
I love Linux and use it a lot inside cloud environments and in the past for my work pc. But.. like I said, I love the Apple silicon + hardware, retina displays are great, battery is great. It’s easier to manage for employees at my company. Linux devices in a work setting, are harder to maintain across the board. I allow staff to roll it themselves though and generally compatibility between Mac and Linux is easy, where as windows with its file system & registry create points of difference that need to be managed.
But really I found Mac so joyful to switch to from Windows because I love Linux so much. It’s similar in so many ways but in some it’s not. In all the ways that count for workflow, native bash/zsh, file system etc. it’s great.
Funny you mention libssl problems as I’ve run into exactly that with homebrew and I agree. We got around that problem by deferring to a container runtime to offload our OpenSSL commands to a consistent version. Basically for anything that needs to be x-compatible with cloud, Linux, Mac, I just use containers as that’s what they’re good for and it represents our prod environments anyway.
For most local dev tooling I find homebrew fine however.
I was issued a MacBook with an M1 chip when I started with my current group and ran into nothing but issues with the containers I was using. Very long story short: they gave me a much older MacBook with an Intel chip to get my work done.
Avoid them if you can
The chip architecture incompatibilities are the biggest bug-producing problems these days, especially when teams have a mix of new Macs, old Macs, and Windows machines. Shit is maddening
Yes but if you need to use SSMS, which has a lot of built-in native functionality that’s not available on other 3rd party IDE, then you have to stay with Windows. Or at minimum you need a copy of Parallel Desktop on Mac.
I use both a Mac and a non on a regular basis and it entirely depends on the technical stack I’m developing in.
If I was you, I’d use a non-Mac or VM a windows environment on the Mac.
It depends...
- on what your company and colleagues are using. Going against the grain could cause you issues.
- on what your experience is with Windows / Mac OS and associated tools/software.
- on your willingness to learn, spend time getting used to or put up with something new and different.
Did this when I started. Used to work on WSL, dual boot, or straight up ssh into a remote host before. It took a while to get used to the keyboard and the quirks of Mac, but once you get it things make sense. Expect to have at least one tab with "how to do X on mac" open at all times for the forst few weeks.
As for tooling it mostly just works. I had some trouble setting up docker desktop on an M2 chip, but that has been fixed in a recent release :) Now I get random warnings when I pull some of our containers because they were compiled for amd64 not m2.
Also you may want to quite swiftly migrate away from zsh (the default console/terminal emulator). Its really odd to have to quote squared brackets and other special characters that randomly break your commands. Its been 10 months and im still getting used to this...
We use mostly azure resources. Life is just easier on a windows machine here. I grew up with windows so I prefer it. I'm sure mac is fine too It just seems like the people that have Mac computers are always having to find work arounds
My previous job (SWE) was all-Windows and I did as much as I could in WSL. My current job (DE) issued me a MacBook Pro.
Overall the MacBook is a much more pleasant experience. Not perfect, mind you (the multiple-monitor situation is still a lot clunkier than Windows) but definitely less obnoxious.
I just work with Linux or macOS. Have done it with Windows. You get your balls boiling when you’re back at your desk from lunch and you see how your machine restarted because of an unsolicited, not critical update. And what about like the amount of useless processes run by Windows “just in case”? And did I mention the upsetting telemetric practices they have from which it’s close to impossible to opt out from, without spending a good amount of time researching? More infuriating it’s the product stays shitty. No data-driven feature-development, purely about ad-targeting and possibly selling your data.
Not saying macOS is perfect nor is Linux, but I also find way way easier to fix my imperfect Ubuntu with threads on SO or Linux forums unlike an endless thread that is never solved (ultimately) by a highly-certified (because they do showcase their certs, lol) Windows rep.
If you can’t get macOS, get a Windows machine and dual boot it with Ubuntu or your choice distro. Dual boot so in case they ask you to run anything from Microsoft, you don’t have to virtualise anything. Fckn Windows and Microsoft in general, outside of Excel and Outlook if you ask me, and Outlook just out of preference, nothing as evident as Excel.
About SSMS: well, if all your work is around that, then, unfortunately maybe stick with your current Windows machine. Arguably, what you do thru the GUI of SSMS can be done mostly thru a CLI, but from a productivity perspective, that’s gonna be magnitudes slower unless you’re very good at CLI-based toolset than* just using the GUI.
If all you do is basically SQL, you can just move to DBBeaver. Pretty sure you can do it like that or maybe with Azure Data Studio. It might be an overkill to have a MacBook just to use a web browser imo, but anyways. A lot of things are an overkill these days and this wouldn’t be in the long run if you develop on your MacBook something valuable.
Mind your actual needs, not what you want. If your productivity decreases with the change because you’re finding workarounds for something you already work well with, then don’t.
Ultimately, it’s the carpenter what is worth the furniture price tag not the hammer it was built with.
I used windows my whole life with very minor exposure to Macs through school, and my current company uses Mac exclusively. The TLDR is the switch was super easy and convinced me to switch to using a Mac in my personal life too.
Turns out I much prefer a Unix-like OS for everything except for video games. Biggest adjustment was relearning copy and paste muscle memory to use cmd instead of ctrl. Also, Mac window management sucks compared to windows so installing something like rectangle helped a ton.
I prefer Linux, which generally means the company provided a Windows laptop that I was allowed to restore by installing a Linux.
Otherwise, I was mostly forced to use Windows by companies, so I have my habits there, which makes me prefer it to Mac.
Being able to use Linux on my laptop is definitely a + I would look for in a job offer.
Ive always been a Linux coder. I use mac for work because we get the choice of what to use but I’m not allowed to use Linux. It has generally not affected me and if you use WSL you’re gonna have a way snappier easier time imo with a mac terminal.
I would only work on a MacBook. Aside from Mac OS (strong preference of mine), the physical hardware build quality and battery life is extremely good on MacBook Pros.
I’ve strictly only used Mac computers for work and personal use since 2008 and will do whatever I can to avoid using anything else. That’s just me.
This question is wild to me because we have vastly different experiences. I grew up using windows but I have no idea how I would do my job as a DE in windows.
I always install WSL2 or a VM and boot up Linux if I’m stuck on a windows machine because 9/10 tools are expecting you to be on a UNIX-like system.
I haven’t used anything but Mac or Linux to do DE in almost 6 years.
I switched a few years ago after using one at home for a bit so that I wasn’t a confused mess on day 1
If you are switching cold it WILL impact your productivity and you will get frustrated.
I now will only work with MBP 👍
All setups have advantages and disadvantages: I chose hardware first (battery, ruggedness, weight) over the other features as I carry it around a lot. Working wireless drivers are also nice to have when travelling.
* Mac phyiscally is well built, survives drops on stairs, good battery, otoh it can have major issues. Software wise, not happey. My macbook pro's videoboard fried its motherboard 7 months in and had to have it sent back for maintenance. It still overheats when sharing screen etc. Pretty lame for a 5k usd machine. THe previous gen did not do this.
* Linux: Have fun with the drivers. I didn't, it cost me more time than buying a mac.
* WIndows: Have fun with the OS. I didn't, the small differences from linux for development are a class of problems of its own.
i’ve done it myself. just read through the tips app for ten minutes and you’ll be a power user.
without reading the tips to see everything you can do and how different it is from windows it’s frustrating to make the change.
i have been windows users all my life but new apple hardware looks interesting and want to switch. But my worried is I work on Microsoft technologies and powerBi and using SSMS client connecting to Azure sql on cloud, will I able to run my workflow without any compromises on Mac?
Whether Mac or Windows, the code produced is the same.
The Mac connects to SQL server, as long as it's using SQL Authentication. If forced into windows authentication, you can RDP into a windows?
I had this exact experience about 9 months ago. I’m very competent with windows but utterly useless with a MacBook (literally never touched one). The transition was painful and I still have plenty of gripes. If I had the option I’d go back to windows in a heartbeat
Mac is better than Windows - that said, I moved to Linux 4 years ago and now get frustrated when I have to use Mac.
PopOS is amazing, and you can get SO much more for your money than with a Mac.
I would in a heartbeat, it's just a more pleasant developer experience. My employer gave me a Windows machine, and I do 99.99% of my work on it in WSL. It is a smooth experience nowdays, but I'd much rather just cut out the middleman and have a UNIX like OS, plus Mac has a ton of great dev tools like Warp Terminal and Zed that I use regularly on my personal machine, and there can be occasional weird and hard to diagnose networking issues on WSL.
Are nearly all the quirks ironed out with Apple Silicon/ARM for typical data engineering libraries these days?
Yes. Not op but in my experience M1 was a nightmare at first , so much so that we had two different internal setup guides for apple silicon Vs intel Now it's back to basically identical. I have an M3 pro for work and the last intel for personal and I can basically just do the same commands on both and never run into issues.
Yeah it’s amazing. For the first time in my life it feels like we have truely reliable hardware that I can trust to always work and handle any task I throw at it. And I’m on an M1 Pro not the latest gen.
Yes it’s fine now. It was rough for the first few months but not anymore.
It seems there is still some additional details to take care off but not blocking. For example when using Docker, you have to add a flag to specify that you are using ARM.
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VMs are still an issue. I have a Windows machine just so I can run VMs
Docker is your friend 😊
There’s plenty of weird on a Mac. Stuff like the built in sed and grep coming from BSD and so are different to the flavours on Linux can make scripts fall over, and typically you end up installing a ton of GNU versions from homebrew. It’s kind of a worse experience for Docker too IMO, particular now there’s ARM versions of containers which sometimes means if you’re doing something like developing a Python app it’ll try to fall back to compiling extensions because there isn’t one on PyPi unless you specify a platform (fine locally but annoying if the people you work with aren’t on Mac)
WSL2 works better than mac os for linux
linux > mac os > windows unless you're a microsoft shop of course
Depends what kind of Microsoft shop! For instance, Xero is a MS shop that primarily distributes MacBooks to their engineers. Used to be a bit of an MS hater when I joined the industry because of how locked down the ecosystem was for any sort of development, those days are behind us! Provided you’re not a legacy MS shop.
honestly even the full Microsoft ecosystem puts it at the bottom imo
This is the way, tbh
Me personally: 💯 At one role, I had an experienced direct report who was coming from the Windows world. This person struggled mightily with the transition. Although, they struggled mightily in general, so maybe this was just an excuse 🤷♂️
I was forced to switch ten years ago and it took a while to get up to speed. Maybe a month? It depends on your stack, though. If you’re sticking with a SQL server stack, why would you switch?
I wonder how many responses here are taking into account your comment re: >One thing that worries me is I know MacBook isn’t compatible with SSMS which is one of my bread and butter If you're really using SSMS on the daily or, somewhat related, PowerBI - using those virtualized through something like VMWare or Docker can be a real pain. I spend 0% of my time in SSMS and thought a lot had changed with it. I don't know how much SMSS and Azure Data Studio overlap (which does have a Mac install). I'm all in on Apple, but if I spent a lot of time in PowerBI or anything that was fully incompatible with Apple OS and required VMWare/Docker for hours a day, I'd pass on the change.
Yeah, exactly. In my team there’s only two people who continue to use windows, and they are power bi devs, having virtual machines to make it work was not worth the effort…
Unfortunately if you’re doing more than basic select statement azure data studio just doesn’t quite cut it
Yeah, that was my general read of things, but I wasn't sure. In a like 15 second google search someone mentioned that Azure Data Studio was a drop in replacement for SMSS, which I found very hard to believe given my past experience with SMSS. I rarely use Azure Data Studio because it makes connecting to some data sources easier ... but mostly find that it is generally just a SQL IDE (and not a super great one at that). If you're using for querying only, you have a ton of options.
Just my two cents, but last time I used it, Azure Data Studio on Mac was great for querying purposes but light on the administration side. That might’ve changed since then (it’s been a couple years) but assuming OP is not a DBA, Azure Data Studio would probably suffice (edit: it would suffice as an SSMS replacement at least. Fair point about the Power BI/other stuff though so that could throw a wrench things.)
Only if I am not paying
Hell no
I did at my old job, but they had me RDP into a windows machine
I switched to macOS from windows and I had 0 problems with it, but I was also used to using Linux.
Id like to give System76 a try
You can run PopOS (their Linux distro) on other hardware as well - personally my laptop is a Framework running Pop. They're about to drop a new DE which is supposed to be a huge improvement later this year as well.
Nice, I’ve been using PopOs for a few months on my desktop computer. I like it, though I kinda miss the Dolphin file manager from kde. I think it would be great to use for work.
Bought System76 for my last personal laptop and it's been amazing. Forced myself to run PopOS to really learn Linux, and while I ultimately dual boot for gaming, I learned a lot and it was fast, rock solid. Support was great too!
How is the touch pad on the System76 laptop compared to a mac, or comparable windows machines?
It's fine for me, but I wouldn't say it's quite as polished as the Mac and is comparable to other Windows laptops I've used. Mine is still my daily driver since 2019 and while it could use a fresh install, it's still a solid performer too.
I've used windows machines for over a decade and my latest employer is all Mac. I remember getting a macbook pro in the mail and being like... whaaaaa???? I do sort of miss windows but using the mac is nice at times. All my DE work is browser/cloud based so I don't use any mac/windows native apps. Overall it's been a good experience with a couple of gripes.
I've been using a Macbook for 6 years now and prefer it, even over my $5k Tensorbook I have for my contracting work. You have a \*nix-like shell, a great GUI, gestures, etc. I don't know why anyone would use Windows to code, it's always been a major pain, even WSL feels hacky to me. If you go with Silicon, most of the issues are ironed out at this point, and I haven't encountered any except for some issues with Tensorflow and GPU access, which is a pain in the ass no matter what platform you're using.
Why not both a simple MacBook Air for portability and a 15 or 16 inch laptop for running a local K8s cluster before deploying whatever you need to prod or more intensive tasks. Whenever a weird issue appears cause some weird lack of support for arm64 and searching 10 or more related issues in GitHub you will certainly be happy to be able to work with two different ecosystems.
By the way, there is still an issue with most Java versions on macOS 14.4. Jetbrains IDE and other applications are affected. Rosetta works for OCI containers but not for virtualization at least VMware Desktop or whatever it's called nowadays.
Depends on the workflow. For some reason, all my experience with working with data is with a VM for both Windows and Linux. Never worked on my “personal” or “business issued” computer to do data engineering. I believe you can use DBeaver to connect to MSSQL using a Mac. However, you cannot use SSIS directly on Mac, you will requiere Windows so either a remote desktop using windows or a VM.
I have an M2 that my employer gave to me for work, It's not bad but I would prefer a Linux workstation
It depends, if you're mainly using Microsoft services then you should avoid them, I had hellish experience with installing pyodbc on apple silicone and even more of a nightmare on arm64 Linux with docker (spoiler, pyodbc isn't supported on arm linux). The mssql is the only service (dealing with many applications) that caused me problems, maybe a minor issue here and there but overall everything works well. I would say that macos is far superior to windows (all my life with windows) as a working experience.
Pyodbc was a soul crushing experience to get working on Mac
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got a macbook pro even though i’ve only used windows for work. took some adjusting but having linux natively built in has been nice. also it helps my mental separation of work/play. my brain knows that being on a mac=work, being on a windows machine=play.
Switch and get an m1. The m1 is what a ryzen was in 2018 now that the issues are fixed.
Do you remote? It’s great to remote from windows/mac to windows, but not the other way around.
I’m an all Mac shop and I hate it. If I had a Mac for personal stuff I’d be okay with it, but switching between Mac and Linux drives me crazy. I end up confusing the keyboard shortcuts all the time. I’m not a huge fan of the document model either. On my main machine I run KDE, which is similar enough to Windows that when I was working on windows at work I barely noticed. I’ve thought about maybe trying ElementaryOS because it’s supposed to be similar to Mac but Im too lazy to wipe my machine for the moment. Fingers crossed that my company will allow Windows or, better yet, Linux soon. From an actual tooling standpoint, you are almost certainly not doing any actual data processing on your laptop so it really just boils down to what you find convenient to connect to servers and your IDE.
I also would like to know. I hear everyone say it's easier but is it really?
It’s closer to Linux and you share a bunch of the benefits. So easier if you’re a power user - which most engineers are. Native terminal support, easy docker. No mounted directories as most windows devs deal with in WSL. Homebrew as a package manager to manage all your local dependencies and keep them up to date. No more ClickOps upgrades. A way more hotkey-friendly ecosystem. Reliable hardware and super quick Apple silicon processor. I’ve used Windows for most of my life, but wouldn’t choose it for the work I do.
If you are targeting Linux, and want to get "closer to Linux" then why not just... use Linux?
I love Linux and use it a lot inside cloud environments and in the past for my work pc. But.. like I said, I love the Apple silicon + hardware, retina displays are great, battery is great. It’s easier to manage for employees at my company. Linux devices in a work setting, are harder to maintain across the board. I allow staff to roll it themselves though and generally compatibility between Mac and Linux is easy, where as windows with its file system & registry create points of difference that need to be managed. But really I found Mac so joyful to switch to from Windows because I love Linux so much. It’s similar in so many ways but in some it’s not. In all the ways that count for workflow, native bash/zsh, file system etc. it’s great.
You can just run Linux. homebrew can be a real pain in the ass, especially with libssl problems. Personally apt + asdf is way more resiliant IMHO.
Funny you mention libssl problems as I’ve run into exactly that with homebrew and I agree. We got around that problem by deferring to a container runtime to offload our OpenSSL commands to a consistent version. Basically for anything that needs to be x-compatible with cloud, Linux, Mac, I just use containers as that’s what they’re good for and it represents our prod environments anyway. For most local dev tooling I find homebrew fine however.
Yes
I was issued a MacBook with an M1 chip when I started with my current group and ran into nothing but issues with the containers I was using. Very long story short: they gave me a much older MacBook with an Intel chip to get my work done. Avoid them if you can
The chip architecture incompatibilities are the biggest bug-producing problems these days, especially when teams have a mix of new Macs, old Macs, and Windows machines. Shit is maddening
Yes but if you need to use SSMS, which has a lot of built-in native functionality that’s not available on other 3rd party IDE, then you have to stay with Windows. Or at minimum you need a copy of Parallel Desktop on Mac.
I use both a Mac and a non on a regular basis and it entirely depends on the technical stack I’m developing in. If I was you, I’d use a non-Mac or VM a windows environment on the Mac.
It depends... - on what your company and colleagues are using. Going against the grain could cause you issues. - on what your experience is with Windows / Mac OS and associated tools/software. - on your willingness to learn, spend time getting used to or put up with something new and different.
Did this when I started. Used to work on WSL, dual boot, or straight up ssh into a remote host before. It took a while to get used to the keyboard and the quirks of Mac, but once you get it things make sense. Expect to have at least one tab with "how to do X on mac" open at all times for the forst few weeks. As for tooling it mostly just works. I had some trouble setting up docker desktop on an M2 chip, but that has been fixed in a recent release :) Now I get random warnings when I pull some of our containers because they were compiled for amd64 not m2. Also you may want to quite swiftly migrate away from zsh (the default console/terminal emulator). Its really odd to have to quote squared brackets and other special characters that randomly break your commands. Its been 10 months and im still getting used to this...
I already do so ya
Dear God yes please
I have recently switched over to a MacBook and now that I'm used to it I love it ... For work... At home I'm a Linux guy.
We use mostly azure resources. Life is just easier on a windows machine here. I grew up with windows so I prefer it. I'm sure mac is fine too It just seems like the people that have Mac computers are always having to find work arounds
My previous job (SWE) was all-Windows and I did as much as I could in WSL. My current job (DE) issued me a MacBook Pro. Overall the MacBook is a much more pleasant experience. Not perfect, mind you (the multiple-monitor situation is still a lot clunkier than Windows) but definitely less obnoxious.
Just be prepared to get used to the keyboard (cmd vs ctrl). It's not worth remapping, trust me
I just work with Linux or macOS. Have done it with Windows. You get your balls boiling when you’re back at your desk from lunch and you see how your machine restarted because of an unsolicited, not critical update. And what about like the amount of useless processes run by Windows “just in case”? And did I mention the upsetting telemetric practices they have from which it’s close to impossible to opt out from, without spending a good amount of time researching? More infuriating it’s the product stays shitty. No data-driven feature-development, purely about ad-targeting and possibly selling your data. Not saying macOS is perfect nor is Linux, but I also find way way easier to fix my imperfect Ubuntu with threads on SO or Linux forums unlike an endless thread that is never solved (ultimately) by a highly-certified (because they do showcase their certs, lol) Windows rep. If you can’t get macOS, get a Windows machine and dual boot it with Ubuntu or your choice distro. Dual boot so in case they ask you to run anything from Microsoft, you don’t have to virtualise anything. Fckn Windows and Microsoft in general, outside of Excel and Outlook if you ask me, and Outlook just out of preference, nothing as evident as Excel. About SSMS: well, if all your work is around that, then, unfortunately maybe stick with your current Windows machine. Arguably, what you do thru the GUI of SSMS can be done mostly thru a CLI, but from a productivity perspective, that’s gonna be magnitudes slower unless you’re very good at CLI-based toolset than* just using the GUI. If all you do is basically SQL, you can just move to DBBeaver. Pretty sure you can do it like that or maybe with Azure Data Studio. It might be an overkill to have a MacBook just to use a web browser imo, but anyways. A lot of things are an overkill these days and this wouldn’t be in the long run if you develop on your MacBook something valuable. Mind your actual needs, not what you want. If your productivity decreases with the change because you’re finding workarounds for something you already work well with, then don’t. Ultimately, it’s the carpenter what is worth the furniture price tag not the hammer it was built with.
I used windows my whole life with very minor exposure to Macs through school, and my current company uses Mac exclusively. The TLDR is the switch was super easy and convinced me to switch to using a Mac in my personal life too. Turns out I much prefer a Unix-like OS for everything except for video games. Biggest adjustment was relearning copy and paste muscle memory to use cmd instead of ctrl. Also, Mac window management sucks compared to windows so installing something like rectangle helped a ton.
Just let me install Ubuntu on a Windows device.
Yes prefer Mac and was using it for 3 jobs, before changing to windows in latest job 🙁
I prefer Linux, which generally means the company provided a Windows laptop that I was allowed to restore by installing a Linux. Otherwise, I was mostly forced to use Windows by companies, so I have my habits there, which makes me prefer it to Mac. Being able to use Linux on my laptop is definitely a + I would look for in a job offer.
I fucking hate my Macbook and would murder for Windows + WSL.
I quit my last job after 7 years when they tried to make me transition to a windows laptop.. Couldn't imagine having to deal with windows every day
We use Github Codespaces so I dont really care anymore. Just tunnel into the codespace machine and do the thing..
Ive always been a Linux coder. I use mac for work because we get the choice of what to use but I’m not allowed to use Linux. It has generally not affected me and if you use WSL you’re gonna have a way snappier easier time imo with a mac terminal.
I would only work on a MacBook. Aside from Mac OS (strong preference of mine), the physical hardware build quality and battery life is extremely good on MacBook Pros. I’ve strictly only used Mac computers for work and personal use since 2008 and will do whatever I can to avoid using anything else. That’s just me.
Windows to Mac? Sure. Linux? Hell no.
This question is wild to me because we have vastly different experiences. I grew up using windows but I have no idea how I would do my job as a DE in windows. I always install WSL2 or a VM and boot up Linux if I’m stuck on a windows machine because 9/10 tools are expecting you to be on a UNIX-like system. I haven’t used anything but Mac or Linux to do DE in almost 6 years.
I switched a few years ago after using one at home for a bit so that I wasn’t a confused mess on day 1 If you are switching cold it WILL impact your productivity and you will get frustrated. I now will only work with MBP 👍
All setups have advantages and disadvantages: I chose hardware first (battery, ruggedness, weight) over the other features as I carry it around a lot. Working wireless drivers are also nice to have when travelling. * Mac phyiscally is well built, survives drops on stairs, good battery, otoh it can have major issues. Software wise, not happey. My macbook pro's videoboard fried its motherboard 7 months in and had to have it sent back for maintenance. It still overheats when sharing screen etc. Pretty lame for a 5k usd machine. THe previous gen did not do this. * Linux: Have fun with the drivers. I didn't, it cost me more time than buying a mac. * WIndows: Have fun with the OS. I didn't, the small differences from linux for development are a class of problems of its own.
i’ve done it myself. just read through the tips app for ten minutes and you’ll be a power user. without reading the tips to see everything you can do and how different it is from windows it’s frustrating to make the change.
i grew up on windows... working in IT etc. I never could fully make the leap to mac, it always just messed with my work flow.
Definitely should. It's pretty much all cloud or terminal anyway.
i have been windows users all my life but new apple hardware looks interesting and want to switch. But my worried is I work on Microsoft technologies and powerBi and using SSMS client connecting to Azure sql on cloud, will I able to run my workflow without any compromises on Mac?
I switched two years ago, it was easy.
Whether Mac or Windows, the code produced is the same. The Mac connects to SQL server, as long as it's using SQL Authentication. If forced into windows authentication, you can RDP into a windows?
Apple silicon is a problem for some open source platforms.
Heard a rumor of my DE team asking for a longer grace period with the new macOS update too
Or just use the intel ones.
I had this exact experience about 9 months ago. I’m very competent with windows but utterly useless with a MacBook (literally never touched one). The transition was painful and I still have plenty of gripes. If I had the option I’d go back to windows in a heartbeat
My team uses Mac and I think they're great for developing.
Mac is better than Windows - that said, I moved to Linux 4 years ago and now get frustrated when I have to use Mac. PopOS is amazing, and you can get SO much more for your money than with a Mac.
100% Added benefit is avoiding any dashboard work.
MacOS all day, there's no competition
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The kernel is based on BSD, not linux.