How so? Debian is my and many others’ goto for servers, for desktops there are simply too many moving parts, at least for me.
The issues I was getting where I was breaking for example my audio, was not debian specific, but the fact that you remove a bunch of packages and install others, then obivously something goes wrong as something is incompatible. The problem is then restoring the OS to a previous working state, IMO all mutable distributions suffer from this.
Stability my friend. apt is what keep my basement PC updated since 2009, through many hardrives, CPUs, motherboards. I never did any fresh installation and I am on the latest Debian stable.
Check out Xubuntu. Part of future proofing is adopting a UI that never and I mean never changes. It’s beautiful.
Re: Linux phobia - most developer activity just needs terminal, browser and maybe VsCode. Xubuntu gives everything you need.
Side benefit: you can easily run the Linux desktop as virtual machine. VNC remote desktop works great (checkout the Remmina client). Boot, configure, load packages, experiment. If things go wrong, destroy the VM and restart.
Also: To debug Linux configuration, ChatGPT and similar LLMs are really good. For developers, this is the golden age of the Linux desktop.
Mine is Manjaro. Only two problems in several years. 
That is very specific to Debian though. My Manjaro almost never did that. Only once a script failed to remove an outdated package that was being superseded by another. Fixed by a quick Google and two commands.
Agreed, that’s why I want the immutable ones that are being transactionally upgraded.
My Manjaro is stable as well. I don’t make fun of anyone using any Linux – if it works for you, cool. But I’ve used Debian many times and always found it infuriating at one point. They leave you to fend for yourself on bigger upgrades. Many people don’t mind, I do.
Does it also use Snap? Canonical screwed up pretty badly with packages in it, including such with very bad ads, and the calculator being 300+ MB, and taking seconds to start, and a few others I am forgetting.
It has Snap and Apt, and maybe something else. I hate Snap. APT is used for most everything, ASDF version manager for programming languages, uv is also seeing a bit of use lately.
I would do the same but I no longer trust Canonical. They made questionable decisions. If Snap exists on the system then I assume they can remote-push whatever they like.
Paranoid I know, but going to Linux for me mandates full control over my machine.
But again, I am not judging anyone using anything Debian-based. I have used both Debian and Ubuntu and made the informed choice of not using them anymore.
I’ve been rocking Arch for the better part of 15 years now. I’ve only really had hardware problems.
Moved these posts to a dedicated thread as I’m sure a lot of people may be thinking about doing the same…
At times I feel the same. The thing that wants me to do it more than anything is that macOS is now beginning to feel like a compromised system.
I recently noticed that Help Apple Improve Search in Spotlight settings was checked but I did not opt in for this (and I’m pretty sure there will be some sort of legal action against Apple at some point for enrolling people into this automatically). It could mean that every single file name (and maybe even some of its data) has been sent to Apple.
There was also all that fuss about Apple by-passing network security so apps like LittleSnitch could not detect their activity:
Unfortunately, Apple (without telling anybody) decided to “exclude” or exempt over 50 of its own applications (such as the App Store) and daemons from being routed thru the Network Extension Framework.
Source: https://www.patreon.com/posts/46179028
And there are various other things too, like why isn’t Advanced Data Protection on by default (so that your iCloud data is encrypted - by default!) and speaking of iCloud, why can’t we just run our own servers to act as our own cloud? These could simply be at home (home broadband is fast enough now) or hosted online somewhere. This could be set for personal or family use and even multiple servers could be used for contingency. There’s absolutely no reason why anyone’s personal data ever needs to be on Apple’s servers.
I can’t get away from Windows because my dev machine is also my gaming machine 
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# remove snap
sudo snap remove core
sudo snap remove snapd
sudo apt remove --purge snapd
rm -rf ~/snap
sudo rm -rf /var/cache/snapd/
# To stop Snap from sneaking back during system updates, create a file to block it:
sudo cat << EOF > /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
Package: snapd
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -10
EOF
echo "GOODBYE SNAP FOREVER!"
Man I used to love my Linux machines, until I started a job in 2015 and on my first day got sent to the Apple store to buy a Macbook. That was a sad day.
I’ve been pretty entrenched in the Apple ecosystem ever since 
I love the hardware, but the software leaves a lot to be desired sometimes
I don’t see why people care to use apple stuff these days. when i was in university the big deal with apple was that the computers came with compilers, linux was sorta trash as slackware was one of the major distros, ubuntu was about the same as it is today (extremely bad). windows is now much better than linux or mac, as you can run arch or ubuntu directly on it, and windows has better performance than typical linux distros.
i’m surprised when devs don’t use tools that are close to their production env, your products aren’t run on apple servers. devs who work on BSD (macos) and linux now have 2 ways of doing things they have to learn. it’s just simpler to focus on 1 system.
The fact that you run wsl on windows proves the point that windows is not up to the task when it comes to development experience. I’ve used it back in the day at the university and if you went beyond visual studio, the experince was just horrible, of course wsl was not a thing then.
Let’s also not forget that you get a OS littered with ads, spyware and other useless stuff you cannot easily get rid of. I loved windows 7 and I would be happy to keep using that OS for gaming if they didn’t artificially force you to migrate to newer versions to get latest directx support. These days, if the folk working on making games compatible on linux succeed to make a big part of games work on linux, I will drop my windows installation forever, as windows 11 even managed to screw up the audio drivers and I get crackling in a lot of games, (and I’m not the only one) never found a fix after searching for multiple hours even to this day.
When I first got my mac air m1, I thought that macos is just a linux-like distribution with a great desktop environment, this was always an issue for me on linux until I recently found out plasma.
The last major update that introduced “AI” and I couldn’t opt-out was a clear sign that this is not the case. Most likely this will get much worse from this point on, so linux remains the only sane choice in this insane world. I’m very happy that in the last 5 years linux distributions got huge improvements when it comes to it being used as a desktop OS.
Is there a laptop that has great screen & battery aside from silicon macbooks? On desktop, yeah linux still rocks.
Funny, I take WSL as an example of why Windows is able to still do serious development. I would pick Windows third of the three, and personally avoid it, but WSL is a great solution.
Not that I’ve found but they may exist. From my experience with Linux laptops (Thinkpads) you can get great screens and decent performance, but not the same battery life as a MacBook. My current personal laptop is a Thinkpad T14s Gen4 AMD, with a gorgeous OLED display, but the battery life leaves a lot to be desired. The screen itself is a big draw and the lower resolution screens should improve battery life. I also assume it has something to do with battery capacity. My work MBP M3 is almost a pound heavier, and some of that must be battery.
Despite my rant macOS is still one of the best operating systems and a great choice for developers being Unix based/derived and because it’s so popular with developers (so most of the dev tools and software you need will usually be available/work well on a Mac).
There’s also the general UX which resonates with a lot of people, and nowadays, the integration with your other Apple devices. Such as you being able to reply to text messages on your Mac, when they come in for 2FA your Mac will autofill the code from them and then automatically delete them, you can easily link up your iPad (via wifi/bluetooth) as a second display and now you can even mirror your iPhone! I no longer watch YouTube when I am eating at my desk, now I just open up TikTok via iPhone mirroring 
You can also copy and paste between Mac and Phone, share contacts across all devices, even share web browsing - so you can start reading something on your Mac then continue on your phone. I love the Books app as any highlights I make on my iPad will show on my Mac.
There are other really good positives as well - such as the excellent Time Machine backup system and FileVault, which encrypts your hard disk and is so fast that when switched on you can’t even notice the difference - this is because there is dedicated silicon to handle the encryption and decryption (built in to Apple Silicon Macs and via the T2 chip in older Macs).
So there are a a lot of benefits and reasons to use a Mac, but many people wish there were less negatives creeping in, and that privacy is uncompromising. I was never a Steve Jobs fanboy, but I think if he was still around we’d be seeing a lot fewer of these negatives/concerns. Many people feel they never should have made the person responsible for worldwide sales the CEO - it completely goes against what most people yearn for: for large companies that we rely and depend on to have clear and strong principles higher than that of making money.
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