Triple booting Ubuntu, Win10 and OSX86. On Ubuntu development with C++ you simply adhere to open standards.

Or you use one of the many freely available programs which, for one reason or another, let you do something with different fonts. Luckily, Windows hides those Chinese fonts that you can't read anyway. Except sometimes (for example in LibreOffice) it doesn't. You cannot remove them easily either because Windows doesn't let you. Guess what, if they were never present on the install, the whole problem never appears.

I dislike Mac OSX a lot. The kernel is garbage, the file system is garbage, the memory consumption is obscene, stability is equal to or slightly worse than my Windows machines (all of which have their issues), and I despise pretty much every last UI decision they've made.

They're also fantastic for media production work, no doubt about it.

Seriously? Why? I though that was once true and now just a myth.

One of the best things Macs have going for them as far as productivity goes is that there is so little to do with them that you're less likely to have 'distractions' close at hand...

One of the best things Macs have going for them as far as productivity goes is that there is so little to do with them that you're less likely to have 'distractions' close at hand...

This is coincidentally why I used to maintain a Linux partition on my home PC. I don't know how the environment is today, but a decade ago it was hard to get distracted by games on my Linux boot, and Wesnoth only stays so fun for so long.

So there's a lot of Windows users, tho that shouldn't surprise me given that this is a game dev website.

I dislike Mac OSX a lot. The kernel is garbage, the file system is garbage, the memory consumption is obscene, stability is equal to or slightly worse than my Windows machines (all of which have their issues), and I despise pretty much every last UI decision they've made. And then there's XCode. This is not the worst IDE I've used, and exactly how bad it is varies up and down through the years and versions. But basically I'm not generally happy about using XCode to do anything that is actually productive. And of course there's a BSD userspace awkwardly grafted on top, which is admittedly handy but does not justify calling this OS a unix-alike. Counterpoint: clang. Clang is the best. This is also the only OS where somebody has put actual thought and time into designing the audio subsystem. You really notice if you do any type of recording work.

Oh, and this gets its own paragraph. The Mac OSX 3D graphics stack is the worst creation in all of the modern day desktop OSes. THE WORST. You are not a serious graphics programmer if your primary environment is Mac. There is no redeeming factor to anything Mac does with GPUs or graphics - and I've learned in the last month that against all odds, Android is somehow even worse. If you're serious about 3D graphics, stick to Win/Linux/iOS.

Linux has its ups and downs. I like a fair number of things about it, and I've warmed to the kernel since the 3.x series started. (2.6 got on my nerves and 2.4 was incredibly problematic.) The filesystem options are pretty solid. I hated XFCE in the past but I've gone back to test recently and it's actually alright now. GNOME 3.x and Ubuntu Unity are trash. Cinnamon is my favorite and Linux Mint in general is nice, except that you can't distupgrade. They want you to delete the entire system and restore a backup onto a new install, which is idiotic. I'm testing Ubuntu Studio as a candidate for primary distro now. Don't have a good read on the audio capabilities, need to test how well JACK etc actually works. I continue to hate working with GCC, but clang as a drop in replacement works wonderfully. There are still too many occasions where you have to go to arcane or obscure command line commands to accomplish seemingly basic tasks, enough that I wouldn't recommend any Linux to non-techies still. The package manager fans can go to hell, the entire approach is ludicrous and they know it. But for someone technically minded and with compatible hardware, I'm generally okay with Linux.

Windows. Oh, my old wonderfully flawed friend. I'd put 7 as the best version, but 10 is alright. Didn't care for 8.x before, can't stand it now. Decently capable kernel, mediocre filesystem, way too many things eager to run in the background and too hard to find out what or why. Interface design is miles ahead of Linux, nevermind whatever drugs they're using on the Mac side. All the usual advantages of software and hardware support. I like VS a lot, although they need to fix all the damned performance regressions they keep introducing. The C++ compiler used to be the best in the business for speed and code gen if not features, now it's sort of a sad also-ran in a world where clang exists. Clang for Windows is sadly not ready yet. Audio is a catastrophe of competing shifting APIs that you'd expect from open source, not a commercial product. The way updates are delivered continues to be the single biggest problem with Windows for literally everybody, and yet none of the changes they make ever seem to have any user facing improvements. How is a hexcore 64GB SSD-RAID machine still slow at installing updates?? Has any update ever not required a reboot? And now they're aggressively required. Goddamn. And while the telemetry/privacy stuff doesn't bother me per se, MS appears to have no understanding at all of "optics". They make stupid decisions and then stupidly look like they're trying to hide them.

Overall, Windows. I will recommend Mac to people who have repeat problems with Windows, as the laptops were until recently vastly better made and the system as a whole is harder for the tech-ignorant to break. They're also fantastic for media production work, no doubt about it. I don't consider Mac to be a serious choice for tech-savvy people or developers, based on 12 years of using the damned things. Linux... well. I much prefer it to anything else on servers, Windows client versions and Mac are horrific even as impromptu servers and Windows Server is mostly fine but not my preference. For a desktop OS, I don't see a reason to but I always have a Linux VM ready to go as it's my preferred way to do "unixy things", not Mac.

I'm really surprised you've had that many issues with OS X dev. In my experience (I was a Windows user for a considerable portion of my life and I am currently using it for work related stuff) OS X suffers from way fewer issues than the Windows OS's do. I haven't seen the same memory consumption issues or kernel issues you mention. Of course no machine/OS is perfect. Xcode is really a matter of opinion, plus many other IDEs are available for people not interested in Xcode.

They're also fantastic for media production work, no doubt about it.

Seriously? Why? I though that was once true and now just a myth.

Serious professional media production work is based around a lot of hardware and software pieces, and they mostly just work better on Macs. Mac is to production software what Windows is to games - the default environment for development and testing. On top of that, the OSX audio architecture is vastly more consistent, reliable, and capable than Windows or Linux, and the availability of QuickTime and some other codec stuff in the core OS is a big plus too. OSX's idiotic UI makes no difference when you're living inside a production app, and it doesn't suddenly decide that you can't work today because UPDATES MUST BE INSTALLED NOW OR EVERYONE DIES. And I know of several people who woke up to a surprise Windows 10 update and core software broken including Office. If production were my primary occupation, I'd buy an rMBP and an iMac. Maybe a Mac Pro if the expense made sense.

That said, Mac OSX major version updates and production software do not mix. In general, it seems that in order to run a stable Mac environment for audio/video work, you need to lag the releases about 12-18 months. IOW you probably shouldn't install El Capitan for a while yet.

I'm really surprised you've had that many issues with OS X dev. In my experience (I was a Windows user for a considerable portion of my life and I am currently using it for work related stuff) OS X suffers from way fewer issues than the Windows OS's do. I haven't seen the same memory consumption issues or kernel issues you mention. Of course no machine/OS is perfect. Xcode is really a matter of opinion, plus many other IDEs are available for people not interested in Xcode.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but I know a novice Mac user the moment they tell me it's stable. I restarted my rMBP today, a few hours ago, because the keyboard stopped responding. The wifi dies randomly coming out of sleep. I upgraded to this machine from my last MBP because 8 GB was not sufficient to run XCode with no other programs running. This machine is floating at 14/16 GB used, though a large part of that is that Chrome at around 20 tabs. I only really have just enough memory on this machine to run Chrome, XCode, and source control, and the machine will go berserk and unresponsive if I exceed total system memory. If it weren't for iOS dev, I'd buy a $2,000 XPS 15 instead of this. Same core specs, same build quality, much more usable dev machine.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but I know a novice Mac user the moment they tell me it's stable. I restarted my rMBP today, a few hours ago, because the keyboard stopped responding. The wifi dies randomly coming out of sleep. I upgraded to this machine from my last MBP because 8 GB was not sufficient to run XCode with no other programs running. This machine is floating at 14/16 GB used, though a large part of that is that Chrome at around 20 tabs. I only really have just enough memory on this machine to run Chrome, XCode, and source control, and the machine will go berserk and unresponsive if I exceed total system memory. If it weren't for iOS dev, I'd buy a $2,000 XPS 15 instead of this. Same core specs, same build quality, much more usable dev machine.

Wow, I often have 20-30 Chrome tabs, plus two or three instances of Visual Studio, and big sets of log file open in Notepad++, and I've never gotten anywhere near that kind of memory usage on my Win10 desktop with 16 GB of RAM. I get irritated when VS starts to go tits up around 2 GB of memory usage - they really need to release an x64 version...