On the electronics world people switching?

[SuperMiguel]

So are people from the electronics world switching from windows to mac/linux? Most videos i see related to arduino have macs on them... People getting away from microsoft?

[pburgess]

My totally unscientific, informal observation at hackerspaces, Maker Faires, etc. is that there seems to be a roughly equal-ish mix of Windows, Mac and Linux systems in these circles. The large market share figures generally attributed to Windows probably stem from its near ubiquity in business settings, a much larger field. So I don't think there's any big switch going on here, just maker folk being...well, maker folk.

[michaelmeissner]

Though for some of us, it is not switching from Windows. Except for 2 jobs that lasted 2-3 years (out of 35 years of employment), I have not used Windows as my main computer operating system. I have been using UNIX, Linux, DG/UX, SunOS, AIX, or related operating systems as my primary OS since about 1988.

Of course since my wife and daughter have their own computers, I do at times need to do Windows related stuff on their computers every so often. I do have a few things that need to run under Windows (updating the firmware in my cameras for instance).

And hey, if Windows works for you that's cool. If Apple floats your boat, that's cool also. At this point neither appeals to me, and me using Linux should also be fine (in other words lets not start the usual flame war of OSes in this forum).

[adafruit_support_mike]

Microsoft primarily makes Windows for the x86 platform, so anyone who wants to put an OS on an embedded device will probably end up using some form of Unix.. Linux is the most common flavor, but there are others. Google is doing a lot of work to promote Android as an embedded OS.

Unix is a very hacker-friendly OS. It scales up and down well, its guts continually being redesigned for ease of tinkering, there's a huge body of Open code to support almost any project, and it's easy to make one Unix machine talk to another Unix machine. Once you start using Unix, it's almost inevitable that you'll use it more.

OS X has a highly-developed GUI over a Unix core. People tend to treat it more like the command center/network monitor than the OS to deploy everywhere, but it hits a nice balance between "I want to post a message to the Adafruit forums" and "I need to debug TCP packets on my CC3000".

It's a matter of reduced friction as much as anything else. It's not that one OS has a single feature that makes it hugely better than any other, it's just that Unix-based OSes present fewer OS nuisances while you're trying to deal with the major, project-based headaches.

[kscharf]

If you want to use the support software supplied by the major chip makers you'll probably HAVE to run Windows. In a few cases, Microchip comes to mind, either their windows software runs under Wine on Linux, or they have a Linux version available. I have a (legal!) copy of Windows 7 home premium that I run under VMware Vmplayer for Linux which solves my problems running AVRstudio, etc. Note that running Windows under a VM might not comply with their EULA (TSM$!) but Windows runs just fine this way.

There remains a few things you can't do on Linux such as play Blueray disks (I don't think Apple makes a BD drive for Macs, though there might be a third party USB3 external drive available), Netflicks, etc. Otherwise, it's a great OS. I run Linux Mint on both my homebuilt desktop and my T400 thinkpad.