> I didn't really see he benefit over dealing with Windows
What possible nightmare bugs could macOS have that would lead you to this claim? I'm really curious. They'd have to be big ones because I've been developing on Lin/Win/Mac for 6 years and nothing comes close to the pain of developing on Windows.
The cat versions since Tiger were pretty much flawless upgrades and never had any issues. Then the mountains came, and upgrades never went as smoothly and problems would crop up. Display driver issues, Wifi would just disconnect, strange performance issues (I think caused by CPU throttling to keep the fan quiet), it was a while back. Then the display developed a bright yellow vertical line DURING the upgrade to Sierra. So annoying. The Apple store people said I needed a new motherboard. Nothing helped, downgraded to Mountain Lion. I don't like the new MacBook Pros that came out since, so I switch to a Surface. However, High Sierra came out so I pulled out the machine with its bright yellow line and upgraded. The line was gone.
Honestly, Apple software and machines have way too much magic locked away and hidden. This was acceptable to me when everything was perfect, but those days are gone. I check the Apple support forums from time to time. MacBook keyboards come to mind.
Oh, ok, these are anecdotal bugs and not something systemic and real, like, say the redesign of the file system or memory managers or the driver system.
I've had 3 macs over a decade and they've all been flawless. My 2013 MBP is still my trusty workhorse, my Mac Mini handles the living room.
Only issue ever was Catalina when my chinese 32-bit Alfa drivers stopped working, but I had two OSes worth of warnings. And my new iPhone 7 sometimes cannot make calls because the phone app crashes and I have to reboot (bahahahah wtf apple... YOU HAD ONE JOB!!!). SO there's that.
I've got dozens of anecdotal issues with windows though: I still have to sit and wait 60 seconds to see what is in my recycle bin (or any folder with large # files) for Explorer while it does a bunch of bloatware internet checks behind the scenes to tell me things I don't need to know. Or my system randomly grinding to a halt due to upgrades. Or the spontaneous 100% network usage associated with services that require me to get a coffee while they finish (because rebooting will kill an hour). Or the Device Manager that hasn't changed since Win2000. Oh, and I love the advertisements for games in my start menu. Or being able to actually stop windows updates (twist: even dinking with the registry still is undone).
Battle of opinions here, obviously: but the Candy Crush showing up my start menu really sealed the coffin on Windows being a serious platform.
Oh yea, if I wanted to really torture myself I could dev exclusively on windows with, like, the ARM toolchain for GNU. That would be insanity. I thought you meant cross compiling the other way: from linux/mac to windows.
Um, I'm talking writing the code on linux and targeting Windows using Linux cross compilation. The compilers are run on linux. The code is targeted at windows. You'd need windows to run it. Windows is the target.
Developing on windows has gotten much better recently. VSCode is my favorite IDE, and with wsl its easy to hop onto bash when I want to. Now that its easy to mount onto wsl there isn't much more I'd ask for.
What possible nightmare bugs could macOS have that would lead you to this claim? I'm really curious. They'd have to be big ones because I've been developing on Lin/Win/Mac for 6 years and nothing comes close to the pain of developing on Windows.