When it is not the mandated option, under what circumstances is Windows the best choice for software dev? The only domain I can think of is gaming, and Valve is seemingly coming up fast to eat Microsoft's lunch in the next few years.
When it is not the mandated option, under what circumstances is Windows the best choice for software dev? The only domain I can think of is gaming, and Valve is seemingly coming up fast to eat Microsoft's lunch in the next few years.
As mentioned: gaming, most of enterprise dev, graphics/gpu/cad, desktop, certain classes of embedded. Broadly speaking, outside of hacker/web/creative culture, the default is windows.
Regardless of how evil gigantic companies can be, or what the ideal world should look like: from a pure usability perspective, windows is top of the list.
If I got 5$ every time a linux/mac enthousiasts has to tell me they just cannot run something, and proposing a myriad of workarounds to stick to their ideology, I could buy an apple vision pro and let it collect dust in the corner of my basement.
Game development, graphics programming and GUI tooling.
The alternative being macOS, if Apple actually had competitive prices for all kinds of world economies.
Valve is certainly increasing the viability of Linux as a platform for gaming, but I can't see developers targeting Wine or Linux for a major game over Windows directly. Not for a decade, if ever.