Report: More Developers Use Linux Than a Mac

A new survey from Stack Overflow shows that significantly more developers use Linux than a Mac, though Windows maintains a huge lead over both.

“Each year we explore the tools and technologies developers are currently using and what they want to use,” the vaunted developer resource explains in its 2022 StackOverflow developer survey. “We have the favorite Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted data as well as Worked With vs. Want to Work With, which shows us precisely what developers used in the past year and what they want to work on in the following year.”

As for the platforms that developers use, Windows retains its lead, with 62.33 percent of respondents using Windows for personal use and 48.82 percent using it for work. Linux is number two, with 40 and 40 percent, respectively, while the Mac brings up the rear with 31 and 33 percent. Interestingly, Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux is in fourth place, with 15 and 14 percent usage, respectively, which indicates that the popularity—or necessity—of Linux with developers is even higher.

For non-developer “synchronous tools,” Zoom and Microsoft Teams are tied for number one with 56 percent usage, followed by Slack (53.43 percent) and Google Chat (20 percent). As for “asynchronous tools,” Jira Work Management is in first place by a wide margin (50 percent), followed by Confluence (40 percent), Trello (33 percent), and Notion (20 percent).

Moving onto actual developer technologies, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is by far the most popular integrated development environment (IDE), with 75 percent usage, followed by Microsoft Visual Studio (32 percent), IntelliJ (28 percent), Notepad++ (28 percent), Vim (23 percent), and Android Studio (20 percent). (Apple’s Xcode is a very distant 11th place with 10.5 percent.)

The most popular developer framework is Microsoft .NET, with 34.5 percent usage, followed by NumPy (27 percent), Pandas (25 percent), Spring (16 percent), TensorFlow (13 percent), and Flutter (12.6 percent).

On the web framework side, Node.js is the most popular with 47.12 percent usage, followed by React.js (42.6 percent), jQuery (28.6 percent), Express (23 percent), Angular (20.4 percent), Vue.js (18.9 percent), ASP.NET Core (19 percent) and ASP.NET (15 percent). Interestingly, Microsoft’s two web frameworks combined represent almost 34 percent usage, which puts them collectively into third place here.)

Amazon AWS continues to be the dominant web platform with 51 percent usage, followed by Microsoft Azure (29 percent), Google Cloud (27 percent), and Firebase (21 percent). And MySQL is the most popular database (46.9 percent), followed by PostgreSQL (44 percent), SQLite (32 percent), MongoDB (28 percent), and Microsoft SQL Server (27 percent).

The programming languages bit is particularly interesting to me. Here, JavaScript retains its dominance with 65 percent usage, followed by HTML/CSS with 55 percent, SQL (49 percent), Python (48 percent), TypeScript (35 percent), Java (33 percent), Bash/Shell (29 percent), and C# (28 percent). This is the 10th year in a row that JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language. Stack Overflow also determined which languages were the most loved and hated, and which developers wanted to work with most.

There’s a lot more in there, so be sure to check it out.