I'd say about 70-80% of the engineers I know in the Bay Area, including me.

Uhh, pretty much everyone these days, dude.

Debian on a powerbook (eat it).

I do, I used to code on a laptop running gentoo but got tired of spending too much time working as a sys-admin on my own system...

Now I use a mac and use prefixed portage to manage all the unix apps I use.

You use portage on a mac? How? Got a link?

It's not not a port of Gentoo Portage, but here's something similar: http://macports.org

There's also Fink, but for some reason I didn't like it when I first tried it (over 2 years ago).

I do.

Since 2002.

What do you code on?

Linux or BSD is where it's at for hackers. MacOS is nice too, of course, it's simple enough that my mom can use it. Just that if you really want to be in control of things, you probably want Linux. If I had to do sales or something else where looking flashy was important, I guess that would be another place where Apple's very nice looking products would be a good pick, but Dell+Ubuntu is a much better price/performance bet for someone who just wants to hack, a lot, and enjoys the freedom and control that come with free software. Admittedly, not for everyone, but then again, this site is for hackers, right?.

I want to be in complete control in my production machines (aka servers) not in my development machines. When I want to code I want to get it with the minimum hassle.

It's not exactly tough to code on Linux, so it's not an 'either or' proposition. Furthermore, you get the added bonus that if you set things up right, you can have very similar environments on your desktop and server.

And even on your desktop, there are good reasons to have more control than Apple might allow you to have. Steve Yegge's focus follows mouse rant is a great one:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-f...

... and finally, it's just cool, for anyone who really loves to hack, to get source code to everything.

I code on Kubuntu using vim. Macs are too expensive in my area + i don't really know of any advantages to kubuntu other than the prettier interface. My kde desktop is really fast and i can do my daily tasks really fast so i have no problem with it. Macs are probably cool too, but i enjoy flexibility more than pretty icons, and my crystal clear icons are pretty enough for me.

ps. Fluxbox is pretty too.

I will never cease to be amazed by how nerds can imagine anything (and read crazy sci-fi about it), but if an object can be described as "pretty", it cannot have any other positive traits.

That wasn't my point at all, and there are plenty of things to which I would ascribe many positive attributes including pretty - first and foremost my wife, who quite smart, and also pretty.

Or, you know, if you want to work without having to worry about ALSA taking a dump in your ears.

Me

I do.

Crazy talk. Apple hardware is nice, but OSX is at best mediocre for systems programming.

Why? I'm not hacking the kernel or anything, but I write plenty of systems-level code on Mac OS first and then port to Linux (usually painlessly). It's like any other unix. The only pain I can remember encountering was dealing with a MacOS calling convention weirdness (it uses 16 byte stack pointer alignment even on x86).

I'd still use OSX then virtualization to get to whatever OS I need. It does depend what sort of programming you need to do though.

Do many people still do systems programming? :/

A couple of years ago, I created a coin-op internet access system from a stripped down version of Debian, that ran in several hotels near Venice, Italy. It was pretty cool, and would have been difficult to accomplish with anything but Linux (infact, it replaced a windows system that never worked very well). Unfortunately the business side of things didn't work out very well because the guy I was working with was not really on the up and up:-(

I still have the code somewhere, if anyone's interested in doing some kind of deal.

Me.