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Hello Power Apps community! My name is DOM and I am new to Power Apps development. I currently only have experience with full stack web development on Linux and Macs and very unfamiliar with the Microsoft stack (especially .NET, nuget, Visual Studio).
I am curious, how many of you out there primarily use MacOS or Linux for Power Platform development (PCF, web resources, plugins, etc)?
It looks to me like Microsoft is moving in the direction of making things more cross-platform, retiring the Mac version of Visual Studio and committing resources to Power Platform tooling on VS Code, CLI, etc. So far, I've been able to do all my training exercises on my Mac dev environment without any issues compiling or deploying. The community tooling I've seen in tutorials, most of them look like they are Windows only tools but I don't know how relevant/useful/obsolete they are in 2023.
You're not alone, but you are in the minority.
Yes, the community tooling is almost all windows-centric. None of it is absolutely essential, but there are a lot of big accelerators, like the XRM Toolbox, that might be a good reason to set up a dual-boot or VM. The CLI tooling cross-platform is good progress, but we do see issues here in the forum where Mac and Linux users hit walls (usually related to .net compiling: make sure .net is on PATH!).
Generally, yes, the tooling is becoming more and more accessible cross-platform but you will probably have difficulty from time to time, and this ProDev forum will be the place to go for help (though we too are mostly Windows folks, so be patient with us!)