So I wanted to create a short post here and get some opinions from the community. Since I have gotten back to the web dev game I have been looking into what was a better OS to make my workflow faster.
I originally used to use a mac and have found that it was great for my development environment. But I have since moved back to windows and have found that well it lacks a lot of stuff. And is a huge pain when it comes to the command line and being able to install things.
Which brings me to my topic I have started using Linux on my laptop as a test. As I have found that the command line and the ability to install things on it is just night and day. For setting up a development environment. But It comes with the drawback of having to go the extra mile of running wine to use certain windows programs ect.
So my question to you all is which do you prefer. Also is there a way of setting up a fast windows environment to get a similar cmd?
Latest comments (66)
Linux.
This should not even be a question.
Windows is for profit and closed source, if you are a coder you need access to the real stuff behind your code. Also your code is more likely to run on a Linux server. (depends on what you do but...)
And then you got Mac OS.... If you want to be told what to do and how to do. (Sheeple 🤮)
I use Linux as my primary OS. That being said, I use VMs to do all my development. This saves my primary machine from catastrophic events (I live to experiment), and allows me to use different OS for different development projects. I have found this method has worked really well for me.
I'm curious about why you moved away from OS X( Mac)? As you state it, it's a solid Unix environment, with many more free tools than on Windows (cf. the recent Mint language), very similar to Linux.
At the time I moved away from mac because I was using c++ and I wanted a better graphics card. So I had bought a gaming laptop to suit the need.
Makes sense - at least for the graphics part, unless you want to pay a fortune for the high-end macPros.
Then unless your windows programs are unavailable in the UN*X world (e.g. probably related to gaming), you'll be much happier with Linux .
Even that's a non-issue for the most part these days, really.
I mean sort of is considering my mac does not have a 1060 in it and will melt LOL. and my desktop has a 1080 and cost the same amount of a basic mac.
Huh?
If you're replying to me, the non-issue I was referring to was Jean's "Windows programs unavailable in the UNIX world (e.g. probably related to gaming), you'll be much happier with Linux" assertion.
Considering I spent Sunday playing Borderlands 3 on my Manjaro rig, it's literally a non-issue on the gaming front for the vast majority of games these days.
Basically, unless you need something like Photoshop proper, which is notorious for not playing well with Linux (because Adobe), you'd very likely be happy with Linux.
I have not used Windows since Vista. Used MacOS for several years until I had to buy a new computer. A few months ago bought a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, twice the memory, twice the SSD and a better CPU than a Mac of the same price. The first day with the X1 I booted the preinstalled Windows 10 Pro, checked that all the hardware was working fine and then deleted Windows 10 Pro and installed Ubuntu. Yesterday I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 (pre-release). Love it!
I use a five-year-old windows laptop. The only hardware upgrade is replacing the DVD drive with an SSD. I write example code for a living, using VS Code and emacs. I also have cygwin installed, as I have a plethora of bash scripts I've written over the years and am loathe to have to rewrite them in PowerShell.
Everything works. That and MS Office tools are so much smoother than the alternatives. I also have a Mac Pro I use infrequently, and an EC2 instance on AWS I use for things that take a while to build, so I don't slow my Windows laptop down.
Horses for courses. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
I'm definitely biased toward Linux for everyday use.
Nevertheless I believe that it's possible (as long as using "outside packagesi" is allowed) for any of these platforms.
If you don't have what you want, OS X is probably the most limited in flexibility, but again source code is available for all of the platforms and binary images are available too.
Most of my professional career involved using Windows, but I actually began my career programming mainframe legacy development in PL/1, Cobol, and occasionally Fortran.
Once I moved to UNIX systems, C programs and shell scripts became the common toois. Moving to Linux was similar in experience to my early use of microcomputer systems and the first PCs.
I found a new sense of speed and enjoyment.
Windows hasn't stayed static. Many of the objections to the early systems have been improving, though Linux has more flexibility than the other systems, at the cost of a learning curve to figure out what makes sense for each person and environment.
So when we're honest there are features and limitations in each system and the choice to do what works best for both individuals and their employers is usually the deciding factor.
A lot of good opinions here, and here are my two cents.
I've given up on Windows but for gaming, I still use it. Everytime I boot it up, it's bad, and it feels bad. The performance is bad, access management is bad, if I have to do a quick tinkering on a server it's bad, opening anything while a process is running is bad. I don't understand why some of Windows' own widgets and windows are laggy. I mean, why would settings program be laggy? Why does task manager sometimes just hang?
I appreciate the amount of field specific softwares on it but I think we are not in the age of "Linux is hard, Windows is easy and has all the good apps".
Linux has great applications, very easy to use. It's much, much faster and really the much better options in a lot of cases.
Currently I'm learning how to create pixel art (I've been programming almost half my life now, never done anything art) and found a lot of fantastic applications readily available for Linux.
I'm the kind of person who likes to customize their environment to their liking and Linux is just amazing for that kind of thing. Doing so makes my opinions seem biased to my friends. Most of the time I get "I just want something that works". Well, does Windows really work? How many times has a software crashed and you had to wait a few minutes before continuing your work? Or how many times you started your computer and you had to wait for an update to finish? Or how many times something froze and you couldn't close it because task manager froze as well?
All in all, I prefer something that gives me the control when I want it and controls everything with reasonable defaults and with responsibility. Something that frankly, Windows doesn't provide.
I hope this wall of text is useful to you.
WSL 2 is not a solution! IT IS SLOW! Check this thread:
github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197
Development on the Windows is a painful process, whole Windows is a painful thing, I can recommend it only for Windows app development.
Hi my name is Bogdan, and I was devops in the past and now I'm SE, I have a lot of experience of work with Linux, Windows, MacOS operation systems.
Linux is very fast and it is the best OS for the backend development and for the docker. But I do not recommend it for the laptops! Linux don't have a good support for the laptops driver, do not have a good Resolution Upscaling and do not have any support of the gestures on the touchpad! :D But it is a good OS for the PC.
Laptops = MacOS. It is good for development, a bit slow with the file syncing on docker, but still better than en Windows or WSL2.
Windows....if you need to create something for it, use it. If you're working on backend or frontend or mobile development, forget about it! 1 Billion of users and Microsoft cannot even fix their update problems.
Linux don't have a good support for the laptops. That is a wild overstatement, if you have a bleeding edge machine chances are this maybe true, otherwise you're probably good to go.
Upscaling, again if you came in the bleeding edge, you probably have to wait. Blame the manufactures
Libinput provides touchpad gestures.
I use linux, on desktop, laptop, servers. Just recently got a machine with windows, and it is a lost cause honestly.
Um...both of those are two different tools and neither of them have anything to do with logging in to anything.
Which Linux developers, exactly? Red Hat? Canonical? The Arch crew? There are hundreds of different distributions. "Linux" isn't a monolith. Without knowing what distro you used or what the actual problem was that you had, your review is pretty much entirely without meaningful context.
For me it all depends on the project.
I tend to use Linux OS 90% of a time but just recently I been using Windows for my personal project due to pure laziness I say and not bothering to add Linux HDD back to boot list after Windows HDD got a fresh install.