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Nishchal Gautam
Nishchal Gautam

Posted on

OS wars let's settle this right now

Let me re-ignite this flame one last time, but trust me, I'm sure you'll like what I have to say.

In past 5 years, I have been in 3 companies, in first company, they only asked me what hardware I want and what were the specs. I could choose literally any hardware I'd want. When I joined I saw majority of people were on windows, one guy was on mac and me being on Manjaro at first and Ubuntu when I crashed Manjaro. There the code we wrote was cross compatible, when any of us found compatibility issue, we fixed it.

On my next company I was locked down to windows but I was given a separate laptop after manager's approval which had linux mint on it, but most of the project under this company was in legacy .NET framework which meant working a lot with windows hardware.

My current company, everyone is locked down to a MAC even though all projects are in golang or elixir. There's no manager's approval to get other hardware. It's a company policy to give everyone a macbook pro regardless of developer wanting it.

My philosophy is that tools should work for me, I shouldn't work around the tools, there are small things I like to do, the virtual workspaces on linux, the guake terminal, all of these tiny things make me so much productive, now being locked to mac is making me working AROUND the mac instead of making IT work for me.

Now I'm not bashing on mac, if mac does what you want it to do, great. I guess what I'm saying is choose an OS which you're comfortable with, don't jump on the hype train, just because all the nerds are using gentoo or arch doesn't mean you've to do the same, if you're comfortable with windows, good for you!

Make your tools work FOR you, don't work around the tools, use what you're comfortable with. For me, workspace is a must, guake terminal is a game changer, and small tiny things I can't even remember to write it down, doesn't work on windows nor mac.

Now I know someone will say, "But windows has virtual workspace", yeah, but is it as good as what I have? Say I'm on my primary workspace where I write code. I want to listen to music so I open Spotify, but I realize Spotify doesn't belong in primary, so I can press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + DownArrow which moves my Spotify to music workspace, (I use 2x2 workspaces), there's no shortcut for that, windows has only horizontal workspace and no 2d Grid, don't get me started with mac, just to switch workspace, you need to use mouse. The support for external keyboard is non existent.

So for the last time: Let people use what they want to use. If they're building a iOS app, they'll ASK for mac, if they're building windows app, they'll ASK for windows, if that's not the case, there's no point locking people down to what YOU think is better for them, they know what's good for them.

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