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Discussion on: Why would you consider Linux over Windows?

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James

I currently use Windows, but there are two big things I preferred about the time I spent using Linux as my daily driver for web development.

1) Tooling. I suspect this is a case of "everyone uses Unix (Linux/mac), so everyone develops for and supports Unix" rather than any actual superiority of the system, but I have always found tools and libraries much easier to install and configure on Linux systems than on Windows. Trying to get a ruby on rails development environment set up on Windows can be pretty tough. A lot of the time the solution to getting stuff working is "install cygwin", at which point you might as well just be booting into Linux anyway.

2) Linux systems rule the roost when it comes to web servers. If you're deploying a website or web application, chances are it's going on a linux server. Keeping your development environment similar to the deploy environment reduces the number of unexpected hurdles you're likely to face. There are things like docker, vagrant, etc. which are intended to fill that role, too, but in my experience you often spend as long trying to get Docker to work properly as you spend on the project itself.

I've been enjoying rails development on Windows a lot recently with Windows Subsystem for Linux, but... that's just a roundabout way of saying that Windows is better the closer it gets to being Linux.