A lot has changed in the world of computing over the years. In the early days, computers were primarily used for work purposes. But today, they are...
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I think the "original" reason was probably just that the Windows command line is a tragedy, while Bash is wonderful. Nowadays, Windows itself is a tragedy.
That said, I actually use Windows because I need to scan things. This is itself a blast from the past, since the reason to use Windows back in the 90s was that there were a lot of problems with PCI 56k modems on Linux.
It wasn't just the command line. There were problems with Windows that made some things nigh on impossible; especially in relation to node: IIRC there were limitations to path lengths and deeply nested dependency trees that broke things badly. There was also the infamous node-gyp problem: github.com/nodejs/node-gyp/issues/629
I moved to Linux exactly because of these issues...
Huh? Scanners work just fine with Linux. I use mine all the time. I just plugged it in - worked immediately
I would like to know the scanners name
Canon PIXMA MP240 - combined printer/scanner
I use an Epson printer/scanner, network connected, and it works just fine.
Also Epson ships Linux drivers.
HP has very good Linux support with it's HPLIP driver suite. Never ran into issues.
I also use HP both pc and laptop, with Parrot OS
you have have a linux subsystem on Windows, and it runs anything you want, so a POSIC terminal is no longer a problem on Windows.
A sane command line is now the least of Windows' issues. After all, we now have a Windows that forces you to update, forces you to associate it with a Microsoft account, and actively surveils you. On top of having an increasingly absurd configuration system.
I know there are workarounds for these things, with varying effectiveness, but you shouldn't have to work around an operating system so heavily.
Absolutely agree with you.
While windows is usable, it still tells you actually you don't own your system, on every opportunity they have.
Also Linux is a great option for developers as it provides a native support for developer related software. Technologies like docker, shell, packages, are designed and tested for Linux making it a reliable and developer friendly option.
Linux supports the FOSS principle, thereby giving the freedom to the user regarding the usage and creation of the programs.
Thanks my linuxmate..
I work in finance but I do side jobs in my free time using Ruby on Rails.
Windows was very problematic and since I moved to Linux my life has been easier
Never have i ever touched Ruby on rails
You can try it, it's fun working with Rails 🤣
No problem Djangomate ;)
After 4 years on a company issued MacBook I was happy to return to Linux as my daily driver for one simple reason: I am in control.
I feel like both major OSs are being dumbed and locked down, taking heavy inspiration from iOS and Android. At least Windows keeps some user's agency, mostly for legacy reasons, and WSL with new terminal make it a decent working environment. But macOS, with its constant "call home" due to app notarization and other anti-user "features" insults me.
Also, window management both on Windows and macOS is inferior compared to most Linux desktop environments.
Working with hp, i heard macOS are cool, but from your knowledge it seems Linux is better than all of them
It is cool alright, for some definitions of cool. 😉
The more correct title is "Why do developers prefer Linux over Windows?". I wouldn't make the same claim over Mac, as I see it as the preferred platform for many (most? how does one know?).
Let's see what the numbers are on the latest Stack Overflow survey. According to survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#sect...
62% use Windows personally
49% use Windows professionally
40% use Linux personally
40% use Linux professionally
31% use Macs personally
33% use Macs professionally
Perhaps the best title for your article should be "Why I prefer Linux over Windows"
Surprising results considering the number of companies forcing you to use Macs.
Got you, Thanks for the source
Good point. But I think a good number of older developers rarely participate in this survey. I think mostly newbies do participate in it.
NB
This is just my observation.
Sure, it will be good if they bring part of their side
Linux is incredible faster compared to Windows and also security it suited in most workspace. Linux uses less resources, dont have much bloatware, Open Source, Free of costs and Fully customizable but in terms of Gaming thats another story.
Window is heavier because of many application i guess..
not just the application itself the Operating System. The idle in windows 10 is about 1.6GB and in windows 11 more than 2GB. But in linux particularly in Linux Mint the idle was just 800MB of RAM.
Sure, Windows 11 failed to run on my 8GB RAM machine, I had to use backdoor.😂😂
It able to run perfectly on my lowned machine tho but i cant just use an OS that consumed half of my ram which is just 4GB. so i instead uses linux for workspace and normal usage and windows 11 specifically only for gaming hahahhaha
I guess just working on Linux is friendlier than Windows?
I tried Linux a long time ago and loved it. Everything was just running smoothly.
I'm still using Windows OS for development though. I think I'll probably stick to that for the time-being.
No prob, i actually use both linux and windows..But for dev I prefer Linux..
Linux is like a lightsaber in star wars trilogy and open source is the force
😂😂😂lightsaber in star wars🙌🙌
I mainly use Windows for development, mostly so I don't have to reboot to play games, and because it's generally very easy to make JavaScript applications that work fine on any major OS.
But Linux wins hands-down for actually deploying code because:
Number 1 is the main one. Windows Server is okay, but having to buy licenses puts it way behind Linux in terms of deploying code.
Sure, i migrated to linux because of deployment reasons
For me, it isn't Linux per se, it's any Unix-like system.
Linux? Great!
AT&T Unix? Great!
SCO Unix? Great!
DEC TRU64 Unix? Great!
FreeBSD Unix? Great!
macOS Unix? Great!
Cygwin on Windows? Close enough!
I'm aware of — and use — MinGW, WSL, and Git BASH (Git for Windows). But I have a fondness for Cygwin.
The Linux distributions I've used a lot have been: Yellow Dog, SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, and Raspbian. I'm still using Raspbian. I'm seriously considering the Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition that has Ubuntu LTS preinstalled.
So you are roaming trying to use all the OS😂😂I like your exploration.
I try to make the switch to Linux at least once a year, trying with different distro's but ultimately I always go back to Windows after quite some time, just because it works for me. I don't know if my hardware isn't super compatible with Linux but it always ends for me with everything not working, my taskbar missing and I cannot install any app because of some package manager errors which you have to manually clear for a few hours.
I love Linux, it's customization and I really would like to use something private, I try the UNIX but in the end it just stops working for me at some point. The longest working distros for me were Pop OS and Mint and were using both of them for around 10 months but then... I don't know, maybe it's just not for me.
My reason: Docker just works.
Haven't tried this
Interesting explanation why developers prefer linux. If you only compare Windows and Linux, I tend to agree with the points but the comparison with macos is missing. Sure you could argue that macos is close to Linux.
I will look into this
Also you can make your own Linux distrib with only software you need (core stack is constant)
Never tried this, I think I will give i a shot
Here is how linuxfromscratch.org/
Thanks G
When you use Linux, people also think you are some hacker man, which is always a nice thing to have.
You can do simple hacks though, like weak wifi
The most obvious reason, not really listed here, is you own your system when you use Linux, and that is not the case on Windows or OSX,
For example, I wanted to have my Windows machine on (for mining), and damned windows would restart it for updates every night, the only way to shut that off is to mess with the registry, but that change can break with an update.
I keep Windows for gaming (yes, I mine and game on the same PC), so what id I do to fix this? I bough a small SSD, installed linux on it and now it does what I told it to do, very simple.
Thanks for insight
Developers prefer linux over Windows ? Really ? What's your source ?
Only newbie will prefer windows, but as time goes by, dev change the OS...
Again, based on your intuition or some concrete stuff ?
According to data have gathered from quora
For me, Windows is buggy and noisy about Windows Auto Update (try to turn off but not work) when update some driver is crash, I have bad experience with Docker long time ago. Linux is best for me but some daily use app not have, Today I use macOS(mb pro) instead it stable and can develop my main job (iOS Dev) and easy setup like bash or linux/unix env.
When i buy my first macbook i might try macOS...😂😂yearning to explore that
Well, in my opinion Windows is much less documented and doesn't allow users to customize & personalize by design. Thus for developers like us it's not always possible to tweak as per the requirement of programs. Or doesn't allow us to learn more about how it works from inside or which code does what or what breaks the code. Thus leaving a gap between our research while development.
Rather if windows adopts open source at it's core like powershell, we'd love to develop on windows and research about how they made it possible at it's core.
Do you think Bill Get will allow that..Open source, Naaa
Naa! 😂 Nevertheless the company is embracing open source linux technologies for building windows...
Two are the reasons I prefer Linux:
That's it for me.
Decent shell
All the hating on windows here...and yet every Linux GUI OS is striving to be more like Windows, because let's face it, windows is easy to use. Always has been easier than linux flavors.
Anyway, i love linux, for command line, still have not run into a nice linux GUI that made me quite windows for it. [And windows doesn't force updates, you can stop them, and windows doesn't force microsoft accounts, i don't use one]
The main thing windows still does for me over linux any day is gaming. Linux gaming just hasn't caught up to windows, is all.
But really, who cares? The vast majority of developers have no clue how the operating system works anyway.
Most devs just want their tools to work, as a web developer, for me that means being able to run servers. I run Node just as easily as WAMP and i use Git as easily via CLI or github desktop. The tools are there and they work. All this complaining about the OS is pointless.
The GUI point is funny when we look back in history. Linux used to be a very special UNIX-like project for academics, and I remember early Linux distributions in the 1990s used to boot without GUI by default, so we had to configure and type
startxif we thought we needed a desktop environment. At the same time, other UNIX systems like IBM AIX already came with the common desktop environment (CDE) based on the X Window System which originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984, one year before the first version of Microsoft Windows was released.Apple sued Microsoft for stealing their ideas, as - years before the Mac(intosh) - Apple Lisa already had a graphical user interface back in 1983.
Windows has not been taken seriously as a gaming platform for many years to come. Before DirectX was released in 1995, " programmers had found the Windows environment more difficult to develop for compared to MS-DOS or other gaming platforms."
I have used Commodore's BASIC command line and Workbench desktop, MS-DOS Personal Computer command line, Microsoft DOSSHELL, Windows 3.0 to Windows 10, Classic Mac OS 7 to Apple macOS 10.15 Catalina, and I have been using Linux since maybe 1997 starting as a nerdy alternative after getting upset about Windows software problems again and again.
My personal reasons I prefer Linux as a developer: 100% configuration control, not bound to any major company forcing me to login, update or provide tracking data, no need to buy any license (I do pay for software licenses and support though and I donate to open source projects if I enjoy their products), and better performance (faster and needs less memory compared to Windows on the same machine).
Additional reasons I prefer Linux in general: I'm not a gamer, and I don't like Microsoft's recent UX design decisions wasting screen estate with clunky UI elements that can't be properly themed apart from changing colors. Last but not least, as a German, I despise their inconsistent and confusing translations that do not even sound like proper German language to me.
love the history lesson :)
And yea, i get that a lot of devs love the 100% configuration control....personally i don't care to control every little thing so Windows has been fine for my needs.
My main beef has always been gaming. If linux has been mainstream with gaming i'd probably be using some flavor of it. I used to mess with linux OSs a lot but it's been at least 10 years since i last installed one.
I do use linux exclusively for my web servers as anyone who's on microsoft's platform, using .NET or whatever for web servers is just masochistic and wants to suffer all the time lol
I understand , gammers stay with windows
Nowadays with Proton and Lutris and EAC ported to Linux, there’s not very many games that you can’t play on Linux.
Haven't tried that..Thanks
Configuration easy
I love it because it provides closest feeling to server environments.
serverful OS
Installation and maintenance of developer tools over years is consistent and stable and works as expected. This is at least why I use it.
Here we go linux😂😂You dint talk about Linux
But what is your best Linux distribution and why ??
I do use parrotOS, aint into cybersec but the whole wide range of inbuilt packages just make it easier for prgramming
Closer to something usable, everything is applications and apple trash, I'd imagine dev's enjoy being able to be closed to an actual source like c rather then anything beyond c++, also coding on slow computer would be frustrating.
It's all about what you want to support, slow trash or actual computing.
Disadvantage of windows?
Slower then linux , extra applications processes and executions running on start up and windows is a larger operating system as a file then linux is so it creates more "lag" and takes more ram and rom to use, also I think licensing or something I know applications if you force them to stop will reboot your computer, linux is
C,Linux, then application
Windows is c,windows,applications but the applications are rooted to the windows operating system
much like a virus the app can't live without the windows and sometimes without the virus the windows ceases to exist as an entity.
You seems to like this movie lol
"The Matrix"
Probably could find it on piratebay BitTorrent thing
Sure, when t comes to deployment, We cant talk of any other OS except linux
Good article. I think Windows became more and more bloated over time and less performant relying heavily on the power of the processor to compensate. Also, the registry still a mess and get also bloated over time. This legacy thing was good at start, but not anymore. MS have a great IDE for development, but it gets too heavy with all the frameworks and .Net things. Linux philosophy is more like “on demand” so, that keeps things lean and efficient.
Another important point, with Windows 10, 11 and soon 12, developers knows they are loosing more and more controls to MS. Yes the OS is free, but at what cost? Your privacy and ownership!
May be because security, easy to work with command line interface, provides quick responses from server and compatibility to different types of technologies.
Quick result is a turn-ON
Thanks for insisting on security
I'd love to switch to Linux, if it wasn't to Adobe to ruin everything for me (I actually depend on some of the CC-Apps because the alternatives kinda suck atm (imo)).
whatsap with Adobe
Because docker run faster in native!!!!!!
Sure
Sure, this is true
Because it's better than windows and open source 👌
Simple reasons😂😂sir Thanks
Exactly 😜
Well according to the stack overflow survey they don't, and by a large margin so 🤷
survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#sect...
You had to fetch the data from Stack, Thanks for the insight, but based on Qoura, its linux
From my standpoint, most developers prefer OSX. While it's Unix based, I believe it's not considered Linux IIRC. Personally, I'd never change my good ol' BSPWM tiling for some fancy trackpad 😅