Among the many exciting new challenges facing me at my new job is making a decision about which operating system to use on my new desktop machine.
For years I’ve been using Windows for development, but many of my respected colleagues made the switch to Linux years ago, and only use Windows if forced to by their evil corporate overlords.
Using Linux in many software engineering shops has become a kind of “badge of honor”. At my new job, I have been offered the choice, but I’ve noticed that most of the engineers use (Ubuntu) Linux, and I heard our sysadmin joke about “batting for the other team” in reference to using Windows. Yet for some reason we still use Microsoft Exchange, ActiveDirectory, Office, etc., and of course our web apps have to run on Internet Explorer. The Linux diehards Remote Desktop into a Windows box to test their code on IE, presumably at the very end of their dev cycle.
Like most software companies, we use Linux for our servers, so using Linux on the desktop makes it easy to share files with those servers. On the other hand, there are some very nice file sharing solutions for Windows, such as SFTPDrive (http://www.sftpdrive.com/).
As for applications, nearly all of the good, free apps that run on Linux also run on Windows.
Then there are some great tools that only run on Windows, such as EditPlus (a really nice, lightweight text editor), Yahoo Instant Messenger (with Yahoo Music support and nice email notifications), and TortoiseSVN (a great Subversion client that works as a Windows Shell extension). I spent several hours today looking for a good, free PHP IDE for Linux; so far all of the ones I’ve tried either didn’t work out of the box (e.g. Eclipse PHP plugin) or lacked features I really want. If I’m going to end up buying something anyway, the whole “something for nothing” allure of Linux starts to fade pretty quickly.
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As for the argument that Linux “never crashes”, while that may be true for the core OS, I experienced two Firefox crashes today, and in one case I had to manually kill the firefox process from a terminal before I could start it up again. I also had problems running Eclipse – window drawing issues that could only be cured by restarting the app.
Another annoyance is there are several competing version of Linux out there, and not all “Linux” software is available for all of them. In many cases you have to compile applications from the source to get them to work.
Don’t get me wrong – I think Linux is fantastic, and I’m really impressed by how far it has come over the years, especially considering the fact that most of the development is done by folks who apparently do it for free (perhaps motivated by a desire for fame in the software community, plus a chance to “stick it to the Man”). If I were starting a company, I would seriously consider not spending any money at all on Windows.
However, after a long day of putzing around with my Linux box, I’m already feeling the urge to return to the “dark side”. Anyone care to talk me out of it?
P.S. I use Mac OS X for my home machine, and I LOVE it.
…and is there some reason why you can’t/don’t use OS X at work? Why not feel the love during work hours as well. I use Parallels to help test websites/apps in IE as well as a Windows apps. Just works.
My employer doesn’t provide a Mac OS X option, and I don’t feel comfortable using my personal laptop for work. Otherwise, hell yeah, I’d be all over it.
So what’s the deal with Boot Camp? Have you tried it?
Similar to what John said, you could OSX and Parallels, or stick with Linux, bump up the memory and use VMWare (free) and install an XP license (relatively cheap?). Or just move to Windows. At the end of the day it’s all about what you’re going to be most productive in – that’s the highest priority. Second is to what extent you can get help/support when dealing with the rest of the company. If the rest of the company is Linux, go Linux. However, if they’re still (for whatever reason) locking themselves in to AD and whatnot, why fight that? I’ve done it before, and the rewards generally aren’t that worth it. You can always use Windows and put Linux in a VMWare session and get the best of both worlds there.
FWIW, I’ve had Eclipse problems with redrawing and what not on both Windows and Linux – I’m not 100% sure the drawing problem you had was just a Linux thing. I chalk it up as a Java thing.
The eclipse.org/pdt PHP Developer Tool project was just released a couple weeks back – it’s a bundle of Eclipse and all the PHP stuff in one pack. Have you tried that?
The ‘never crashes’ thing is becoming less of an issue. The core kernel rarely crashes (and generally then only due to hardware issues) but no one uses the kernel – they use userland apps. Apps still crash, and FF with multiple extensions is one of the worst examples now. Excellent browser, great ecosystem of addons, but flaky with memory usage. It’s what IE5 was 5 years ago in terms of stability, sorry to say.
But yeah, the remote desktop to test apps on IE – that’s just lame (sorry to be so vocal here!). VMWare and do it locally. Unless the issue is cost savings, but I’d imagine they’ve had to get a ‘terminal server’ license to host multiple people at the same time, right? Or is this serialized testing? 😉
My understanding of bootcamp was that it was a way to dual boot in to OSX or Windows – it’s not a ‘run at the same time’ thing like vmware or parallels.