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.