Like the author says:
> Linux is the preferred platform for development
Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge
> Linux is the preferred platform for development
Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge
This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago, so for many switching only became viable relatively recently
Which, similarly has more than convinced me to fight for PostgreSQL over MS-SQL everywhere possible.
Hu... use Dolphin?
There's literally nothing special about Linux when it comes to development. And there are quite a few downsides especially when it comes to some specialized tooling because many vendors often only have Windows tools for their devices.
For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.
For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially development that involves vendor provided physical devices: Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent otherwise. I'll note this is starting to change, but it's not yet over the hump.
The only place I'd consider macOS as a "perfectly fine" linux alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it with borderline abusive policy/terms). Otherwise it's just a shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host of other issues. It's not really even "prettier" anymore.
I've been at several corporations and companies where the target OS doesn't matter in the least, and I've had multiple projects on my own where it was the same.
Most of development is so far removed from actual hardware and actual OS, it doesn't matter if your backend is developed on Mac and runs on Linux.
Funny enough, the bluetooth stack works better on a bare metal Linux box than a Windows one. Audio starts being played sooner.
I had a friend who runs Windows host (because of gaming) and Linux as a guest OS for development for the same reasons :)
I certainly don't find development tools better on Linux, particularly for C++ debugging. Windows/Visual Studio is the leader in that regard.
I have also done C#, PHP, Java, JS + web development across all 3 and don't see the difference.
Linux for desktop is a joke, always have been since at least Slackware 7.1 running at my 486
I switched from Windows in 2018 because I was trying to install some Python packages, and it was hours of work to find the specific visual C++ runtimes that were needed to get them working.
On Linux: pip install, done.