Ask HN: In what OS do you develop?

2 points by humaninstrument ↗ HN
I program mostly in Ruby and Rails but I know that people have a hard time setting rails and ruby to properly develop rails applications in windows.

On the other hand, I find it slightly annoying to have to switch between my Ubuntu installation and my Windows installation to do different things and I'd like to centralize everything in one OS. What is your strategy for this?

5 comments

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For the last seven years I developed on Ubuntu/Debian desktop.

I recently purchased a Surface Pro with intentions of installing Linux on it, but actually was quite happy with Windows 10 (read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14062143)

Right now I use Vagrant to setup my dev environments, and honestly, even if I went back to a Linux based desktop I would continue using Vagrant boxes to handle my environments. It's so nice to be able to spin up/down, reset, etc all without messing up my home base.

I'm trying to set up vagrant on my windows machine, but I can never installed it properly, there's always some error when installing a box (for example, the trusty64 hashicorp). It always says "it can't find this box", no matter which box I use
Professionally, I program on my desktop running Ubuntu, and I interact with servers using Ubuntu LTS. On the rare occasion that I need test something in Windows, I boot up the Windows partition on my laptop. If I needed to use Windows more frequently, I'd look into buying or using a spare license to run Windows in either Virtual Box or VM Ware.
That's cool. Are you running ubuntu with unity or any other DE environment?
For a while I was running Lubuntu with AwesomeWM which I really liked but I had a hardware failure so now I'm just running stock Ubuntu with Unity because I haven't taken the time to setup AwesomeWM again. I can't say I'm sad that Unity is being discontinued because it's never been completely stable for me.