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Ask HN: OS for doing back end development?

1 points by burntoutfire ↗ HN
What would you recommend as an OS for doing backend development?

Nowaydays, backend development pretty much means running a lot of docker containers, so I'm thinking Linux is the best fit. Anything else (OS X, Windows) will have to run the linux kernel in a VM for docker, which sounds inefficient. Any thoughts on this?

EDIT: two more thoughts:

1. Linux comes with potential drivers issues as well as poor scaling (4k) support. So, the comfort from native docker has to be weighted against these.

2. The M1 MBP seems like a great machine, but I hear it's completely unusable for backend development - you need ARM binaries inside containers, while images are built for x86. Did anyone find a workaround for that, or do we ineed have to forgo these sweet machines?

8 comments

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kaycebasques
I am only a tourist in this space (I run personal sites etc. but do not do any heavy duty engineering nor am I an expert here) but I usually default to Ubuntu. I'm familiar with it because it's my day-to-day personal OS, and it is usually well-supported whenever I use a PaaS (or it's the default, recommended choice, as is the case with Heroku I believe).
thecrumb
Linux. I haven't tried WSL2 yet on Windows but WSL was slow, and currently Docker on Mac is really slow. It works but you don't realize how slow it is til you do the same thing on a Linux machine.
linkdd
Docker + WSL2 + VS Code in WSL is a terrific experience.
fsflover
> Linux comes with potential drivers issues

Buy a device with preinstalled Linux, and all "potential" issues will not be affect you.

burntoutfire
Drivers - yes, if I limit myself to laptops with Linux support (although from what I'm seeing, Lenovo has recently started selling its laptops with Ubuntu). But what about scaling issues? Just recently someone wrote here that they had to switch their screens to lower non-native resolutions, because 4k caused too many issues under Linux.
fsflover
Some people complain about the 4k support on Linux, other people say it's working fine. I guess, in case of the preinstalled system, you will be able to complain to the vendor and it should work.
burntoutfire
I'm more worried about specific software I want to use (such as Intellij IDEA) working correctly. Even on Windows, some older programs don't handle scaling well (i.e. SumatraPDF), I suspect Linux situation is worse.
yuppie_scum
Intel Mac is fine if you can afford Docker Desktop or get Podman running.