Poll: Which OS do you prefer for development (coding) work?

3 points by techaddict009 ↗ HN
If possible please also share why you use that, what are pros and cons of the same.

If you have switched from one to other, please share your experience too.

4 comments

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I have been using Debian, and then Ubuntu since 1996. It "just works" compared to other OS's that don't let me do things like focus follows mouse.

I also like having the source code for everything.

You should probably also add the BSD's to your poll.

(comment deleted)
I like coding from a Mac, but running on a remote Linux box, as it's usually the deployment target.

Recently I've been doing a lot of Unity, for which I _greatly_ prefer OS X (to Windows, there is no Linux version even though it can build for it).

I prefer to run on my workstation whatever is running on the environment I manage. Which is Ubuntu Server. Thus I run the same release on my workstation (14.04.2 LTS), with i3wm.

I find that using the same distro on my workstation aids with local testing, not to mention just improving general familiarity. You could say the workstation is a "pre-dev" environment.

While I haven't necessarily switched "config" OSes, I do run Windows 8.1 at home (because gaming), and tend to use MobaXterm for remote administration. It's frustrating, mostly because I lack the "intermediary" between multiple servers.

Example: I needed to grab a bunch of files from a Mikrotik (no Bash there) with the format "syslog.(number).apr.09.2015.txt", only I wanted them all formatted as "syslog.(number).txt". So I just scp them over to my workstation and:

for $(ls syslog.*); do N=$(echo $i | awk -F"." '{print $2}'); mv $i syslog.$N.txt

This, obviously, is sorely lacking when running a Windows machine, even with the cygwinesque wrapper they so graciously offer.

I suppose this is relevant to all variants of Linux (or rather GNU/Bash), and I'm sure the same could be done on other OSes, but seeing as I work on Linux, gaining this level of familiarity can only be beneficial.