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Is there any advantage to use a Linux machine to develop instead of Windows?

Everyone at work tells me to switch to Linux, since I'm developing hard-core on linux anyway. I manage 40 servers, and do everything from DB to data-backend to developing web services.

I don't find anything wrong with Putty. I"m just too lazy to install another OS... What do you guys think?

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    Please re-phrase the title so it's a real question.
    – fretje
    Mar 24, 2010 at 19:48
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    This sounds like Community Wiki stuff to me...
    – Ivo Flipse
    Mar 25, 2010 at 17:28

5 Answers 5

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IMO, if you can do the job efficiently, it doesn't matter whatever OS you're using since you're working remotely anyway.

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  • +1 "Efficiently" is the keyword here. But if it works, it works.
    – Michael Itzoe
    Mar 24, 2010 at 19:50
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I've found that a great combo is to run Windows as a host machine and to run Linux in a VM using VirtualBox. This way I can switch between machines as needed. Not that there is anything wrong with putty, but sometimes it's nice to connect to the remote host and scp files via dolphin or nautilus, or some other sort of thing.

And besides, there are a lot more solitaire games on Linux. :-)

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  • +1 This is how I do Linux-based dev work. The host can connect to the guest via ssh, ftp, or the network. Works great. If I could, I'd +1 again for the Solitaire remark!
    – Grant Palin
    Mar 24, 2010 at 22:12
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Seems to me that if you're essentially using other systems remotely, it shouldn't matter what your primary setup is. It doesn't make a difference at the other end of the connection, and I imagine you get your work done regardless.

Speaking for myself, I do some dev work on Linux, but am quite happy to be using Windows most of the time.

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I was the same for the first 6 months of my last job, and then I got asked to try out VMware Workstation, and I had a new found appreciation for virtual-machining.

Putty et al are great for console stuff, and yeah, most of the time you can create a served website to display any needed graphics, but for some applications, even being able to redirect x-sessions and do things like (shock) mount drives over NFS / SSH is a great plus. And you still get iTunes.

(I'm currently switching over from win7 with a half dozen VM's to Ubuntu, so i fell for it eventually)

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I was working on a medium sized Java and Maven project on Windows. I and about half the team eventually switched to Linux and we did notice that build times dropped to around 50% of the Windows build time. All the disk access stuff just seems significantly faster under Linux.

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