Why do programmers/developers like to use Linux?

[Haituga]

I know, this question tends to be philosophical. I am an Security engineer that only has the view from my traineeship as a systemintegrator.

This question ties a bit into my work and I'm looking for a bit of a fresher insight, as I am anything but a programmer.

Is it the scalability like Docker and Kubernetes?

That Linux has pretty much every compiler you could wish for?

Is it more efficient to compile on the same hardware, when you do it with Linux?

 

I am currently confronted with many questions like this. Maybe you would like to share you insight.

 

Thank you so very much.

[will0hlep]

Depending on the distro Linux can have alot less overhead than windows which makes it faster for this kind of work.

 

Linux also has other advantages like it's resistance to most malware (malware has to be designed for an OS to invade that OS and almost no one builds malware for Linux distro). Linux is also very reliable/stable.

[Needfuldoer]

It costs $0 to deploy on as many machines as you want.

[Sauron]

There can be plenty of reasons, for me a big part is the ease of scripting and system automation. On Windows scripting everyday tasks is more difficult and less reliable due to the relative obscurity of the system.

[TeeQue]

being a bit ocd, I like everything to be as minimalist as possible. So for developing when it is possible I will always use my Linux machine. But since I work mostly in dotnet it sometimes require windows for some stuff. But then again I have a completely ripped windows install to remove every bloat I could with something like NTLite. Overall it is much more pain free to develope on linux bc of the os and also if you are deploying your software on linux it becomes easier to work on linux as well.

[10leej]

Actually usable error messages on compile time.

[wasab]

For personal and work computers, developers follow the same trend as general consumers. It is windows follow by Mac and then linux. It is when deploying the applications that os are swap to linux for hosting.

 

Few are actually coding web applications on linux for example even if the target os for hosting the said application is linux thanks to cross platform nature of most web dev tech stacks. The only caveat is if you actually need the target os to develop effectively. This can be for making a linux only app or cross platform apps that you need optimizations or configurations for specific platform like games for example in which your only choices to test run/set break points during debugging is either running on the actual target operating system or inside a virtual machine. 

[Normand_Nadon]

At my workplace, the Devs use both Linux and Windows... Depends on the target OS... When working on desktop apps for Windows, in C# and dot.net... Windows is used.

 

Pretty much everything else is done on Linux... Since most of our dev efforts are deployed in docker, on webservers and on Linux Servers, it makes no sense to use Windows!

(And don't talk to me about docker on Windows, or running it in WSL... The experience is utter trash when compared to running it in native Linux!)

 

We are setup as follow:

Pop!_OS Linux machines with 32GB of RAM and 6 cores CPUs... We run Windows in a VM through Virt-Manager when programming on Windows is needed (and we use Windows server in the VM for it's lightness and non-bloated nature!)

My role is mostly sys-OP, so 99% on Linux... I use my Windows VM only when I need to run Powershell scripts against the Azure infrastructure the other part of the business is using or for some occasionnal Excel or PowerBI stuff

[maplepants]

I was a DevOps / SRE consultant and have worked with people who use macOS, Linux, and Windows to make web and mobile apps. So no gaming, desktop GUI, or other types of develop. So my experience is going to be different from other people. For example, I know a guy who works on hardware that's used in broadcasting opera live to movie theatres. He uses Ubuntu, but his reasons aren't really the same as mine. I also have a friend who works on in flight entertainment and while her and I both use macOS, it's not 1:1 for the same reasons.

 

Personally, I use macOS with Ubuntu VMs that I manage using multipass (https://multipass.run), and some cloud VMs I use for dev work too. I always use Linux in my development flow because it "just works". Code I write is typically in Python, Go, Javascript, or Java and the Linux toolchain for all of those languages are absolutely first class. 

 

Since I started my career as "programmer" in "operations" and the industry moved into "DevOps" one of the big moves has been towards reproducibility. Linux is a huge part of how we gained so much reproducibility. In the old days you'd have your windows devs running some janky WAMP stack the Linux guys have never heard of, the Mac devs would be using a stack closer to prod, but not exactly the same, and the few desktop Linux devs there were would be spending a lot of their day debugging hardware issues on their workstations. 

 

Nowadays desktop Linux is way better, and an actual viable option. Also things Docker, and build pipeline tools such as Jenkins ensure that not only are you getting what you expect to be getting deployed on PROD, but you reproduce it on your localhost too. It's amazing. 

 

The distinctly early 2000s pain of some dev running Windows XP trying to find out why this Python script written on a Mac is throwing errors in our Windows Server 2003 server is gone. And it's mostly because of changes to modern Linux. Improvements in Linux and open source software are why a GitHub project can just give you build instructions and know that they'll work. Modern Linux and it's core tools "just work".

[SydneyBrokeIt]

Linux exposes a lot of the things you need to get to quickly, and true package management makes it so much easier to do what you need to do.  Setting up Ruby on Windows used to be a nightmare -- the company I work for uses Ruby and we *still* discourage devs from using Windows, unless it's through WSL.

 

Linux is also where most web apps will be running; it has a lot of functionality that makes modern development easy (like Docker); almost every language has Linux as a first class citizen, when Windows is... uh... it's an H1-B holder at best?

 

Plus, lots of devs love to tinker.  Heck, I have a *good* job, and I only have it because of my tinkering for the last 18 years (oh goddess above 16 was 18 years ago).  

[chaslinux]

On 3/17/2023 at 7:10 AM, Sauron said:

There can be plenty of reasons, for me a big part is the ease of scripting and system automation. On Windows scripting everyday tasks is more difficult and less reliable due to the relative obscurity of the system.

Not a programmer, and I think you've nailed the reason for me. BASH scripting is very accessible, with a zillion examples out there, and all the tools are free. All of the work I've done on hardware probing tools couldn't have been done without all the free tools available on Linux/*BSD. Being able to pipe commands together, cut, redirect output - just sweet! I'm just a hack, but what I'm scripting is helping us automate some of our processes in a way we couldn't before without spending.

[ToboRobot]

Tools.
Developing on the platform you are deploying on.
Ideology (OSS, Anti-MS/Apple).
Personal preference.

[Fordle]

Unix and unix based systems are some os the most popular and ubiquitous systems in the world. Thus, working on Linux which exposes the Unix system makes a lot of sense.

[wasab]

On 3/25/2023 at 11:07 AM, Fordle said:

Unix and unix based systems are some os the most popular and ubiquitous systems in the world. Thus, working on Linux which exposes the Unix system makes a lot of sense.

all the devs i know all use unix/unix like os via ssh at some point. i have rarely seen anyone using it as their personal os (aside macos) however. i am the only one in my company in fact. mac os and windows tend to be the os these devs actually code on. when they do deployment, they just git push to their company repo and then devop script and whatever CI/CD pipeline would take their code and deployed it from there, either on docker or something else.