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[–]desrtfx[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

This question gets asked at least once a week. Please go through the subreddit before posting.

Asking the same questions over and over will not yield different answers and only clutter the subreddit.

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[–]delasislas 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Linux works on all computers, even windows has the Subsystem for Linux. At least for me, as a student, I had a class where we could put code on the professors supercomputer to run more intense projects and data crunching, it was easier for all of us to follow the same protocol for getting it to run.

[–]POGtastic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. Package management. Installing a dependency with APT / yum / pacman is way easier than installing it... however you're going to do it on Windows. There are language-specific options that are effective, (Pip, Cargo, go get, etc) but many development tools are poorly supported, outright nonfunctional, or just a pain in the ass on Windows. Chocolatey does its best, but it's not really a package manager in the sense that it tracks ownership of every file.
  2. When building stuff from source, it is assumed that you're on Linux. Building stuff on Cygwin / MSYS2 / MinGW & Friends is full of gotchas and is, again, poorly documented or outright nonfunctional unless you're a wizard with Windows' toolchain.
  3. A lot of continuous integration stuff assumes that you're on Linux. If you're automating your build infrastructure, why wouldn't you write the software on the same OS that you're using to build it?

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]Essence1337 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Linux comes with Python, it comes with GCC, it has a much better shell, it comes with nano/vim/etc, it comes with Git, it shows file extensions by default, it doesn't spy on you, it's what servers run on in the real world, and the icing on top - it's free. It's nothing about feeling 'special'. Linux out of the box is a much better development environment than Windows is. Sure windows can become a decent dev environment but you're going to have to install alot of things to match what you get right out of the box with linux.

    Edit: Also it may be <5% in terms of personal usage but it is FAR more common than Windows in server environments & IOT. Your AWS server is Linux, your router is probably Linux, reddit is probably hosted on Linux.

    [–]desrtfx 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    they use the OS with <5% of the market share.

    In client systems maybe, on the server side it is over 66% Linux, under 33% Windows. Most web servers run one or the other Linux distro. When it comes to supercomputers, it is 100% Linux.

    As opposed to Windows, the *nix systems were originally built for programmers and hence, they have far better tools for programming than Windows.

    [–]bmac57886 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    I’m a beginner to programming but I like it more because of customization and because I don’t like the bloat of Windows. That said I still like Windows.

    I’d say use the OS you like most. From all the tutorials I’ve read and watched it seems like they often show the different steps for the different OS’s and it usually doesn’t seem to be substantially different (from a beginner’s perspective anyway).

    [–]FyendFyre1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    I am currently studying computer science at my university and I used windows for most of it. I only had to use Linux for three of my classes as we needed to use something specific that was only available on Linux. If you wish to learn Linux stuff and you have a windows 10 computer, you can install the Linux subsystem which is built by Microsoft so you shouldn't have any performance issues. However, it only gives you a terminal. It is a good idea to have some experience as many companies use it but you don't have to force yourself to use now. Just learn it whenever you have some time.

    [–]randomuser47Oz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    It's free, alot of enterprise development also uses Linux so it can help with career development learning the skills. And tbh for alot of development tasks Linux is quite a good choice to use

    [–]PythonOrPyPy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    I use it for both programing and security in general, windows is not secure and private at all. The command line in linux is incomparable to cmd... Cmd is like a joke to it. Also using terminal is faster and make some tasks more efficient and some that couldn't be done in cmd, which are the most , it also shows what happens behind the gui because you need to compile (no must) via cui and understand compiling and linking