What is your favorite development platform, survey results

Not to long ago I posted an article on my favorite environment for software development. There was also a survey in that post asking about your favorite environment. The results are below.

Clearly, Linux is a winner. Here are some comments you guys added to a survey.

Can’t believe people are still using text editors to code… Visual studio rocks!

Well, not sure about this comment 🙂

Well, Ubuntu. For the package system, for the standard package archives and for the PPAs. And for everything else about it being good enough.

Windows 7, mainly because ive been using windows for, well ever. I find it really intuitive and i just know the tools really well. Windows 7 is really nice too.

Obviously I long for the day that will never come when I can develop my .net applications in intellij, deploy to a cut down windows vm for compilation and testing against iis… Anyway dreaming aside I pick mac osx for reasons you said and also because I have one and nothing beats dev on a native machine…

Mac is quite reasonable. Windows just feels clunky.

I need to be able to navigate to files and find things quickly, let alone use apps. Windows explorer/cmd is crap. Linux and Mac OS both work quickly and the command-line is effective. Mac OS X, however, just requires less of my time to maintain it than Linux. All three work similar from within an app like Eclipse.

Could be interpreted as a fan oy phrase, but for dev there is no better option than Linux…

I prefer Max because when I develop I am not just programming. Sometimes I need to check some screencast and last time that I used Linux (last year) I was not able to check all of them. Also I need a good mail and contact manager, I tried Thunderbird and Evolution. But none of them where satisfying my need.
Also i use my computer to develop and for personal use (creating video, music viewing videos). Linux is poor on that side.

I still have to fall back to Windows when working with clients who insist on using Outlook for calendaring and those horrible built-in surveys. Some aspects of my MacBook are pleasant, but I detest the keyboard layout – no home/end/pgup/pgdown and, worst of all, no visible # key 😦

We all got a favorite environment, but what is the actual one that you use every day at work? I’m using Visual Studio as there is no real aternative to .NET development. Fortunatelly ReSharper makes it usable 🙂

Thanks for your answers guys, Greg

Windows, Mac or Linux? Flavours of development environments

After a few months of using Mac as a playground and development machine I took a little step back to remind myself of all different environments/systems/platforms I was using in my short development carrier. I know what you think, that I will say Mac is the best. But it actually it isn’t. At least not for me. Why?

Linux

I used Linux in my early days of development. I was coding on practically knitted together pice of hardware with free operating system. I was using Mandrake and Suse, switching between them constantly . After few years I switched to Ubuntu. Using Linux as development platform was harsh and raw when I started. After few ups and downs I got to grips with it and it server well as platform for PHP, Java and Ruby development. With Ubuntu it was extremely easy to install new software and be up to date. I never managed to crash it (no blue screens of death).

There was one quite big issue with it though, lack of .Net development environment. I have to mention as well problems with file formats in the every day office life.

Windows

The only environment that I could develop on targeting Windows environment as runtime. With .Net and C# Windows became bearable and useful. I didn’t have problems with office documents compatibility anymore. It was possible to set it up with Unix like command line tools and possible to script and automate a lot of build/setup tasks. There was one very big flow in the setup. After few days of usage, somehow Windows manage always to crap itself with plenty of junk and gets very slow. The most common solution for that problem was … reinstall.

Mac

Very shiny and friendly. I love the 4 fingers swam and expose. It has Unix/Linux command line out of the box so I don’t have to install anything for that. Comes with a bunch of tools for development. Unfortunately most of them are for Mac development.

Once you would like to get a latest version of Java, Ruby or Python, it is impossible to simply change or upgrade the version as parts of the system (some OSX applications) depends on specific version. So … I was in a hassle to build it up for what I wanted it to be. Now when it’s ready, it rocks. It would be very cool if some of the task that needs to be done in order to make it work I had to google and spent some time on it.

So … for me the best platform is …. LINUX, TADAAA. Simple and to the point on installing different environments. Huge community with plenty of tips, easy to find. With OpenOffice.org and Google Docs pain of documents incompatibility disappears.

I guess for me the winner is the one that gets me up and running in no time and is very easy and Agile when I want/need the change.

What’s your favorite Platform? What do you like and what dislike. Please take a moment to answer this short survey or just post a comment 🙂 I will post the results and survey findings in next few weeks.

Survey closed

Greg

Quick Tip: How to setup Time Machine to backup to NAS storage

I was trying to setup Time Machine on my MacBook to create backup on network storage. It seems that by default it is impossible to do it, if you don’t have Time Capsule.

There is a handy command though that gives you permissions to see all types of storage in Time Machine setup.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

I am able to see my Network Storage in Time Machine now 🙂

Greg