The Environment for Beginner Developers

5 min readOct 2, 2018

Environment always influence productivity and happiness.

Every-time, environment not only refers to our working surroundings or the machine we work upon. There is a significant part of the developer’s environment is the operating system.

Yes! The operating system.

Nowadays most of the machine comes with the pre-installed OS i.e. Windows Or the expensive machines having MAC.

MAC is a good option for all kind of development and it also gives a better experience than windows but is not affordable by the beginners or the students.

Here Linux comes into play. The open source OS which gives more flexibility to do every work in your way. Open source which leads developers to contribute to the Linux project and the best part is the community where Linux users put their issues and their issues get resolved in either minutes or some hours. “Imagine you faced a problem in the OS and before you ask your friend you file an issue in the community and you got the solution- isn’t it cool!”.

I don’t think this is enough to convince you to switch to Linux. Many people think Linux is more secure so they wanted to switch. But Linux is as vulnerable as Windows if u miss configuring things in Linux you may get hacked or u get affected. And another myth “Virus don’t affect Linux”. VIRUS (Vital Information Under Seize) these are the computer programs which instructs the machine to work abnormally. And the truth is the around 90% of users in the world use different versions of Windows so, it is easy to target more machines with a single virus or a piece of code written to get executed in Windows.

After a lot you thought of switching to Linux but which one?

There are so many distros (distributions). Choosing the right one is quite tricky. You may find many videos in YouTube pitching Kali Linux is the OS to hack things. No, This OS comes with the tools that you can use to hack things. But the tools are used for pen testing by security researchers and if u want to use those tool you need to learn things. And being a developer you don’t need those tools and installing Kali is a waste as it will use more machine resources. There are other distros too like

Linux Mint
Kubuntu
Lubuntu
Fedora
Debian
Red Hat
Deepin
Ubuntu
Parrot os(used for pen testing)
kali (also used for pen testing)

And you can find more here but these are the popular ones.

In my opinion, you must try Ubuntu. Why?

It will give an interactive UI(User Interface) which helps you to do things efficiently. And before deep dive into Linux command and it’s GUI(Graphical User Interface) will help you in many ways. Apart from that Ubuntu had a greater active community which helps you when u face the problem.

“Ubuntu gets updates on a regular basis and compatible with more machines and it has better power optimizing system”.

Once you get familiar with the Linux environment it’s your choice to switch to other distros as well but must start with Ubuntu.

Advantages of using Linux as a developer?

We must use things which gives us good result or in developer’s term which is more productive.

Don’t you get bored from seeing the same type of windows theme, the same start button and all But in Linux, you can customize everything without using the machine’s resources. As Linux is open source it can be highly customizable even you can put your favorite colors to use in the theme.

So being a developer we use many CLI (Command Line Interface) tools which is easy to configure with the Linux terminal. The primary CLI tool we use is the git. And GitHub is the platform to collaborate with others. And you will come to learn more about CLI while learning through the intermediate stuff.

After reaching the intermediate level, you will come to know about npm (node package manager). It has a CLI which helps you to install packages and to manage dependencies. While installing those some time you face some random error in Windows which may be recursive in time but Linux, no such things will happen until you break some rule.

There are many resources available but out of them linuxjourney.com is the best one to learn and explore. Much-advanced stuff are there which you will figure out while learning. Before ending this article I would like to show you some screenshots showing my customised version of Ubuntu.