Steve Wilcox
Aug 28, 2017 · 1 min read

Having made the switch over a year ago, I did decide to have both a Windows boot and a Ubuntu. Linux boot managers are amazing and simple. My intentions of switching to Linux was simply to learn more web development, and I can say that having a familiarity with Bash command line is extremely useful for web development. Configuring a dev environment on Linux is essentially plug and play for many web tools. Windows often requires setting various environmental variables. I feel that every web dev tutorial would require a second tutorial of equal or greater length to just translate the principles to work on Windows machine.

That being said, Windows is the clear winner for other tech stacks and developing for lower level code not intended to run in a Linux enviornment. Want to make a 3D game? Want to launch a 3D game? Linux is extreme hard mode. Drivers support is non-trivial factor in both making and playing processor / graphic intensive games. I don’t even play that many games, but the Linux versions require work to troubleshoot, and that’s the last thing I want to deal with when I’m relaxing!

And even then, once you have a deep understanding of Linux, the Linux Subsystem for Windows is absolutely amazing. Most the benefits of a real Linux instance with the support of 90% market share product.

I think knowing both platforms are extremely useful. And many of the Linux lessons can transition over to Apple product development.

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Steve Wilcox

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Continuously in treatment for cognitive bias.