Your choice: Windows, Linux or Mac OS X – YOU decide!

Hi everybody!

I hope everything is well for you! Today I’ve got a question which some might even call a religious one :)

I work as software developer at a big company and until very recently, every new employee we hired could choose whatever platform and/or hardware they are most familiar with. I think this is very beneficial because everybody can use „their“ favorite platform. The counter argument „increased administration overhead“ is not always true for software developer machines in my opinion.

What do you think? Are you able to use what you want at your current work site? Would you like to do so?

[poll id=“2″]

Again, what’s YOUR platform of choice and even more interesting: Why? Please let us all know in the comments section!

As for our company, most developers chose 27 inch iMacs. I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux very successfully since mid 2007 in an office environment (see My Story in Ubuntu Magazine). Most of our server are linux ones and since I’m doing mostly JAVA development so everything works fine on Linux.

Personally, I’m using a 27 inch iMac (which I bought used some time ago) or a Windows 7 PC for watching videos on a projector.

I’m very curious in what you are using :)

10 Gedanken zu „Your choice: Windows, Linux or Mac OS X – YOU decide!“

  1. On my personal computers as well as at university and work, I’m using some flavour of Linux (Mint, Arch, Ubuntu) because I feel that software development work is integrated into these systems very well. Plus, having mostly free and open software products gives me a lot of choices and allows for experimentation, because I needn’t buy before I try something.
    But everytime my desktop manager crashes (Cinnamon on Linux Mint) or some update messed up the standby feature on my Dell laptop (Arch Linux), I envied the Windows or MacOS users for the simplicity and high reliability of their systems. But for me, the UI of MacOS just contained a few too many, often very tiny annoyances or short-comings, which all together just made me still feel more comfortable on Linux.

    I use Windows only for games and for transferring data from my Android device, since I cannot get the latter one to correctly mount on Mint.

  2. I’m using a completely windows-based setup. In my opinion the system doesn’t matter and the person should use the setup he is most familiar/comfortable with :)

  3. As for me

    Linux provides maximum flexibility if you really want to understand what is going on technically. You’ve got all the tools you need, most of them are really good and proven since decades. 99% percent is free and because of package management is so simple to install / remove. Keeping everything up to date is just a breeze. Since the last 3-4 years the desktop is super easy to use and you can even get all your office work done very efficiently.

    The downside is driver support (resulting in stand-by not working on laptops, increased energy consumption, fans going on very often etc.) and the lack of some very mature professional programs.

    Windows (especialls since version 2000) is a very usable system. You’ve got TONS of tools and software for everything. Most of the software runs for years. If you’ve got a problem which can be solved with software, on windows, there’s a tool for it. Driver support is superb. The downside is you have to update your software individually, buy lots of (otherwise free) stuff (Winzip anyone?) and you carry along lots of legacy decisions (UTF-8 not being standard file encoding in Windows 7 is really soooo bad).

    Mac OS X has a rock solid Unix foundaition and a very easy to use interface on top of if. Due to limited hardware driver support is very good. Some productivity tools like Pages or Keynote are by far the best software you can get if you want good looking results very easy and very fast! Lots of advances functions you will not want to miss once you got used to it like a touch surface on you mouse for gestures and scrolling, timemachine super easy backup solution, rock solid system upgrade path of you buy a new version of mac os x.
    Downside really is Apple policy and that they want to push you into their universe. Sync only via iTunes, all those macbook monitor adapters for 30€ plus, memory soldered to mainboard (therefore no possibility for a later upgrade), non Standard Interfaces (lighning, monitor output or micro USB anyone??) are really bad for compatiblity. In my opinion Apple is more and more moving away from „professionals“ towards consumers (maybe people spending 900€ for their phone every two years are more lucrative then people buying a €2000 machine every 5 years)….

    As for me, every platform has their pros and cons so I really like to know and use them all :)

  4. I’ll prepare shortly for a week where I switch from iMac to Ubuntu for my personal computer. We’ll see how that will be… I’ll let you know ;)

  5. I generally use Windows based systems as I like to game ( this might change now with Stream support linux though!), but preferably I like CentOS 6, as I use it for my servers. It might not be the best linux distro for a PC but I like it this way as I can keep learning about the same linux distro as my servers so yea it’s all good!

    But right now, Win7 – I will skip Win8 (I like this OS a lot, but it will be the new „vista“ for most people due to the major changes they have made, so people need to adapt – just my 2 cents) as I will be moving to Linux very soon :) hopefully!.

  6. Hi! I prefer using Linux ubuntu because in my country(Nigeria) we have high virus threat and 99% of the IT people and offices uses Windows. So it is only when i am using Ubuntu that I comfortably feel free of threat.
    However, since i am not a geek rather a beginner who has high enthusiast in programming i cannot do either my favorites C, C++ and Java programming which necessitated me having to install Windows along side with my Ubuntu(Dual boot). I do hope that the day I am good in programing in Ubuntu, i will let go the virus threat OS-Windows.

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