This piece must read a bit biased. Professionally I’ve been into full-fledged development on Windows for a few projects but I’m using Linux for more than a decade and I favour it to proprietary operating systems. There’s a reason Linux is known as the hackers’ OS (besides the fact it’s also the most hackable OS). This article is to explore the benefits of using Linux as a developer on a reference distro like Fedora or Ubuntu or openSUSE.
- Linux comes with lots of stuff installed by default or in the default repos
- Powerful terminal emulator with multiple shells
- Editors: vim, emacs, kate, gedit
- Compilers, interpreters, scripts: gcc, llvm, openjdk, shell, python, perl, ruby and much more
- Assembly, parser: nasm, bison, flex, yacc
- Debugger: gdb
- Text processing: sed, awk
- The powerful combination of ctags and cscope (for browsing code) is almost addictive and probably compulsory if you are developing over the network.
- Quick help with tools and programming
- man pages are invaluable for programming.
memmove()orstrtok()at your fingertips. - ASCII table (
man ascii) or operator precedence (man operator) - Most of the packages and libraries being open source and free, source packages are readily available
- man pages are invaluable for programming.
- Best of both the worlds
- Windows users may miss Notepad++ and Source Insight on Linux, both run on Wine. Notepad++ has an under-development Qt clone, Notepadqq.