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do you use linux, windows or macOs on your PC?

Farid Aditya on August 05, 2019

so far I always use windows, but in one week I tried linux precisely ubuntu. As a result I felt ineffective because instead of making something, I struggled more with how this works or how to do this.
Now I doubt whether I should continue to force using ubuntu / Linux or keep using Windows.

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gvetri profile image
Giuseppe Vetri

Windows for gaming.
Linux for development personal projects.
MacOS at the job :).

I started with Xubuntu without even know anything about it was like a crash-course. That was because as an Android Developer my intel celeron and 4gb of ram can't handle Android Studio, so i installed Xubuntu and modified it to consume the less ram memory as possible. Today's I'm using Manjaro with XFCE and I'm pretty happy with it, don't be afraid of the terminal.

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derickhess profile image
Derick Hess • Edited

My main desktop is Windows mostly for gaming. Though I do use WSL and have an ubuntu virtual machine for development. I have a macbook pro with Mojave on it I use fro around the house, travel and some development.

In my home electronics lab the machine on my bench is ubuntu 18.04. I use ubuntu on raspberi pi and beaglebobe black projects.

At work: main machine is a 2019 macbook pro I develop on. Most of the machines that my work code run on are windows so I also have a windows test machine, but the code also runs on mac and linux.

I have a centos virtual machine on my laptop just for testing purposes but that is rarely used.

Once you get used to switching between Operating systems is easy. really unless I'm gaming I prefer linux or MacOS. For ubuntu just spin up a vm and play around. Break it a bunch and learn. You will get the hang of it and eventually it will become just as easy to use as window for you.

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farid_aditya profile image
Farid Aditya

thank you Derick Hess
really inspired me, at my place of work I use windows. but on my laptop I am currently trying to use linux

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Windows for gaming, Linux for pretty much everything else.

Reasons for using Windows for gaming should unfortunately be pretty obvious (namely, nobody wants to support Linux, even though they often are actually using Linux for much of their build and testing infrastructure). Main reasons for preferentially using Linux for almost everything else:

  • It lets me actually remap hotkeys however the hell I want. One of my biggest remaining gripes about Windows that isn't architectural is that they don't let you change global hotkey mappings (so, for example, you can't change Win+L to do anything but lock the desktop). macOS has had this functionality for years, and Linux and other UNIX-like platforms have had it for even longer than that, yet Microsoft thinks it makes more sense to keep adding increasingly complex global hotkey defaults than just let people remap them how they want.
  • I don't have to pay large sums of money on a regular basis to do development work on Linux (this is less of an issue now than it used to be on Windows since Microsoft made Visual Studio free for most non-commercial use).
  • I despise PowerShell. Put simply, I use the command-line a lot for day-to-day activities, and I absolutely cannot stand PowerShell for this usage for a wide variety of reasons (or the Windows console host for that matter, though that's going to be a non-issue in the near future). I could easily write a whole article on this (and might some day).
  • Linux is quite often more efficient than Windows. Put simply, Linux doesn't have anywhere near the volume of useless crap running in the background that Windows does, and what is there tends to be much better about resource efficiency.
  • Linux software isn't as likely to suffer from a complete lack of basic parallelism support as Windows software is. The classical UNIX process model lends itself much more readily to parallelization than the NT process model, and even some very old UNIX software does a rather good job of efficiently utilizing multiple CPU cores compared to even modern Windows software.
  • I significantly prefer POSIX VFS semantics to the amalgamation of historical compatibility hacks, odd edge cases, poor design choices, and performance issues that Windows calls a filesystem interface. I could easily write a whole article on this one too.
  • A pretty sizable percentage of the software I use on a daily basis was designed first for UNIX-like platforms, and Windows support got added more as a 'OK, enough users want this, we probably should implement it.' type thing, so support on Linux tends to be far better than on Windows.
  • Not having to deal with the insanity that is software management on Windows is nice (again, I could write a whole article on this).
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farid_aditya profile image
Farid Aditya

thank you Austin S. Hemmelgarn
One of the reasons I tried linux is because on my Laptor Windows 10 feels very heavy, even though my laptor i7 + 8GB RAM but does not use SSD. then I installed ubuntu with dual boot with windows, I felt my laptop became very lightweight. The problem came after I did a job that was easy on windows but was very difficult on linux, for example I used to use Eclipse, wamp, github desktop, desktop docker. Maybe it was my mistake to get used to relying on Gui (even when I needed to build my database using mysqlWorkbench to create sql files), so when using the CLI I was a little confused and felt my work was slow.

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Yeah, the GUI versus CLI aspect tends to be a big one for people. Once you get used to the CLI though, you'll find it's often faster for a lot of things than the GUI (especially when it comes to software development).

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Leandro Reschke • Edited

Everything new you attempt to use/learn is going to be that way. I think Linux is a hard pill to swallow when you are too comfort with your OS deciding everything for you, sometimes you don't even have a choice on Windows.

Perhaps this is why you are struggling to learn. Linux gives you too much choices and too much freedom.

That's funny, when you stop to think how too much freedom makes you powerless too when you don't know what you are doing.

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farid_aditya profile image
Farid Aditya

thank you honi kun

it's true that linux is too free and confusing for ordinary users like me. to install anything can be done in various ways, can with the .deb pakage or by snap or other ways. not to mention docker, usually I run docker through docker desktop but in linux there is none. and many more that still confused me.

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ghost profile image
Ghost • Edited

For me is Linux everywhere.

When I need to use Windows happens the same as you, on Linux what I learned on day 1, 10 years ago is still useful, same commands and everything is called by its technical name so you dealt with networks today just the same as 10 years ago because TCP/IP is TCP/IP when I switch to Windows everything are "thingy", "stuff", no clear routes, etc.

I used Windows for 15 years and every new version made a little more obsolete what you learned before. So now Windows seems very foreign to me and stuff that Windows users see as common or obvious feels really weird: the lack of a repo to just install anything and the need to download sw from the web seems very insecure and clunky to me and having to update everything one by one, very strange; those system updates that takes over your PC are on themselves a deal breaker to me; having to browse for drivers? and with a 5+ year HW having to get them in shady websites? ew.

Just be able to customize colors? not able to choose your WM, almost no SW without GUI, no integrated manuals, the huge amount of memory needed, the need to reinstall everything periodically because the system get sluggish, GUI only configuration that means that every installation start from zero and have to manually reconfig everything and no able to git your configs, etc.

Before Linux non of this bothered me, now I wouldn't get close to Windows if not extremely neccesary. Is just what you are used to, everything else feels strange and of course it will slow you down. At first Linux also felt weird to me and in time it started to get familiar as Windows started to feel weird.

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Mike CK • Edited

I personally find MacOs as the middle ground between the Linux world and Windows world, so that's where I'm stuck.

I say this because I love the linux terminal, but also support for design apps. Macos gives me these two. Finder too, is super useful for when I want to navigate JavaScript projects with many folders.

Lastly, I can't give up the tap with 3 fingers for popup dictionary no matter which app I'm using... Never found a replacement on Windows or Linux.

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Brad

I use a mix of the following:

  1. Manjaro on my Work PC. Its a Linux distro based on Arch Linux. Meaning I get Arch Linux's excellent package management, rolling releases, some extra stability and up an running faster than a bare Arch installation.

  2. ChromeOS (!!!) on my Pixelbook (i7) for my personal use and light development.

  3. Windows 10 on my home computer I built years ago. It holds up for development well enough, and I use it to play games every now and then.


I learned Linux by duel booting a laptop a few years ago with Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I forced myself to use Ubuntu daily, stumbling around and bashing my head against it until I got things working. I forced myself to learn the terminal, how updates work, and where and how to get software I needed.

I eventually dropped duel booting, and now if I install Linux, I don't duel boot.

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Patrick Keßler

Whean learning something new, expect to have some issues. Most, if not all, people do. Learning a new OS can be hard, but it will be worth it in the long run.

I personally run Win10 for my gaming needs, MacOS @ work and Linux (and my tablet...) for everything else.

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EzeM

Windows for gaming and Linux for the rest of activities.

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Thomas

I'm using Ubuntu for work as well and I was a bit lost at first.
now it's been a year and i really like it !
now i feel slower when working on windows..

I might try mac os too someday.

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Derick Hess

I think you will pick up macOS quickly. A few things are a bit quirky, but hey if you are used to linux command line you can already do whatever you need to on mac as well.

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mzaini30 profile image
Zen

I always use Linux Lite. I use Windows 7 only for SPSS in skripsi