

What is your best practice as a programmer to use different OS - doubaokun

XP or Mac, Linux? What is your best practice? And which verison of Linux will you use?
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eitland
While I think this question would need a little editing to avoid being an
invite to a flamewar, I'll add some feedback:

    
    
      - I personally prefer linux (used to be Ubuntu, but now fedora or mint).
      - I used to prefer KDE and might be moving back in a few months when I get some better graphic card, although gnome 3 seems like a huge step in right direction.
      - I work together with people who love Macs, and I've been doing most of my paid work on a MBP for a couple of years. Still don't like it. Made me understand that usability is in the eye of the beholder.
      - Win 7 is great, but once you have to do a lot of the work in the terminal, it quickly becomes tiring. Also, getting a snappy setup on most prebuilt systems w/o reinstalling everything from scratch seems hard.

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lupatus
Use virtual machines!

It is one of the better "best practices" you can practice.

Keep whatever Windows came with your computer, install VMWare, and then spin
up a new virtual machine to experiment/test in whatever other OS you want w/o
mucking-up your base OS. Plus, if you hose your virtual machine, it is easy to
revert it to a previous, okay, state by restoring to a snapshot.

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rudiger
Windows; the Win32 API is great to develop applications. Microsoft puts an
emphasis on maintaining software backwards compatibility.

    
    
        int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, PSTR szCmdLine, int iCmdShow) { ... }

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dillon
Linux has traditionally been the hacker's choice but OS X has gained
popularity recently and Windows is so far from being a competitor.

Also, it would help telling us what you're developing cause that could change
things quite drastically.

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doubaokun
I write PHP, Erlang, Python, Java, somethings C#. And want to connect to
Windows server and Linux server to do some configuration.

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logos
I use Arch Linux with gnome, to program in php and java. I think its
brilliant, quick and stable. It took me some time to get it all working, but
it was worth of it.

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code
OS X aka Mac for me. Run Parallels for other OS testing.

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hewigovens
linux,gentoo/ubuntu

