

Is Linux ruining my chance at a good software engineering career? - systems
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/193487/

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sounddust
He's totally missing the point of studying computer science. It doesn't matter
if you are using Linux or Windows during your studies; a proper education in
CS will give you a foundation on which you can easily adapt to any platform,
language, or environment. My school was almost entirely Unix-based, and my
first job was with Microsoft. They weren't concerned at all about whether I
was familiar with the Win32 API, C#, COM or anything similar - and this
attitude was consistent across all new hires, not just college hires. Most
competent companies (the ones you want to work for) will recognize this as
well.

But in any case, there are an enormous number of jobs that do not require
knowledge of Microsoft-based technology.

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jimfl
The majority of commercial software shops are probably developing on the MS
stack. Smaller shops, startups, small online services are more likely to be on
the LAMP stack. My shop is on the MS stack, and we will hire people with solid
OO design, database design, and n-tier application architecture chops. The
toolset isn't important.

Likewise, when looking for a job, look for people making something you wants
to make, with similar attitudes and interests to yours, and care less about
the tools they're using.

The comments at Stack Overflow are all over the map I notice.

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Tichy
Most companies I worked for gave MS Windows to their employees, but the web
applications we developed would be hosted on Unix/Linux servers.

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jerryji
There are plenty of Google employees building their (arguably ;) good software
engineering career using mainly Linux, just an example.

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Tichy
Are the majority of jobs really for Microsoft products. I am surprised.

~~~
rbanffy
The dull ones, mostly.

That said, the company I work for has an IT department that is not happy at
all to issue non-windows boxes for employees. You can have one, but then you
will have to manage it yourself. We have a couple Windows servers but all our
software run on *nix-ish boxes.

At least I could install cygwin and X on top of XP.

~~~
sho
_"You can have one, but then you will have to manage it yourself."_

You say that like it's a bad thing ...

~~~
rbanffy
Depending on what you have to do, it's not, but I have to edit documents that
live in a sharepoint server a couple times a week and I never quite figured
out how to do that without a Windows box. That and exchange managing our
e-mail makes moving my corporate-issued computer out of Windows somewhat risky
career-wise.

Believe-me, I have meditated on this more than once.

~~~
weaksauce
You can access basic IMAP from an Exchange server. I was using thunderbird at
my last job and it worked fine. Connecting to the LDAP server for the global
address book took a bit to figure out. I finally got it all connected and
figured out though. If your Exchange usage is more than email and shared
addresses I don't know how much further you can get into it without Outlook.
Not because it's impossible only because I didn't try to do it.

As far a sharepoint goes I don't have any real experience with it but it looks
like you are able to use it on linux but the activex controls will not work(of
course):

<http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx>

~~~
rbanffy
Sadly, we use Exchange for corporate calendar and contacts. Evolution sort of
works, but I have seen it refusing to connect or update stuff more than once.

Had I sufficient memory (machine has 1 GB of RAM), I would go down the
VirtualBox/VMWare route.

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strlen
Knowledge of Linux is what greatly helped my software engineering career: I've
been told at interviews how rare it is to find a software engineer who
understands the OS as well as operations/systems administration concerns.

If the author is seeing only .NET/Windows jobs, he should either modify his
job search query (or look on different sites) -- to look for employers where
software development is the core competency (versus "IT" programming jobs), or
look elsewhere (either on another job site or in another geographic area). In
addition, if he knows Java learning .NET will be trivial.

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Confusion
I have the distinct impression that familiarity with the command line and the
Linux's commandline tools give me quite an edge over Windows-based developers
I work with.

\- Something wrong with the build? Use ant or maven from the command line, so
I can be sure it isn't the IDE screwing things up. Should be possible for
Windows developers, but I've never seen'em manage it.

\- Need to collect some data from a log file? Grep/sed/awk are often fastest
and sufficient.

\- Windows desktop search nowhere nears the power of 'find'.

\- Hmmm, what port is the JVM debugger listening on again? ps auxwwf | grep
java. Ah yes, 9001.

I would feel extremely handicapped developing on a Windows system.

~~~
prodigal_erik
I contracted at Microsoft a few years ago, and even they didn't use Visual
Studio, just vim and a make clone with some extra win32 support (build.exe)
and sometimes windbg.

I can actually get by on a Windows box with just Emacs and Perl, though I do
miss stuff like lsof.

~~~
mblakele
You know about the sysinternals tools, right? There's a gui version of lsof in
there.

<http://sysinternals.org/> (redirects to MS technet page)

I think [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/sysinternals/bb896655.asp...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/sysinternals/bb896655.aspx) (Handle) is the lsof-equivalent.

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sown
1.) Go get a C# or .net book with a shiny cover 2.) Go download Visual Studio
2008 Express 3.) Get to work.

