Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
#2That makes a lot of sense, as Windows boxes are not really good for web development, but I really hope they still test everything on Windows, extensively. Even though their software is web-based, there's still difference in behavior on different platforms.
Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
#3That makes a lot of sense, as Windows boxes are not really good for web development, but I really hope they still test everything on Windows, extensively. Even though their software is web-based, there's still difference in behavior on different platforms.
Windows in a VM makes web application testing easy. Always starting from a snapshot insures integrity of the environment too.
Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
#4Banning the platform most of your users are using doesn't sound like a great idea to me. There's enormous value in eating one's own dogfood (and stuff running in Chrome is an entirely different kind of dogfood than stuff running in IE, on Windows).
Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
#5That makes a lot of sense, as Windows boxes are not really good for web development, but I really hope they still test everything on Windows, extensively. Even though their software is web-based, there's still difference in behavior on different platforms.
> Windows boxes are not really good for web development
Unfair! I use Linux and Windows for web dev and they are both equally as good as the other.
EDIT; oh come on, at least justify it... :)
Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
#6Banning the platform most of your users are using doesn't sound like a great idea to me. There's enormous value in eating one's own dogfood (and stuff running in Chrome is an entirely different kind of dogfood than stuff running in IE, on Windows).
Exactly. One has to wonder what kind of culture this fosters with time.
Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
#7That makes a lot of sense, as Windows boxes are not really good for web development, but I really hope they still test everything on Windows, extensively. Even though their software is web-based, there's still difference in behavior on different platforms.
> Windows boxes are not really good for web development Unfair! I use Linux and Windows for web dev and they are both equally as good as the other. EDIT; oh come on, at least justify it... :)
Honestly, it depends what you're developing in. If you're developing in .NET, Windows isn't a bad platform. Anything else, and Windows starts to feel like a second-class citizen. For instance, a lot of tools written in Ruby tend to assume a Unix-like environment, even though the language itself is cross-platform.
The other problem with Windows is that it doesn't make a very good server, and it's often useful to develop on the same OS you'll be eventually deploying to.
Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
#8Banning the platform most of your users are using doesn't sound like a great idea to me. There's enormous value in eating one's own dogfood (and stuff running in Chrome is an entirely different kind of dogfood than stuff running in IE, on Windows).
Exactly. One has to wonder what kind of culture this fosters with time.
Increasingly their users are going to be using Macs and Android, and I really do expect Linux distros to start to see an upswing as data becomes accessible on more and more devices.
Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
#9Banning the platform most of your users are using doesn't sound like a great idea to me. There's enormous value in eating one's own dogfood (and stuff running in Chrome is an entirely different kind of dogfood than stuff running in IE, on Windows).
From what I've heard, very few engineers were using Windows in the first place. This mostly affected sales people.
Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Windows boxes are not really good for web development Unfair! I use Linux and Windows for web dev and they are both equally as good as the other. EDIT; oh come on, at least justify it... :)
Honestly, it depends what you're developing in. If you're developing in .NET, Windows isn't a bad platform. Anything else, and Windows starts to feel like a second-class citizen. For instance, a lot of tools written in Ruby tend to assume a Unix-like environment, even though the language itself is cross-platform. The other problem with Windows is that it doesn't make a very good server, and it's often useful to devel…
Windows is surely a better server than OS X. Also, the tool set for web development on Windows is very mature and stable.
Google is making a business decision here: it is too expensive for them to support Windows at the level of security they desire, which is likely a higher standard than most software development shops, and perhaps many banks.