Ask HN: Why use Linux for coding?

One compelling reason for using Linux is the availability of an incredible number of command tools that can be combined to automate just about task. Recently I had to download about 2 million video clips, extract audio from them and do this parallely using some 40 threads. I used an openly available script that uses youtube-dl, ffmpeg and gnu parallel to do exactly this.

I stopped using linux this month after 3 years. I'm a game programmer and I want to do casual things and get productive work done. I had appreciated linux for the speed it gave me when i had a slower PC. I could do more quicker and customize it a lot. The cost was that with the less bloated distros, most things didn't work well and had very few sensible solutions. Linux overall is terrible for casual users and productivity at the expense of a lot of time configuring it.

As a game dev, i like to play games as well and there are a fair bit that are windows only. The only wine app that worked was lutris. Everything else crashed with vague errors and no info online. Even then, games were slower (as expected) and often had errors. John Carmack had made a post before that he doesn't really see Linux as fit for gaming and that effort should be put into making wine better due to how few people on linux make up sales sales and I agree.

The community can be quite unhelpful as well. A lot of people are elitist and use their ego to bash people's choice of software or at their problems getting things working. There are a lot of genuinely helpful people as well though, just not as impactful.

I think linux will have a place in tech like servers and lightweight gadgets like Android, but not for every day use. And I've used Linux every day before. Instead of making multiple distros that due some of the same thing, the community could have focused on solid high quality apps to become competition to windows. Ubuntu is the best thing to that and even that isn't very usable. Using Windows, things just work. I'm uncomfortable with how Microsoft treats users but was more willing to put time into improving privacy and interference on an OS that can last. I'm still an advocate of linux, but only when it's needed.

When I started coding, I installed linux one day. I didn't use windows again for like 6 months.

It seems to open up a new world, where you can program what you need to use. Sure you can do this on windows, but on linux it feels like you're closer to the smell of sawdust.

Also, when you likely deploy your server to something like AWS, it'll probably run on linux, so there's that consistency.

You feel like you live inside the internet. Because the internet runs on linux.

I'm typing this comment from a debian laptop. This laptop isn't super fast, but debian makes it seem totally fine, whereas windows makes it sad. (speed boost).

I'm thankful when I use linux. When I see all the lines of computer code at startup and during install, I think of all the time someone put into that, wow, so glad.