Skip to main content
gamedev.net
🔒 Locked

Your Preferred Os And Why

Started by warhound 67 replies 17.2k views
Original Post
warhound
warhound
Hey all,

I've been recently debating with coworkers the merits and demerits of each OS. My coworkers are adamant Windows users while I'm pretty much an Apple convert. I'm curious tho what most devs use and why. So like I said, I prefer to use Mac OS X mainly because of ease of use, Unix-based, great hardware (although that's not really OS specific), and because overall (imo) it seems to be of better quality than most of the Windows systems I've used (I used to be a Windows only type guy at one point).

What about you guys?
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Nypyren
Nypyren
Windows 10

Reasons: Visual Studio, PC games, and I've got a ton of knowledge of Windows built up over a long period of time that I'd have to re-learn if I switched OSes.

Auxiliary reason: I build my own computers, so I avoid subpar components that many times are responsible for making people dislike Windows.
Ravyne
Ravyne

I mostly use Windows but I'm pretty pragmatic about it and I've been adopting more and more from the *nix world -- I'm pretty comfortable in Linux, using it part-time, and I run Emacs even on my windows machine (vim before, now emacs + eVil mode).

Apple has made great laptops for years at great price/quality ratio, despite the oft-repeated mantra that "macs are expensive". I've got an original Unibody macbook that still runs great, and I'm planning to sell it off soon along with my beast of a PC laptop to buy the next MacBook Pro. I bootcamp Windows most of the time, but since their laptops are so nice and because I want a Mac readily accessible to me, it makes sense to me to have a Mac Laptop and a PC desktop.

What made Macs so popular among developers was twofold -- a) the iOS goldrush, and b) its a no-hassle environment that's "*nix enough". Its nice enough, and especially in the past was years ahead in many ways (usability, Grand Central Dispatch, Time Machine), but its lost ground lately both because its slowed down, and because the other's are catching up. PC laptop manufacturers have caught up to Apple too, both in terms of design and quality-to-pricepoint.

With the upcoming Bash on Ubuntu on Windows feature in Windows 10, I think a lot of the *nix-enough crowd might migrate away. Ubuntu on Windows isn't *nix-enough, it is *nix -- it runs the same binaries as actual Ubuntu, from the same package repositories, or compile and build from the same sources. No MacPorts, no Homebrew. Its not meant for graphical apps at this early stage, but unofficially you can even run Xwindows inside it and pipe it out to an Xwindows server running on the windows side -- I'm personally looking forward to having my emacs server running on the Ubuntu side, with the graphical client running alongside my Windows programs. Some people have even gotten entire desktop environments running on it (i3 and Ubuntu's) -- though there's still some bugs to be worked out.

throw table_exception("(? ???)? ? ???");
SeraphLance
SeraphLance

Windows 10. The moment I get Bash support in my shell (August 2nd I hear? Or whenever it lands on stable preview for me) I will never* look at Linux again.

Honestly, Windows gets a lot of crap, but the only things I really notice are the lack of good command-line tools and a good package manager.

WozNZ
WozNZ

Windows. Because history (I started using MS in DOS era), My steam collection and Visual Studio which is best IDE out there. As Ravyne said, Bash comes to Win 10 at start of next month.

TheChubu
TheChubu

Debian (Xfce because fuck everything else). Why? Because Windows development stack (Windows 7 + VS2010 + C# at work) pisses me off in subtle ways all the fucking time.

"I AM ZE EMPRAH OPENGL 3.3 THE CORE, I DEMAND FROM THEE ZE SHADERZ AND MATRIXEZ"   My journals: dustArtemis ECS framework and 
frob
frob

On my various machines right now across home and work I've got five machines with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, one with OS X, and one on Ubuntu. So ... all of them?

I have a general preference to Windows-based PCs due mostly to experience.

For development, I dislike OS X the most. I dislike typing NS-everything. I hate how so many programs force me to move my hand to the mouse, offering no way to tab around or otherwise shift around or manipulate windows on the keyboard.

For everything else it depends more on the language and tool I'm using at the time.

I absolutely love Visual Studio's edit and continue, and if there was a way I could put that into every product in existence I would do so. Outside of that ... there are plenty of editors and tools out there, each with pros and cons.

ronan.thibaudau
ronan.thibaudau

Windows 10, anything non Windows is a no go for me, i need my visual studio and all my steam games ><

ericrrichards22
ericrrichards22

Win 10. Visual Studio and Steam are the biggies, but I'm also a MS ISV partner at work, so that's what I do. I like .NET, too. But Win 10 is a pretty solid OS at it's core, if you can ignore the forced-upgrade, telemetry tinfoil hatters and the kind of schizophrenic UI in places. The kernel and system level stuff is much more solid and stable than 7 or 8.

I've been dabbling with Linux Mint as well, mostly because I wanted to play with Rust.

Debian (Xfce because fuck everything else). Why? Because Windows development stack (Windows 7 + VS2010 + C# at work) pisses me off in subtle ways all the fucking time.

Ugh, VS 2010 is not fun - especially if that also means you're on an old version of .NET. I think 2015 hasn't caught up to VS 2013 in stability, but there is so much nice stuff added over the last six years...

ongamex92
ongamex92

Windows because of visual studio, it's eco system, games and it's stability. Yes as said above windows is getting crappier, I hope this trend will change(and it needs to change drastically).

kolrabi
kolrabi

An Ubuntu based Linux distribution with Xfce (although I installed the Cinnamon the other day and quite like it so far). But every now and then I have to boot into Windows (10), because some game developers still don't care about making their games run on Linux. (Don't be that dev.)

blah :)
Gian-Reto
Gian-Reto

Windows 7 Baby... best OS ever conceived (okay, thats maybe an overstatement, but still hands down the best Windows I have ever used, and I have used them all!)

Slowly migrating to Windows 10 on all machines save my work rig... not really warming to it. Change for changes sake, really. Fixing what wasn't broke compared to Windows 7. Windows 8 of course was a total trainwreck, no a big fan of Windows 8.1, so its at least better as those two. Well, maybe over time MS improves Windows 10 so it becomes more like Windows 7 again.

Because in the end, I'll have to migrate to Windows 10 as soon as I want to use DX12 on my work rig, or connect XBox One gamepads, or the Kinect 2.....

Mac OS is not for me, though I have used it for years... its just too alien for somebody so used to Windows. And again, nothing broken with Windows (7), so why try to fix it by converting to another OS? :)

I really like Unix systems, Unix dev is what I mostly do for my day job (besides Java and Oracle development)... but then, I don't know about Linux as a Windows replacement at home. Given what I hear about the performance Problems with openGL with some modern games, and the small selection of Steam Titles for Linux....

Buster2000
Buster2000

OSX because it is the one I use for work. I also like the idea that I can get a brand new machine and without even connecting to the internet I can start coding in one of several languages with a choice of programming editor straight away.

Also with OSX if I need a windows program I can legally access windows using Parallels, Bootcamp, VBox etc.. Yes yes I know I could technically do the opposite on windows but I would be breaking Apples EULA.

I don't tend to play Windows PC games anymore. I used to be a die hard PC gamer and spend several thousand a year having a custom PC to run everything with the best settings. Nowadays most PC games are eventually available on OSX or console anyway.

I do still have several Windows devices at home but they very rarely get switched on and when they do the usually need to install a bunch of stuff before they actually work.

samoth
samoth
Windows 7. Thanks to ntLite, you can turn Windows 7 in an entirely shit-free environment (best 45€ I have spent in my life). It's actually possible to have an up-to-date, fully functional (without the shit) Windows which takes up just 15G on your harddisk. Bet you didn't think you could.

Now, Windows 10, no thanks, not as long as I can get around, and when that is no longer possible, I might just use Linux or not use a computer any more at all (which is the same thing, basically). Windows 10's problem is not just the telemetry stuff (though sure that is a concern, it's more the EULA that accompanies the telemetry), but first and foremost it is designed bottom-up, through and through as something I don't want. I do not want my voice sent to and analyzed on the cloud (nor waste the bandwidth for doing that), I do not want smart ass suggestions from a virtual babe, I don't want fucking MSN and Facebook in the start menu, I don't want to search the web when I'm not explicitly saying: "Search the fucking web". No, I don't want your suggestions, I don't care what you think might interest me, just fuck off and leave me alone.
I don't want fucking blinking stuff that I didn't ask for, and although much of it can be disabled, the point is, I don't want to have it running when I don't want it. Nor do I want to see fucking warnings about it all day long. This phenomenon existed under Win7 already (that's really the single bad thing I can say about Win7). Disable that fucking indexer service which scrubs down your harddisk yet doesn't work properly anyway, and you get yellow warnings about search being slow in every darn search window. As if you didn't already notice it's slow. Besides, it's only slow because it does stuff you didn't ask for. Of course if you remove the shit from the install disk alltogether (one click in ntLite), the warning is gone, too.

And I don't want a fucking Windows store, nor the millions of trash apps inside it. Nor do I want to be shop-locked (which is certain to come eventually). It's still my computer, I paid for it, and I pay the electricity bill and for internet access. I want to decide what's going on.

I used to have Apple until they cheated me (and millions of others) on the PPC Macs. And Linux at the time when you had to manually untar a dozen floppies with Slackware. Fun to play with, but well... not really suited to do something "real". Sadly, this hasn't much improved. Ubuntu looked promising for some years, and Cinnamon/Mint is almost usable... but "almost" just isn't good enough.

Started in the Windows world with Win98SE, which much to my surprise didn't nearly suck as much as everbody said (well, definitively a "home computer" style of OS, not for a work environment... but still, not so bad), and NT 3.5 (later 4) in university, which by contrast was pretty much the worst nightmare. Had XP and after getting used to the ugly plastic look kinda liked it, and was surprised how stunningly better Windows 7 was. But anything Microsoft did after that... bleh.

Apple's overall approach nowadays is, unluckily, worse than Microsoft's even (although I'll grant them the benefit of being mostly trouble-free in their user interface), and for that you pay extra $$$, no thanks. Ironically, it's the very same company that was marketing against "big blue" dominating your life in 1984, and look what they do now. They are trying to control every aspect of your life, with virtually no choices. I can't even seem to be able downloadin a photo from this darn iPhone onto my computer by means of a plain normal USB cable. Not without asking Apple for permission first.
21st Century Moose
21st Century Moose

Windows. Every few years I check out the latest Linux distributions (I'm due shortly) but I've not yet seen anything to convince me that it's viable. So much of Unix mentality seems stuck in the 1970s that it actively hinders progress.

I'm in the habit of being an early adopter of new Windows versions, but that doesn't necesarily mean that I think they're awesome. In work I'm a domain admin and tend to judge an OS by criteria relevant to that; hence the Windows ecosystem just feels more complete and useful, overall.

Direct3D has need of instancing, but we do not. We have plenty of glVertexAttrib calls. 
Mussi
Mussi

Windows 8.1 I guess? Been using that for a while, upgraded my PC at home to 10 for DX12 support, but I dislike the fact it's not as easy to select tiles with arrows keys as it was in 8. Also, the amount of settings on disabling the built-in spyware :|... USB headphone works slightly better on 10 though.

Sticking to windows because it's what I'm used to, but more importantly games and Visual Studio. Also, I feel it's more stable than Linux. There, I said it!

Bregma
Bregma

Linux, because I've been using Unix since decades before Windows was even invented, and I'm just not familiar with Windows other than how to turn it on and bring up games. Worked in a place that had Macs on the desktop, and when they came out with a brand new OS based on Unix, it was real nice.

RIght now, I use Ubuntu, with Unity 7 and Unity 8. Unity is the best graphical shell I've used in terms of efficiency and convenience, although what counts is the applications not the shell for the most part. I use ssh to connect to multiple machines (phones, tablets, laptops) at a time so I can sit at my desk with a single clicky keyboard and multiple displays to do my work (which often involves broken graphics, so remote access is a goatsend.

As a developer, I prefer the full-on power of having access to everything in the system when I need to rather than the fuzzy "no user-serviceable parts inside" approach of other OSes.

I do have a Windows 10 machine hooked up to the TV and used as a games console in my living room. I'm not sure how to do much except click on the Steam icon on the desktop.

Stephen M. Webb
Professional Free Software Developer
sunandshadow
sunandshadow

Read the thread title. Wondered why one O would be different from any other O. I guess I prefer mine circular and sweet?

I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.
rave3d
rave3d

Windows 10 for Game and Engine development, because Visual Studio IDE (especially debugger) is unbeaten, and DX12.

For other projects involfing electronics and embedded processors Ubuntu for dev and debian on the device, because of the huge amount of free tools available, and the possibility to build your own kernel

I thougt about switching to Ubuntu for GameDev to but Vulkan took to long to arrive so i had already started using DX12 and don't want to switch again.

Icebone1000
Icebone1000

Do ppl willfully switch from win 7 to 10? My experiences with win 10 is that its like a windows 7 where they removed your power to choose and make stuff hard to access (probably with the mentality "lets not scare dumb users")

Topic Locked

This topic has been locked by a moderator. New replies are not allowed.

Sign in to reply to this topic.