To be honest I really love Apple computers and I think macOS is a pretty is a really good choice for web developers. As a dev using homebrew for package management you are able to set up your environment in now time. And I really like the UI design of macOS. Nevertheless, I have been itching to try something else for some time now. So I decided to build my own PC and evalute a few OS options for development.
What alternatives should I try?
Linux
Since 14 month now my daily driver for dev work on my job is Linux on a virtual machine. To be precise Debian. At the beginning it was quite unfamiliar and also a bit scary. I had prejudices against Linux, because I thought it was difficult and could only be operated via the console. But I was wrong, now I really enjoy working with Linux and there are also many ways to improve and customize the desktop UI.
In the next few weeks after the PC build is completed I want to evaluate different distributians a try.
Windows 10
In the past I would have never thought about Windows 10 as the OS of a web devs choice. But I also used Windows a few days around Christmas on a bootcamp partition on my old iMac before I sold it. And I must say my experience was quite smooth. I tried WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which enables you to run a Linux distro by the side of Windows 10 and together with Docker, VSCode and the Remote Development Plugins its a seamless dev experience and I enjoyed the few hours I tried it. So I also will test the Windows ecosystem and review it.
What's up next?
The custom PC build
The next step will be the build of a new PC. I am really looking forward to this step. I built the last custom PC in 2011 and I've already forgotten how much fun researching components is and I'm already looking forward to assembling it. So in the future I will also report in a separate post about this process.
OS evaluation
I will also write posts about the individual operating systems I will be looking at and report on how easy/difficult it was for me to install the OS itself or set up the development environment.