The Develo perati

Q

I have always wondered what a Linux developer’s environment looks like. Do they still favour desktops for development? Do they have a separate machine for development and personal (due to library updates), or are they using virtual machines? Do they tend to any particular desktop?

Thanks for your time. PegRussell,byemail

A

There seems to be a growing perception that developers are a separate species that deal in arcane sigils, monads and Vim shortcuts. This may be true, but I prefer to think that anyone can learn to code, and by extension anyone can be a developer.

That aside, developers (like other creatures) all have their own preferences, but for many the Macbook seems to be the weapon of choice (go to any Linux conference if you don’t believe me). Many of them run Linux of course, and of those some will prefer graphical desktops and some prefer more minimal arrangements. Many of those I’ve talked to are happy running vanilla Ubuntu. Doing everything from

Emacs remains as popular as it ever was, but there’s also a lot of interest in modern code editors such as Atom, or even, shudder, Microsoft’s Visual Studio:Code.

Thanks to containers (be it chroots, systemd-nspawns, Docker or full-blown VMs) there isn’t really a need to have a separate machine for solo development. But for larger collaborative projects that use continuous integration and such the actual build infrastructure still needs to be centralised.

Things are much less homogenous than they used to be, and open source is a big part of this. You can talk to a git server no matter what your OS, desktop or text-editing proclivities. Heck, even Microsoft use it in-house (see LXF231), and (thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux) their customers no longer have to fight with Cygwin to get a working GCC set up. While it’s not specifically about devs, the website https://linuxrig.com lists all kinds of diverse Linux setups which might give you some ideas.