I recently received a new Dell laptop. It came with windows 7, I tried it and it didn’t look bad. But for my personal stuff I prefer Linux over Windows. The computer at the office is managed by somebody else, that off course runs windows. It’s a very good machine and the guys who manage it know what what they are doing. As soon as somebody has a virus somewhere (e.g. usb stick from a customer) they are standing next to the person within a matter of minutes. Or if somebody is consuming a lot of bandwith and effecting others, they’ll notice it. However I’m a developer and all these extra monitoring tools (network consumption isn’t on my own computer off course) consume resources from my machine.
As we build all our projects with maven, it’s pretty easy to do the build on another system. I always have a version on my laptop, so I also checked out one to my new Ubuntu 9.10 laptop. If I do a mvn clean install -DskipTests on my laptop it takes about 27 seconds. If I do this on my main workstation (that actually is a dual cpu dual core machine) it takes 4 minutes 30 seconds.
Noted that the maven version isn’t the same and that I’m running 64 bit Linux instead of Windows xp 32 bit. This still seems a big difference, but then again every time I access a file the antivirus kicks in and who knows what else.
If I had a big company I would make all my developers work on Linux machines, reducing licensing costs and gaing time 🙂
If they were .net developers, well that would make it a bit more difficult but I’ld definitely give it a go. Time is money and loosing 4 minutes for every clean build is way to much. Luckily mvn compile and some ant tasks run much faster.