A little introduction
I’ve been curious about learning Linux, of course on the entry level, I’m not to interested on deep Linux administration tasks. I am interested on setting up Linux servers, but right now its not my focus. So I figured the best way to experience the environment was to installing it on a Laptop I have that was just collecting dust. So thats what I did, I uninstalled Windows and selected a famous distro called Linux Mint.
Why Linux Mint?
Well, the quick answer is just is simplicity, it’s good for beginner Linux users, and it is a stable distro with a large community. I wanted a distro that was not that complicated to use since I’m planning to stay in that distro for a few years, if I were to choose something like Arch I could have problems that would just ruined my first impressions and experience, so I just decided to choose Linux Mint between all the options. Also, not forgetting one of the reasons is that Mint is based on Debian, which is, for what I understand, a really good stable Linux environment with huge documentations and support.
So how has my experience been
So far it’s been great! One of the reason I wanted to try Linux is because I really believe is the best OS out there for development in general. Why? for me theres two main reasons, the shell and the available software, packages, libraries, etc for Linux.
Generally, Unix based shells have superpowers compared to the ones on Windows for example. There are of course many of them, but the two I have use are ‘bash’ and ‘zsh’, the second one having even more options for the file searching and other things. Both are great, and both are always in the top options when you want to install a package for Linux or even any development library or framework out there.
Also, when you have a powerful shell like that, you can end up using development tools like VIM or EMACS in a more advance way comparing it to Windows. By the way, I plan to to add a post on EMACS and comparing it to Neovim, but that will come later this month. I’m still learning EMACS so its now quite the time yet.
About the second point on why I things its a better OS for development. When you have been developing projects, you end up encountering problems related with Windows specifically, meaning you have to go around and look for solutions on the internet to make a package work or to resolve performance issues.
On the other hand, you also encounter software that is not available on Windows and that you really want to use for a project or even if you just want to learn how to use it. But with Linux, its actually the opposite, commonly packages are develop in a Unix/Linux environment, so once the author finishes the package its already released on Linux. Even if the package is not even developed on Linux, authors commonly release Linux versions at the launch of their project because theres a huge demand for it.
On a less serious topic, I also love the way you can freely customize you Linux environment the way you want, with not a lot of limitations. I’m currently running the Cinammon version of Linux Mint and it looks so good, just the way I like it.
I’m done with Windows?
Well, I will still be using Windows, because is installed on my main computer, and I have a lot of things set up, and videogames, that I am not willing to change to Linux. So for the tasks like learning new stuff development wise, I will use the laptop. This way I can keep using both OS’s without limiting myself to just one.