Which OS should I drive?

You’ll spend more hours with your OS on your daily driver than your spouse. Think about it. Will you spend 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week, for 30+ years with your spouse? If you will spend that much time with your daily driver’s OS, can you really afford to use a suboptimal OS? Can you waste your life away like that? Isn’t it worth investing some time in the best OS?

The Options

Today, there’s still only the big 3: Windows, Mac, and Linux. non-mac BSD is esoteric. Temple OS doesn’t support networking. And Plan 9 never made it out of the lab. The big 3 are all popular enough that we won’t go into them or their differences.

The Golden Rule

The golden rule for choosing any long term personal technology choice like an OS or a text editor. Once you’ve ruled out everything that doesn’t meet the technical bar, we should pick:

The one that you’ll want to spend the most time with.

Kinda like a spouse. That’s right. The golden rule of long term, personal technology choice is based on feelings. It doesn’t matter why you want to spend time with your OS, as long as it’s productive.

If you want to spending time

on your mac because you just loooooove the clean design or

on arch linux because you’ve customized it just so or

on Windows because you feel so professional

it doesn’t matter. You’re spending the most time being productive, coding and growing (arch-ers, don’t get distracted by over-customizing). This matters the most because the desire comes from your emotions which gives you energy. You need this energy to maintain the marathon of your fast coding career over the years and decades you’ll be coding. This energy and fit matters much more than any trivial differences in productivity that come from a GUI or CLI. Here you must trust your instincts. Only you know what will give you energy. What other people like or say or you think they’ll say? Feh. Only you can tell what you like from how you feel inside. In the long term, your internal energy matters more. Even if your friends think Windows is “lame” but you feel the most energized when you use it, go for it. Even if “real programmers use linux”, but you just find macs so elegant and love using one, go for it. And if you’re a girl, and using arch makes energy course through your veins, don’t worry, just use it, you won’t grow a tacky neckbeard, although you’re still at risk of ablutophobia, fear of showers.

Now let’s say you’re truly indifferent, then there is an OS a cut above the rest. One with tools more powerful, elegant, and accessible: Linux. But, if you decide to go with Linux, you’ll also need to decide which Linux distribution, that is which “flavor” of Linux.

Which Distro?

You could spend hours on IRC arguing with neckbeards, and neckbeardettes, on this one, but basically all linux distros support the same programming toolchains, so there’s rarely a technical difference to discuss. Unless you have some very niche needs like pentesting (in which case you need Kali linux), the golden rule applies here too.

The one that you’ll want to spend the most time with

So, it’s all about feels. Thankfully, and unlike windows/mac however, Linux is free as in freedom and beer. So you can go google around, see what’s popular on Distro Watch, talk to your friends on IRC about it, and go try a bunch out without breaking the bank and see which one feels best. Then, you can go spend the rest of your life with your beloved distro knowing you made the right choice.

Happy hacking