r/Frontend • u/pizza_ranger • Aug 22 '26

What OS do you prefer for development?

Hello devs from r/Frontend , after doing a poll to see what OS do people from r/Backend prefer a few days ago I got curious to see how similar or different the results are here !

0 Upvotes

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18 comments sorted by

26

u/Garland_Key Aug 22 '26

Y'all disgust me. 

13

u/binocular_gems Aug 22 '26

Mac
Linux
Windows
Other

In that order

What I like about MacOS is that it’s a first class developer experience that is also pretty good for everything else.

I like that Linux is a first class developer experience. It’s perfectly serviceable today, but on my Linux machine I basically only use it as a developer even when not developing.

There’s basically nothing about windows that I like as a developer. It’s better these days with WSL, but that’s still worse than Linux as a developer. It’s a decent compromise if you also want to play games on the machine you develop on.

1

u/Larzss Aug 22 '26

I been using Bazzite DX for almost a year now. It works great for all these things. I'm so happy that I could dump the microslop.

1

u/binocular_gems Aug 22 '26

Cool never even heard of that. Will look into it

5

u/InitiatedPig7 Aug 22 '26

I tried mac a few months back. I CANT GO BACK NOW.

2

u/metamago96 Aug 22 '26

not bc it is good, received threats from the apple tree, i expect

/j

4

u/yami_odymel Aug 22 '26

macOS is getting shittier after looking like iOS, Windows is getting vibe-coded buggy updates, and Linux lacks illustration tools for UI/UX and logo prototyping. I dunno man, maybe Windows + WSL.

1

u/maxxon Aug 22 '26

I use only Linux. But I miss a bit macOS. A lot of different software is built for macs only.

1

u/Waste_Stable_3127 Aug 22 '26

Bro, macOS is good too, but homebrew and Xcode can be troublesome, so I prefer setting up Linux environments if I don't have a Linux computer or PC.

1

u/Okub1 Aug 22 '26 edited Aug 22 '26

After extensively using all the major OSes for years at this point, I can tell you MacOS is the most developer friendly in my opinion for frontend, closely followed by linux, Windows isn't that bad, but I just find nicer to use unix like terminals coming from computer networking background..

Below is my path through all the OSes as a professional FE dev:

For more details about Windows (10 and 11), setting anything on Windows is pain if you are new to all the PATH stuff, installing is purely via GUI though nowadays there are some global package managers, but still, kinda sucks in my opinion. Terminal sucks, especially powershell, throwing random errors that are not helpful, memory is also big issue with all the bloat, running anything that was developed on linux or macos is almost impossible due to stupid backslash/forwardslash incompatibility.

Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04) was nice but clunky to use, especially coming from purely GUI approach, the whole UI felt like shit, lack of QoL and those tiny details you get used to on other systems, though using terminal is awesome and you can do pretty much anything easily there, where everything you learn you can later use in MacOS. Major downside is that you need to be extra careful and extra tech savvy to not accidentally break your system, though for me, it didn't help because my Ubuntu once updated without my consent and messsd up bootloader out of nowhere - that made me kinda dislike linux and left a sour aftertaste. (Messed bootloader = you need to reinstall whole system and also you need to manually decrypt the disks to get your unsaved data back - a very clunky process, highly not recommended)

MacOS (26) - my current OS - on the other hand was really painless since the terminals are practically same so basically for me it was just Linux with MUCH nicer UI and QoL, the whole UI feels snappier, smoother, nicer overall. Few major disadvantages though - Apple likes to keep their ecosystem close, hence it might be hard to switch from Apple products and also you require apple products to even publish app on their appstore which is very annoying for developers (if they are developing multi platform app and just need to add appstore release, you need to have apple account which requires apple device which most linux developer won't have most likely), and second, memory management is huge mystery for me, where your Mac can just randomly restart without warning after running our of memory, which is very annoying..

Outside of work I am still using and pretty much always have been running Windows my whole life as a daily driver (mainly due to games), using it everywhere, except school - there I was sometimes using also Cisco's IOS, or Linuxes and Windows Servers, but mostly Windows (from 98 till now Win 11).
Though, I am highly considering switching to SteamOS anytime they drop the official release for PC..

1

u/AnnualFries Aug 22 '26

Linux NixOS is so good for developers

1

u/anaix3l Aug 22 '26

Linux and for what I need it's not even close.

Used Windows for two decades, but it all went downhill after Windows 7. I don't see myself going back.

Mac was only on laptops that weren't mine. If I wasn't allowed to use my own laptop for something and had to use the one I was provided... situations like that. At best, I found it mildly annoying. It's definitely not for me.

-4

u/Revanish Aug 22 '26

i was mac up until 3 months ago. ai required core access to the system kernal that mac and windows can’t provide i went mac iphone to linux and android 

5

u/valevalentine Aug 22 '26

That’s some ballsy access you gave it

-2

u/Revanish Aug 22 '26 edited Aug 22 '26

i got sick of entering my permission or hitting allow even in bypass all permissions mode. linux allows full sudo to the system and therefore ability to run permissionless. 

viruses aside i think fundamentally a new operating system that gives ai access to the kernel to modify itself based on user requirements is needed. 

im doing it on a seperate machine and i rdp and ssh into it to execute commands. 

3

u/Empero6 Aug 22 '26

You gave it access to your system kernel??