You Had Me at Softlinks

Last week Ubuntu 7.04 was released. I thought I’d contribute to the hype by talking about why I love Linux. Before I do though, I just want to say I am not a zealot. I believe in the right tool for the right job — and I’m even forgiving of not-quite-so-right-but-comfortable tool for the right job. I use Windows all the time, but when it comes to development, I prefer Linux hands down.

I’m relatively new to the party. A couple years ago I had been hired at a Linux-only development shop. Fortunately, even two years ago, it was relatively easy to transition from Windows to Linux. Which isn’t to say there isn’t much to learn — but even with a shallow knowledge of Linux it was easy for me to get around. Like many programmers though, I need more than shallow knowledge, and began delving into the OS’s nuances.

Its through this exploration that I began to appreciate Linux. These short, terse commands I entered at the command-line — these aren’t just tools, they are the collective wisdom of the ancients. My handy bash-scripting reference talks about the evolution of the “echo” command for two pages! Clearly, most of the basic concepts of Linux have been honed and polished for two decades, and truly I feel as if I’m standing on the shoulder of giants with each “sed” or “cat” invocation.

Granted, you don’t need to know how a car works to drive it, and Linux was the same for me. Indeed, I had been piping commands to each other for years before appreciating the holy trifecta of stdout, stdin, and stderr.

For those who want to get their feet wet, you can run Ubuntu entirely from CD. There are even instructions for running Ubuntu as a virtual machine using VMWare. But doing a full-on, dual-boot installation isn’t difficult (though disk partitioning is always harrowing for me), and I’d encourage anyone to give it a shot.

Here are some reasons, in no particular order, why I prefer to do development work on Linux:

• Command-line Console. Slowly I’m becoming a command-line ninja, and find it much easier to navigate my filesystem, and perform other operations, by typing.
• Warm fuzzies when using open source software.
• Softlinks. Besides being a very handy way to organize my filesystem, it never fails to make me giggle when I compare it to window’s *.lnk (“Shortcut to…”) equivalent.
• Appropriate Verbosity. Most unix commands (cp, mv, chmod) don’t provide any output upon completion. Type “man cp” though, and you have a couple pages of describing the simple command’s functionality.
• Easy Package installation. How do I install MySQL? “sudo apt-get install mysql”
• Multiple Desktops. One for my mail reader, one for log-viewing (via Chainsaw), and one for my IDE.

Undoubtedly there are dozens of other reasons, and I look forward to finding even more.