The trials and tribulations of moving to Linux as a developer

A talk I gave at CFCamp 2019 in Freising/Munich.

When you look around among your developer and other tech friends and colleagues you’ll probably find that most of them use a computer running Windows or macOS. Sometimes that’s personal choice, in other cases employers or clients dictate which platform one would have to use. Every year around Christmas time there are articles with titles like “Why 20xx will be the year of the Linux desktop”, but has it ever really been that year?

In 2018, I made the jump from using macOS as my main platform to Linux and since then, people didn’t stop asking me how it went, what I did, what problems I ran into and why they could probably never make such a platform transition. The truth is: they - and you - probably could do it just fine as well.

In this talk, I’ll talk about and explain the pros and cons of my move to Linux. Starting from hardware and distribution choices to very specific development and infrastructure challenges. Along the way I’ll explain the audience some of the underlying Linux concepts and show tools to match what they might be used to from Mac or Windows.

After this talk, people will hopefully be more confident when it comes to leaving the mainstream operating systems macOS and Windows.

Transcript

1. Kai Koenig @AgentK he/him Trials & Tribulations of moving to Linux as a developer
2. THE BEGINNING
3. SOLARIS
4. FACHSCHAFT MATHE enterprise.mathematik.uni-essen.de
5. ENTERPRISE
6. ENTERPRISE
7. SUSE 6.4
8. “DARK DAYS”
9. WHAT CHANGED?
10. APPLE HARDWARE
11. APPLE HARDWARE
12. LINUX TO THE RESCUE
13. • Fully Linux-supported hardware • Drivers from vendor • Customisable in many ways • Very specialised vendors Dedicated Linux laptops • Many things work, some might now • Drivers might be included in some distributions • Big brand vendors Dell, Thinkpad etc.
14. MY TUXEDO
15. WHAT IS LINUX ANYWAY?
16. DISTRIBUTIONS
17. DISTRIBUTIONS
18. DISTRIBUTIONS
19. MULTIPLE DESKTOPS? W...T...eeeeeff?
20. X AND DESKTOPS
21. DESKTOPS
22. 22 SOFTWARE
23. SW INSTALLATION
24. OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY
25. PDF
26. SYNC TOOLS
27. COMMUNICATION
28. CFML
29. CFML TOOLING
30. DEV TOOLING
31. DBs
32. MOBILE DEVELOPMENT
33. UDEV
34. BUT WHAT ABOUT…?
35. FILESYSTEMS 101 Case-sensitive Case-insensitive Case-preserving UFS, ext3, ext4, HFS Plus (optional), NTFS (in unix), APFS (optional) VFAT, FAT32 which is basically always used with long filename support, NTFS, HFS Plus, APFS Non-case-preserving Impossible FAT12, FAT16 only when without long filename support.
36. IBM FTW “...JFS has a niche role in Linux: It offers a case-insensitive mount option, unlike most other Linux file systems.”
37. JFS
38. WHAT IS MISSING?
39. WHAT DO I MISS?
40. 40 HOW TO BE STABLE
42. LTS
43. 43 WHAT’S NEXT?
44. <3
45. Kai Koenig kai@ventego-creative.co.nz @AgentK THANKS