HACKER Q&A
📣 burntoutfire

OS for doing back end development?


What would you recommend as an OS for doing backend development?

Nowaydays, backend development pretty much means running a lot of docker containers, so I'm thinking Linux is the best fit. Anything else (OS X, Windows) will have to run the linux kernel in a VM for docker, which sounds inefficient. Any thoughts on this?

EDIT: two more thoughts:

1. Linux comes with potential drivers issues as well as poor scaling (4k) support. So, the comfort from native docker has to be weighted against these.

2. The M1 MBP seems like a great machine, but I hear it's completely unusable for backend development - you need ARM binaries inside containers, while images are built for x86. Did anyone find a workaround for that, or do we ineed have to forgo these sweet machines?

  👤 kaycebasques Accepted Answer ✓
I am only a tourist in this space (I run personal sites etc. but do not do any heavy duty engineering nor am I an expert here) but I usually default to Ubuntu. I'm familiar with it because it's my day-to-day personal OS, and it is usually well-supported whenever I use a PaaS (or it's the default, recommended choice, as is the case with Heroku I believe).
👤 thecrumb
Linux. I haven't tried WSL2 yet on Windows but WSL was slow, and currently Docker on Mac is really slow. It works but you don't realize how slow it is til you do the same thing on a Linux machine.
👤 fsflover
> Linux comes with potential drivers issues

Buy a device with preinstalled Linux, and all "potential" issues will not be affect you.

👤 yuppie_scum
Intel Mac is fine if you can afford Docker Desktop or get Podman running.