Why is there a stereotype of it being better to developing applications inside Linux vs Windows?
In: Technology
There are two things that I would say are the main reason.
1. Linux is open source, for application development this means you have everything at your fingertips to figure out why your thing doesn’t work. Building an application that doesn’t work because you have corruption on your screen, you can debug it and debug your graphical libraries too, GTK+, OpenGL, your graphics drivers, and the kernel APIs, they are all available. If your graphics driver is causing your application to break you can debug it, pull up the code, and fix it yourself. Now usually that doesn’t go that far, but a bug in your toolkit (GTK+) isn’t all that uncommon, it’s also not uncommon to have bad documentation and you can find the error in the documentation and fix your application that way.
2. Linux is ultimately designed by developers, and generally if someone wants to write a feature it’s going to get accepted if they do the work. Someone is debugging a bug and thinks it’s in GTK, and thinks that GTK could benefit from debug tools, they’ll write that tool and they’ll accept it. This tends to result in a lot of libraries having a lot of developer-centric features.
Microsoft on the other hand largely takes different views on them.
1. For debugging system libraries, they leave that to Microsoft employees, so when you encounter an error in a system library, or something doesn’t work as documented you have two choices. Ask online (like reddit), or ask Microsoft (and they won’t help you for free). Also Microsoft might be busy and doesn’t have your system, so it’s probably going to take Microsoft longer to do it than if you just had all the stuff their employees had. To compensate, they tend to have better documentation, but it’s not perfect, and you still have problems.
2. Microsoft adds features their users want, if you can get by without some feature because only developers need it, they probably won’t add it, it confuses the idiot user. They want usability with minimum effort, and they don’t care that much about the developers. That means the tools don’t really work as well as they do on Linux.
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