I am in the market for a new laptop, and am wondering if I should use Windows 7, 8, 10, or some flavor of Linux (Ubuntu)?
This will be a general purpose/dev laptop, with most and perhaps all of the dev being Meteor.
Is one OS decidedly better for Meteor development, or is it pretty much a case of “six of one, half dozen of the other”?
My first computer was a Macintosh (Classic), but since I’ve been a professional developer (20+ years), I’ve had only Windows (Delphi, then C#, and some Java). I’m not “married” to Windows, though. I’d be willing to switch to Linux or Mac if there was a decided advantage to do so.
Or perhaps a dual-boot system, with Windows 10 & Ubuntu, or some other combination.
I’m also open to suggestions on a dev laptop (make and model). I’m not a gamer, either as a player or a developer, so don’t need a super-duper system in that sense.
I mainly use windows, but run OSX on a VM for certain needs (e.g. building for iOS). In conclusion, if you want an OS where you can do everything meteor related on I’d suggest OSX, but honestly it doesn’t matter if you’re comfortable with running VM’s.
VM’s, as mentioned above are the way forward in my opinion. I use Windows 10 and have an Ubuntu vm for testing on Android. Of course, osx allows you to compile for ios too but you could also just set up an osx vm.
In short, I don’t think it matters as long as you’re comfortable running VM’s, again as mentioned above!
I’ve been on Windows for many, many years and switched to MacOS just some months ago. The main reason was that I wanted to develop native iOS apps as well. And I have to admit that I don’t want to miss it anymore. It’s Unix base gives you easy access to all relevant command-line tools, on Windows this always required some work-arounds and did not really feel natural. On the Mac, everything just works as expected. This helps a lot when developing for Meteor (and Cordova).
Mac OS X or Ubuntu (both without VM). VMs always sucked for me. They are never as smooth as when you run the OS directly on the computer without VM. I also tried Windows like two months ago, but the support was still not good enough for me to use it for Meteor development.
If you don’t have MacBook then I would recommend to try Ubuntu. Meteor works well on it, also I believe that in the end of the day you’ll deploy to some Linux machine as well and it’s good to develop in the same environment as your server.
I was in the same situation couple months ago, and decided to go Windows with Ubuntu dual boot + Ubuntu and OSX VM because of personal preference and hardware support (windows gaming muscle machine). But I have to agree with other posters that OSX is the best way to go at the moment, where everything just works. For example, I’m developing a mobile app with Cordova and was burned knowing that Meteor Cordova is not supported on Windows yet, and another example in an Ubuntu VM you can’t run the Android simulator, since VM in a VM is not supported in VirtualBox. Hope it helps.
From my experience so far, it’s hard if not impossible to bring an app to production on Windows. It’s possible to do on linux, so if you’re on a budget, my suggestion is to repurpose an older X86 box you probably have around… install your favorite linux distro and use that.
The main limitation on a linux box is iOS, of course, but web and Android you can do just fine.
The limitations on Windows are extensive. Very few NodeJs package authors (including MDG) do much testing on windows, so things tend to break or not work at all, and then it costs you a bunch of time trying to Google the solution. Even the base NodeJS environment with the problem of path length > 256 really hasn’t been solved properly.
VMs resolve some of those limitations, but open up others, like the Android simulator issue. Again, it’s going to cost you time, and time is money.
My suggestion, set yourself up a cheap little linux box to do development on, you’ll be a lot happier and more productive. I do my dev on a little Dell laptop that I bought like 7 years ago and is now worth maybe $50 on ebay. I installed Ubuntu on it it does everything I ask without complaints. It’s even got 2 monitor ports and a graphics card that can deal with 1080P, so I have a nice big environment to work on. The battery now lasts maybe 10 minutes, but hey just plug it in.