OS Talk: Why Web Developers should use Linux
DarrenM
There are many reasons why working on Linux has advantages, but for web developers, it should be a no-brainer, but just in case you really need reasons here are just a few of the main ones.
The main feature Linux boasts that makes it better suited for web development over any other Operating System is the fact your local apache server has the same setup as your live hosting. Even without this, the benefits of using Linux over Windows or Mac OS are massive. I’ll go through the main advantages with you in this article.
Spending less time worrying about problems
As Web Developers spend a lot of time on the Internet, whether its checking emails, working on twitter or downloading the latest patches for software you use. It’s nice to know your pc, and all the important work on it is save. When using Windows and even a Mac to an extent you can install Antivirus, anti-spyware and anti adware on your computer to have any chance of making sure its safe from the threats that come with using the internet these days. And even then, that is a lot of trust to be putting in the hands of a 3rd party company.
A real life, proper server to test on
When working on a site, many web developers work on a local development server before transferring it over to their live site. This enables them to test everything before it goes live. Any computer with a browser can view locally stored html files, although if you work with php in any form, you’ll need a server with php supported (guess what you can do that locally on the Linux box as well!).
Both Windows and Mac can be setup to run as a local server, although these have totally different setups from over 70% of all online servers, which run on Linux Machines.
When running Linux on your PC you can have a fully functioning web server on your computer with the exact same setup as your live site.
How to install Lamp on Ubuntu
Save Money
You don’t need to spend big bucks to have the latest and best Linux running on your computer. Licencing is non-existent as Linux is Open Source.You’ll be able to easily find a linux distro that will run on nearly any PC made within the last 10 years, possibly more if you really want to.
Instead of spending money on the applications you use, you can get something suitable for free, which can be installed in minutes without any hassle once you get past the relatively easy learning curve. And as Linux is open source it means that anyone who is interested can help out with the code, just like what happens with WordPress!
It’s Yours: Web Developers love Open Source Software
It’s a fact that a majority of our community love Open Source software. Most of US believe that software should not be under proprietary license. So why use a software which is not open source. Linux is open source and you are free to do anything with the code. Change it, rip it, sell it whatever you want to do with it. Just keep it open source. :)
5 great free Linux Web Development Applications
Comes as default with most Linux distributions, is a great simple no frills text editor which its quite popular for coding. Has syntax and tab support.
jEdit
Another text editor, though more advanced. This truly is a programmers text editors.
KompoZer
Kompozer is a great free wysiwyg web editor. Another similar software is Amaya which is a great free Web editor started by the WC3.
Offers a full web development environment producing html, css and JavaScript.
Despite what some people believe browsing on the web using Linux is the exact same (apart from being allot safer). You can use all the big browsers apart from Safari, and I’ll also point out that all the addons work as they should no matter what Operating system you are running.
Lamp (Linux, Apache, MySql & PHP )
One I’ve already mentioned: The package LAMP, an anagram of Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP provides a fully working server which is the same package 90% of all websites run on. Great for offline development too!
Note: I haven’t linked to the above few programmes a I recommend you download them with your system installer.
For a great sized list showing some brilliant Linux Applications head over to Top 100 OpenSource Applications
Designing on Linux
Designing on Linux is also a lot better than what people seem to think. By default many distributions include the programme Gimp, which although not exactly as detailed as Photoshop, it defiantly does pack a punch.
Other programmes that are great for designing are:
An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
OpenOffice Draw
From the OpenOffice package offers the ability to draw anything from a quick simple design to detailed complex designs
It’s also possible if you don’t want to use any of the great Linux alternatives to get Photoshop working on Linux using Wine.
Photoshop CS2 on Linux with Wine
And if there is a Windows programme that you can find for Linux then you can more than likely get it installed on Linux using Wine (Free) or Crossover (from €37.00 ) though crossover is more aimed at playing Windows games on Linux.
As an alternative if you do have a reasonably fast PC with sufficient ram you could use a virtual machine (VIRTUAL BOX) and have a couple of flavours of Windows on it (licensing is the issue here, but you are just testing) and then check if IE7 and 8 (and IE6 for about 20% of the web users) can access your site. More importantly you can then see how badly these will mangle your code and what fixes you have to make.
Linux is suitable for everyone
A common misconception is that you need to be a big tech person or geek to use Linux, although this is true with some distributions such as Arch Linux, with the dawn of new distro’s like Ubuntu, you can have a fully working Computer with a few clicks and 15 – 20 mins of your time.
You can even use Wubi: the Ubuntu installer to install Ubuntu with a single click from Windows.
Helpful Readings:
- Offical Ubuntu Installation Guide
- Dual Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
- Ubuntu 10.04 Post-Install Guide: What to do and try after installing Lucid Lynx!
- Installing Apps in Ubuntu
Some other great Linux distributions
So there probably isn’t any single reason why you should move to Linux for your Web Development work, though it can drastically make life a lot easier for you. I really recommend you at least give Linux a try, it really is worth the effort.
What’s your opinion on which operating system, web developers should use?
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abhishek rigue
Posted 69 days ago 81Thanks Darren!
one of the best article i ever read. It helped me a lot.
Thanks again……
jd
Posted 93 days ago 80Back again…
As many have said, and I said originally… and this is also a good point
“But as a professional engineer I don’t have *time* to get it up and running.
This is something many Linux fanboys don’t quite understand. Time spent finding work-arounds for Linux is time lost. I use both systems at work. Linux is an excellent server side platform but for dev I prefer to use Windows because I never have to question whether anything will run on it or not. IE runs natively and software that normal people actually use can be tested without using a VM or WINE.”
TIME TIME TIME…saving 100 bucks is a non issue, why is this even mentioned…
Face it, if you are prof web developer, i.e. you make several thousand dollars a year, having STABLE Adobe CS5 and MS Office is a MUST. I repeat, a MUST. Virtually every client’s wireframes, graphics, etc are going to come with this. Both Mac and Windows both run good dev environments for eclipse. They are all just tools, linux is great for a web server with no gui, of course it is… but as a Desktop client it is still far behind.
Some linux geeks act like we are newbs b/c we are using windows and mac…Are you joking? We use Win/Mac b/c it saves a lot of time, linux is not exactly difficult to use. But time is money. I’d rather be developing/designing than troubleshooting.
Mike
Posted 67 days ago 82Hi, I’d like to second jd’s post.
I have had my experiences over the years with windows 3, 95, 98, ME, and XP. and not one single one of them ran perfectly all the time, maybe except for windows 3. I had to put up with random blue screens of death, I even had to deal with viruses, I even had to download a dos virus scanner to clean the windows viruses, etc. Come XP, and its no different. in fact, the newer versions are SLOWER. they put in more eye candy to make the end user think that he or she is having the greatest system ever. Then when windows starts to fail, they make their error boxes more fancy by giving you the opportunity to send an error report… for what?
Another problem with windows for me is that alot of times, a restart was necessary to make the system work and to even make certain changes effective like swap file size, etc.
Now on to linux….
I installed it only once, made minor configuration changes (since im a slackware user), and now it is working flawlessly on the exact same computer that I ran all of the windows versions on. On top of that, I was able to create a custom config script to make linux work as fast as windows 95 or even faster. Funny thing is that this linux is newer than windows 98!
On top of that, linux is much more secure. not only do you have your read-write-execute permissions (in windows is archive, read-only, hidden and system), in linux, the permissions are categorized by groups that certain users can access as defined by the administrator, and you don’t even need a GUI to configure anything in linux. In windows, you’ll be lucky if the files are bound to permissions and to certain groups and to certain users. I dare someone to access windows remotely from a low level.
On top of this, I got a lamp stack included in my distro and it was pretty much ready to go.
Bottom line…. even tho some linux distros show a bunch of text at the start, linux is NOT slower. It’s all about how the OS’s are configured. The best part is that the odds of a lockup and/or a required restart in linux are like 1 in 1,000,000,000 where as in windows, its more like 1 in 100.
Moduł dźwiękowy Classic dla SlovoEd - Rosyjski (20 000 słów) dla Symbian S60
Posted 117 days ago 79Interesting article. Were did you got all the information from?
Brian
Posted 171 days ago 77Awesome post, wish I read this earlier. Linux all the way for sure ! You just made me see why exactly
Karl
Posted 199 days ago 76We’re a small web design and development company who use mainly open source software. However, as part of our job is cross-browser support, we need IE.
Windows licensing means in order to run IE you need a Windows OS. To check all browsers properly, the best OS is W7 Ultimate with XP mode.
I love Linux, and all the software we run as a company is cross-platform so we can use portableapps and Linux Live if anything goes down.
We run XAMPP for development, use Inkscape, GIMP and Scribus, so there would be no difference to any aspect of our business except browser checking if we switched.
If we did just GD or dev it would be Linux, but since the browser thing is important to us, we’ll develop on and for all major browsers, and W7 is the best solution
Martien de Jong
Posted 215 days ago 75I use Windows 7 as desktop. I cannot use a lot of programs in any other OS than Windows plus a lot of my hardware won’t work. If you use Ubuntu or Linux Mint which seem like good end-user distributions, you could be using Windows 95 as well, given the features and all. I agree that Vista has a lot of bugs but Windows 7 is just the best OS at the moment imo. Add all the programs available for Windows and it’s a winner.
I use Linux for servers and test environments, since it is very easy to configure with scripts and it is performs well and is secure.
I can see how OS X can be the OS of choice for design and development since it does a good job at that as well. I never used OS X much myself since the programs are available for Windows as well.
Cycron
Posted 255 days ago 74I’m a Linux using web designer/developer. However, I don’t think this post was well put together (typos everywhere).
I currently use Ubuntu 11.04 with Gnome, but I’m planning on switching back to Debian.
Currently, for my development and design needs I use Gimp and Gedit.
Yorkshire
Posted 267 days ago 73Great post, I believe website owners should acquire a lot from this site its real user genial .
ajayahmed
Posted 284 days ago 72None of the comments above are from actual web developers. You do not need to do cross browser checks when you follow web standards (try w3school). Linux users need to stop expressiong opinions as facts and misleading the less informed. Commercial operating systems are always more stable and superior as the developers are paid to work and non commercial are worked on as a hobby – who would you trust? I use Windows for odd games, mac for movies, music production and now learning video editing and ubuntu for web development and my employers use rhel. At the end of the day it’s like the infamous saying; “it’s not the car it’s the driver”. The best tools are what you find most comfortable, there’s nothing else to. Nonetheless, article was great, thank you.
Mike
Posted 67 days ago 83I am a web developer. It is a good idea to have your code checked by multiple browsers and definitely the HTML validator at http://validator.w3.org/
While the HTML is important, some browsers cannot comply with the standards and do what they think is best. If you test with just a few browsers, like the latest versions of IE and Firefox, and the tests pass with them and the html validator then your website should be good.
Marcelo
Posted 332 days ago 69Hallo. i tried to use.. many web dev tools. like bluefish,geany and other but. … i dont like it. now i use komodo edit for linux. is no under gpl licence but its free :) and work good for me. other good web dev IDE .. i think. and i use it to is Netbeans. for php exactly.. code completetion and more .. :) to create images… inskape and gimp.. and i use web developer tools. (u can download it from ubuntu repositories. or from launchapd…) bye :)
jd_
Posted 344 days ago 68Hello,
Decent article with breadth but not much insight or depth. Regardless… I suppose it is useful.
Don’t get me wrong, in an ideal world, linux would be king. However this is not an actual ideal world.
I am a web developer, and my servers use well… a paid version of linux (gasp) Redhat Enterprise …Because I actually have to work with other people, who know Redhat, and rely on real world stability. If I have an issue, I know I can get an answer for it.
At home however… I still run Windows, even though I know bash in linux, every thing you mention in your article, are actually done better in Windows.
Not because Windows is inherently better, it isn’t. It is because Windows supports the applications I need to succeed with professional tools.
These would be, Microsoft Office. Complex Excel sheets with VBA, general word docs, just are not reliable in OpenOffice…There are too many quirks to even attempt it. Plus the giant mass of consumers use Mac/Windows which both run Office.
2nd, Adobe Suite… there is simply no substitute that runs natively (or correctly) in Linux such as InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator
Windows is great because I build my own hardware, and it works. I have triple screens at home, dual 24″, and a 46″ Plasma. All connected to my box for monitoring purposes. This simply would NOT work under linux.
My audio software will not run favorably with linux either.
My Wacom tabs do not function correctly in linux, nor do my custom keyboards.
So … basically for a Pro desktop, I would stay linux is still far behind, though I think it makes the best web server, and I use it and I’m sure I am much better at the command line and as a sysadmin than all these newb linux fanboys… I’ve been using unix for almost 20 years now.
Best
jd
Bas Schouten
Posted 404 days ago 66Are you serious? ‘incredible cost savings’? Windows 7 Ultimate is $220 .. that’s a whole 2 hours of work if you’re a fairly cheap contractor. OS pricing is really not an issue in a commercial environment.
As for a live server, it’s quite easy to setup a Linux VM host or another sort of setup where you can easily test without having to run a (security sensitive ;)) thing like a web server on your day-to-day computer which may contain security sensitive information.
As for the Virus thing, it’s nice, and it’s true, until everyone starts using Linux and viruses start being made for it. So for now that argument will hold, but it’s mainly a merit of using a fairly uncommon OS.
No, the good reasons to use Linux for these sort of things are idealistic, not practical. Not that there’s anything wrong with idealistic reasons, they just should be confused with practical ones.
H.
Posted 429 days ago 65Regardless of being a fan of open source and Linux, however EVEN Linux isn’t a trouble-free system, in fact, I can feel that working on a Linux system gets your hand more “dirtyer” in things you shouldn’t have wasted your time with in the first place. For example, why till now I have to fedle around to get x3100 VGA running smoothly in Ubuntu, for example ??
Linux may be better in lots of aspects than either Windows or Mac, but it isn’t superior in every aspect, nor offer a trouble-free computing out-of-the-box.
Someone
Posted 429 days ago 64“Up to par with Windows and Mac”
This wasn’t the impression I got from the introduction.
Shawn Scammahorn
Posted 499 days ago 63I only use Windows on my other machine for testing IE.
Been using Ubuntu exclusively for about 6 months and I love it.
I’ve tried Aptana, Bluefish and some other code editors, but Geany is my favorite so far. I use FileZilla for my FTP and Dropbox to sync any files I need on my other computers.
I’ve been running PS CS5 under Wine and it works great. Never could get the hang of GIMP.
I do love me some Inkscape. I usually send files in EPS to sign and print companies that use Illustrator.
I don’t use Windows anymore because of the amount of virus/spyware/malware software I needed have just to feel safe turning on my computer.
But that said, you won’t make the transition from Windows to Linux overnight unless you’re already comfortable with it. However, I don’t intend to go back to Windows as my main system.
Christoph Martens
Posted 552 days ago 59Nice article!
…but a recommendation: I prefer using bluefish as my editor.
It’s pretty perfect – supports gvfs (which means you can open and save files that are mounted via ssh or ftp).
You can click on the nautilus bookmark, open your “external hosted” website ftp directory and edit the files with double-clicking them. Pretty cool and much time-saving!
Also there is something like “macros” where you can set templates using variables (which are requested when you click on ‘em).
Many, many features.
Have a look at the screenshots:
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/screenshots.html
Greets,
Chris
Marijus
Posted 567 days ago 58Actually I would use Linux (and I have tried to do for about half a year) for WEB development. But the problem is a compatibility of windows-based programs, which are wide used by clients, colleges – IE, Photoshop, MS Office. Gimp and OpenOffice could not substitute them. Using VM could be a solution if not a high resource consuming and delay of loading…
Actually I thing Linux developers should invest on Windows-based programs running solutions, such as Wine. Otherwise Linux always would be NR 2.
Otto Rask
Posted 575 days ago 52A no-brainer for a web developer to use Linux? I’d say a no-brainer for me is to get work done in Windows and leave playing around in a new OS for the free time when I can be arsed to learn a whole new set of varying workflows, quirks and problems.
Not saying Linux is worse or better than Windows, but if Windows works as well for a web developer, why waste (paid) time and learn Linux? I’d rather use Linux to learn how to set up an actual server environment, used and offered by web hosting companies. :)
Hellboy1994
Posted 576 days ago 51I hate Linux ,its a stupid OS.U may say its developed , Open source or whatever that doesn’t change the fact that the regular person finds difficulty in using it.And in what concern design , i give him 0/20 and this is why :
-Most powerful design softwares are built for Mac or Windows.
-Unstable system.
-The system can crash anytime.
-You fell like you are handling with a rock ,not a pc.
Darren
Posted 573 days ago 54Are you sure it wasn’t a rock you tried Linux on? As everything you mentioned is complete and utter BS
Xavier Sythe
Posted 534 days ago 60Linux is definitely the best OS. Period.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 works on it via WINE, too.
For new users, I recommend Linux Mint.
Qchmqs
Posted 135 days ago 78U think LInux Is UNstable ????
I worked With Linux My Whole LIfe (i am currently running a Mandriva )and never saw A BSOD
do u call windows stable ???
do u like to have to do a fresh install and loss all your data for one single bad mouse click(virus spyware spamware damnwares)
linux never crashes for me and it is not rocket science it is just a bit complicated and if u handle it well u’ll find that it does the job well
(the more u love him the more he loves you)
tobias
Posted 591 days ago 48I tried Ubuntu and quite liked it also it has a few quirks.
It’s a show-stopper that I cant use the Adobe suite on Ubuntu (To the geeks: No, Illustrator 10 on Wine and/or Gimp is not enough).
Having a real server and the apt-get package management is “nice-to-have” but not really something essential.
I switched back to Windows and I feel its much more reliable and it “just works”, what’s kind of most important for professional work. For that reason I would also like to switch to MacOS at some point.
Xavier Sythe
Posted 590 days ago 49Actually, you can run the Adobe CS4 Suite on Linux, it just takes time and energy to get it up and running. The arguments listed in this article are specifically for web developers, and Linux isn’t specifically designed for us. Linux is simply wonderful, for hundreds of different use-case scenarios.
Daniel Hooker
Posted 355 days ago 67But as a professional engineer I don’t have *time* to get it up and running.
This is something many Linux fanboys don’t quite understand. Time spent finding work-arounds for Linux is time lost. I use both systems at work. Linux is an excellent server side platform but for dev I prefer to use Windows because I never have to question whether anything will run on it or not. IE runs natively and software that normal people actually use can be tested without using a VM or WINE.
Sure some software tools don’t run quite as smoothly as on Linux, but I seem to have fewer problems than colleagues who run Linux as their main client side dev box. They spend their time messing around with drivers and working out why things are broken and I spent my time doing development. I once ran XP for months without requiring a single reboot.
Having programmed computers for over 24 years I can tell you that they are a tool and nothing more. The differences between operating systems is really not worth spending so much time and energy debating about. You find your prefered tool and stick with it.
Christopher Anderton
Posted 591 days ago 47I don’t get it. I can run every app mentioned on OS X (including the KDE/Gnome apps) + all the non open source apps like the Adobe apps, MS Office and so on.
Browser testing? You could go with a Virtual Windows or Linux installation. Or you can go with setting up different Windows IE versions stand alone with Wine.
Server. MAMP (up and running in 1 minute) instead of LAMP. I never had a single problem to develop a complex site on MAMP and then move it to a Linux server. It’s Apache, PHP and MySQL. It’s not different on OS X.
However. I don’t want to bash someone that using Linux. It does not mather what you are using. As long you get the job done. The only thing is that the arguments of why choose Linux is pretty flawed in many ways.
DarrenM
Posted 590 days ago 50Thanks for the comment Christopher,
This wasn’t just a post on why the choose Linux, its aim was to show people Linux was up to par with Windows and Mac.