Which Operating System is the best for PHP development or Development in General?

Question

Which Operating System is the best for PHP development or Development in General?

1) Linux Mint? 2) Ubuntu? 3) Windows 7? 4) OS?

Answer 1

There are four possibilities for the best operating system to develop on:

1. The one you're most familiar with. Familiarity breeds productivity;
2. The one everyone else on your team uses. You can create problems by being different;
3. The one your tools are available on. Sometimes you don't have a choice; and
4. The one your production environment is on. I've seen problems caused before because the dev environment was on Windows and the production environment was Linux. This was with Java. As similar as they can be there can be subtle differences that can bite you badly. PHP is another good example of being quite different on Windows vs Linux.

The one thing I'll add to this is that, of any OS-specific features I can think of, the one that can really matter is filesystem. Once I went a 20 minute subversion checkout on WinXP/NTFS with putty (svn+ssh) to 40 seconds on Ubuntu/ext3. Build time also dropped from 15 minutes to ~3 minutes. In both cases that was nearly all filesystem.

Answer 2

Whatever your most familiar with and like the best.

It is really a personal decision about how you like to work and the tools you like to work with.

It can also depend on the team that your working with. If you have a specific IDE that the team uses, it may help to use the same IDE they are using.

One of the great things about PHP is that you can develop almost anywhere with a large variety of tools.