On rants about laptops for developers
&gt; <i>What I want to highlight is that for some people (including this author) running Linux on some machines make them less useful than whatever they begun with.</i><p>Ok so this is a pro-choice defense.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t try to counter-argue that perhaps many people would be more capable on whatever they use today. There&#x27;s the fact that Linux hasn&#x27;t been a particularly well supported possibility for people to mature &amp; develop (themselves) on of course factors in here, that most people are path dependent on what is available, but whatever.<p>To me a lot of the assessment boils down to whether we care about what helps us the most today, or whether we have time &amp; interest &amp; capacity in getting better in the long term. This author, like many others, would undoubtedly do better with what they already know, today.<p>But over time, the advantages of living in Linux, in learning a posix-ish shell well, in coming to understand &amp; thrive with the OS you probably deploy on: those long term investments, in learning a learnable, open source, malleable system, make you a better wiser more experienced dev to who better understands how your application fits together with the rest of the computer, and it probably will teach you a bunch of great tricks along the way. A lot of time it doesn&#x27;t really matter, and you can happily develop away, leave the funny bits to someone else, continue cranking happily away in VSCode either way, and this investment wouldn&#x27;t be returning. But there definitely is something to be said for a holistic approach, for gaining a better perch on computing &amp; picking an Open Source way.<p>But if we only evaluate how productive we&#x27;d be right now, as this article certainly does, and ignore future prospects: everyone&#x27;s going to pick what everyone already saw in the world, and no one is going to invest in learning Linux. You have to want to be able to go further. That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s exciting seeing big companies like HP starting to ship Linux laptops.<p>The author has their own defense of not liking Linux.<p>&gt; <i>Heck, I don’t know how people can think that their subjective personal experience running Linux can simply be extrapolated to be applicable to 100% of the developers in the world. There is no pinnacle of computing, there is no perfect machine for developers. Each person will have a different idea of what they want and what is good for them, let them be.</i><p>&quot;There is no pinnacle of computing&quot; is something I agree with strongly, &amp; is, in my view, by far one of the best &amp; strongest advantages of Linux. There&#x27;s such a wide gamut of Linux experiences, from GNOME to PopOS to Sway to xmonad to Sugar&#x2F;XOPC, there&#x27;s a lot of &quot;something for everyone&quot;, many different styles of Linux, and great adaptability within each system. We can layer in the more outside contenders too perhaps... GoboLinux, ChromeOS, WebOS... Linux isn&#x27;t the pinnacle, but it certainly looks like the right platform for building peaks, has the most versatility &amp; potential.<p>Perhaps Linux&#x27;s worst fault is that Linux challenges us to explore in ourselves what we want, and what best serves us, as opposed to being one well known paved road we all travel down.<p>&gt; <i>I like open-source, I felt that I needed to run a FOSS system. I was mostly running Linux due to self-imposed expectations and peer pressure. I was not happy with it at all. That was not because there is something wrong with Linux, it was because what I wanted was something different.</i><p>I&#x27;d like to see a little more elaboration. They&#x27;ve described a host of external factors, said Linux failed to be what they wanted. But they haven&#x27;t at all labelled what wasn&#x27;t working as they wanted, how they tried to adapt Linux or themselves. It feels like a very pat forgone conclusion; it doesn&#x27;t allow for progress or change: there&#x27;s no possibility Linux could ever improve it&#x27;s way through this, nothing the author could have done to improve themselves. This iconifies  what feels to me a lack of useful genuine candor &amp; argumentation throughout this article, makes it nothing more than a huge example of what the author is most protesting: social pressure, just not in a pro-Linux direction.