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

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.

Answer 2

If you're talking about PHP development, there's pretty robust support in all of the operating systems. Linux really starts shining if you're monkeying with the source code and/or building PHP extensions (it's possible on Windows, but VERY unpleasant).

Answer 3

Possibly the same one as you want to deploy your software to, although this applies less (but is still important especially when testing) for technologies like PHP which is fairly good at running on multiple platforms.

Answer 4

I've used Notepad++ on WinXP to do my PHP development on. Pretty straightforward and has ftp built in.

Answer 5

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 Windwos 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 6

There is no best operating system for PHP development. Pick the one that you are comfortable with, which the IDE that you want to use works on. Also make sure you are familiar with using the operating system.

Answer 7

There isn't a clear cut answer. If you are familiar with Windows there is no issues in using it. You can either use the Wamp (http://www.wampserver.com/en/) or Xammp(http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/) server(They install the whole PHP, Apache and MySQL stack for you in a hassle free way). If you are absolutely new, I suggest Wamp as it is more easier. If you are not cool with the PHPMyadmin thing you can also use SQLYog(http://www.webyog.com/en/) for database management.

However if you are hacker minded, try linux. It is good but little harder to set up than windows, but give you atmost power and freedom. Also since it is usually called the LAMP stack, you'll get enough documentation to help you.

I haven't used MAC but there may be good resources there too. Just google.

Answer 8

Ubuntu is the best operating system for PHP development..