Linux is the most popular development platform on Stack Overflow
Posted on 03/23/2018 3:19:56 AM PDT by ShadowAce
More than 100,000 developers participated in this year's Annual Developer Survey, which included several new topics ranging from ethics in coding to artificial intelligence (AI). The results are finally here and reveal the fact that some technologies and operating systems have become more popular than others in the past year.
According to the survey, JavaScript remains the most used programming language for the six years in a row, back-end developer is the most common developer type, over 80 percent of responders code as a hobby and 92.9 percent are male, and Node.js is the number one framework used by developers.
Moreover, MySQL and SQL Server remain the most commonly used databases, Rust is the most loved programming language for the third year in a row, Redis is the most loved database for the second year in a row, and Visual Studio Code dethroned Visual Studio as the most popular integrated developer environment.
To our surprise, the open source Linux platform has dethroned Microsoft's Windows operating system in becoming the most used platform for development, according to Stack Overflow's survey. In numbers, this year's survey shows that Linux is used by 48.3 percent of all responders, compared to 32.9 percent in the 2017 survey.
"Linux and Windows Desktop or Server are the most common choices that our respondents say they have done development work for this year," said Stack Overflow. "Linux is once again the most loved platform for development, with serverless infrastructure also loved this year."
This year, Windows is down 5.6 percent, from 41.0 percent to 35.4 percent, on both desktop and server systems, followed by Google's Linux-based Android mobile OS with 29 percent. Apple's macOS sits on fifth place in this year's survey with 17.9 percent, followed by Raspberry Pi users with 15.9 percent.
The survey also shows that Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud platform is more popular than Google's Cloud Platform/App Engine and Microsoft's Azure. Check out the full results of Stack Overflow's 2018 Annual Developer Survey to learn more about this year's technology trends.
And the Linux office programs work pretty well and are mostly compatible with MS Office. However, as was mentioned, support us not always best under Linux. Best to test compatibility and avoid frustration later. It would have worked well for us since most of our computers are cookie cutter — same hardware, same software.
I am going to be finishing my Linux+ cert by mid April.
Yup, it is too bad.
Years ago I helped out a department at a local university who didn’t have much money. This was around 2003-2004 or so. They had several old file servers with Windows NT 4.0 on them, wanted to upgrade to Server 2003 but couldn’t afford one let alone several licenses. This was long before the university started using an Enterprise Agreement which give unlimited licenses via KMS...
Anyway, I put RedHat 5.0 on them and set up SAMBA for the file shares. You could not tell the difference, even browsing through the mapped drives in XP’s Windows Explorer. The systems were old, getting out of warranty, but they had about 30 of them to play with that had the same hardware. I only set up five, telling them to use the others to cannibalize parts until they got some money.
Anyway, the local sys admin, who was in my user group, a few years later wanted me to sneak him some “free” Server 2003 product keys. This was for those same file servers. I asked him what was wrong with the setup I made for him. He said that Linux was too hard, and it kept him up at night worrying what he’d do if they crashed! So he reinstalled all of them with bootleg copies of Server 2003.
How much work was it for him or her to reformat the servers with Server 2003? Sounds like a painful stressful process. But maybe job security?
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