Best OS for Front End Devs? Easy. Not.

Which OS should I use?

Let's be real, it's not 1990 and the possibilities for web programming are so wide that one could probably state, loud and clear, that any operating system (OS from here on) is a good choice.

Why is it a good choice tho? Why would you have the same quality of coding and productivity both with a Windows OS, a MacOS or the long time favorite, Unix OS based systems?

The short answer can be recapped from the intro, just a little bit above this paragraph: it's not 1990 anymore.

Systems have evolved, Windows now pretty much ships with Linux installations out-of-the-box, and I'm not talking about virtualized, heavy, non-performing Unix installations, I'm talking about containerized full scale Unix OS, smooth as water.

So how do we know what system is better for front end engineering, but also for software engineering as a whole? Pretty simple, we look at the tools we are used to use.

Some tools are Unix OS only, which means that you cannot run them directly on Windows (unless you use Linux inside of Windows), but that also means that you can probably use them on MacOS because MacOS is Unix-based and that, among many other reasons, is why a lot of software engineers do love their Macbooks Pros.

Now, am I telling you to go out there and buy a 3.000,00$ Macbook?

 

If you can spend that money, sure, I'm a macOS user and I do love my Macbook Pro, so I do recommend that system. Also, if you want to work on macOS or iOS, there's no other way, you have to have a macOS computer.

At the same time, you probably won't need it (but it can make your dev life easier for the tooling you can install on it) and why won't you need it? Because you got to be real and recognize the tools that you are using.

Most of you readers might only be using VSCode with extensions and for that any system is a good OS for software engineers.

As a Front End Engineer what's your toolbelt like?

1. HTML5
2. CSS3
3. Javascript
4. Frameworks (React, Angular, Vue et al)
5. NodeJS (even if just for configs and npm)
6. Browsers

See where I'm getting at? Those tools are available EVERYWHERE, on EVERY system.

So again, I'll recap like this:

use whichever system you can buy and that makes you more productive. Whichever answer to those parameters is the right choice.

What to buy

There are so many good choices out there, but depending on your preferences I'd argue my top three would be:

1. Macbook Pro 14" (2021)
2. Lenovo XPS 13" (Both Windows and Linux)
3. Alienware (if you are also a gamer)

The goodbye

I hope you found this article useful and to your liking and if you have any requests, drop a message on one of my social media accounts or open an issue/start a discussion on github, on this repository!