As of November 2017, all supercomputers on the 500 list run some variant of Linux.” ( Wikipedia )Īs a developer, you sometimes have to do server configuration or maintenance. “Linux distributions are also dominant as operating systems for supercomputers. Note: a website may use more than one operating system. Operating system share for website hosting according to. Because macOS scored so low, less than 0.1%, I didn’t bother inserting it into the graph. It may not seem obvious, as you usually don’t see it, but the majority of servers actually run Unix-like operating systems (of which more than half are Linux). For example, you could create a virtual camera to stream its output and apply some special effects to the original video. You can also create virtual devices as your program’s way of interfacing with others. Specific utilities can be used to read or write data from/to these devices allowing you to access and communicate with the CPU, power supply, hardware modules, and more. To unmount them, use the following command: umount. They can then be accessed as they were part of the file system. Storage devices can be easily mounted via the mount command. Devices are usually stored in the /dev folder.
The file model Unix-like operating systems use means you can effortlessly access every physical device or software endpoint from the command line. This concept goes wonderfully well with task automation.
You don’t need any fancy plugin or driver to do that. Cron is a program that runs tasks (shell commands or programs) at specified times, dates, or intervals.Īnother great benefit is that you can easily interface with everything from a script. You can then use Cron jobs for task scheduling. The most widely used language (and the default shell) for scripting is Bash, although other popular choices are Python, Perl, and JavaScript (with NodeJS). Great Automation CapabilitiesĪutomating long, repetitive tasks is as easy as writing a script that does it all for you. Some companies may choose the operating system for their employees for security purposes or business agreements. Here are the reasons I claim developers should do the switch or at least give it a shot if they have the possibility. Moreover, macOS is also a Unix-like operating system, and thus, many of the benefits I’m going to list below also apply to it. This is because companies often equip their employees with Apple devices for security and privacy reasons. And it’s not because developers feel cool by using Linux, looking at their htop output pretending to be in the Matrix.Īs you can see, macOS’ share in the programming world is significantly higher (+65% actually). However, it’s an extreme increase in popularity with regards to the total desktop users market share (+1068% actually). Operating systems used by developers according to the 2020 Stack Overflow survey.