that's a very personal decision. most of the guys i met are developing
on mac osx. i preferably work with linux (sometimes mac), but if you
have no experiences with linux it might cause more confusion starting
to work with ruby, rails and linux all at the same time. you should
not have any difficulties doing your stuff on windows.
I think it's really better if you can switch to Linux. There are many
tools that only work on Linux (like the God monitoring tool and
Capistrano), many Gems require "building" tools, like "nmake" and the
Virtual Studio C++ compiler and it will be harder for you to find
"fixes" for your problems (I had a problem running RSpec that I solved
only by moving to linux, no one knew what was happening), as most of
the community runs on Linux or some kind of Unix like OS.
Today i'm full linux (having used Ubuntu and now with OpenSUSE) and I
still run Windows using VirtualBox for IE7 debugging and it's quite
nice, I definitely don't regret what I did.
I think you should consider switching OS when you’re comfortable with Rails. Or when you see that you current OS shows some limitations that linux and Mac OS don’t.
You need to stay with the os that you are comfortable with and DO NOT
insert another huge learning point when you are trying to learn RoR.
This is for your development platform. RoR is very easy to learn but
you do need to take baby-steps, and using Aptana is a great start.
There are many good rails developers using windows btw.
That said I feel that Windows should not be used as a production
server for the RoR environment.
Personally I use a mac with Text-mate and love it. However I did not
switch to my mac just because someone feels its the better platform to
develop with.
Would you change your car if your professional race-car driver friend
said that a ferrari is the way to go?
Would you change your car if your professional race-car driver friend
said that a ferrari is the way to go?
If I had the money for it I might seriously consider it
Personally I use a mac with Text-mate and love it. However I did not
switch to my mac just because someone feels its the better platform to
develop with.
All joking aside, sometimes trusting someone else’s judgement should be taken into consideration. There comes a certain point in Rails development on Windows where frustrations and hurdles trying to get certain niche gems to work (or even quite frequently used gems) get the upper hand. Yet, even in those hard times, some people might find it very hard getting out of that comfort zone of “knowing the OS inside and out”. Biting the bullet and either buying a Mac or switching to Linux for development in Rails’ context is a wise choice imho and the learning curve for either OS is far less steep than most people think. The fact that there’s such a strong voice within the community to either opt for MacOS or Linux should be reassuring. But hey, that’s just my personal opinion.
If deployment on a linux host is likely (much faster than windows for
ruby, and price is cheaper anyway) then it would certainly make sense
to get a grip on linux by making it your dev platform. But it is a lot
of work to learn linux administration.
It might be better to try a linux host within their tryout period and
just see if you really need to learn linux to make a success of such a
strategy: I suspect not. If clients are depending on you, though, I
would go with what you know best.
I never used Linux before, the first task I did after installing
Ubuntu, a month ago, was to set up a Rails environment, if you´re
from Windows world it could take some time just because it´s different
to install software in Linux, but once all it´s set up you don´t have
to mess a lot with the OS. There are many good tutorials on the web.
Now i´m the happy owner of a linux box with a complete Rails
environment for free, if it helps I could tell you that I only had 2
problems:
1. Using Netbeans 6.5 for linux I had problems to configure it to use
my gems repository for the ruby interpreter (not JRuby), this is when
I realize that in Ubuntu I was not the root user! and NB require real
root user permissions. I tried to configure GEM_PATH to use a
repository inside my user dir but this did not work. After some hours
of battle I give up and tried Netbeans 7, and it works!! Of course if
you don´t plan to use Netbeans you do not have to care.
2.I recommend to install Git before you start any programming, sooner
or later you´ll need it. for example:
script/plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip.git won
´t work if you do not have Git installed on your system, who knows
it!!!. Well this may not be a linux issue but if you are as clueless
as me this could save you some time
In the end it is a good learning experience, and I do not regret of my
decision.
I think that linux is really good environment to work in web
development and it has a lot of support from the comunity to solve
problems quickly. Maybe you need try a little how to install a linux
distro and some packages before start with a Rails application over
linux.
I recommend you if you don't have any experience using linux that try
to install first a distribution as Ubuntu. It is easy to install and
mantain actually, and over all, is derived from Debian. I personally
use Debian that is very flexible to install a lot of packages.
Anyway, if you are not sure about linux, so, start learning Rails over
windows, but, try to switch to linux operating system in the future,
you will feel nice using this environment as programer.
Well, after all, this is only my point of view. You will decide that is better.
