Question

What is the best OS for Java development? People from Sun are pushing the Solaris, yes Solaris have some extra features included in itself such as (dTrace, possibility for Performance tuning the JVM, etc.. ). Some friends of mine, had port their application on solaris, and they said to me that the performances was brilliant. I’m not happy with switching my OS, and use Solaris instead.

What were your experiences?

Answer 1

Of the three I’ve used (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows), I consider Linux the best place to do Java development.

My primary personal machine is a Mac, and I’ve done quite a lot of Java development there and been happy with it. Unfortunately, however, Apple lags behind the official JDK releases and you’re pretty much limited to the few versions they choose to provide.

My employer-provided machine is an old P4 crate from HP which I use mostly to keep my feet warm. The real work occurs ‘Oberon’, on a 2.6 GHz quad-core running Ubuntu 8.04 in 32-bit mode [1]. The two advantages I notice day-to-day compared with Windows are:

1. A powerful command line, which helps me automate the boring little stuff.
2. Far superior file system performance. (I’m currently using EXT3 because I’m becoming conservative in my old age. I used ReiserFS previously, which was even faster for the sorts of operations one typically performs on large workspaces checked out of subversion.)

You can get those advantages from a mac too, but Linux offers another nice bonus:

• Remote X11: Before my $EMPLOYER provided e-mail and calendar via web, I had to be on the Windows box to read my mail and see my meetings, so I used Cygwin’s X11. This allowed my to run the stuff on Linux but display it on my windows desktop.

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[1] I used to run Ubuntu in 64-bit mode, but I had no end of trouble. (Mixing 64-bit and 32-bit is something Mac OS X does much better.) 7.04 worked fine running 32-bit applications on the 64-bit kernel. 7.10 broke the linux32 script and the ability to install new 32-bit applications though old ones continued to (mostly) run. 8.04 killed 32-bit java by making it impossible to connect to the network from a 32-bit JVM (no more updates for Eclipse). Running Eclipse 64-bit didn’t work reliably. The then current version of oXygen would only run (grudgingly) under the IBM 64-bit VM which would work for about 10 minutes until it stopped getting keyboard events. I finally gave up in frustration and used my Mac for a few months until I had enough slack time to do a 32-bit install of 8.04 on the linux box. Now everything works again and I’m quite happy.