While  I am thinking about myself as OS agnostic person, I do have some preferences or opinions about what is an ideal OS form me. I switched my personal computer to Linux a few years ago, but my workstation OS was usually chosen by my employer IT department. To be honest I did not try Vista, I was happy with XP and this was true even after a lot of my colleagues moved to Vista (and back  to XP again). For software developer there are more essential things than Aero or new security model. Developer needs to write code, compile and debug. I have to say that best development experience on Microsoft platform was with combination of Visual Studio 2008 and Windows XP.

To be short I listed my top preferences:

• Performance
• Usability
• Transparency
• Extensibility using scripting languages

From point listed above it is clear what I need, but what OS matches these criteria? I have some other important requirements for my primary working OS. I am a developer and I am using quite a lot of programming platforms and environments. Developing using Microsoft .NET is only available on Microsoft Windows platform (yes I know about Mono ). So I had to use Win64 platform – Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (with some desktop tunings), but I was not satisfied with me experience both from usability and performance side of view.

So what am I missing on Microsoft Windows platform:

• Full 64 bit support
• Performance
• Extensibility
• Transparency
• Solid support for scripting (I used Ruby for scripting, because PowerShell is not an option for me and VBScript just sucks)

Because I have quite a new hardware (including Raptor disks) me and my work colleague decided to move our workstations on Linux using VMWare as solution for .NET development.  I have to say that I was little bit scary about virtualization performance, but it is just fine! I really liked this setup for my workstation. Doing everything inside Linux desktop and do what can not be done using virtualization).

After a week of using Ubuntu as my primary working environment I have only one thing that is not as optimal as I want to. It is remote desktop connection. I was using RDP and it was great, but now for a remote connection from home to my office I have to use VNC. It was only one solution, that fulfil all my requirements. The most important was resuming an existing Gnome session (yes I am Gnome user ). Well to be shot VNC to be fair Gnome Vino server implementation is quite  a slow and bandwidth consuming. But it works and I am writing this post using this connection. If it will be too slow I will use my local browser to write this .

Final conclusion? I am very happy about my move and … that’s all I really enjoy it!

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