General > General Technical Chat

OS used in a electronics development setting

<< < (8/8)

nctnico:

--- Quote from: SteveyG on June 11, 2021, 07:08:50 pm ---In the corporate engineering world, it has to be Windows. It just means you can send stuff to clients, or quickly get something onto a laptop for offsite testing etc.

--- End quote ---
That depends entirely on your customers. I have a few customers who run on Linux and a Windows application is very cumbersome to use for them. As I wrote before: if you are serious about software deployability then make sure your software runs at least on Windows and Linux otherwise you'll miss out.

Siwastaja:

--- Quote from: asmi on June 10, 2021, 03:12:34 pm ---In my experience, engineers love going on about how superior Linux is, but when it comes to the actual work, they tend to choose Windows precisely because "it just works".

--- End quote ---

Sounds like trolling but I'll reply seriously just in case...

For the record, I consider myself doing "actual work".

I do initial design - component web research, spreadsheeting, SPICE simulations - on linux. This is actual work.

Then I boot into Windows for PCB schematic&layout for obvious reasons (EDA software availability), and I know mechanical designers do the same. The "OS itself" IMHO really works worse than linux but works well enough to let me do the job, namely running the EDA monster, no problem here, it's ok. This is actual work as well.

For firmware & other software development (actual work again!), I then again boot into linux because it just works for this workflow and does it so much better. I know the difference because I was a Windows-only guy up until around 2013. It was manageable, but it was different. Someone gave me a laptop with linux installed and I changed my MCU workflow into base GNU tools, command line, make automation and linux and it skyrocketed my productivity compared to Windows IDE crap. I was sold; now I'm the one who's called when "Actual Work" needs to be done.

Being stuck in dualboot is manageable but not optimal. The Windows part seems to be some heavy hours during a few days to weeks in a large project.

Because I do both HW and SW, and due to the fact SW is 99% of the time more work, the end result is more work in linux. If I was a HW-only guy, the chances are, I would run a single-boot Windows system; or maybe I forced myself to try KiCad for the fourth time. Nah, it would probably continue to suck.

nctnico:
Same here except that I run WIndows stuff in a VM but that is only for text processing, schematics editing and some other minor tools. For the rest everything runs in Linux (including PCB design with Orcad Allegro). The same goes for firmware development. What takes less than a second to compile under Linux takes 20 seconds to compile on Windows. Same source code, same compiler, same IDE and same machine. Claiming Linux can't or isn't used for real work is utter nonsense. Why would so many companies (Xilinx, formerly Altera, Cadence, etc, etc) have Linux versions of their engineering software? Even Microsoft is forced to make quick progress to have Linux software to run in an integrated VM in order not to have Windows lose traction in the workstation market.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod