Hello - I am taking your LPTHW 3 class and your videos show you using Windows. I am just curious to why you use Windows. Is that your platform of choice for coding in Python?
Just curious, plain and simple. And no, I do NOT want to get into a discussion of what environment is best, Windows, Mac or Linux as personally I like all 3.
Hey Bob, I’m sure Zed will chip in too, but if you watch a selection of videos for Python and the other courses, he flips between Windows and Linux frequently.
In fact during the Learn Unix videos we install several distros to see what we preferred. Mac OS is similar to *nix so usually installs and help only need to be explained in Windows or *nix.
Personally I feel terror at the mere mention of Powershell but we have to except the fact that windows PCs are still in use by the masses.
A number of us LC Live students tend to use Mint or Pop_OS!.
Primarily it was for ease of production on my side, and to hit the highest number of possible students on your side. It breaks down like this:
Recording the screen reliably on windows is much easier. OSX does a lot to make recording difficult and the majority of the tools available (like Camtasia) all try to use a proprietary format that I have to spend 40 minutes exporting to use my preferred video process.
What I wanted was a way to record my screen while streaming it out and then just take the recorded results with ZERO post processing over to my Davinci Resolve setup for editing and post production. The best tool for that is OBS https://obsproject.com/ and it works best on windows. Windows also has no problem with codecs, can share the files easy, and it uses less CPU.
Next, the Windows 10 developer story really improved in 2017-2018 once they stopped being jerks about open source and Linux. In the past trying to code Unix things on Windows was a nightmare, but now I honestly don’t see a whole lot of difference in Windows vs. other platforms.
One huge problem my previous books had was I just didn’t bother supporting windows at all. Given that Windows is something like 90% of the desktop market that’s a huge number of people to sideline. Problem was in the past I could just support them because Windows was so hostile to any development environment that was not all Windows. With Windows 10 and Windows Subsystem for Linux that’s not a problem anymore.
So, what I did was I created the 3 setup videos for Linux/Windows/OSX but then went all Windows 10 but I use Windows Subsystem for Linux so that it’s mostly a setup that works for everyone. I also actually code daily on just straight Windows 10 so I may do an update to the intro videos showing how to do that too.
Finally, with Windows 10 there really isn’t too much difference between the three OS these days. It’s mostly stylistic things that are differences in design, and then some various administration things, but for an average user most of the UI elements are nearly identical. Everyone has a home directory now, they’ve got kind of the same folder setup, installing software is easy, they have various command line tools, and even PowerShell does an alright job at mimicking Linux tools.
So that’s why. Mostly just technical and practical reasons.