Why is it that Linux is preferable for programming

We explained why programmers choose Linux in our previous article, but why has it historically happened that Linux is a more suitable option in the eyes of developers? Is there one and the main reason why this happened? Let's talk about it further.

The historical aspect of choosing Linux

Since the very beginning of web programming on Windows, programmers have used CP-1251 encoding, but in Linux distributions it was UTF-8 encoding. Linux was often installed on web servers, obviously there was a need for UTF-8 program sources. While working with them on Windows, they usually had to be converted or used special development environments in which all this was provided.

Not so long ago, a native SSH client became available for Windows. Programmers have always used Putty before, by the way, you can do it now, or use other third-party programs. But there was no built-in client for SSH, and this brought a lot of discomfort. The built-in SSH-based client became available only with the advent and release of Windows 10. And in Linux, the SSH client has always been easily accessible in the terminal.

On top of that, there was no WSL and Docker before, any Linux-specific ones needed to be installed on Linux side by side/on a virtual machine or install and configure programs for cross-compilation. In some cases, this led to various kinds of problems. In Linux, most of the programs were installed initially, and they were put in several commands and did not require any settings. To do this, it was enough to use the package manager.