Which OS will be the best subsitute for the Microsoft Windows XP/7 [closed]

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 11 years ago.

Improve this question

I want to switch my OS from Windows XP to but as a software 开发者_如何学Cdeveloper I am worried about that will I able to install/run the development tool successfully [Software like: Visual Studio, Sql Server, PHP ... other related tool].

Which OS will be the best subsitute for the Microsoft Windows XP/7, from a developer point of view?

---

This really depends what platform you want to develop the software for. If you are writing Windows programs, Microsoft makes great developer tools which of course run on Windows. The effective tools to develop Mac software are (no surprise) available on Macs. So there's really only a choice if you're targeting cross-platform or Linux. You can use virtual machines to construct whatever testing environments you need, so the main choice is your preference.

Since you sound like you are interested in experimenting with new environments, I would suggest you try Linux. I primarily use Emacs with GNU Global and GDB in Linux to do all my development, and I have benefited from other tools like strace and Valgrind. Eclipse is also available, and I hear it's nice. Since you're used to MS tools, I'll warn you that the open-source stuff isn't as polished or as integrated as MS's stuff appears to be, but it's certainly capable.

---

Well, if you need Microsoft-based software, such as Visual Studio and SQL Server, the best choice of OS will probably be a Microsoft one...

After that, you might want to run some Virtual Machines, for PHP / Linux development.