The Operating System Preference Is Dead

At least for me. I grew up using Windows. Since the early days of Windows 95, it’s been the de facto OS that I worked on day in and day out. It was the place for games, the place to browse the yet-to-be-bloated web, the destination for fun ICQ and MSN Messenger chats, and undoubtedly the place for all sorts of hobbies, from building with Visual Basic 6 to tinkering with 3ds Max and Photoshop. Granted, a lot has changed since then. My preferences have evolved towards more open and extensible tools. I became much more comfortable with programming on top of platforms that were portable, and with working outside the bounds of very narrow APIs. The tooling itself also became much more broadly available across platforms, so with time I felt less of an affinity for any particular “computing home.” With mobile devices, I started using both iOS and Android, depending on what I was trying to do. I grew comfortable with both - it all blurs once you have muscle memory of the platform basics. The…