I’m a reasonably competent developer with a degree in EE an eternity ago (1974). I’ve been paid to write code since 1982. I’m proficient in most current languages and several others that were a Big Thing in their day. That means that I’m somewhat jaded about the various claims made by pretty much any current language provider.

For the few years, I’ve spent most of my time doing ES6/NodeJS/React, Python, Neo4J, and whatever has been needed to make those work – all in a CentOS 7 environment. Prior to that, I spent more time than I like to admit doing PHP and Perl for Experian back-end systems. I was a senior architect and consultant for IBM during the glory days of the IBM “Object Technology Practice”.

In both of those roles (and some others), I’ve spent more than my share of nights “on call”. I know what happens when an enterprise-scale system suddenly crashes while, for example, trying to handle millions of inbound http requests in response to a successful ad placement in a Monday Night football telecast.

I therefore have reasonable insight into what it takes to design, build, maintain, document, and support production-quality code.

I’ve been using Linux/Unix in various forms since CentOS 5. I chose the CentOS path in something like 2010 (I don’t remember exactly when) – I think it was CentOS 5. I’ve been recommending RHEL-whatever to my corporate clients and CentOS-N to my friends and colleagues for as long as I can remember.

Like the rest of the world, I was blindsided and appalled by the acquisition of RedHat by IBM and the subsequent murder of CentOS.

Rocky Linux is therefore the obvious choice for me.

Simultaneously with all this, I’ve been developing using machines with WIndows 10 Pro (and Windows 7 before that, Win/XP before that, you get the picture) on the iron and using Linux in local guestVM instances and more recently on AWS EC2 instances.

The last two years of intransigence and incompetence from Microsoft have driven me to put my money and time where my mouth is and purge my local iron of Microsoft anything.

So I’m committed to running Rocky Linux (or, failing that, CentOS 8) on my local iron and then running Windows 10 pro in one or more guestVM instances hosted by vmware Workstation Pro (or its equivalent).

I entertain hopes that as I climb the learning curve to make this work, I’ll share whatever wisdom and scar tissue I obtain in order to make life easier for those who come after me.