Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Android development – Ubuntu vs. Windows platform

Just wanted to share my experience. As part of my crusade for Linux study I first installed Android development environment on my Ubuntu 10 box – dual core hyperthreaded 1.6GHz Atom, 2GB RAM.
After 2 weeks of ignoring 5 minutes long emulator restarts (if lucky) and unbelievably sluggish everything, my hope was raising that may be on Windows platform it will be better.
Today, another frozen emulator start got me other the tipping point and after installing dev platform on Windows (Dual core 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM) I’m working with a TOTALLY USABLE environment, responsive and even nicer looking emulator.

Overall my Ubuntu box is quite fast, but qualitatively not enough for android I should tell.

I’ll re-measure once I have both environments as VMs on the same server.

And actually I can’t see anything to improve Linux knowledge should I do development on Ubuntu as Android dev is pretty much limited to the Eclipse/ADT boundaries per my experience so far.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, Eclipse is main and pretty much best option for Android development no matter which platform you choose. But your experience was ruined because your Ubuntu computer is not enough.

From my experience, I need at least dual core + 4 GB RAM to work efficiently enough. That's exactly what my old laptop looks like and I would say it's the minimum. In practice you should go for more if you want to work really efficiently.

Talking about Windows vs Ubuntu, I think that Ubuntu is better as a working environment but Windows has better JRE. I find Linux JRE being slower than Windows version.

stan said...

Yep, I agree Ubuntu machine should be decent to support Android development with no frustration. It was just my mindset of that time that Ubuntu/Android dev setup would be cheap. Since that time I actually bought Macbook Pro and started with iOS development :). It makes it 2 years actually now. Overall, happy with iOS development.