Will a programmers computer necessarily have different hardware?
It strikes me that with better virtualisation technology you could have your "appliance" device and your dev box sitting side by side on the same piece of hardware (or access it remotely). The question will be more about access to that, will it be something you can just install like everything else on your device or will you need to do some complex jailbreak or sign an agreement with the manufacturer to install?
I'm not sure to what extent Linux has "take over servers" though. Surely this would seem to be the case with HTTP servers (which are the most visible to the internet) but if you go into businesses from small to large you find an awful lot of Windows Servers doing stuff like Active Directory, Exchange and File/Print sharing. In fact almost all of the "IT Service Provider" companies in my area are Windows only shops.
> I'm not sure to what extent Linux has "take over servers" though
15-20 years ago for a lot of functions a big UNIX box would be installed. More often than not, that box is now a Linux box. Linux didn't so much as push Microsoft out of the datacenter as replace UNIX.
Since virtualized IO is slower, and since developers often pay a premium to get faster compile times, I don't think virtualized development environments are very productive unless a dev can't get a bare-metal box for the target OS environment.
It strikes me that with better virtualisation technology you could have your "appliance" device and your dev box sitting side by side on the same piece of hardware (or access it remotely). The question will be more about access to that, will it be something you can just install like everything else on your device or will you need to do some complex jailbreak or sign an agreement with the manufacturer to install?
I'm not sure to what extent Linux has "take over servers" though. Surely this would seem to be the case with HTTP servers (which are the most visible to the internet) but if you go into businesses from small to large you find an awful lot of Windows Servers doing stuff like Active Directory, Exchange and File/Print sharing. In fact almost all of the "IT Service Provider" companies in my area are Windows only shops.