Why Do Coding Agents Work Better on Linux?

David Heinemeier Hansson says coding agents work better on Linux than on Mac or Windows. They like the Unix idea of separate tools called from the command line, and on Linux almost everything is a config file or a command-line tool. Those used to be the reasons people avoided Linux. They are now the selling points, because an agent can read the files, change them, and copy a setup from one machine to another.

A Mac still hides pieces of the setup. Homebrew has gotten quite good as the missing package manager, but Raycast has no config file you can simply open. The export goes onto a USB stick and gets imported somewhere else. Default Mac key bindings are a manual click-through. Linux inside Windows, through Windows Subsystem for Linux, stays in a sandbox. He wants the system unleashed so an agent can configure the machine and save that configuration for the next one.