My 2026 Software Development Stack

OS: Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop

When I have the choice, I generally prefer a Linux-based OS for ease of configuration, consistency, and a general lack of for-profit-software shenanigans. Unfortunately, at work I have to use Windows as the bare-metal OS — but fortunately I'm able to use Windows Subsystem for Linux to virtualize Ubuntu and get a sane, predictable environment for most day-to-day tasks.

For my personal systems, I tend to gravitate toward Fedora for its excellent focus on being a stable, consistently updated workstation OS. I prefer the KDE Plasma Desktop edition since Plasma offers better performance, Wayland, and VR support compared to GNOME.

IDE: Visual Studio Code

I've switched my work and personal development setup entirely from IntelliJ to Visual Studio Code. At work, I use VS Code's WSL extension to remote into my Ubuntu environment. For personal projects, I generally use VS Code directly in Fedora, but have DevContainers set up for projects with finicky environment requirements. I previously found IntelliJ to be a significant step up from other IDEs and well worth the subscription cost, but that gap has closed considerably. IntelliJ also suffers from consistently outdated third-party extensions — not necessarily JetBrains' fault, but less than ideal when rapidly updating LLM integration extensions are driving most IDE efficiency gains.

LLM: Claude

My employer provides an enterprise GitHub Copilot license, and while I'm only permitted to use official IDE extensions (MCP servers are explicitly blocked), it's been a great way to get exposure to frontier LLMs and agentic coding. The latest GPT and Gemini offerings are available, but I spend the vast majority of my usage on Claude — specifically Sonnet and Opus 4.6 — and find it the most consistently capable of the three. I also pay for my own Claude Pro subscription for my personal projects and have never really missed GPT or Gemini. The tooling (Claude Code) is a definite step up from Copilot, though I do find myself missing code autocomplete from time to time.