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Tried this recently as an exercise in broadening my horizons. - Expect not to be able to SSH into your machine, for example when you really need to remotely ma
by udp 10y ago
Tried this recently as an exercise in broadening my horizons.
- Expect not to be able to SSH into your machine, for example when you really need to remotely make that git push you forgot before you left work.
- Expect either a very slow unix emulation through Cygwin, or a very glitchy one through the new Ubuntu subsystem for Windows.
- Expect installing software to be a royal PITA, and expect to start trusting binary blobs from random vendors because that's just how software is delivered on Windows. Expect every single piece of software to have its own update system, each of which will notify you separately when updates are available and have their own varying degrees of reliability in performing the update.
- On Windows 10 you can not permanently install unsigned drivers even if you really, really want to. The closest you can get is booting up in a one time development mode which is disabled the next time you reboot, or enabling a test mode which watermarks your screen. Very annoying if you have esoteric or bespoke hardware, and I don't like being told what I can and can't do on my own system.
Other than that, my major issues - common to Windows and every linux DE I've tried - were with running on my MacBook with retina (high DPI) display. It's a 1/3 chance for a given piece of software whether it will gracefully support the higher pixel density, will display as a tiny window with unreadable text, or a combination of both. Lack of smooth zoom and scrolling with the trackpad was also annoying, though not a showstopper.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y agoThe Windows equivalent of SSH is Remote Desktop/RDP. I've used RDP from an iPad to a Windows 10 box and it was surprisingly good. Between the RDP client and the Windows box, something realized that I was on a machine without a keyboard and presented the Windows tablet stuff through the RDP connection. In other words, my iPad looked and acted like a Surface when I was connected to the Windows box. HiDPI is a mess on Windows. Apple got this right and everyone else still seems to be playing catch up.
- tyfon 10y agoFor SSH: https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/Install-Win32-OpenSSH https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/Install-Win... For "unix", you can actually run linux on windows now: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_guide https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_gui... If you want to use windows store, it acts like any other walled garden store regarding "binary blobs", but personally I have never used this. The only software I have in windows is Steam which acts like an "app store" for games. Now, I use Linux almost exclusively (there are one or two games I boot my gaming machine to windows to play), but it's actually gotten better over the years, not worse. Just remember to block all the telemetry stuff in your firewall. https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker
- udp 10y ago> If you want to use windows store, it acts like any other walled garden store regarding "binary blobs", but personally I have never used this. The only software I have in windows is Steam which acts like an "app store" for games. Have you ever used an installer? Because that's a binary blob.
- xenophonf 10y agoIt is pretty easy to SSH into a Windows PC. Install Cygwin, install OpenSSH, run the ssh-host-config script as an admin, and open the port in Windows Firewall. I use OpenSSH and rsync to transfer data from a Windows web server to a Linux database server, initiated from the Linux side via cron and logging into an Active Directory domain account using RSA public key authentication. I have never noticed any performance problems with Cygwin. Then again, for the given scenario, you could connect to the Windows PC via RDP.
- udp 10y ago> I have never noticed any performance problems with Cygwin. What have you been doing with it? Even just running a configure script is very noticeably slower than on Linux or OS X. You can actually see the pauses while it executes each test binary.
- xenophonf 10y agoAside from the ETL stuff I mentioned, we also use Cygwin for the X server (although we're phasing that out in favor of something more multi-user friendly like X2Go) and for Unix tooling that hasn't been ported to Windows (mostly bioinformatics stuff, and which is becoming less and less of an issue).