9 ms·

What it comes down to for me is that I can do my job (web development) on Windows just fine. But I'm going to spend the entire time trying to trick Windows into

What it comes down to for me is that I can do my job (web development) on Windows just fine. But I'm going to spend the entire time trying to trick Windows into doing Linux things. Mintty for terminal stuff, VMs or the new Ubuntu mode for Linux software, etc. And yes, that works, but it feels hacky, performance is so-so, and it takes considerably more time to setup than the native alternative. The inverse of that is that all I need Windows for is Adobe stuff and Outlook (we use Exchange for mail, meeting scheduling, tasks etc.), which all run perfectly fine in a Windows VM with minimal resources. The only real extra setup involved there is running the Windows installer, which takes like 20 minutes tops. So what's left to compel me to use Windows? The UI? Admittedly, I feel a bit more zippy in Windows than I do Linux, but Kubuntu feels pretty damn close and I kind of prefer its UI over Windows' at this point.

megablast 9y ago
Sounds like Mac OS would be perfect for you.
- byefruit 9y ago
  Indeed and I'm in a similar position the parent poster. However, OS X gets excluded because it immediately constrains my hardware purchases.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Apart from the apple tax and the lag in performance both IPC and in core count plus the fact that apple seems to not realy be focusing on the real power user/workstation user
  - freehunter 9y ago
    >the apple tax Man how often do I hear "I don't want ads on my desktop" or "I want higher quality hardware" or "I'd pay more for a system that X" and then in the same breath someone says something ridiculous like "the apple tax". It's like in cell phones. People bemoan how expensive iPhones are and brag about how cheap you can get an Android phone. An iPhone is $600 but you can get an Android phone for $100! Then I ask which Android phone I should get and I'm told "Samsung Galaxy S8", which is the same price as an iPhone! I'm told Apple laptops are too expensive, so I ask which Windows laptop I should get and I'm told a Surface, a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, an XPS 13... all of which are exactly comparable in price with a Macbook. It's almost like "the apple tax" doesn't exist and people are just mad that Apple doesn't make cheap low quality products that the person complaining would never buy anyway.
    - byefruit 9y ago
      Not sure I agree on the cell phones at all. I have plenty of relatives who are very satisfied with their Moto Gs and for whom the alternative would have been an iPhone at 3x the price. If you want equivalent specs then sure, the prices are going to be similar but that's the whole point, with Android (and a PC) you've got a wide range of _choices_ on many parts of the specifications/price spectrum. With Apple you've got far fewer. The same goes for laptops where you listed three different manufacturers.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        So what you're saying is comparable hardware costs the same no matter if its Android or Apple, the difference is Apple doesn't make low-end devices. That is literally exactly what I said. If a Galaxy S8 and an iPhone with the same hardware costs the same price, there is no such thing as "the apple tax". None. Can't happen. They cost the same. The only difference is that Apple doesn't make anything cheaper, but google "best laptops 2017" and guess what? They all cost the same as a Macbook. So as it turns out, Apple's prices are comparable with their direct competitors. Ergo, the Apple tax doesn't exist.
        byefruit 9y ago
        Exactly as you've said, Apple's prices are comparable with their direct competitors for similar specifications but they just don't provide a low end. If your needs are met by the low end, you're forced to pay a premium.
        freehunter 9y ago
        I originally said "It's almost like "the apple tax" doesn't exist and people are just mad that Apple doesn't make cheap low quality products" You replied "Not sure I agree on the cell phones at all." Your justification for that was "Apple's prices are comparable with their direct competitors for similar specifications but they just don't provide a low end." It is a complete non-sequitur to say they're charging you a premium to buy a high-end device if you want a low-end one. They charge exactly the same for exactly the same. Not a tax. Fact: Apple's prices are competitive with comparable devices. Fact: Apple only competes in the high end market. Not fact: Apple forces you to buy their products even if you can't afford it.
- rocky1138 9y ago
  Why run Mac when he's happy with Linux? Mac is a lesser quality Linux from that standpoint.
  - jetti 9y ago
    Perhaps Elementary then? Mac feel but still Linux.
    - type0 9y ago
      Why, to get the worst of both worlds?
    - FussyZeus 9y ago
      Elementary has potential but it has a LONG way to go. I noticed a lot of issues around installing really anything that didn't come with it. I don't think I was able to get Chrome on it, for example, at all.
    - toxican 9y ago
      Elementary feels like it was cobbled together to look gorgeous (and it does), but zero thought was put into performance and stability. I would take literally any other Ubuntu-derived distro over Elementary any day
  - lojack 9y ago
    Because he still needs to run Windows in a VM in order to get Outlook and Adobe software. I wouldn't necessarily call it a perfect choice for him, but its worth considering if those apps are important to you.
    - PopsiclePete 9y ago
      ...and he can't run Windows in a VM on Linux because....why...?
  - aanm1988 9y ago
    because desktop linux is god awful.
mschuster91 9y ago
Hmm... sounds like OS X would be the perfect fit for you. All the Adobe stuff, and Outlook/Office for Mac is pretty decent (although it uses Spotlight for its INTERNAL search, which means I have to use my org's webmail for search because I hate disk indexers that run in the background). Also you get a proper terminal (the built-in is fine but iTerm is a bit better imho) and a native Unix filesystem.
- JadeNB 9y ago
  > a native Unix filesystem Does HFS+ really count as "native Unix"? (I'm not entirely sure what that would mean, so it's hard to argue, but it doesn't feel right.)
FussyZeus 9y ago
All of this is exactly why I love my Mac. Native unix capabilities with the ability to use the big names (Adobe, Microsoft Office, etc.). I have an RDP to a laptop under my desk for anything Windows-related that needs a physical machine, but I live on my Mac.
- Clubber 9y ago
  I do the same but I also have VMWare Fusion for when I feel like doing Windows development. I created shortcut keys that match Xcode, so instead of [End], I use Cmd ->, etc. and they feel quite natural.
- walshemj 9y ago
  A Native to MAC unix environment almost all unix developers will be deploying to Linux so having a slightly different Unix is actually a risk, as is local development as opposed to a proper dev /test /prod set up
  - cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
    Nonsense. You can have both - a local dev environment where you sandbox test your changes, a "proper" dev environment running Linux, a test environment running Linux that matches production, and a production environment. When you sandbox test your changes in your local dev you also quickly learn which pieces of your code are non-portable or non-standard.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      And your deploying on MAC hardware? Serious developments have identical hardware for dev and test to that used for prod. Its all about removing risk. I have worked at places were the dev test and prod systems where brought from the same sun production run so that the systems where identical down the rev of the motherboards, our networks and sysadmin said he would have liked to buy all the Disks (DASD) from the same production run as well.
      - 9y ago
zvrba 9y ago
> But I'm going to spend the entire time trying to trick Windows into doing Linux things. Mintty for terminal stuff, VMs or the new Ubuntu mode for Linux software, etc. Windows is not UNIX and that's its strength. Don't try to coerce it into doing Linux things; learn Powershell and Windows concepts instead. I've recently switched development from Linux to Windows and couldn't be happier.
- devoply 9y ago
  It's also a weakness as most developers can't switch over to the Windows eco-system at the drop of a hat.
  - zvrba 9y ago
    Well, I was careful to write cross-platform C++ code from the start, meticulously isolating the few platform-specific parts. Yes, it's a lot to learn at start, but Powershell is rather user-friendly, so it helps. Yes, I work slower now than in Linux, but I'm quickly picking up the pace and it's paying off. Plus, there are many hands-on howtos for specific tasks I need to accomplish.
- type0 9y ago
  > Don't try to coerce it into doing Linux things; learn Powershell and Windows concepts instead. Also change to IIS web server, because it's better.
- lottin 9y ago
  > learn Powershell and Windows concepts instead. And how does one exactly do that? Because I once tried to learn what a "home group" was and to my surprise it wasn't defined in precise terms anywhere. Not to mention lower-level stuff such as the init system.
  - com2kid 9y ago
    > Not to mention lower-level stuff such as the init system. The init system on Windows is robust enough that 99.999% of users never have to consider it. There is a UI to control what runs at startup, and that suffices for most things. Windows has services of course, and there is a dependency graph built up of how they initialize, and for a huge % of people developing services, this also doesn't matter. Set what dependencies you have, if your service can be loaded on demand or if it has to be always on, and have at it. More complicated services do require work, at which point documentation can be dug into. > Because I once tried to learn what a "home group" was Bing actually provides a great answer box on this. (search term: windows home group) tl;dr a group of PCs on a LAN that share out file folders (video, music, etc) and printers. Each computer can choose what to share. A PW is requested upon joining a home group. The first non-ad result on Google also explains it pretty well. :) A protocol spec is also available: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff362232.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff362232.aspx (found by searching home group msdn)
cmurf 9y ago
LVM thinly provisioned "virtual sized" logical volumes. This is how I'm installing non-linux VM's these days. Neither virt-manager nor Boxes will see them, but you can use virsh to edit the path to the LV. For example. Create a new VM, and just have it create a dummy LV that you can throw away later (I actually keep a 4MiB one around just for the purpose of having something virt-manager will see and select). Create the virtual size LV: sudo lvcreate -V 50G -T thintastic/vg -n windows Then 'virsh edit daisy' and find the disk section. <disk type='block' device='disk'> <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='unsafe' io='threads'/> <source dev='/dev/vg/dummy'/> <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/> <boot order='1'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x0'/> </disk> Change the path from /dev/vg/dummy to /dev/vg/windows, save it. Now start the VM normally, and it'll use that thinp LV just fine. So the neat thing about that is, you give 50G to Windows, but it's only going to suck up from the VG what's actually being written to disk from Windows; i.e. an installation involves about 15G of writing, so it will only take up 15G of the VG pool's extents. The other 35G are still in the VG pool. You could make the virtual size LV 500G and Windows will see it as 500G, even if it's only backed by 75G of VG. Obviously if you hit 75G of writes, the virtual block device spits out ENOSPC and then presumably Windows gets pissed that it doesn't in fact have 500G to play with. But what this means is you make the LV as big as you would practically ever want it to be, without having to second guess and go "well if I give all that space over to Windows, now I can't ever use it for anything else without it being a hassle of fs resizing and repartitioning". Also fstrim commands on NTFS will cause previously deallocated space (file deletions) in the LV to be returned to the VG for other use. It's actually more efficient doing this than fs resize. I find NTFS on either qcow2 or raw disk on top of a file system means a bigger performance impact than just handing the VM its own virtual block device in the form of an LVM LV. It is easier to move file backed VM's around, like if you have to do a backup-restore. But so far I just backup the user data onto my NAS or cloud, and expect if I have a hardware failure I'm rebuilding the VM from scratch.
foolfoolz 9y ago
I think your concern is actually going to be the same on all platforms. these days we work in a lot of repos. a lot of services that depend on services. almost every one I work in now has its own environment set up. each Python project has its own version of Python. Java projects can share a jvm but get all their own jars. a few services only run in docker locally so it can do further set up. with this in mind, I don't see anything running natively for work anyone. it's always going to be packaged up in a manager/container/vm. the times I do have service specific stuff at an OS level it's actually bad and bites me later on

megablast 9y ago

Sounds like Mac OS would be perfect for you.

byefruit 9y ago
Indeed and I'm in a similar position the parent poster. However, OS X gets excluded because it immediately constrains my hardware purchases.
walshemj 9y ago
Apart from the apple tax and the lag in performance both IPC and in core count plus the fact that apple seems to not realy be focusing on the real power user/workstation user
- freehunter 9y ago
  >the apple tax Man how often do I hear "I don't want ads on my desktop" or "I want higher quality hardware" or "I'd pay more for a system that X" and then in the same breath someone says something ridiculous like "the apple tax". It's like in cell phones. People bemoan how expensive iPhones are and brag about how cheap you can get an Android phone. An iPhone is $600 but you can get an Android phone for $100! Then I ask which Android phone I should get and I'm told "Samsung Galaxy S8", which is the same price as an iPhone! I'm told Apple laptops are too expensive, so I ask which Windows laptop I should get and I'm told a Surface, a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, an XPS 13... all of which are exactly comparable in price with a Macbook. It's almost like "the apple tax" doesn't exist and people are just mad that Apple doesn't make cheap low quality products that the person complaining would never buy anyway.
  - byefruit 9y ago
    Not sure I agree on the cell phones at all. I have plenty of relatives who are very satisfied with their Moto Gs and for whom the alternative would have been an iPhone at 3x the price. If you want equivalent specs then sure, the prices are going to be similar but that's the whole point, with Android (and a PC) you've got a wide range of _choices_ on many parts of the specifications/price spectrum. With Apple you've got far fewer. The same goes for laptops where you listed three different manufacturers.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      So what you're saying is comparable hardware costs the same no matter if its Android or Apple, the difference is Apple doesn't make low-end devices. That is literally exactly what I said. If a Galaxy S8 and an iPhone with the same hardware costs the same price, there is no such thing as "the apple tax". None. Can't happen. They cost the same. The only difference is that Apple doesn't make anything cheaper, but google "best laptops 2017" and guess what? They all cost the same as a Macbook. So as it turns out, Apple's prices are comparable with their direct competitors. Ergo, the Apple tax doesn't exist.
      - byefruit 9y ago
        Exactly as you've said, Apple's prices are comparable with their direct competitors for similar specifications but they just don't provide a low end. If your needs are met by the low end, you're forced to pay a premium.
        freehunter 9y ago
        I originally said "It's almost like "the apple tax" doesn't exist and people are just mad that Apple doesn't make cheap low quality products" You replied "Not sure I agree on the cell phones at all." Your justification for that was "Apple's prices are comparable with their direct competitors for similar specifications but they just don't provide a low end." It is a complete non-sequitur to say they're charging you a premium to buy a high-end device if you want a low-end one. They charge exactly the same for exactly the same. Not a tax. Fact: Apple's prices are competitive with comparable devices. Fact: Apple only competes in the high end market. Not fact: Apple forces you to buy their products even if you can't afford it.
rocky1138 9y ago
Why run Mac when he's happy with Linux? Mac is a lesser quality Linux from that standpoint.
- jetti 9y ago
  Perhaps Elementary then? Mac feel but still Linux.
  - type0 9y ago
    Why, to get the worst of both worlds?
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
    Elementary has potential but it has a LONG way to go. I noticed a lot of issues around installing really anything that didn't come with it. I don't think I was able to get Chrome on it, for example, at all.
  - toxican 9y ago
    Elementary feels like it was cobbled together to look gorgeous (and it does), but zero thought was put into performance and stability. I would take literally any other Ubuntu-derived distro over Elementary any day
- lojack 9y ago
  Because he still needs to run Windows in a VM in order to get Outlook and Adobe software. I wouldn't necessarily call it a perfect choice for him, but its worth considering if those apps are important to you.
  - PopsiclePete 9y ago
    ...and he can't run Windows in a VM on Linux because....why...?
- aanm1988 9y ago
  because desktop linux is god awful.

mschuster91 9y ago

Hmm... sounds like OS X would be the perfect fit for you. All the Adobe stuff, and Outlook/Office for Mac is pretty decent (although it uses Spotlight for its INTERNAL search, which means I have to use my org's webmail for search because I hate disk indexers that run in the background). Also you get a proper terminal (the built-in is fine but iTerm is a bit better imho) and a native Unix filesystem.

JadeNB 9y ago
> a native Unix filesystem Does HFS+ really count as "native Unix"? (I'm not entirely sure what that would mean, so it's hard to argue, but it doesn't feel right.)

FussyZeus 9y ago

All of this is exactly why I love my Mac. Native unix capabilities with the ability to use the big names (Adobe, Microsoft Office, etc.). I have an RDP to a laptop under my desk for anything Windows-related that needs a physical machine, but I live on my Mac.

Clubber 9y ago
I do the same but I also have VMWare Fusion for when I feel like doing Windows development. I created shortcut keys that match Xcode, so instead of [End], I use Cmd ->, etc. and they feel quite natural.
walshemj 9y ago
A Native to MAC unix environment almost all unix developers will be deploying to Linux so having a slightly different Unix is actually a risk, as is local development as opposed to a proper dev /test /prod set up
- cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
  Nonsense. You can have both - a local dev environment where you sandbox test your changes, a "proper" dev environment running Linux, a test environment running Linux that matches production, and a production environment. When you sandbox test your changes in your local dev you also quickly learn which pieces of your code are non-portable or non-standard.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    And your deploying on MAC hardware? Serious developments have identical hardware for dev and test to that used for prod. Its all about removing risk. I have worked at places were the dev test and prod systems where brought from the same sun production run so that the systems where identical down the rev of the motherboards, our networks and sysadmin said he would have liked to buy all the Disks (DASD) from the same production run as well.
    - 9y ago

zvrba 9y ago

> But I'm going to spend the entire time trying to trick Windows into doing Linux things. Mintty for terminal stuff, VMs or the new Ubuntu mode for Linux software, etc. Windows is not UNIX and that's its strength. Don't try to coerce it into doing Linux things; learn Powershell and Windows concepts instead. I've recently switched development from Linux to Windows and couldn't be happier.

devoply 9y ago
It's also a weakness as most developers can't switch over to the Windows eco-system at the drop of a hat.
- zvrba 9y ago
  Well, I was careful to write cross-platform C++ code from the start, meticulously isolating the few platform-specific parts. Yes, it's a lot to learn at start, but Powershell is rather user-friendly, so it helps. Yes, I work slower now than in Linux, but I'm quickly picking up the pace and it's paying off. Plus, there are many hands-on howtos for specific tasks I need to accomplish.
type0 9y ago
> Don't try to coerce it into doing Linux things; learn Powershell and Windows concepts instead. Also change to IIS web server, because it's better.
lottin 9y ago
> learn Powershell and Windows concepts instead. And how does one exactly do that? Because I once tried to learn what a "home group" was and to my surprise it wasn't defined in precise terms anywhere. Not to mention lower-level stuff such as the init system.
- com2kid 9y ago
  > Not to mention lower-level stuff such as the init system. The init system on Windows is robust enough that 99.999% of users never have to consider it. There is a UI to control what runs at startup, and that suffices for most things. Windows has services of course, and there is a dependency graph built up of how they initialize, and for a huge % of people developing services, this also doesn't matter. Set what dependencies you have, if your service can be loaded on demand or if it has to be always on, and have at it. More complicated services do require work, at which point documentation can be dug into. > Because I once tried to learn what a "home group" was Bing actually provides a great answer box on this. (search term: windows home group) tl;dr a group of PCs on a LAN that share out file folders (video, music, etc) and printers. Each computer can choose what to share. A PW is requested upon joining a home group. The first non-ad result on Google also explains it pretty well. :) A protocol spec is also available: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff362232.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff362232.aspx (found by searching home group msdn)

cmurf 9y ago

LVM thinly provisioned "virtual sized" logical volumes. This is how I'm installing non-linux VM's these days. Neither virt-manager nor Boxes will see them, but you can use virsh to edit the path to the LV. For example. Create a new VM, and just have it create a dummy LV that you can throw away later (I actually keep a 4MiB one around just for the purpose of having something virt-manager will see and select). Create the virtual size LV: sudo lvcreate -V 50G -T thintastic/vg -n windows Then 'virsh edit daisy' and find the disk section. <disk type='block' device='disk'> <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='unsafe' io='threads'/> <source dev='/dev/vg/dummy'/> <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/> <boot order='1'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x0'/> </disk> Change the path from /dev/vg/dummy to /dev/vg/windows, save it. Now start the VM normally, and it'll use that thinp LV just fine. So the neat thing about that is, you give 50G to Windows, but it's only going to suck up from the VG what's actually being written to disk from Windows; i.e. an installation involves about 15G of writing, so it will only take up 15G of the VG pool's extents. The other 35G are still in the VG pool. You could make the virtual size LV 500G and Windows will see it as 500G, even if it's only backed by 75G of VG. Obviously if you hit 75G of writes, the virtual block device spits out ENOSPC and then presumably Windows gets pissed that it doesn't in fact have 500G to play with. But what this means is you make the LV as big as you would practically ever want it to be, without having to second guess and go "well if I give all that space over to Windows, now I can't ever use it for anything else without it being a hassle of fs resizing and repartitioning". Also fstrim commands on NTFS will cause previously deallocated space (file deletions) in the LV to be returned to the VG for other use. It's actually more efficient doing this than fs resize. I find NTFS on either qcow2 or raw disk on top of a file system means a bigger performance impact than just handing the VM its own virtual block device in the form of an LVM LV. It is easier to move file backed VM's around, like if you have to do a backup-restore. But so far I just backup the user data onto my NAS or cloud, and expect if I have a hardware failure I'm rebuilding the VM from scratch.

foolfoolz 9y ago

I think your concern is actually going to be the same on all platforms. these days we work in a lot of repos. a lot of services that depend on services. almost every one I work in now has its own environment set up. each Python project has its own version of Python. Java projects can share a jvm but get all their own jars. a few services only run in docker locally so it can do further set up. with this in mind, I don't see anything running natively for work anyone. it's always going to be packaged up in a manager/container/vm. the times I do have service specific stuff at an OS level it's actually bad and bites me later on