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I've been working for 10+ years this way. Windows on the desktop, ssh in to Linux boxes for real work via ttys. There's nothing about the X11 ecosystem I miss a
by NelsonMinar 9y ago
I've been working for 10+ years this way. Windows on the desktop, ssh in to Linux boxes for real work via ttys. There's nothing about the X11 ecosystem I miss at all. The one hassle is the editor; you're either stuck with using tty editors like emacs or running a Windows app as an editor and relying on network filesystems to let you remotely edit files.
I had a couple of years with MacOS instead of Windows. Definitely better in so many ways. But MacOS Unix is worse than WSL Ubuntu in every way, mostly because it's a bizarro BSD variant with 10 year old tools and Homebrew is a kludge.
I don't do much with WSL but find it occasionally useful in a pinch. The lack of an init system is very limiting, I find I still need a full Linux environment for most things.
- vlunkr 9y agoSome people would argue that using a text-only editor is not a downside at all
- Dude2021 9y agoThey are probably arguing on those FidoNet boards or something.
- NelsonMinar 9y agoEd is the standard text editor.
- wyclif 9y agoI'm curious: how is Homebrew a kludge? Also, the *BSD userland command-line tools on macOS aren't old, they are fairly close to the latest updates for bash, git, vim, etc.
- NelsonMinar 9y agoHomebrew seems far behind dpkg/apt in terms of managing complex dependencies and versioning. It's gotten better, but largely by replicating the complexity of those systems. Last I looked unzip on MacOS still couldn't handle files > 2GB in size. That was a patch submitted about 10 years ago. The version of less is also ancient and compiled without standard features like LESSKEY. At least as of a year or two ago, it's been awhile since I've tried using MacOS.