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Boy I'm happy Microsoft is making Windows 10 into a great development platform for the web! One of the rare things to feel upbeat about is that we have great c

Boy I'm happy Microsoft is making Windows 10 into a great development platform for the web! One of the rare things to feel upbeat about is that we have great choice when it comes to OSes.

e40 7y ago
Competition at the OS level is good. Windows getting better will only make others try harder. As a former Windows user, then macOS convert, I look at what's happening on Windows with envy. macOS is getting prettier and perhaps more consistent, but buggier. It's very frustrating. I've had so many problems with security updates, with both the latest and other supported versions. Apple support is terrible these days. I filed a bug report with them and weeks later they give me absolutely lame replies. The only thing that gives me pause, still, about Windows 10: it updates when it wants to and that is difficult to turn off (you can set your network to "metered" and I hear that will do it). Also the telemetry. I feel like it spies on its users more than Apple's product does.
- blinkingled 7y ago
  The updates btw got a lot better even for Windows 10 Home users. It can be argued if letting users turn off the updates is a overall good idea or not but at least you have more flexibility in postponing them with 1903.
- miaklesp 7y ago
  Updates were improved in 1903
- lostmsu 7y ago
  Many standard Windows apps are currently also quite buggy, including Store and Mail to name a few.
- jmkni 7y ago
  I just wish they would take the advertising right out of Windows 10, as well as Bing in the start menu etc. It really ruins it.
h1d 7y ago
Better late than never but I feel sorry to people using Windows for web dev when the tooling experience has been way worse than Mac for a decade now. And some people can't even try to switch out of Windows.
- blinkingled 7y ago
  I kind of feel the same way about using macOS. At this point in time if your hardware works with Linux you're missing out on a lot of things by using macOS. Windows/WSL2 removes the hardware compatibility part leaving macOS to catch up.
  - h1d 7y ago
    What is there to miss on Linux exclusive tooling or even Windows exclusive tooling?
    - blinkingled 7y ago
      There are lot of small things that to me personally add up to a much bigger annoyance when using macOS. Lack of official hypervisor means I have to use 3rd party stuff - few times I used it I had kernel panics on wakeup. Old versions of all command line utilities - need brew to install that which has broken on me at least once. Updates are slow - both in terms of availability and installation times. If I need new stuff, I am forced to upgrade to entirely new major release. Compare that to a rolling release distro like Arch or fast moving one like Fedora or slower moving Ubuntu LTS that gets HWE stack upgrades life is really easy. You get a built in hypervisor (KVM) that can be used by the Android emulator, your libvirt VMs and docker. Want to run dtrace/bpftool - no need to compromise security. Need latest GCC - easy enough to get - it goes on and on. Not to mention the package managers are pretty good on all Linux distros now a days. With Windows the downside was that WSL 1 was slow and macOS was faster than that although slower than Linux for FS operations etc. But now with WSL2 pretty much matching native Linux performance and allowing you to use docker natively - it suddenly becomes a much better option - can buy cheaper hardware that does what you want to without relying on Apple to give you the right keyboard, # of ports etc.

Boy I'm happy Microsoft is making Windows 10 into a great development platform for the web! One of the rare things to feel upbeat about is that we have great choice when it comes to OSes.

e40 7y ago

Competition at the OS level is good. Windows getting better will only make others try harder. As a former Windows user, then macOS convert, I look at what's happening on Windows with envy. macOS is getting prettier and perhaps more consistent, but buggier. It's very frustrating. I've had so many problems with security updates, with both the latest and other supported versions. Apple support is terrible these days. I filed a bug report with them and weeks later they give me absolutely lame replies. The only thing that gives me pause, still, about Windows 10: it updates when it wants to and that is difficult to turn off (you can set your network to "metered" and I hear that will do it). Also the telemetry. I feel like it spies on its users more than Apple's product does.

blinkingled 7y ago
The updates btw got a lot better even for Windows 10 Home users. It can be argued if letting users turn off the updates is a overall good idea or not but at least you have more flexibility in postponing them with 1903.
miaklesp 7y ago
Updates were improved in 1903
lostmsu 7y ago
Many standard Windows apps are currently also quite buggy, including Store and Mail to name a few.
jmkni 7y ago
I just wish they would take the advertising right out of Windows 10, as well as Bing in the start menu etc. It really ruins it.

h1d 7y ago

Better late than never but I feel sorry to people using Windows for web dev when the tooling experience has been way worse than Mac for a decade now. And some people can't even try to switch out of Windows.

blinkingled 7y ago
I kind of feel the same way about using macOS. At this point in time if your hardware works with Linux you're missing out on a lot of things by using macOS. Windows/WSL2 removes the hardware compatibility part leaving macOS to catch up.
- h1d 7y ago
  What is there to miss on Linux exclusive tooling or even Windows exclusive tooling?
  - blinkingled 7y ago
    There are lot of small things that to me personally add up to a much bigger annoyance when using macOS. Lack of official hypervisor means I have to use 3rd party stuff - few times I used it I had kernel panics on wakeup. Old versions of all command line utilities - need brew to install that which has broken on me at least once. Updates are slow - both in terms of availability and installation times. If I need new stuff, I am forced to upgrade to entirely new major release. Compare that to a rolling release distro like Arch or fast moving one like Fedora or slower moving Ubuntu LTS that gets HWE stack upgrades life is really easy. You get a built in hypervisor (KVM) that can be used by the Android emulator, your libvirt VMs and docker. Want to run dtrace/bpftool - no need to compromise security. Need latest GCC - easy enough to get - it goes on and on. Not to mention the package managers are pretty good on all Linux distros now a days. With Windows the downside was that WSL 1 was slow and macOS was faster than that although slower than Linux for FS operations etc. But now with WSL2 pretty much matching native Linux performance and allowing you to use docker natively - it suddenly becomes a much better option - can buy cheaper hardware that does what you want to without relying on Apple to give you the right keyboard, # of ports etc.