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> Use Windows versions of things, not things compiled under Cygwin or MinGW This seems like an oddly outdated notion in the WSL era. Having used Windows 10 f/t

> Use Windows versions of things, not things compiled under Cygwin or MinGW This seems like an oddly outdated notion in the WSL era. Having used Windows 10 f/t in 2018, I'd say 'use Linux versions of commandline dev tools, not Windows'. Mostly though I agree that Windows 10 is a decent and viable Desktop OS. It does have some problems. The task bar is an appalling bit of Stalinist design (insisting on obscuring parts of running apps even when on auto-hide), and much of the Microsoft-supplied software (eg. Mail, Calendar) is terribly amateurish. If you use the Insiders builds (tempting because of WSL2), it's pretty buggy. But most of the fundamental stuff works extremely well. All of the OSs available have their irritations, but I don't think those of Windows are any more egregious or numerous than the competitors. Certainly MacOS (my main OS for many years prior to 2018) has become irrelevant to me because of absurd price-gouging and fake keyboards. What eventually pulled me off Windows towards Linux is largely the development experience and the filesystem. But then I have to put up with its egregious hdpi & multimonitor support and general GUI flakiness. There are no good OSs in 2019, just balances of tradeoffs for your particular purposes & preferences.

mxschumacher 7y ago
agree on the trade-offs have you given pop_os a try for the hdpi/multimonitor issue?
- crispinb 7y ago
  > have you given pop_os a try for the hdpi/multimonitor issue? A rule I made for myself when shifting to Linux is 'no distro hopping'. I want to spend as much of my computer time programming, and as little faux-sysadmining as I can. So no, I haven't tried pop_os. I'll have another survey of available distributions next time I change laptops, but thats a couple of years off yet which is a long time in the Linux distro world ;)
vips7L 7y ago
I'm curious what cli tool you find is better on linux? Imo WSL is fighting windows, especially WSL2, as it locks you out of the windows filesystem and you need special plugins to edit your code. For my workflow (node,electron,java) all of the tools are already cross platform and any shell tools are usually covered by powershell. I do admit though doing C development is probably more difficult as getting ports of things like make, ld etc is harder.
- crispinb 7y ago
  > I'm curious what cli tool you find is better on linux? It's not so much individual tools being better, but rather the whole unix shell ecosystem is still very much the dev default that everything command-related 'just works' from linux shells. Kind of the opposite from the GUI situation. WSL2 doesn't lock you out of the windows filesystem, it just slows it down. I found when working in Windows I preferred keeping everything in the WSL2 image, for speed & simplicity (no messing about with wslpath!). So to that extent I agree with your 'fighting Windows' comment. I don't want to exaggerate the differences - everything works in both, particularly in an age where developer toolchains are becoming ever more platform neutral (node, go, rust, java etc).

mxschumacher 7y ago

agree on the trade-offs have you given pop_os a try for the hdpi/multimonitor issue?

crispinb 7y ago
> have you given pop_os a try for the hdpi/multimonitor issue? A rule I made for myself when shifting to Linux is 'no distro hopping'. I want to spend as much of my computer time programming, and as little faux-sysadmining as I can. So no, I haven't tried pop_os. I'll have another survey of available distributions next time I change laptops, but thats a couple of years off yet which is a long time in the Linux distro world ;)

vips7L 7y ago

I'm curious what cli tool you find is better on linux? Imo WSL is fighting windows, especially WSL2, as it locks you out of the windows filesystem and you need special plugins to edit your code. For my workflow (node,electron,java) all of the tools are already cross platform and any shell tools are usually covered by powershell. I do admit though doing C development is probably more difficult as getting ports of things like make, ld etc is harder.

crispinb 7y ago
> I'm curious what cli tool you find is better on linux? It's not so much individual tools being better, but rather the whole unix shell ecosystem is still very much the dev default that everything command-related 'just works' from linux shells. Kind of the opposite from the GUI situation. WSL2 doesn't lock you out of the windows filesystem, it just slows it down. I found when working in Windows I preferred keeping everything in the WSL2 image, for speed & simplicity (no messing about with wslpath!). So to that extent I agree with your 'fighting Windows' comment. I don't want to exaggerate the differences - everything works in both, particularly in an age where developer toolchains are becoming ever more platform neutral (node, go, rust, java etc).