4 ms·

What benefits do you see from running windows? I really see none as a software dev and os enthusiast. The only reason I kept windows so long was for a game that

What benefits do you see from running windows? I really see none as a software dev and os enthusiast. The only reason I kept windows so long was for a game that I stopped playing 2 years ago, and the only reason I have to use it now is because the company I currently work in has made us use it. WSL makes me embarrassed to show my work colleague how good linux/vim/tmux really is (but that might be because the laptop's 8gb is almost totally used up by invisible processes (whereas the wsl portion uses around 500mb!))

_ph_ 6y ago
Well, you list one of the benefits of running Windows, you can keep working at your company :p. Many companies don't allow running Linux natively. For example, because Office and Outlook are considered mandatory tools. There is other software, which is only available on Windows or the Mac. Also, it is still not a trivial thing to buy a random laptop and get full hardware support, especially with very new hardware. Not even to mention NVidia... As a consequence, Mac+VMware is my currently preferred way of running Linux, and Windows+WSL is an increasingly attractive alternative to this.
- stragies 6y ago
  In some business sectors I see increasing demand for bottom-up-open-stack, going as far as inquiring about "Open-Firmware-no-BLOB" computing devices for all important tasks, including network and domain control, where "legacy client application systems like Windows/Outlook/Office" are relegated to isolated TS-Servers, and are being replaced by glorified thin-clients, with a local browser, media-decoder, and RDP-RemoteApp-client, all running open stack. Currently the problem here is the availability of ARM system with user-configurable TrustZone support. But O.K., I admit, we also have a lot businesses wanting less paranoid data security practices for the sake of convenience, or other legacy Apps/Hardware.
jiggawatts 6y ago
It's always bemuses me to see some Linux developers talk like there is literally no other option, and that all 'real' development is done on Linux. Meanwhile, in the Real World(tm), something like 80% of all software is developed for Windows or other non-Linux operating systems. Linux is just the most popular, at the moment, with a small subset of developers in a certain age-range. Mostly web-developers working outside of the enterprise environments, such as startups. These are people that think MySQL is a real database, PHP is a proper programming language, and Bash is the only shell. I have the same reaction when I see some documentation with instructions on "how to set up Kerberos support" that doesn't even mention Active Directory. It's as if the authors came from some alternate reality, a parallel Earth where Windows Server isn't quite literally 99.9% of all deployed Kerberos authentication systems. I'm a consultant that gets to visit many different types of organisations, big and small, many with on-site or outsourced development teams. Almost all of them use Windows, develop in C#, VB, or Java and deploy on IIS or various Java platforms, but still on Windows. There are a handful that use the LAMP stack or WordPress, but these are few and far between. Try Visual Studio and C#, focusing on its strengths like the "async" keyword. Try writing a little web app using the latest .NET Core and MS SQL Server 2019. Try adding some ColumnStore indexes on your data and point PowerBI at it. The performance will blow your mind. PS: All of the above are free, and/or free for developers: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downloads https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downlo... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-serve... https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/
- _ph_ 6y ago
  Yes, the "desktop" is basically Windows with some traces of Macs :). For server-like systems, Linux has pretty much "won" though. Which probably is the reason why MS is working on WSL. There are also a lot of GUI applications, which run mostly on Linux because their work domain fits in a server-like setup - and be it even for data protection reasons where the applications are running on a server cluster accessed by a remote protocol like Citrix.
- arpa 6y ago
  > Linux is just the most popular, at the moment, with a small subset of developers in a certain age-range. Mostly web-developers working outside of the enterprise environments, such as startups. These are people that think MySQL is a real database, PHP is a proper programming language, and Bash is the only shell. And MSSQL has great features, like lack of pagination, VBA is a proper language, ASP.NET was a proper framework, IIS is not a complete shitshow, and enterprise-grade is not a term describing overpriced bullshit software. Get your head out of your ass.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    These are straw man arguments, and you know it. 1) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/select-order-by-clause-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15#using-offset-and-fetch-to-limit-the-rows-returned https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/select-or... 2) VBA is 1990s legacy, nobody in their right mind has used it for new software development in at least the last decade. VB.NET (which is semantically nearly the same as C#) has been around since 2005. I mean, that would be crazy! That would be like using a unsafe language from the 1970s like C for new software development in 2020. Nuts. Just nuts. Nobody in their...oh. Never mind. 3) ASP.NET Core MVC is very popular and very good. It's fast out-of-the-box, has native multithreading, native async without callback hell, has proper i18n support, etc, etc... By the way, Blazor is absolutely amazing technology unique to ASP.NET, and at the moment only Rust has anything even vaguely comparable. But Rust has none of the back-end support. ASP.NET also has impressive integration of technologies like reactive extensions and SignalR. I doubt there's a more elegant or easier-to-use API for WebSockets out there. 4) IIS works fine for www.microsoft.com, www.live.com, etc... Works fine for our customers. For an idea of how much more advanced IIS is than some other platforms, it is not only multi-threaded out of the box, it's NUMA aware too: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/get-started/planning-your-iis-architecture/understanding-multicore-scaling-on-numa-hardware-with-iis-8 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/get-started/planning-yo... Speaking of "shit shows", IIS, like most Windows server software, doesn't have to be restarted for a minor config change. 5) Enterprise-grade is software that is priced for a market that has requirements many developers haven't even considered. Things like live backups that don't interrupt users. Error messages in French. Correct formatting of numbers and dates, because not everybody thinks that "month-day-year" makes sense. It means support for access control lists, not just "owner-group-other". It means centralised authentication support that works. It means auditing, not just "syslog". It means documentation written by technical writers, not a comment to "read the source". PS: The first point is particularly bothersome, because database-side paging support actually makes very little sense from a relational theory point of view, which is why many engines never had support, or pay only lip service to it. Let me explain: Sit down an think about what paging means in the context of a database with, say, 5000 concurrent user sessions. You either, A) allow users to hold on to transactions for nearly forever to ensure that your server is overloaded, or B) page through your data without long snapshots or transactions, in which case each page is stepping through different data because it's changing in between each page. Now, lets say you get 5 rows out of 10, with values "0, 1, 2, 4, 5". What does it meant to get "the next page" minutes later? If you simply ask the database to "skip 5 rows and read the next 5", you could very well get back "-56, 2, 4, 7, 105" because god only knows what transactions have gone on since the first query. But if you say "get rows with values > max(previous result)" you might get "101,102,103,104,105" because so many rows have been inserted and deleted since then. Either way, the query has to be re-run, and neither query is guaranteed to return data that makes sense to a human user, or has valid relations to other data that was returned. This kind of "feature request" is made by small-minded developers that have a) never read a text book, b) watched a production server processing $100M daily lock up, c) stayed up until 3am on Sunday fixing their mess. It's the kind of convenience feature that "works" until it either breaks everything in sight, or causes silent data loss or silent data corruption. So please, before you tell me to get my head out of my ass, get some experience.
toast0 6y ago
> What benefits do you see from running windows? I get to use the most tested version of all the cross platform software. Things that work for others, usually works for me. I can buy software off the shelf (games, TurboTax, whatever --- if they sell it at the store, it will run on Windows, unless I'm in the wrong store). Most desktop oriented open source is targetted towards Windows, unless it's specifically Mac focused. When I was getting tired of my laptop running Linux was right around the release of Windows 7, which was a very nice release. I'm not sure I'll stick around with Windows 10, but at least for now, things mostly work, and I fight less with my computer than before.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
There are lots of professional software that only runs on Windows. I don't understand why you can't run windows programs/OS and also still be an open source advocate/fan/user?

_ph_ 6y ago

Well, you list one of the benefits of running Windows, you can keep working at your company :p. Many companies don't allow running Linux natively. For example, because Office and Outlook are considered mandatory tools. There is other software, which is only available on Windows or the Mac. Also, it is still not a trivial thing to buy a random laptop and get full hardware support, especially with very new hardware. Not even to mention NVidia... As a consequence, Mac+VMware is my currently preferred way of running Linux, and Windows+WSL is an increasingly attractive alternative to this.

stragies 6y ago
In some business sectors I see increasing demand for bottom-up-open-stack, going as far as inquiring about "Open-Firmware-no-BLOB" computing devices for all important tasks, including network and domain control, where "legacy client application systems like Windows/Outlook/Office" are relegated to isolated TS-Servers, and are being replaced by glorified thin-clients, with a local browser, media-decoder, and RDP-RemoteApp-client, all running open stack. Currently the problem here is the availability of ARM system with user-configurable TrustZone support. But O.K., I admit, we also have a lot businesses wanting less paranoid data security practices for the sake of convenience, or other legacy Apps/Hardware.

jiggawatts 6y ago

It's always bemuses me to see some Linux developers talk like there is literally no other option, and that all 'real' development is done on Linux. Meanwhile, in the Real World(tm), something like 80% of all software is developed for Windows or other non-Linux operating systems. Linux is just the most popular, at the moment, with a small subset of developers in a certain age-range. Mostly web-developers working outside of the enterprise environments, such as startups. These are people that think MySQL is a real database, PHP is a proper programming language, and Bash is the only shell. I have the same reaction when I see some documentation with instructions on "how to set up Kerberos support" that doesn't even mention Active Directory. It's as if the authors came from some alternate reality, a parallel Earth where Windows Server isn't quite literally 99.9% of all deployed Kerberos authentication systems. I'm a consultant that gets to visit many different types of organisations, big and small, many with on-site or outsourced development teams. Almost all of them use Windows, develop in C#, VB, or Java and deploy on IIS or various Java platforms, but still on Windows. There are a handful that use the LAMP stack or WordPress, but these are few and far between. Try Visual Studio and C#, focusing on its strengths like the "async" keyword. Try writing a little web app using the latest .NET Core and MS SQL Server 2019. Try adding some ColumnStore indexes on your data and point PowerBI at it. The performance will blow your mind. PS: All of the above are free, and/or free for developers: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downloads https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downlo... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-serve... https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

_ph_ 6y ago
Yes, the "desktop" is basically Windows with some traces of Macs :). For server-like systems, Linux has pretty much "won" though. Which probably is the reason why MS is working on WSL. There are also a lot of GUI applications, which run mostly on Linux because their work domain fits in a server-like setup - and be it even for data protection reasons where the applications are running on a server cluster accessed by a remote protocol like Citrix.
arpa 6y ago
> Linux is just the most popular, at the moment, with a small subset of developers in a certain age-range. Mostly web-developers working outside of the enterprise environments, such as startups. These are people that think MySQL is a real database, PHP is a proper programming language, and Bash is the only shell. And MSSQL has great features, like lack of pagination, VBA is a proper language, ASP.NET was a proper framework, IIS is not a complete shitshow, and enterprise-grade is not a term describing overpriced bullshit software. Get your head out of your ass.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  These are straw man arguments, and you know it. 1) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/select-order-by-clause-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15#using-offset-and-fetch-to-limit-the-rows-returned https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/select-or... 2) VBA is 1990s legacy, nobody in their right mind has used it for new software development in at least the last decade. VB.NET (which is semantically nearly the same as C#) has been around since 2005. I mean, that would be crazy! That would be like using a unsafe language from the 1970s like C for new software development in 2020. Nuts. Just nuts. Nobody in their...oh. Never mind. 3) ASP.NET Core MVC is very popular and very good. It's fast out-of-the-box, has native multithreading, native async without callback hell, has proper i18n support, etc, etc... By the way, Blazor is absolutely amazing technology unique to ASP.NET, and at the moment only Rust has anything even vaguely comparable. But Rust has none of the back-end support. ASP.NET also has impressive integration of technologies like reactive extensions and SignalR. I doubt there's a more elegant or easier-to-use API for WebSockets out there. 4) IIS works fine for www.microsoft.com, www.live.com, etc... Works fine for our customers. For an idea of how much more advanced IIS is than some other platforms, it is not only multi-threaded out of the box, it's NUMA aware too: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/get-started/planning-your-iis-architecture/understanding-multicore-scaling-on-numa-hardware-with-iis-8 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/get-started/planning-yo... Speaking of "shit shows", IIS, like most Windows server software, doesn't have to be restarted for a minor config change. 5) Enterprise-grade is software that is priced for a market that has requirements many developers haven't even considered. Things like live backups that don't interrupt users. Error messages in French. Correct formatting of numbers and dates, because not everybody thinks that "month-day-year" makes sense. It means support for access control lists, not just "owner-group-other". It means centralised authentication support that works. It means auditing, not just "syslog". It means documentation written by technical writers, not a comment to "read the source". PS: The first point is particularly bothersome, because database-side paging support actually makes very little sense from a relational theory point of view, which is why many engines never had support, or pay only lip service to it. Let me explain: Sit down an think about what paging means in the context of a database with, say, 5000 concurrent user sessions. You either, A) allow users to hold on to transactions for nearly forever to ensure that your server is overloaded, or B) page through your data without long snapshots or transactions, in which case each page is stepping through different data because it's changing in between each page. Now, lets say you get 5 rows out of 10, with values "0, 1, 2, 4, 5". What does it meant to get "the next page" minutes later? If you simply ask the database to "skip 5 rows and read the next 5", you could very well get back "-56, 2, 4, 7, 105" because god only knows what transactions have gone on since the first query. But if you say "get rows with values > max(previous result)" you might get "101,102,103,104,105" because so many rows have been inserted and deleted since then. Either way, the query has to be re-run, and neither query is guaranteed to return data that makes sense to a human user, or has valid relations to other data that was returned. This kind of "feature request" is made by small-minded developers that have a) never read a text book, b) watched a production server processing $100M daily lock up, c) stayed up until 3am on Sunday fixing their mess. It's the kind of convenience feature that "works" until it either breaks everything in sight, or causes silent data loss or silent data corruption. So please, before you tell me to get my head out of my ass, get some experience.

toast0 6y ago

> What benefits do you see from running windows? I get to use the most tested version of all the cross platform software. Things that work for others, usually works for me. I can buy software off the shelf (games, TurboTax, whatever --- if they sell it at the store, it will run on Windows, unless I'm in the wrong store). Most desktop oriented open source is targetted towards Windows, unless it's specifically Mac focused. When I was getting tired of my laptop running Linux was right around the release of Windows 7, which was a very nice release. I'm not sure I'll stick around with Windows 10, but at least for now, things mostly work, and I fight less with my computer than before.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

There are lots of professional software that only runs on Windows. I don't understand why you can't run windows programs/OS and also still be an open source advocate/fan/user?