6 ms·

Why would you want to dev on a Windows machine though? Unless you're writing Windows code, I see no reason.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
com2kid 6y ago
Because I have almost 30 years of experience using Windows, and a complex set of tooling, scripts, and utilities that I have grown accustom to. Heck the sysinternals suite alone is incredible. Windows has incredibly good keyboard shortcut support. A small example, the context/menu key on keyboards is the equivalent of right clicking wherever the cursor is at, making spellchecking as I type super easy, I'm sure MacOS has some meta-combo that does this, but over 20 years ago Microsoft made this tiny piece of accessibility a first class citizen on their platform by starting a certification process for keyboards that included such a key. Windows has non-borked external monitor support, unlike a slew of MacOS machines. (See, every thread on HN where some subset of people report problems with external monitors). Windows has insane hardware support, buy whatever upgrade is on sale today, throw it in your machine, and odds are it'll just work. Speaking of insane hardware support, my current Windows install has switched motherboards and CPUs multiple times. Pop the SSD into a new computer, boot, wait a few minutes for the OS to setup proper drivers, and off I go. The UI is a first class citizen, not an afterthought. At no point do I have to wonder if my setup supports screen sharing. Its media pipeline is pretty darn powerful. Per app volume control rocks, but the entire media stack can be rerouted, split, and merged, in all sorts of fun and cool ways. The clipboard works. really well. I have actually seen the source code to the clipboard in Windows, a lot of engineering effort has gone into making it work that well. Apps don't randomly stop working because I upgrade. Major UI utilities that reach deep into the system that I started using on Windows 7 work just fine today. Do I have complaints about Windows? Of course. IMHO it has gotten way to large, back in Windows 2k and even the Windows 7 days, the # of background processes on a clean install was a fraction of what they are today. My start menu only opens up every other time I click it (...). And as with every other OS, reliability has gone down over the years. But Windows isn't some half forgotten wasteland. It is the single most popular desktop OS, and for over a decade it was also the single most popular development platform. Would I do docker based development on bare Windows? No, but I've done Android and Web development quite happily on Windows. For reference, I have done C/C++ dev on Linux, and right now I use both MacOS and Windows for dev.
- monoideism 6y ago
  > And as with every other OS, reliability has gone down over the years. I can run Debian or Ubuntu for weeks, even months, without rebooting. I can barely run Windows for a day or two without rebooting. Others have mentioned the maddening and massive updates that happen frequently, and the weird application crashes and poor performance. Windows has some cool stuff, like Powershell and .Net, but it’s otherwise too painful to use unless I absolutely must (which happens more often than I’d like these days, despite going 5 years without using windows at one point). Plus, Powershell and .Net are more readily available on Linux.
  - ttt0 6y ago
    > I can barely run Windows for a day or two without rebooting. Does Windows even allow to not reboot? I've heard that if you miss the update popup it will automatically do the update and reboot. And if you click "Remind me later" or whatever too many times it will just remove the button and force you to update. Did they fixed that or is it still doing that?
    - com2kid 6y ago
      Consumer versions work this way for high priority updates. I guess no one remembers the days when the entire industry (re: Slashdot) yelled at Microsoft that they needed to stop letting users run around with ancient exploitable installs of Windows. So, Microsoft forces important updates. Fancier versions of Windows let you turn off most updates. Sev0 exploits, RCEs, and the like, well, those updates still get pushed down unless you have a corporate install with policies disabling all updates. There is a trade off, and for decades (!!) Microsoft let users decide, but eventually "1/4 of Windows users just got their machine 0wned" showed up in the press too many times. Kind of like how every time there is a widely installed Android malware app, Google gets blamed. "Why don't they enforce their policies!" Then soon as they do enforce their policies "The Android app store should just be a dumb distribution mechanism!" I get it, different people expressing those sentiments (I hope...), but balancing "keeping people from having their bank accounts cleared out" vs "user choice" is not the easiest of decisions. After many years, MS has gone full force on the auto-updating side of the debate.
vikinghckr 6y ago
Because Windows 10 is the best Operating System in the universe? It seems like HN is full of folks who last used Windows back in 2005 or something and are painfully out of touch with modern Windows.
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  >unironically implying modern Windows is better than older Windows >obviously has never used Linux U+1F923
cameronh90 6y ago
Between MacOS and Windows in recent years, I vastly prefer Windows. WSL2 alone beats the pants off anything in MacOS - and MacOS had become a much more frustrating experience over the past few years. Windows is still, to some extent, full of magic and dragons underneath... and while they're doing an increasingly good job at hiding it, it does occasionally bite you in the arse. But Windows has on the whole become a competent development environment that works very well with almost any kind of development workload - with the exception of native iOS and MacOS. Also GPU accelerated ML on Windows is still kind of sketchy. For a dedicated backend application development desktop, I still prefer Linux. But hardware support is generally better on Windows, plus you have access to Adobe Creative Suite, better colour management, better graphics drivers, etc. and there are types of development that just aren't practical on Linux, such as 3D games, Excel add-ons, VSTs and lots of proprietary embedded development platforms don't support anything other than Windows. On the other hand, .NET development nowadays is just as easy on MacOS, Windows and Linux.
- procinct 6y ago
  What do you find is so much better in WSL2 vs Mac? I find when I’m using WSL2 I feel more like I’m using 2 computers since they have the different file systems (you can’t just git clone into your windows file system from WSL for example) Whereas with Mac, it’s all one system and it’s all still Unix. The rest of Mac vs Windows seems like it could be up for debate (last few Mac updates have made it feel a lot less polished) but from a purely terminal experience I’ve found Mac to be so much better since it’s all just one system. I’m switching to Windows soon so I’m really curious, what’s your workflow for dev with WSL? For example, where do you keep your repos? What editor do you use? That sort of thing.
  - PascLeRasc 6y ago
    This is the issue for me too. You can’t interact with your regular files via WSL, so you can’t use imagemagick to convert an image on your desktop folder, or subl to open a file in Sublime. You can sometimes find the folder via File Explorer but Windows will corrupt your files if you change them there. There’s other things that annoy me like typing latency, apt taking forever to run, an awful terminal emulator with basically no customization, copy and paste often just does not work. It’s really so frustrating.
lovetocode 6y ago
After more than a decade of developing on Mac and Linux I am moving back to Windows and continue to be quite happy there. Docker solved most of the problems that plagued Windows as a development machine. Mac hardware is incredibly expensive. Linux is great but I don’t enjoy it as a daily driver to do a lot of the administrative and logistical tasks expected of me as a engineering leader without the company.
npteljes 6y ago
Bill made sure in the past that Windows should be The Operating System on PC, and it stuck. I think most of the upsides of current windows usage stem from this achievement. Hardware, software compatibility, and familiarity are often cited as upsides, but these reflect the status quo more than the merits of the system itself.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Because I have almost 30 years of experience using Windows, and a complex set of tooling, scripts, and utilities that I have grown accustom to. Heck the sysinternals suite alone is incredible. Windows has incredibly good keyboard shortcut support. A small example, the context/menu key on keyboards is the equivalent of right clicking wherever the cursor is at, making spellchecking as I type super easy, I'm sure MacOS has some meta-combo that does this, but over 20 years ago Microsoft made this tiny piece of accessibility a first class citizen on their platform by starting a certification process for keyboards that included such a key. Windows has non-borked external monitor support, unlike a slew of MacOS machines. (See, every thread on HN where some subset of people report problems with external monitors). Windows has insane hardware support, buy whatever upgrade is on sale today, throw it in your machine, and odds are it'll just work. Speaking of insane hardware support, my current Windows install has switched motherboards and CPUs multiple times. Pop the SSD into a new computer, boot, wait a few minutes for the OS to setup proper drivers, and off I go. The UI is a first class citizen, not an afterthought. At no point do I have to wonder if my setup supports screen sharing. Its media pipeline is pretty darn powerful. Per app volume control rocks, but the entire media stack can be rerouted, split, and merged, in all sorts of fun and cool ways. The clipboard works. really well. I have actually seen the source code to the clipboard in Windows, a lot of engineering effort has gone into making it work that well. Apps don't randomly stop working because I upgrade. Major UI utilities that reach deep into the system that I started using on Windows 7 work just fine today. Do I have complaints about Windows? Of course. IMHO it has gotten way to large, back in Windows 2k and even the Windows 7 days, the # of background processes on a clean install was a fraction of what they are today. My start menu only opens up every other time I click it (...). And as with every other OS, reliability has gone down over the years. But Windows isn't some half forgotten wasteland. It is the single most popular desktop OS, and for over a decade it was also the single most popular development platform. Would I do docker based development on bare Windows? No, but I've done Android and Web development quite happily on Windows. For reference, I have done C/C++ dev on Linux, and right now I use both MacOS and Windows for dev.

monoideism 6y ago
> And as with every other OS, reliability has gone down over the years. I can run Debian or Ubuntu for weeks, even months, without rebooting. I can barely run Windows for a day or two without rebooting. Others have mentioned the maddening and massive updates that happen frequently, and the weird application crashes and poor performance. Windows has some cool stuff, like Powershell and .Net, but it’s otherwise too painful to use unless I absolutely must (which happens more often than I’d like these days, despite going 5 years without using windows at one point). Plus, Powershell and .Net are more readily available on Linux.
- ttt0 6y ago
  > I can barely run Windows for a day or two without rebooting. Does Windows even allow to not reboot? I've heard that if you miss the update popup it will automatically do the update and reboot. And if you click "Remind me later" or whatever too many times it will just remove the button and force you to update. Did they fixed that or is it still doing that?
  - com2kid 6y ago
    Consumer versions work this way for high priority updates. I guess no one remembers the days when the entire industry (re: Slashdot) yelled at Microsoft that they needed to stop letting users run around with ancient exploitable installs of Windows. So, Microsoft forces important updates. Fancier versions of Windows let you turn off most updates. Sev0 exploits, RCEs, and the like, well, those updates still get pushed down unless you have a corporate install with policies disabling all updates. There is a trade off, and for decades (!!) Microsoft let users decide, but eventually "1/4 of Windows users just got their machine 0wned" showed up in the press too many times. Kind of like how every time there is a widely installed Android malware app, Google gets blamed. "Why don't they enforce their policies!" Then soon as they do enforce their policies "The Android app store should just be a dumb distribution mechanism!" I get it, different people expressing those sentiments (I hope...), but balancing "keeping people from having their bank accounts cleared out" vs "user choice" is not the easiest of decisions. After many years, MS has gone full force on the auto-updating side of the debate.

vikinghckr 6y ago

Because Windows 10 is the best Operating System in the universe? It seems like HN is full of folks who last used Windows back in 2005 or something and are painfully out of touch with modern Windows.

shrimp_emoji 6y ago
>unironically implying modern Windows is better than older Windows >obviously has never used Linux U+1F923

cameronh90 6y ago

Between MacOS and Windows in recent years, I vastly prefer Windows. WSL2 alone beats the pants off anything in MacOS - and MacOS had become a much more frustrating experience over the past few years. Windows is still, to some extent, full of magic and dragons underneath... and while they're doing an increasingly good job at hiding it, it does occasionally bite you in the arse. But Windows has on the whole become a competent development environment that works very well with almost any kind of development workload - with the exception of native iOS and MacOS. Also GPU accelerated ML on Windows is still kind of sketchy. For a dedicated backend application development desktop, I still prefer Linux. But hardware support is generally better on Windows, plus you have access to Adobe Creative Suite, better colour management, better graphics drivers, etc. and there are types of development that just aren't practical on Linux, such as 3D games, Excel add-ons, VSTs and lots of proprietary embedded development platforms don't support anything other than Windows. On the other hand, .NET development nowadays is just as easy on MacOS, Windows and Linux.

procinct 6y ago
What do you find is so much better in WSL2 vs Mac? I find when I’m using WSL2 I feel more like I’m using 2 computers since they have the different file systems (you can’t just git clone into your windows file system from WSL for example) Whereas with Mac, it’s all one system and it’s all still Unix. The rest of Mac vs Windows seems like it could be up for debate (last few Mac updates have made it feel a lot less polished) but from a purely terminal experience I’ve found Mac to be so much better since it’s all just one system. I’m switching to Windows soon so I’m really curious, what’s your workflow for dev with WSL? For example, where do you keep your repos? What editor do you use? That sort of thing.
- PascLeRasc 6y ago
  This is the issue for me too. You can’t interact with your regular files via WSL, so you can’t use imagemagick to convert an image on your desktop folder, or subl to open a file in Sublime. You can sometimes find the folder via File Explorer but Windows will corrupt your files if you change them there. There’s other things that annoy me like typing latency, apt taking forever to run, an awful terminal emulator with basically no customization, copy and paste often just does not work. It’s really so frustrating.

lovetocode 6y ago

After more than a decade of developing on Mac and Linux I am moving back to Windows and continue to be quite happy there. Docker solved most of the problems that plagued Windows as a development machine. Mac hardware is incredibly expensive. Linux is great but I don’t enjoy it as a daily driver to do a lot of the administrative and logistical tasks expected of me as a engineering leader without the company.

npteljes 6y ago

Bill made sure in the past that Windows should be The Operating System on PC, and it stuck. I think most of the upsides of current windows usage stem from this achievement. Hardware, software compatibility, and familiarity are often cited as upsides, but these reflect the status quo more than the merits of the system itself.