5 ms·

I would like to see someone do the equivalent experiment now with a Win10+WSL2 setup. I'm carefully watching Apple to see what the next line of Macbook Pros lo

by zmmmmm 6y ago

I would like to see someone do the equivalent experiment now with a Win10+WSL2 setup. I'm carefully watching Apple to see what the next line of Macbook Pros looks like. Esp. how well the M1 architecture fits into a development workflow that will still for the forseeable future center heavily on deployment to x86 architecture. We already are seeing significant time wastage from employees having to fight architecture issues with docker. We will see where that ends up. And then, whether the rumors are true that they might support more ports and even options without the touch bar. These things would signal a genuine change of heart on considering developers to be first class citizens in their ecosystem. If all these turn out positive I'll be sticking with it. If not, Win10+WSL2 are looking extremely compelling.

szhu 6y ago
Apple made Macs UNIX developer-friendly (2001) before they switched to x86 (2005), so they have a good chunk of non-hypothetical past data to look at. Really hoping this means they won't screw this up.
iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
WSL2 has quirks that make it not the same as running linux natively. For some workflows this may not matter but I have seen it evaluated for some use cases where not everything worked. Also, windows is, for lack of a better word, obnoxious, in the way it bothers you about updates (and other messages of various kinds), and forces you to restart frequently and kn its terms. The few times I have used windows recently, I found it the opposite of "just getting out of the way and letting me work", and I fear that even if wsl did work smoothly for what I was doing, just the fact that windows was running in the background would degrade the experience.
throwanem 6y ago
A couple Saturdays ago, I spent thirty minutes setting up WSL2 on a Windows 10 machine. Immediately afterward, I called Apple and spent a thousand dollars on an M1 Mac mini for same-day pickup. I've been running Linux devenvs on Windows, in Virtualbox, for something well over a decade now. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vaunted WSL2 is literally just that, plus preinstalled OS images that save maybe a half hour's work, plus also it actually breaks virtualization so you can only use WSL2 and no other VMs. And ~ is still just a shared folder, so chown and symlinks don't work. I'd tolerate it if I had no better option, just like I have all those other times. But even then, just running Virtualbox proper is no worse in any way, and better in some. I really don't understand what the hell all the hype is about - maybe for folks who've only ever used Windows and never had a chance to really try Linux at all, I can see it, but people who have no reason not to know better also seem often to be over the moon about it and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Granted, that Lenovo had been pissing me off well before I tried turning it into a dev machine - Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect, WSL2 or no. But it was WSL2 turning out to be literally just broken Virtualbox that really sent me over the top. And I have to thank Microsoft for that! Even with the occasional slight flakiness of any new architecture, the M1 mini is an excellent dev machine, blazing fast and unbelievably power-efficient - the same deskside UPS that promised 50 minutes runtime for the Windows box claims almost 300 for the mini, and that's with something like a 10x perf boost. If WSL2 hadn't been so lousy, I might have taken another year to make the jump.
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  > Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect Well it works great for me. What issues are you experiencing?
  - input_sh 6y ago
    No way I can list them all, but here's my top five: 1. Start menu is awfully designed, really slow, and doesn't even return exact matches sometimes. Seriously, it shouldn't take that long to launch something. 2. Lack of tabs in file explorer forces me to have like three-to-five windows open, making alt+tab navigation annoying. 3. It's like each app does its own thing with notifications. It does have a decent notification system, it just happens that nobody really uses it. 4. Lack of proper package management makes every app run their own update checker in the background. I easily have 10-15 items in my tray, and have to chase down something essential like Bluetooth across them. And half the time at least one of them doesn't have an icon! 5. Updates. Booted into Windows after about a month, it restarted twice + gave me multiple notifications that it's gonna restart again outside active hours. I only need to use it for like an hour or so.
- Zardoz84 6y ago
  > I'd tolerate it if I had no better option. Did you try to install a native Linux distribution. The experience is always better that running on a VM.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    The machine also has to run Lightroom.
    - papaf 6y ago
      You are probably better off with the Mac, but I can recommend one option that many people ignore but that works for well me. Modern Linux virtualization (KVM/Qemu) is powerful and is getting easier to setup with programs such as Virtual Machine Manager and Boxes. I run several Windows VMs without problems and they have usable performance. I have used Windows VMs for Word and Skype for Business using KVM.
pfranz 6y ago
I basically did that for the first WSL. I occasionally helped friends install drivers or find their printer, but mostly didn't touch Windows from XP until I got a job using Win10. I used macOS at home Linux at work during that period. I wont comment on WSL because I haven't used v2 and it wasn't my biggest annoyance (it also doesn't sounds like v2 fixed the issues I had with it) Man, I hated it. I'm just not a fan of how windows are managed, OS updates are constant and require a lengthy reboot, installing/uninstalling is the same awkward mess except now there's 2 Program Files directories, Control Panel is like archeology digging through generations of UIs dating back to Windows 95. I hate all the intrusive tracking, ads, and preinstalled games and junk. I tried to give PowerShell a fair shake. I liked some of the concepts around it. It's annoying the documentation requires a download (I was on an airgapped network). It was super awkward to wrap everything in a BAT file. Everyone else just wrote in BAT files because our needs weren't huge. They would be more maintainable and better behaved as PowerShell scripts, but it didn't seem worth pushing for. PowerShell was just so verbose I found it very hard to use as a REPL to build pipelines. The experience triggered a lot of things I hadn't thought about in over a decade and I was bummed at how few things had changed. That's probably the case for macOS and Linux, but personally I find myself liking those OSes more than Windows...I've definitely been exasperated explaining their shortcomings to others because I've been comfortable avoiding them. I ended up mostly using it as a dumb terminal to ssh into an Ubuntu box running tmux and vim.
pascalo 6y ago
I'm a Linux user on my own hardware and was just put onto win10 at my current gig. WSL has made this workable, really. Not the nightmare I expected. But the rest of windows still sucks. As for apple stuff, I used to use Macs for a decade, starting with a colour iMac right down to MBP 2013 ... The platform felt like it got and more in the way. I hated the app store. Firwire transfer from old to new machine also didn't work properly between two OSX versions. Set up took long. Everything was a forced login. The straw that broke the camel's back was shitty support when I came home after closing the brand new laptop to find a cracked glass screen when I opened it up again. Been using Dell's xps series and Nuc barebones since then, and moving some crucial things like keyPass files onto Google drive. I can spin up a new Dev ready setup in about 15-30mins. Everything works out of the box. Bliss. Dell btw gave me great support every time I had a hardware issue.

by zmmmmm 6y ago

szhu 6y ago

Apple made Macs UNIX developer-friendly (2001) before they switched to x86 (2005), so they have a good chunk of non-hypothetical past data to look at. Really hoping this means they won't screw this up.

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago

WSL2 has quirks that make it not the same as running linux natively. For some workflows this may not matter but I have seen it evaluated for some use cases where not everything worked. Also, windows is, for lack of a better word, obnoxious, in the way it bothers you about updates (and other messages of various kinds), and forces you to restart frequently and kn its terms. The few times I have used windows recently, I found it the opposite of "just getting out of the way and letting me work", and I fear that even if wsl did work smoothly for what I was doing, just the fact that windows was running in the background would degrade the experience.

throwanem 6y ago

A couple Saturdays ago, I spent thirty minutes setting up WSL2 on a Windows 10 machine. Immediately afterward, I called Apple and spent a thousand dollars on an M1 Mac mini for same-day pickup. I've been running Linux devenvs on Windows, in Virtualbox, for something well over a decade now. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vaunted WSL2 is literally just that, plus preinstalled OS images that save maybe a half hour's work, plus also it actually breaks virtualization so you can only use WSL2 and no other VMs. And ~ is still just a shared folder, so chown and symlinks don't work. I'd tolerate it if I had no better option, just like I have all those other times. But even then, just running Virtualbox proper is no worse in any way, and better in some. I really don't understand what the hell all the hype is about - maybe for folks who've only ever used Windows and never had a chance to really try Linux at all, I can see it, but people who have no reason not to know better also seem often to be over the moon about it and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Granted, that Lenovo had been pissing me off well before I tried turning it into a dev machine - Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect, WSL2 or no. But it was WSL2 turning out to be literally just broken Virtualbox that really sent me over the top. And I have to thank Microsoft for that! Even with the occasional slight flakiness of any new architecture, the M1 mini is an excellent dev machine, blazing fast and unbelievably power-efficient - the same deskside UPS that promised 50 minutes runtime for the Windows box claims almost 300 for the mini, and that's with something like a 10x perf boost. If WSL2 hadn't been so lousy, I might have taken another year to make the jump.

phendrenad2 6y ago
> Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect Well it works great for me. What issues are you experiencing?
- input_sh 6y ago
  No way I can list them all, but here's my top five: 1. Start menu is awfully designed, really slow, and doesn't even return exact matches sometimes. Seriously, it shouldn't take that long to launch something. 2. Lack of tabs in file explorer forces me to have like three-to-five windows open, making alt+tab navigation annoying. 3. It's like each app does its own thing with notifications. It does have a decent notification system, it just happens that nobody really uses it. 4. Lack of proper package management makes every app run their own update checker in the background. I easily have 10-15 items in my tray, and have to chase down something essential like Bluetooth across them. And half the time at least one of them doesn't have an icon! 5. Updates. Booted into Windows after about a month, it restarted twice + gave me multiple notifications that it's gonna restart again outside active hours. I only need to use it for like an hour or so.
Zardoz84 6y ago
> I'd tolerate it if I had no better option. Did you try to install a native Linux distribution. The experience is always better that running on a VM.
- throwanem 6y ago
  The machine also has to run Lightroom.
  - papaf 6y ago
    You are probably better off with the Mac, but I can recommend one option that many people ignore but that works for well me. Modern Linux virtualization (KVM/Qemu) is powerful and is getting easier to setup with programs such as Virtual Machine Manager and Boxes. I run several Windows VMs without problems and they have usable performance. I have used Windows VMs for Word and Skype for Business using KVM.

pfranz 6y ago

I basically did that for the first WSL. I occasionally helped friends install drivers or find their printer, but mostly didn't touch Windows from XP until I got a job using Win10. I used macOS at home Linux at work during that period. I wont comment on WSL because I haven't used v2 and it wasn't my biggest annoyance (it also doesn't sounds like v2 fixed the issues I had with it) Man, I hated it. I'm just not a fan of how windows are managed, OS updates are constant and require a lengthy reboot, installing/uninstalling is the same awkward mess except now there's 2 Program Files directories, Control Panel is like archeology digging through generations of UIs dating back to Windows 95. I hate all the intrusive tracking, ads, and preinstalled games and junk. I tried to give PowerShell a fair shake. I liked some of the concepts around it. It's annoying the documentation requires a download (I was on an airgapped network). It was super awkward to wrap everything in a BAT file. Everyone else just wrote in BAT files because our needs weren't huge. They would be more maintainable and better behaved as PowerShell scripts, but it didn't seem worth pushing for. PowerShell was just so verbose I found it very hard to use as a REPL to build pipelines. The experience triggered a lot of things I hadn't thought about in over a decade and I was bummed at how few things had changed. That's probably the case for macOS and Linux, but personally I find myself liking those OSes more than Windows...I've definitely been exasperated explaining their shortcomings to others because I've been comfortable avoiding them. I ended up mostly using it as a dumb terminal to ssh into an Ubuntu box running tmux and vim.

pascalo 6y ago

I'm a Linux user on my own hardware and was just put onto win10 at my current gig. WSL has made this workable, really. Not the nightmare I expected. But the rest of windows still sucks. As for apple stuff, I used to use Macs for a decade, starting with a colour iMac right down to MBP 2013 ... The platform felt like it got and more in the way. I hated the app store. Firwire transfer from old to new machine also didn't work properly between two OSX versions. Set up took long. Everything was a forced login. The straw that broke the camel's back was shitty support when I came home after closing the brand new laptop to find a cracked glass screen when I opened it up again. Been using Dell's xps series and Nuc barebones since then, and moving some crucial things like keyPass files onto Google drive. I can spin up a new Dev ready setup in about 15-30mins. Everything works out of the box. Bliss. Dell btw gave me great support every time I had a hardware issue.