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I've worked in positions where I've been told "choose your operating system", and places where I've been told "Mac or Windows". Usually the latter comes down t

I've worked in positions where I've been told "choose your operating system", and places where I've been told "Mac or Windows". Usually the latter comes down to the company having group-policies, or mandatory compliance software managed centrally. Sometimes I've picked Linux and had to jump through hoops installing anti-virus, or other similar things. Given the choice I'd pick Linux every time, but if that's not an option and I want the job then Mac is a good fallback. I'd rather quit my job - and have done so - than run Windows.

NayamAmarshe 4y ago
> I'd rather quit my job - and have done so - than run Windows. Chad!
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  Kind of a silly hill to die on with WSL, but it's not my career.
  - stevekemp 4y ago
    I'm "devops" these days, but I before that I was sysadmin. I always preferred to run a similar OS to those systems I managed. These days with immutable containers, etc, it matters less. But a decent shell, the ability to run automation tools easily, etc makes a difference. I know that WSL allows most things, and many devops tools are written in golang/rust, which are available for Windows, but I started at a time when Ruby, Perl, puppet, cfengine, etc, etc were basically not decent options on Windows. I keep up, I use AWS, kubernetes, etc, but I'm used to flexible, scriptable, and predictable working environment - and for me that means Linux.
  - mathstuf 4y ago
    WSL doesn't help solve the lack of decent window management at all. I hate managing window sizes and overlaps; it's why I use a tiling window manager than handles such things for me. There is now tiling support for the others, but they are so manual as to be useless IMO. The focus stealing proclivities of both macOS and Windows for new application windows can also go die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.
    - wing-_-nuts 4y ago
      I've used i3 quite a bit, but to this day I still don't get where one would want a more complex window management than your standard L/R split? If I need more complexity than that, it's inevitably on the command line, and I'm in tmux anyway. I'd love to see a workflow with more splits where one wasn't on the command line.
      - mathstuf 4y ago
        Sometimes content is better as a top/bottom split (e.g., long lines). The ability to "rotate" the layout by 90° with a single keybind is very useful (I use XMonad myself). I can also put multiple windows on the "main" side and rotate between 2 "stable" and a larger set of "smaller" windows. This is handy when juggling RDP into N machines while waiting for Visual Studio or Xcode installations to do their thing. I also enjoy the simple keybinds I have to sling windows between monitors and workspaces easily. I have no idea how I'd do that with any of the tools on macOS or Windows in a maintainable way (XMonad's configuration lets me cartesian product between (noun, key) and (verb, modifier) lists to make things very consistent).
  - depressedpanda 4y ago
    WSL still means you need to deal with Windows, which some of us don't want to do. There's an abundance of jobs available to you if you're a decent programmer, so avoiding the places which prevent you from running your OS of choice is a good first filter to apply.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Mandatory Windows workstations correlate heavily with environments where you spend half the day watching your workstation sit unresponsive because it's doing one damn corporate-mandated background task or another. I wouldn't rule out an all-Windows place completely but I'd see it as an orangish flag demanding clarification. Software in general is bad and time-wasting enough as it is, I don't want all that extra frustration from a pile of poorly-conceived shitware using far more processor cycles and disk IO than my actual work does.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - Nullabillity 4y ago
    Think of it as a brown M&M. A company that mandates a single environment is going to have other issues.
vladvasiliu 4y ago
> Usually the latter comes down to the company having group-policies, or mandatory compliance software managed centrally. Yup. The company I work for kinda has this. Their security software does support Linux, but usually lags a bit. So to fully use it, you have to not apply the latest kernel updates. Makes total sense for a vendor promising to improve your "security posture". They're working on improving the situation, from what I understand, but they're still not there yet. The provider is a company you've probably heard of, that doesn't allow you to download the installers if you're not signed in (they're not custom, since they still require you pass in some installation token to tie it to your tenant). Good times. Fortunately for me, instead of bugging me to switch to Windows, they're bugging the vendor for improved Linux support. The reason being that we intend to run this on Linux servers, too, and don't expect to change those to Windows.
andirk 4y ago
My previous gig was mostly working on a Vue project. It was a .NET shop server-side, so Windows all day. I _almost_ fought for a Linux or Mac machine until I realized my entire day was in VSCode writing Javascript that ran on whatever local nodejs server. A new [nationality omitted] hire, Boris, wasn't a Windows fan so he immediately cracked open his laptop and added a hard drive running Linux dangling out the side, obviously not within the policies. He lasted about 2 weeks.

NayamAmarshe 4y ago

> I'd rather quit my job - and have done so - than run Windows. Chad!

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
Kind of a silly hill to die on with WSL, but it's not my career.
- stevekemp 4y ago
  I'm "devops" these days, but I before that I was sysadmin. I always preferred to run a similar OS to those systems I managed. These days with immutable containers, etc, it matters less. But a decent shell, the ability to run automation tools easily, etc makes a difference. I know that WSL allows most things, and many devops tools are written in golang/rust, which are available for Windows, but I started at a time when Ruby, Perl, puppet, cfengine, etc, etc were basically not decent options on Windows. I keep up, I use AWS, kubernetes, etc, but I'm used to flexible, scriptable, and predictable working environment - and for me that means Linux.
- mathstuf 4y ago
  WSL doesn't help solve the lack of decent window management at all. I hate managing window sizes and overlaps; it's why I use a tiling window manager than handles such things for me. There is now tiling support for the others, but they are so manual as to be useless IMO. The focus stealing proclivities of both macOS and Windows for new application windows can also go die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.
  - wing-_-nuts 4y ago
    I've used i3 quite a bit, but to this day I still don't get where one would want a more complex window management than your standard L/R split? If I need more complexity than that, it's inevitably on the command line, and I'm in tmux anyway. I'd love to see a workflow with more splits where one wasn't on the command line.
    - mathstuf 4y ago
      Sometimes content is better as a top/bottom split (e.g., long lines). The ability to "rotate" the layout by 90° with a single keybind is very useful (I use XMonad myself). I can also put multiple windows on the "main" side and rotate between 2 "stable" and a larger set of "smaller" windows. This is handy when juggling RDP into N machines while waiting for Visual Studio or Xcode installations to do their thing. I also enjoy the simple keybinds I have to sling windows between monitors and workspaces easily. I have no idea how I'd do that with any of the tools on macOS or Windows in a maintainable way (XMonad's configuration lets me cartesian product between (noun, key) and (verb, modifier) lists to make things very consistent).
- depressedpanda 4y ago
  WSL still means you need to deal with Windows, which some of us don't want to do. There's an abundance of jobs available to you if you're a decent programmer, so avoiding the places which prevent you from running your OS of choice is a good first filter to apply.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Mandatory Windows workstations correlate heavily with environments where you spend half the day watching your workstation sit unresponsive because it's doing one damn corporate-mandated background task or another. I wouldn't rule out an all-Windows place completely but I'd see it as an orangish flag demanding clarification. Software in general is bad and time-wasting enough as it is, I don't want all that extra frustration from a pile of poorly-conceived shitware using far more processor cycles and disk IO than my actual work does.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Nullabillity 4y ago
  Think of it as a brown M&M. A company that mandates a single environment is going to have other issues.

vladvasiliu 4y ago

> Usually the latter comes down to the company having group-policies, or mandatory compliance software managed centrally. Yup. The company I work for kinda has this. Their security software does support Linux, but usually lags a bit. So to fully use it, you have to not apply the latest kernel updates. Makes total sense for a vendor promising to improve your "security posture". They're working on improving the situation, from what I understand, but they're still not there yet. The provider is a company you've probably heard of, that doesn't allow you to download the installers if you're not signed in (they're not custom, since they still require you pass in some installation token to tie it to your tenant). Good times. Fortunately for me, instead of bugging me to switch to Windows, they're bugging the vendor for improved Linux support. The reason being that we intend to run this on Linux servers, too, and don't expect to change those to Windows.

andirk 4y ago

My previous gig was mostly working on a Vue project. It was a .NET shop server-side, so Windows all day. I _almost_ fought for a Linux or Mac machine until I realized my entire day was in VSCode writing Javascript that ran on whatever local nodejs server. A new [nationality omitted] hire, Boris, wasn't a Windows fan so he immediately cracked open his laptop and added a hard drive running Linux dangling out the side, obviously not within the policies. He lasted about 2 weeks.