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I run Mac daily and use Windows in a VM. Windows is frustrating. Especially for development purposes you may hit problems with the weak filesystem: 1. It's ext
by fidgewidge 4y ago
I run Mac daily and use Windows in a VM. Windows is frustrating. Especially for development purposes you may hit problems with the weak filesystem:
1. It's extraordinarily slow.
2. It sometimes has weird path length limits.
3. Symlinks sorta work, sorta don't (you have to opt in to enable them).
4. Apps can leak file handles so sometimes you just randomly can't move or delete files/directories.
And if you don't hit problems with that, you'll hit:
1. PowerShell is really oriented around scripting but used interactively. It's totally different to other languages and you'll have to spend time learning it (unless you cygwin of course). Also, making it interactive in the ways you're used to w.r.t. tab completion and stuff requires you to spend lots of time looking up config hacks.
2. Many open source projects treat Windows as a second class or non-existent citizen. The equivalents of homebrew aren't as good.
3. Virus scanners other than Windows Defender are mostly terrible and break things.
4. The OS is absolutely full of bugs and annoying UI inconsistencies are everywhere. Windows users get numb to it but as a long term Mac user it will be noticeable.
Still if you can 'escape' into WSL some of these issues go away, and for web programming you don't need much from the OS.
- freetonik 4y agoOof, okay... Thanks for this, quite a list I must say. This makes so sad though. No escape from macOS it seems.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoCan't concur with many for the things you said. Most of your issues seem to stem from the fact that you use Windows for dev work instead of WSL2, or that Windows components like PowerShell are different than the equivalent Options fromkther OSs, which doesn't make them bad per se. WSL is what you want. And who even uses a third party antivirus these days? Those mostly died off with the rise of Windows Defender during the Windows 7 days. I feel your comment is based on experiences from the past rather than the present day. Also, I have not noticed any bugs.
- fidgewidge 4y agoYeah if you just use Windows as a way to run Linux VMs then some of the issues don't apply, but are you really using Windows at that point.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoThat's a bit of a strawman argument. Using Windows as a host has many advantages especially if you game, use VR, need to use some Windows only software, or for better compatibility with some HW, or want a less janky, feature complete desktop environment (yes, as a distro hopper and GNOME + KDE user, I said it, fight me :P) that actually solved fractional scaling, and supports things like HDR for your laptop with OLED display. Also WSL2 has way less overhead than using an actual Linux VM in something like Virtualbox. It's not for everyone though, especially with the telemetry that has to be disabled, but to me it's the compromise that's best of both worlds and allows me to use the wide library of windows and Linux apps and tools natively on a single OS.
- t-3 4y agoWindows really isn't much better than Linux for gaming. Bluetooth is horrible, and using controllers is waaay worse than Linux. DS3/DS4 just work on Linux, just don't on Windows.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoIt's better for my gaming use cases. I don't use controllers.
- vips7L 4y agoPowerShell is a better interactive shell than bash. It has fish/zsh like autocompletion and it is much more explorable due to its object based nature compared to trying to hobble strings together into separate commands.