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I wish I could upvote this comment a million times. I see the same kind of ignorance-of-their-options (note I specifically say ignorance-of-their-options; I'm

I wish I could upvote this comment a million times. I see the same kind of ignorance-of-their-options (note I specifically say ignorance-of-their-options; I'm not saying anyone is generally ignorant) reflected when developers complain that it's hard to get under the hood of Windows or when developers complain about the tooling on Windows. You'd at least hope that this segment of the user-base would have more intellectual curiosity sometimes. From the software developer angle, Windows is a FANTASTIC system when you need to get down to the nuts and bolts. People really need to educate themselves about the registry and the various ways the OS can be tweaked; as well as the various tools available (at a bare minimum those from Sysinternals). Some other examples - the extensible kernel-level instrumentation that you get from ETW; the excellent crash and hang analysis tools provided by the likes of WinDbg (supported by the excellent debugging support in the Windows kernel -- yes, you can enable a keyboard shortcut that will memory dump your machine if it's hung and then it's a few commands to see what crashed); the commandline environment provided by PowerShell (I haven't used it much but really need to get into it more). Not to mention Application Verfier. I could keep going on and on but it'd probably cloud my point if I haven't done so already :) Not saying it's perfect or the be-all-and-end-all either; I also use all three major OSs, though primarily develop .NET software on Windows. Just frustrating that many of the complaints can be boiled down to "Windows doesn't work just like Linux/Unix does".

lqdc13 12y ago
I agree with the poster above about usability, but I disagree about ease of development. This is partially because linux is the dominant platform for Python developers, but developing/using Python libraries on Windows is really difficult. Many people simply overlook it. The default command prompt is really really bad. There are alternatives, but none of them come close to the gnome shell. The Batch scripting language is terrible compared to Bash. Powershell is way too verbose and API-heavy. You can use Javascript, but then you are using Javascript... Then there are stability issues. I have left my home Linux computer on and online for months sometimes and never had any issues. Try the same thing on Windows... It will crash on the first week for sure. The things Windows is great at is Office productivity software, gaming, design, and some other GPU-intensive tasks. Desktop Linux is great at automation scripts, prototyping apps, temporary services for others (ssh and copy files), and virus-free internet browsing. OSX is somewhere in the middle.
- wvenable 12y ago
  > Try the same thing on Windows... It will crash on the first week for sure. What is this, 1998?
- fr0styMatt2 12y ago
  I will say is that the Linux ecosystem has Windows beat hands-down when it comes to installing third-party apps and updating them - 'apt-get' is fantastic. OSX confuses me a little in that regard - some apps you copy to the Applications folder; others require an installer to run; for the ones that require an installer it's often not entirely clear how you uninstall them, etc. I always feel like OSX is a little inconsistent in that way. The Mac App Store is nice and unified updating through the app store is also nice. Stability-wise my machines have actually been very good. I don't reboot much at all and mainly put the machine into suspend instead of turning it off. My first instinct/fear with a spontaneous BSOD now is that my RAM or HDD or something has gone bad. Agree with you about development with things such as Python (though in that specific case I remember the Python Tools for Visual Studio being okay), or for that matter any new and upcoming language. My first thought when i want to try something like that out is to drop into Linux. It's just better supported for that kind of thing.

lqdc13 12y ago

I agree with the poster above about usability, but I disagree about ease of development. This is partially because linux is the dominant platform for Python developers, but developing/using Python libraries on Windows is really difficult. Many people simply overlook it. The default command prompt is really really bad. There are alternatives, but none of them come close to the gnome shell. The Batch scripting language is terrible compared to Bash. Powershell is way too verbose and API-heavy. You can use Javascript, but then you are using Javascript... Then there are stability issues. I have left my home Linux computer on and online for months sometimes and never had any issues. Try the same thing on Windows... It will crash on the first week for sure. The things Windows is great at is Office productivity software, gaming, design, and some other GPU-intensive tasks. Desktop Linux is great at automation scripts, prototyping apps, temporary services for others (ssh and copy files), and virus-free internet browsing. OSX is somewhere in the middle.

wvenable 12y ago
> Try the same thing on Windows... It will crash on the first week for sure. What is this, 1998?
fr0styMatt2 12y ago
I will say is that the Linux ecosystem has Windows beat hands-down when it comes to installing third-party apps and updating them - 'apt-get' is fantastic. OSX confuses me a little in that regard - some apps you copy to the Applications folder; others require an installer to run; for the ones that require an installer it's often not entirely clear how you uninstall them, etc. I always feel like OSX is a little inconsistent in that way. The Mac App Store is nice and unified updating through the app store is also nice. Stability-wise my machines have actually been very good. I don't reboot much at all and mainly put the machine into suspend instead of turning it off. My first instinct/fear with a spontaneous BSOD now is that my RAM or HDD or something has gone bad. Agree with you about development with things such as Python (though in that specific case I remember the Python Tools for Visual Studio being okay), or for that matter any new and upcoming language. My first thought when i want to try something like that out is to drop into Linux. It's just better supported for that kind of thing.