Comment by Sanddancer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sanddancer | Hacker News Reader

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I tried using a fully Open Source desktop from 1998 to 2007. I finally gave up, because things were "better" but still far worse than windows. It's only gotten worse since then. One of the biggest examples I can see right now is the support compiler chains give in terms of the development process. Visual Studio makes simple what open tools like emacs make near impossible. Remote debugging on windows is a matter of downloading and running the remote debug server, and connecting to it with the local copy of windows. Visual Studio will install any requisite dependencies, transfer app over, and run it all with just pushing debug remotely. For the things I'm working on, where I need access to various hardware devices, such availability is a godsend, and as far as I can tell, any Linux based development environments make such difficult if not impossible to replicate. Other things I notice are Free Software checkers for things like MISRA-C compliance, which puts C programs through much more rigorous checks for safe usage and avoiding poor design decisions. Being open source shouldn't be an excuse for the software to have a fraction of the features other environments have.

Remote debugging is actually quite simple when using QtCreator, gdb and gdbserver. MISRA-C is not just "more rigurous" checking, it significantly restricts the way C is written. It is also a commercial standard that must be bought by implementers.

IMO Windows is a primitive development platform out of the box, one needs to install many tools, a lot of them commercial to replicate what's available on Linux. I've done my share of development on both and strongly prefer investing more effort and time into open source tools instead of some proprietary solution that I have to pay for and which I am not guaranteed to be able to use in future projects.

There is nothing even remotely "primitive" about Windows as a development platform. You let the air out of your own argument when you say things like that.

> Windows is a primitive development platform out of the box

I think it'd be hard to argue that a fresh, clean install of windows isn't an absolutely primitive development platform.

Not that I think it's too relevant of an argument in this discussion, as no developer runs an "out of the box" install as a dev platform, but countering arguments that were never made doesn't seem too productive.

I can't find any diff viewer or git client that integrates directly into any file browser in Linux, like I get with the (FOSS) TortoiseGit and the ~$50 Beyond Compare diff tool i use which I've been using on many projects for years...

I can't even find a diff/patch tool on any platform as good as BC. It has all sorts of heuristics and plugins for different file types and a ton of really advanced features that are easily accessible from it's UI. And those are just 2 of my most basic tools that I use heavily (and I use the keyboard to do everything).

Moving onto text editors, I think the choices on Linux are basically like having to choose between learning Klingon or Vulcan. It's exhausting just thinking about it.

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