Ask HN: Switched from MacOS to Windows for Daily Driver. Any Advice? Tip/tricks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Switched from MacOS to Windows for Daily Driver. Any Advice? Tip/tricks?

4 pointsakulbe5 comments

I do DevOps work. Ruby stuff mostly. I bought a '16 MBP, and had all the GPU issues people have been talking about. Can't have my daily driver wigging out, so I bought a second machine. The new Dell XPS 15" model, running Win 10 Pro. I've been considering putting Linux on here, but that brings its own set of hassles.

It's been >15 years since I've used Windows as a daily driver. Today, I'm having issues with env vars that seem like they're not set. I know where it gets done, but "echo $FOO" or "echo %FOO%" doesn't output anything.

I'm just curious to know if a. any of you made the same switch away from Mac? (how is it so far?) b. do any of you have advice/tips/tricks on making the move? c. do you use the Windows Subsystem for Linux at all? how's it working? d. what issues have you encountered since going back to Windows?

Thanks!

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The Windows Subsystem for Linux should work well for DevOps work that involves administering remote machines, rather than local VMs; I use WSL + Ansible to control AWS VMs semi-regularly. You won't be able to do things like run local Docker instances through it though; Docker on Windows is still done through VMs (afaik).

WSL devs are pretty communicative; I've filed issues on GitHub and had them resolved; I won't say it's the fastest process in the world, but you can actually communicate with them and they do fix bugs, which is more than I can say when I've filed tickets with Apple. They also have a user voice where you can see what people are asking for that doesn't work yet: https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-con...

If you already have the computer you should definitely give WSL a try.

Are you running only stable builds, or are you on the Slow/Fast Ring of the Insider Previews? I've been impressed with their response too.

I'm on the Fast Ring. I have run into some (mostly UI related) issues every now and again, but nothing that's a blocker and getting faster patches has been more useful, mostly to get WSL patches faster. The Slow Ring may be a good compromise; I was going to switch to the Slow Ring a while ago, but at the time Ring switching was broken ;)

A few tools I'm fond of on windows:

http://cmder.net/ http://www.heidisql.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/

To add some details... I do Chef development work.

I'm using Chocolatey for package management.

I used both VMware and VirtualBox+Vagrant for VM stuff.

Using Xshell for SSH.

VS Code for a text editor.

Tower for a git client.

It's mainly the how do you do dev for Linux on Windows that I wonder about. I've been living in a *nix world for the past several years, and this feels like a paradigm shift, for sure.

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