Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

It's not snark, or feeling threatened. It's just that lots of people (me included) fail to see the point of running Windows at all (unless you are developing for Windows, in which case it's foolish not to). If you want a Linux experience, use Linux. If you want polished applications and a Unix experience, get a Mac. Windows has somewhat polished apps (with very lax UI consistency rules), a convoluted overall experience (ever tried to debug a wireless connection?) and a Unix-like environment (and it had one from the start) both with Cygwin and WSL.

IMHO, WSL is Microsoft's attempt to compete with Mac, not Linux, by adding a Unix-like environment to Windows. I already did that with Cygwin, more than a decade ago.

View on HN

I am not a pro-developer, but I do enjoy programming and all its associated activities and by trade I'm a Windows Enterprise Architect, as such I need to run Windows as my primary machine(s), but looking a the list of VMs I have running on my Hyper-V servers, I have an equal smattering of Windows Servers and Linux Servers.

So it's purely horses-for-courses. If my career had been built up designing Linux solutions then my viewpoint would be the complete opposite. I really don't understand the hate that Windows gets. Yes, it's not open-source. Yes, it's controlled by a massive organisation. Yes, it can cost quite a lot if you want to develop on it... but you know what, a lot of people (and organisations) don't care. They happily run Windows because they always have, it comes with support options, and it kinda always works (within reason) for what they need to do with it.

Telling people to 'just run Linux' or 'Windows is Better!' is akin to pushing your religion or your choice of diet at everyone you meet. If are an atheist and have issues with organised religion, or if you are an omnivore and get irritated every time someone says 'I'm Vegan, you should be too!' then maybe, just maybe, it's time to rethink your position with regard to the OS wars.

P.S. The Amiga was better than the Atari ST, and the Commodore 64 pwned the ZX Spectrum. /s

What would be, from your point-of-view, the key advantages of working on Windows?

> P.S. The Amiga was better than the Atari ST, and the Commodore 64 pwned the ZX Spectrum. /s

The ST was a much simpler and more elegant machine. The Amiga was much more powerful, but too video-centric.

The C64 had better graphics and sound than the Spectrum (and a much nicer palette), but the Atari 8-bit computers had the best graphics of that generation by far. It's actually fun (but not surprising) to notice the Amiga is more a descendant of the 8-bit Ataris and the ST looks a lot like a 32-bit C-64.

Frankly, I don't understand the unix-like argument. I keep on hearing it from devs, but if your work happens mostly in IDEs and occasionally on the command line with tools like npm or gradle you never get in touch with potential "unix-ness" of your system.

The reason why I switched to Linux for work is its focus on power users, e.g. great configurability or well thought-out command line applications, but not because it's close to unix.

"focus on power users, e.g. great configurability or well thought-out command line applications"

Yeah, because it's an UNIX-like.

I'm not talking about command line languages or tools, but applications building an interface to it, like Terminal. It's much handier and more configurable than the built-in ones in Windows for cmd and PowerShell.

and that is because the whole pseudo terminal system was always there not encumbered by cmd wonkiness. That plus filesystem semantics alone make a unix like system miles ahead of microsoft.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com