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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong, but WSL looks more like an attempt at stopping developers from moving to Macs in order to get a polished app environment with a Unix-like OS underneath and to keep them in the Windows ecosystem.

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"a polished app environment"

If you're meaning XCode then no.

XCode is never going to draw in developers... or at least no developer I've ever talked to liked XCode.

I changed from iOS to Android development because I couldn't stand XCode anymore. Constant crashing, walled garden bullshit where I couldn't even get plugins running every time they updated, inexplicable code changes to my apps which were un-diagnosable from within xcode because they obfuscate away all layout files... It was nightmarish. I spent more time swearing at my computer than I did coding.

I'm talking about iTunes, iWork, all IDEs that count with the exception of Visual Studio, Skype, the built-in apps and even Microsoft Office if you are so inclined. I've done some development in ObjC using Xcode and didn't notice the problems you mention. Must be luck.

And one thing that others never replicated is the quality of the laptops. I've had Dell XPSs and Thinkpads and the MacBook Pro is still my favourite laptop.

Xcode 3.x was nearly perfect. The Xcode UI went straight south in 4.x with this giant-window-always-the-wrong-size-for-everything design, that also sucked Interface Builder into the same app. That meant any crashy thing in IB took down your whole project, which never used to be an issue. If they back-ported LLVM to the Xcode 3.x GUI and restored IB as a separate app, I would be quite happy.

I can't really tell if this is criticism or just stating the obvious. Software companies want you to use their software. Yes, shocking, I know.

Hard to guess the tone, but do you mean that in a negative way?

I think it's fantastic that MS are being forced by Mac to improve their damn OS. Mac being the only option for many people (although I love Linux) was a terrible situation.

I've been putting it even stronger for a while now. WSL is an attempt to get the horde of MacBook-wielding web devs to slowly migrate away from OSX. Once people notice they can get a grab-and-go Linux laptop at any BestBuy, and it's much cheaper than an equivalent MacBook, and it runs all games and other Windows apps natively... They'll start doing a lot more development on Windows boxes. Then, they might notice that Visual Studio is actually really damn nice. At that point, making their code Linux-Windows cross-platform becomes much easier and more interesting.

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