Comment by 2T1Qka0rEiPr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2T1Qka0rEiPr | Hacker News Reader

I use WSL from time to time on my personal laptop, and the reason is this: I think Windows is still superior to any Linux flavour for doing "leisure" things like watching VoD, or playing games (not that I do any more).

This isn't a dig at Linux it's simply that we still have lazy content creators using things such as Silverlight to provide content. These applications "just work" on Windows, and when they are at all possible on Linux, they tend to require a lot of manual effort and simply aren't as good as the Windows solutions (Google Drive, Spotify, VPN applications etc.).

I also use my personal laptop for dev, and as I'm an OSS-stack developer, I use Linux. Having the ability to run Linux natively on Windows is superb, and is genuinely usable for work purposes for the most part.

The article doesn't capture a few other bugbears with WSL. The file system is slooooooow (really slow), quite a few applications just flat-out don't work, and others are buggy as hell (psql e.g.). Would I use it in a serious work capacity daily? No - but I'm certainly appreciative that I can use it and it works pretty well 95% of the time.

I've been working for 10+ years this way. Windows on the desktop, ssh in to Linux boxes for real work via ttys. There's nothing about the X11 ecosystem I miss at all. The one hassle is the editor; you're either stuck with using tty editors like emacs or running a Windows app as an editor and relying on network filesystems to let you remotely edit files.

I had a couple of years with MacOS instead of Windows. Definitely better in so many ways. But MacOS Unix is worse than WSL Ubuntu in every way, mostly because it's a bizarro BSD variant with 10 year old tools and Homebrew is a kludge.

I don't do much with WSL but find it occasionally useful in a pinch. The lack of an init system is very limiting, I find I still need a full Linux environment for most things.

Some people would argue that using a text-only editor is not a downside at all

They are probably arguing on those FidoNet boards or something.

Ed is the standard text editor.

?

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

I'm curious: how is Homebrew a kludge? Also, the *BSD userland command-line tools on macOS aren't old, they are fairly close to the latest updates for bash, git, vim, etc.

Homebrew seems far behind dpkg/apt in terms of managing complex dependencies and versioning. It's gotten better, but largely by replicating the complexity of those systems.

Last I looked unzip on MacOS still couldn't handle files > 2GB in size. That was a patch submitted about 10 years ago. The version of less is also ancient and compiled without standard features like LESSKEY. At least as of a year or two ago, it's been awhile since I've tried using MacOS.

I agree completely. It's actually quite nice to use the entire range of common software available! There's nothing unique or compelling about macOS that I personally miss.

It will be a difficult choice if my next employer offers an OS choice. The more I ask myself what I really enjoy about Linux and Windows, the more I understand that I might just prefer Microsoft's Window manager to customizing one.

I'd rather ticker with Linux at home than fret about keeping it fixed at work. WSL and Docker let me do that in spades.

> I'd rather ticker with Linux at home than fret about keeping it fixed at work.

What do you mean by this? I've ran pretty esoteric set-ups at work but none of them have required more maintenance than the Windows systems some of my coworkers run.

I agree that the configurations back in the 2010s were much stranger than they are now. Now, things are relatively straight forward. Below are my subjective personal experiences that have assisted me with self-career growth and growth of others.

If a bad patch comes down for Windows or MacOS then the company IT department will likely shoulder some blame. If a package manager update comes through for Linux and does fail then the onus will be on me; IT hasn't supported personal Linux installs at any company I've worked for.

From the job-insurance standpoint, it's a liability to use Linux at work if the business makes you take the full helpdesk responsibility. Plus, we're all inevitably asked to open Visio, Photoshop, Outlook, or one of the many other popular Windows-only tools. Now we get into virtualization and VMs.

Windows works for me. WSL is enough and Docker fills in the gaps. Frankly, I can run Visual Studio, Neovim, both Docker and WSL let me run what I want on Linux. In the end, it's just easier to visualize Linux in Windows than the inverse. I've never been afforded the option to "just" run Linux at the office.

Now at home, where I can let projects sit, they run Linux. My personal servers are Linux. My embedded electronics are Linux. If they break? It's fine. I like to tinker and play with those configuration files. Fixing that obscure display bug on your hardware is very fulfilling to me. When reviews come up, I'd like to be able to demonstrate the ROI I've created rather than hoping that custom WM takes my salary up a notch.

Right, I get the Windows with virtualized Linux/Linux with virtualized Windows debate.

I run the latter because the former doesn't make sense to me; Linux makes for a better foundation security-wise and I can rely on it to do what I tell it to; something that's been a problem for Windows users the past few years.

I also get company policies, I'd try to make this part of the contract —I simply cannot work as efficiently if I'm fighting tools instead of business needs— but if it wasn't a possibility I'd definitely run a full X11 environment on top of Windows. It does makes sense in that case.

But I still do not get your point about maintenance; as you said, this isn't the 2010's anymore (I'd argue it was fine at that point as well if hardware wasn't simply chosen at random) and issues do not come up any more often than they do on Windows or macOS. The opposite has been the case in my office: those of us who run Linux just have far fewer issues both dealing with development tools and with system maintenance (and we have more Windows experts than Linux experts); so the implication that you'd produce a lower ROI by running Linux is a bit laughable from my own point of view.

At the end of the day you have your own situation and it's up to you to decide what's best for you, but I believe that if maintenance cost is your deal-breaker you probably should reassess your choice.

Security is a complex, multi-faceted, ever chancing set of practices. All operating systems receive regular security updates. Can you point out the security issues with macOS or Windows that disqualify it for a developer workstation?

> I also get company policies, I'd try to make this part of the contract

I've never had anything close to that leverage during negotiations. If I had leverage like that then I'd use it on vacation or salary.

Regarding maintenance, Windows and macOS both have package managers now. My dotfiles work across Linux and Windows; macOS is the odd duck. If the operating systems run the same tools then it makes the OS a means to an end instead of a religious debate.

In practice, I've used all three at various jobs for my developer machine. They all have security updates and maintenance options that work fine. All can be successfully maintained, used, and developed on.

> I believe that if maintenance cost is your deal-breaker you probably should reassess your choice.

Your comments demonstrated that you prefer Linux strong enough to negotiate for it. I'm just a developer who enjoys solving problems and thinks the WSL is really useful.

WSL is a godsend for developers. Having easy access to openssl with minimal fuss is awesome for all those obscure cert operations that you need a couple of times a year. Cygwin and all that has always been rather crappy IMO, so I'd usually keep a linux vm handy for those kinds of things. Installation can be slow yeah, QT took forever to build. But it did work!

What is wrong with the openssl binary shipping with Windows?

Apparently there is this strange idea that only UNIX devs are developers.

> The file system is slooooooow (really slow)

Is that for Linux accessing the Windows parts of the system, or even when accessing files within the Linux sandbox?

Both. WSL works by translating Linux calls into appropriate Windows calls under the hood. The Windows file system is already comparatively slow, and the interfaces aren’t especially similar, which means that you end up using a not-fast translation of a medium-fast filesystem implemented on top of a relatively slow file system.

It also doesn't help that Windows Defender wants to scan everything in real-time. Disabling it can lead to a nice boost in performance.

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