Linux'izing your Windows PC into a dev machine – Part 2

You would presumably remote in to the second computer. I do this from my MacBook Pro to my Windows desktop using TeamViewer, and also into native Linux boxes using ssh.

> Sorry I disagree, first many people who work in IT are _forced_ to use Windows as their primary host at work.

I would consider it a bad use of my experience to develop on Windows. The market agrees with me, experienced Linux developers are much better paid.

> Next, even if you install a Virtual Machine it might not work as seamless as having an Unix shell natively, thus some use Cygwin.

I would not call cygwin a native Unix shell.

> Regarding poor students, would you prefer to commute daily with multiple laptops? One for Linux one for Windows? I doubt so.

I don't use Windows for personal stuff. Apart from that, VirtualBox would still be a better solution if it was necessary to use Windows. For example, updates on a Windows machine which is rarely used can easily take hours. One does not want to have his work machine blocked for so long.

Apart from that, abandoning Windows is just a matter of leaving old habits. For me, using exclusively Linux for my personal stuff has worked excellently in the last 20 years.

> Other than that, if your work is not just coding but doing _anything_ apart from code itself, word processing, spreadsheets, graphic design, cad and you still need to run something from Linux ecosystem the WSL is currently probably your best option.

Libreoffice or Softmaker office is available, but LaTeX is much better for reports and articles, and wikis and Markdown is better for documentation. MS Word is a usability nightmare. Also, I do not use spreadsheets for myself, I use Python scripts - it's more efficient, and ledger-cli for accounting stuff. Inkscape is much better than MS Visio. I am physicist and developer, I do not use CAD, but if I had to use a CAD program on Windows, I would use a separate Windows machine, as explained before.

You sound like you are just used to do everything with Windows and never have considered seriously to use Linux software, I guess you don't know most of what exists there.

Also, I'd appreciate it if people would not call areas where some software vendors have managed to create a lock-in an "ecosystem". An ecosystem is a scientific concept from biology. Using that for proprietary software environments is simply marketing BS bingo.

There are also many developers who are forced to use GNU/Linux dev tools, while prefering to use Windows.

Not to mention that Windows has better support for most hardware and modern form factors, such as pen & touch enabled 2-in-1s.

If you're buying something like a Surface Pro or Surface Book, the last thing you want to do is cripple its functionality, ease of use, performance and battery life by installing GNU/Linux.

But the fundamental reason for why I avoid it, is best explained in this video. https://youtu.be/rmsIZUuBoQs

> Also, I highly admire Stallman's dedication, and I hope that you're going all the way by only using free software and services, and not just when it suits your narrative.

I do not agree to that. Improvement is always gradually, it is about learning how to do things. This is a gradual process. Requiring that somebody behaves in an all-or-nothing way is something which blocks experimentation, and also change.

I have seen this argumentative figure in a lot of discussions. Somebody wants do do something against climate change? Require that he lives in a cave, ceases to use electricity, and eats only raw food. But so much could be achieved if we impose a 5% energy tax, and stop to fly around for leisure.

Somebody wants a bit more privacy? Require that he stops to use email, does not use the net anymore, lives in a cave.... But so much could be achieved when people would stop to share intimate information and pictures of people who have not asked for that on facebook.

Somebody wants more road safety and better public transport? Require that he only uses a bicycle in the future, stops to use a taxi, stops using delivery services. And so on. Wait, I forgot he needs to live in a cave.

And now for serious. Stallman has pointed out that if somebody else controls the software on your computer, he has control over your computer, not you. Consequently, your computer will do things which are good for him, but not for you. If you look at things like privacy issues, software subscriptions, unwanted updates, unwanted audio recording by things such as Cortana and Chrome, apps sharing address book data from your phone, and so on, there is a huge number of things software does but the people on whose computers it runs would rather not want. Stallmans conclusion is that users need to control their software, and he has opened ways to do that. The GNU system and Linux are pieces which fit together to achieve that. With a Linux, or GNU/Linux system which is indeed the correct if not a but pedantic name, users do have that freedom. (As an aside, in a world in which FB profile data is mined to influence people to vote total lunatics into offices where real red buttons are in reach which can put not less than the entire human civilisation into ashes, that freedom absolutely matters because it becomes more and more a requirement for collective political freedom.)

I get that Microsoft is afraid of that freedom.

There is a number of issues with that. First, my impression is that Microsoft Surface hardware is, too, heavily advertised in developer forums and social media. Again, one needs to discern the desired association which that PR effort wants to create, from the actual qualities and disadvantages of the product. For example, the surface laptops have earned some negative reputation for lack of durability. Anybody who would consider to buy such a device would surely be well advised to do a web search whether such problems are more frequent, a thing of the past, or a rare exception. But that's a digression. You mentioned touchscreen support as important quality and I am zooming in on that.

Surface books and touchscreens are discussed here in the context of a software developer system. I am however really a bit puzzled by that. What does it mean to have touch on a software developer system? I understand surely that Microsoft does not want to lose a generation of developers, and that it considers them as trend-setting or even required to create gazillions of fantastic future Windows apps which will populate the Microsoft app store with killer apps for the Surface tablet. Microsoft marketing surely wants to sell the surface (if I were them, I'd probably hire some PR agencies to flood Reddit and HN with positive comments about it).

Also, Microsoft still seems to live the dream - in the face of all these failures such as Windows Phone - that desktop software, tablets and mobile apps shall be, will be, must be convergent and that desktop and mobile will have a common UI. Which is touch. I won't comment more on that. If you ever tried, it is hard to shatter someone else's dream, even if those wishes might not entirely based on experience.

But now, let's come to real life, and let's become a little, just a little, practical. As a first, consider that software developers are people which handle program code. In most cases, lots of program code. In many cases, quite complex program code.

The code is displayed on the screen. Developers have to remember many things, and the more code you have on the screen, the less you have to remember while working on one thing. They say that we can only remember seven to nine things in short-term memory, for more things we have to memorize. Memorizing costs a lot of time.

That has a simple consequence: The larger the screen is, the more text it displays, the better. Just let's take my home PC which I mostly use for hobby programming. It is a 43 inch Philips BDM4350 with 4K resolution. It is glare but I can live with that - the room it stands in does has usually no direct sunlight, I can use shutters, and I have happily exchanged non-glare with that amount of screen estate. For me, it is an absolute dream.

I just say, as a professional software developer, you will want a screen that large. A smaller screen is a waste of time, and therefore a waste of the company's money. If you own an IT company and your developers have smaller screens, ask yourself why.

So, I ask you to do a little experiment. Not a thought experiment, but a real-live experiment. Imagine you have a 43 inch touch screen in front of you. Sit at a proper ergonomic distance. Now, lift your index finger and point it at the height of your chin in that ergonomic distance.

Now, keep your finger still for one minute. Just one minute.

Do that now.

You note something? It is hard. It requires a lot of effort. Doing that all day will be very, very tiring.

If you want a high-precision graphical input for a large screen, you will not want a touchscreen. You will want a graphics tablet and stylus flat on your desk. In addition to your 43 inch monitor, of course. Good news! You can buy a high-quality Wacom graphics tablet at Amazon, even refurbished for less than $100. And Wacom tablets have excellent Linux driver support since a long, long time. They are very fine for drawing artwork. I am not going to recommend drawing software since that's not my realm of expertise.

However, as a software developer, especially with more experience, you will normally want to use your screen to display text. As much as possible. With as little waste as possible. Which leads quite naturally to text-oriented, keyboard-oriented work flows, tiling window managers (like i3), and text editor like vim or Emacs, which among other things, do one thing really well: They don't waste screen space. Of course, learning a tiling Window manager requires a little bit of dedication (you have to memorize key chords, duh), but it pays off after one or two days, switching between terminals and windows is not more a matter of a second like when doing it with the mouse, but of a single key combination which does it in a tenth of a second. And this does not only save time, this makes it much easier to keep the flow, to stay focused on what you were working on.