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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

A master woodworker will buy a tool that is appropriate for the job he needs to complete. Buying a computer should be the same, don't buy a tool and try to find a job for it, realize what you need to accomplish and buy the tool that will help you get it done. One reason I do not buy apple is that they try to tell me how I should be using a computer, vs me buying a computer to do what I need/want to do with it. We've had extremely successful implementations of the surface pro with managers and executives, but not with developers.

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I was a PC user long ago, and I moved to mac _because_ it felt like a tool built by a master woodworker (so to speak) as both a general user and a dev. When I first got any PC, I always had to do a fresh install of the OS to clean out the adware, regularly run some cleaner on the registry, and if it was a laptop, it was unpredictable what would happen if I closed the screen to name just a handful of sources of frustration.

When I tried a mac, it really "just worked". You get it, you open it, and you're running. If you need to, close it, and pick up where you left off when you open it next. My current MBP is 4 years old and feels as snappy as day 1, and I've had no part in maintaining that. As a dev, I have a *nix environment right out of the box, which is incredibly helpful.

I'm hoping Microsoft has finally relieved some of those frustrations and gotten these things right as well.

We have wildly different experiences to OS X. It’s never “just worked” for me and it crashes often. I love my 12” MacBook but OS X just isn’t like it used to be. It used to be rock solid. Never crash. Always fast. But it really feels like it’s becoming windows xp. Windows 10 runs better on my 12 MacBook than OS X... I do miss my original retina MacBook tho. That was the last true good laptop Apple made.

Sorry to hear that! I’ve definitely noticed a steady decline in the joy I experience with macOS with newer updates (i really miss Spaces), but it’s still head and shoulders above any experience I had with windows.

Well said, exactly this is the point. For devs a Mac is more comfortable to get things done with than with surface.

I disagree. I was a Linux guy before I was a Mac guy and now I find myself a Windows guy.

My Surface Book is solid hardware with a great keyboard, all-day battery, etc. WSL is to the point where there is less weirdness building libraries in WSL than there is on the Mac.

Its not perfect, but the perfect machine doesn't exist.

I find that WSL requires a ton of hacks and workarounds to emulate a real Unix system. For example, I need to run Docker containers.

To do that, I install docker in WSL, then I have to run a Go binary I compiled as root, that lets WSL talk to Windows pipes, which then talks to Docker for Windows.

WSL makes using Windows somewhat tolerable, but it's not even close to having a regular old Unix.

Is there a reason you can't just use Docker For Windows?

https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/

I am using Docker for Windows, the problem I'm solving is I want to produce Docker images from within my WSL. I don't want to do all my work using vim/tmux from within WSL, only to open a Powershell window to actually build the container.

So I have to set up the strange hack I described in order to use docker inside WSL as a client to Docker for Windows.

Since WSL debuted, this is a rather debatable claim. WSL provides a really nice interface and I never had issues except doing the most obscure things (which were buggy on nix too).

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