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Comment by winuser | Hacker News Reader

I really wish that devs out there, including the HN community, give PCs and Windows another chance.

The PC specs are amazing, value for your money is excellent, the OS is beautiful - the biggest obstacle now is so much open source documentation explains how to install or build on a linux based machine, ignoring the Windows users and making them feel like sh*t for working on a Windows box.

If more dev's offered docs around building/compiling on Windows, and Windows support, that would be excellent...

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Pity that it's so hard to source W10 Enterprise LTSC (previously LTSB), you can bypass pretty much all Windows Update woes that way, miss out completely on Cortana and Edge, and avoid having "features" no-one asked for rammed down your throat every few months.

Despite Microsoft's FUD[0] ("The Long Term Servicing Channel, which is designed to be used only for specialized devices (which typically don't run Office) such as those that control medical equipment or ATM machines"), it also appears to run Just Fine[tm] on the latest desktop hardware[1]

It's the only version of W10 I'll go near.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w... [1] I've had W10 LTSB 2016 running for months on two home-built Ryzen boxes (1x 2700X + 1x 2400G)

I do prefer the macOS ecosystem overall and distinctly dislike the UX mess that is Windows 10. I have been using Windows for decades now, and feel very comfortable with it, and I still maintain a desktop tower for gaming and intensive work, but if I had the option to switch to a macOS machine I would. There just isn't a Mac hardware out there that fits my needs. But each year I feel Apple is making the Mac ecosystem worse and worse. At some point the software advantage will not be worth it.

That being said, if someone likes Windows 10 now, there really is little reason to remain on Mac hardware. Practically, most creative software exists on Windows.

It's my impression that most Mac (and Linux) users have given Windows a chance. Maybe not the very latest versions, but most Mac users I know (including myself) have switched from Windows at some point in the past. I don't doubt that Windows is less infuriating than it was when I left in 1998, but nothing its more modern incarnations appeals to me in a way that would even make me consider switching back. "Not so infuriating anymore" is a weak value proposition. There is also an element of "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me".

At the same time, I am perfectly happy with my Macs; I still absolutely love macOS, my work 5k iMac is a delight to use, and my private 2010 MacBook Pro is still going strong (although as of Mojave, it can no longer run the latest OS). My 2008 Mac Mini is nearing end-of-life, but only because I can't justify upgrading its internal storage to an SSD when the computer is stuck on Mountain Lion. I worry about the price hikes, but OTOH, as long as I can expect getting 8-10 years useful life out of a system, I don't mind paying the Apple Tax.

I find WSL can really help in this regard. It's being actively developed by Microsoft and they're making the interop between WSL and windows better over time (a good example of this is https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/11/05/what... on what's new in October)

So what I tend to do is use linux install paths and do my scripting work in WSL, with my more GUI/Corp apps in windows.

All they need to do now is get raw network sockets working and finish off Linux Docker engine support in WSL and I'll be sorted!

Cons: Windows update.

I'll pass.

Windows makes sense for game devs, Android devs, and Windows app devs. It’s my impression that HN devs are mostly web devs, with some mobile devs. Windows is not best for those types of devs.

IOS devs need to run Xcode.

Server devs can and usually should use remote servers for development. So their local machine’s OS doesn’t matter. It could be Windows, but they are mostly ssh-ing to Linux boxes or VMs for work.

I like PCs.

The PC specs are amazing, value for your money is excellent, and now is so much open source documentation explains how to install or build on a linux based machine.

And outside of laptops, a custom PC can still be built with whatever specs needed.

What advantages does Windows offer over Linux other than gaming?

Software and drivers that consistently work without the need for fiddling. Every year I give Linux a chance, and every year I quickly sober up.

I have dual booted Ubuntu for ~3 years on my MacBook Pro (13” late 2013 model) and used it as my main OS.

I had to install a webcam driver but other than that everything just worked(TM)

Yes, especially on Mac, high DPI on Linux is still garbage to this day. It's not really good on Windows either, but at least with Windows 10, it is somewhat serviceable. On Linux, support is so abysmal, it is really comical in 2018. Moreover, it seems the dev community still hasn't "seen the light" in high DPI displays, and will often dismiss or backlog required changes for support. In 2018.

HiDPI worked / works great in UbuntuGNOME. I spend most of my time in a text editor, terminal or browser, but even things like games for my kid (Tux and Tux Kart) supported HiDPI without requiring any magic tricks.

/edit setting a different scalefactor on my external (non-HiDPI) monitor was frustrating in that it worked... sometimes

For me setting up Linux got easier than Windows a few years ago. There are other problems that stop me using the platform but drivers isn't it anymore.

That's if you are on supported hardware. If your sound/wifi/disk storage/modern GPU lacks support, you are SOL for a long time and have to resort to experimental drivers that may or may not be stable and may or may not be working as expected. Meanwhile, practically all hardware has Windows drivers.

Tired meme, Windows drivers are the only ones you have to "fiddle" with out of band, I can't even think of another OS where going to a third-party website to download an executable is how you install drivers for the machine. (Not OSX, not BSD, not Linux).

Buy any desktop in any supermarket in the world and it's going to work out of the box with the latest Ubuntu. This has been the case for 5 years now.

If you have some weird hardware that needs a kernel module that isn't enabled by default or packaged as a kms for your distro, then sure I can definitely see some awkwardness there, but for instance I haven't had so much as a wifi problem in 10 years.

Definitely a stark contrast to Windows where you have to go to the manufacturer website for each component of your machine if you're not using the bloated OS that comes pre-installed.

What meme? I was speaking about personal experience.

> but for instance I

"I" being the key word there. On the other hand, I have had issues with Linux drivers every year.

What distro, what type of machine? Because I’ve been prolific in my purchase of brand new hardware and I have had only the most minute of issues.

I think it must strongly depend on your use case and exact hardware, because those exact reasons in my case are an argument against windows. I have to download and install what in order to get driver support? How many tray icons can one person possibly need? It's the worst in my experience with printers and scanners; "please install this 300MB package which will constantly run in the background and annoy you at the least convenient time to replace your ink - oh, and in three months we're going to completely change the interface and replace it with something that doesn't even support feature that you're using". Or, hear me out, I could install CUPS and xsane (or another sane frontend) and be done. Driver support is indeed hit-or-miss, but when it hits there's absolutely no work at all. (Exception: if your printer isn't already supported, you can often find and download a single small file to add support; CUPS is beautiful)

I agree with you that a lot of vendor software is garbage. If the hardware you use is supported by your Linux distro of choice, I'd agree it could be a better experience than installing any driver. But at least there is always a driver. That has not been the case for desktops and laptops I have had in recent years. Always something missing in plethora of Linux distributions, and the ways to solve those issues are not straightforward even for a 10-year experience software engineer. That is not something I want to think about when buying new hardware.

I think the advantage right now is largely in a few select sectors right now, and mainly due to ecosystem.

Music production is a big one from my perspective -- currently, if you are looking at the tools and plugins that are the most popular in the professional world, your practical choice is basically between Macintosh or Windows.

The majority of DAW plugin synths / effects currently are not compiled for Linux, and I do not believe many popular DAWs (stuff like Ableton Live, Logic, Cubase, etc.) are currently supported yet either. I have heard that if you keep it light weight, some audio plugins will run just fine under something like WINE. But for a heavy-hitting plugin like, say, Spectrasonics Omnisphere, I have heard that emulation is too slow to be practical.

There are certainly native Linux DAWs and plugins out there, you can probably go quite far with Ardour or the Linux version of Reaper, and there's a few plugins too (u-He has some native Linux builds of their excellent synthesizer plugins for instance). It's just that the native ecosystem out there is quite a bit smaller, unfortunately.

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