Boy I'm happy Microsoft is making Windows 10 into a great development platform for the web!
One of the rare things to feel upbeat about is that we have great choice when it comes to OSes.
One of the rare things to feel upbeat about is that we have great choice when it comes to OSes.
As a former Windows user, then macOS convert, I look at what's happening on Windows with envy. macOS is getting prettier and perhaps more consistent, but buggier. It's very frustrating. I've had so many problems with security updates, with both the latest and other supported versions. Apple support is terrible these days. I filed a bug report with them and weeks later they give me absolutely lame replies.
The only thing that gives me pause, still, about Windows 10: it updates when it wants to and that is difficult to turn off (you can set your network to "metered" and I hear that will do it). Also the telemetry. I feel like it spies on its users more than Apple's product does.
It really ruins it.
And some people can't even try to switch out of Windows.
Compare that to a rolling release distro like Arch or fast moving one like Fedora or slower moving Ubuntu LTS that gets HWE stack upgrades life is really easy. You get a built in hypervisor (KVM) that can be used by the Android emulator, your libvirt VMs and docker. Want to run dtrace/bpftool - no need to compromise security. Need latest GCC - easy enough to get - it goes on and on. Not to mention the package managers are pretty good on all Linux distros now a days.
With Windows the downside was that WSL 1 was slow and macOS was faster than that although slower than Linux for FS operations etc. But now with WSL2 pretty much matching native Linux performance and allowing you to use docker natively - it suddenly becomes a much better option - can buy cheaper hardware that does what you want to without relying on Apple to give you the right keyboard, # of ports etc.
I am optimistic for WSL2 because while Linux was an option I was given it was very much a "Do so at your own peril we have a lot of homegrown tools that are not tested outside Windows and macOS". In a year or so maybe I'll switch to Windows w/ WSL2 or just back to Linux but there was no good reason to rock that boat at this time.