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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

I have gone one step further, to Windows 10.

I finally removed Ubuntu from my home laptop too. I'm now using it in WSL with VS Code.

Everything day to day works better. My shares mount easily, my media players work, but best of all I get proper versions of Word and Excel. I still manage a bunch of Macs at work, but I have come to regard them as the BetaMax computer. Worst of all this is BetaMax, with the users not having noticed that the rest of the world has BluRay. I get so many Mac Users telling me 1990's anecdotes about things Macs do better than Windows. "Macs update silently in the background". No they don't. Windows 10 does a pretty good job of it though.

I have narrowed it down to the real truth. Macs look cool when you are sat in a hipster coffee shop with your hipster book pro. That and stuff with iPhone compatibility, home user stuff.

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>I finally removed Ubuntu from my home laptop too. I'm now using it in WSL with VS Code.

How does this work in practice? Do you run VS code from WSL with an X server? If not, how do you deal with VS code locking your files? As far as I know, the permission issues when accessing the same files from windows and WSL have yet to be solved.

I am very impressed with WSL and how far it's come in the last few years, but the integration between the linux and windows file systems doesn't seem to be quite as seamless as I would like to rely on it completely. I often find myself restarting the Lxssmanager to solve the file permission issues as well as the zombie process issue that still seems to plague WSL.

There is VS Code Remote Dev extension, so you can have everything in ssh/wsl/docker and only use VS Code in Windows as UI.

This, except I don't use docker. Store files in Windows file system. I put a link between that location (/mnt/c/users/username/foo) and unix home. Open up Ubuntu app, navigate to the directory (~/foo), type 'code .' And a VS code server starts there and opens Code in Windows. Any extensions to Code need to be installed in WSL (there is an option under the extensions menu).

While blaming others for it, aren’t you providing a pretty strong anecdotal opinion yourself?

Some people prefer Windows, some Linux and some MacOS. These days you can get work done with all of the most popular OSes without losing a lot in productivity. Beyond that it’s just a matter of preference.

Personally I have opted for Apple ecosystem but can’t really argue it being universally better than others. But then again, dont really feel the need to make that claim either. Just use the software and hardware you are most happy & efficient with.

I don't have to be anecdotal at all, I can count the service cases as a proportion of workstations and tell you that my team get more mac service issues per machine than Windows.

Microsoft Office on Mac is a big cause. I have some users who only use Office or a browser and still use Mac. I cannot understand it, Office on Mac is simply bit as good as Office on Windows.

I have colleagues that swear by some of the new Microsoft portable machines.

The few times I’ve had a look at Windows 10 I’ve been seriously put off by all of the ‘junk’ that is automatically installed, e.g. candy crush etc.

I also worry about Windows still being a big target for malware.

What can die hard Win10 users tell me about these concerns?

>The few times I’ve had a look at Windows 10 I’ve been seriously put off by all of the ‘junk’ that is automatically installed, e.g. candy crush etc.

Not a diehard win10 user, but as far as I know you can only disable this legitimately if you pay out for Win10 Enterprise.

I think there are registry hacks that work on other versions though.

You can't buy Win10 Enterprise if you are an individual.

Now all that ridiculous bloat is pretty easily disabled. But that along with telemetry and forced updates are probably the last drops that will force me to linux for my workstation.

I can't believe they sold their trust for that. I can't use an operating system that I don't trust.

You could ignore it? Not being funny but I don't notice it. It certainly doesn't get in the way of my daily work.

On my home PC I just searched up candy crush and uninstalled it with a right click.

On my work PC using Windows 10 pro and signed in to a domain I don't get them at all.

Re Malware, I think Windows 10 has an excellent security model, and you would have to be pretty careless to get malware problems. However I won't deny that Windows is a much bigger target due to number of installs.

I personally prefer windows as well. But I haven't yet been able to find a setup for it where all my unix centric software works. For example, if I want to debug in my IDE, I have to run it under WSL, since the project contains code that doesn't work on windows, and run an X-window server on Win10, which is flaky and means lots of manual setup.

If you use Code as your IDE you can use the WSL extension to debug inside WSL from Windows.

I think automated Browser testing is the only thing I am seeing I would have to do from Windows

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