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Comment by samsaga2 | Hacker News Reader

- Windows Terminal is nice but the windows command line is not. I don't like PowerShell, it is too verbose.

- WSL 2 is not stable and it is only available for the Windows Insider program. And it does not have X.

- Windows 10 drivers sucks. For example, Intel Graphics drivers has a lot of bugs.

- ClearType has been improved but Linux and Mac font aliasing is a lot better.

- I cannot upgrade my laptop to the last Windows version because something about the seller. The Windows Update does not give me the option.

- Windows really need a package manager. And not, Chocolatey is not enough.

- Windows desktop is nice but is not for me. I would like to remove the task bar and install something like i3wm.

- NTFS is getting old and it is very slow if you have a lot of small files.

Windows is nice to a light development. But if you really need a complete solution you have to search for alternatives.

PD: I have nothing against vscode :).

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> Windows really need a package manager.

I feel like you only have this mindset because that's what you're used to, coming from the 'nix world. I came from the Windows world, and not even once have I wished that there was a package manager for Windows. In fact I think it's safe to say I've hated dealing with pretty much every package manager I've ever touched, with possibly the sole exception being pacman.

> NTFS is getting old and it is very slow if you have a lot of small files.

"Old"? So what? That means it's robust and well-tested with lots of tools designed for it. It's not a Javascript framework. And 2 seconds of benchmarking on FAT32, exFAT, or whatever other file system you want would easily demonstrate that the performance difference has nothing to do with NTFS. NTFS is fantastic; I'd take it over extwhatever any day. It doesn't deal with small files quickly simply because Windows and its performance trade-offs weren't designed around programs dealing with lots of tiny files individually. Yeah it sucks, and I wish it was better just like I wish ext was better in other ways, but it's not really surprising; you're trying to program on Windows with a 'nix mentality, so of course you'll hit an impedance mismatch. It's like going from Windows to Linux and complaining that you need to drop into the terminal all the time (or the reverse direction for that matter). It sucks, but the tool just wasn't designed to be used that way.

>I don't like PowerShell, it is too verbose.

    alias

>Intel Graphics drivers has a lot of bugs

They suck everywhere. I've had nothing but problems with HD4600 on Linux. Frequent video player crashes, kernel lockups, glitches, the whole shebang.

>- ClearType has been improved but Linux ... font aliasing is a lot better.

I have the opposite experience. Depends on your display I guess.

>I would like to remove the task bar

You can remove it. I don't use and don't see it on Win10.

>- NTFS is getting old and it is very slow if you have a lot of small files.

It's not NTFS. NTFS by itself is plenty fast. https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...

I agree on the graphics drivers - you can't really hold that against Windows itself! IME I've had a lot of issues with Intel, AMD and NVidia drivers, on both Windows and Linux.

> alias

Right. And it ships with sensible aliases for pretty much everything right out of the box as well as excellent completion.

Don't really get the 'too verbose' argument at all.

It's probably just too advanced for him. I love PowerShell and use it on Linux, too.

> You can remove it. I don't use and don't see it on Win10.

Not the parent - but a question on this. I was using Win10 as my main OS 'till quite recently. I always had the task bar on autohide, but was frequently annoyed by it popping up (when icons for running apps flash). I tried a few registry hacks but nothing ever worked. For unrelated reasons I'm back on Linux now, but am still curious to see if there's a solution to this.

> powershell

Imo bash and posix shells are too verbose. I have to learn 10 different little programs that have extremely different syntax instead of just learning powershell.

> package manager

https://scoop.sh/

> - Windows really need a package manager. And not, Chocolatey is not enough.

A package manager isn't really necessary on Windows, since Windows doesn't have a web of interdependent packages to manage.

Regarding Windows updates, I'm not aware of anything the vendor can do to prevent you from upgrading?

Microsoft does stagger updates over quite a long period, my guess is that's whats happened. If you want, you can get the update early by using Windows 10 Update Assistant[0]

Regarding the command line, there are more options than PowerShell (which I also really dislike); for example, if you install Git for Windows, you also have the option of installing Git Bash - all the goodness of bash, in Windows!

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/3159635/windows-10-...

Some of what you write is true. Some is false or absurd.

> WSL 2 is not stable and it is only available for the Windows Insider program

True but so what? It works perfectly well for many purposes right now (I know this from experience). Work on it is progressing apace, and it'll be in the mainstream builds before long.

> And it does not have X.

I don't even know what that means. You can install an X server (x410's the best in my experience), and run X11 apps in it. I worked f/t on the Linux build of IntelliJ running in WSL2 for a couple of projects, and it was fine.

> NTFS is getting old and it is very slow if you have a lot of small files.

Windows file handling is pretty slow, but not mainly because of NTFS. Working in WSL2 you have a linux kernel & ext4 for your source files, so it doesn't matter.

> Windows is nice to a light development. But if you really need a complete solution you have to search for alternatives.

That's just a silly ideological statement. And it is not a matter of opinion - great swathes of significant and sophisticated software are written by devs using Windows. To suggest something more is 'needed' flies in the face of objective reality. By all means express your taste (mine also runs to Linux right now, though it's a marginal decision), but you'd be better off being aware that taste is just that, and only that.

"- WSL 2 is not stable and it is only available for the Windows Insider program. And it does not have X." WSL 2 is not perfect, but its pretty stable. And it's available for everyone on 1903 update. No need to be in Insider program. Yes, no X, that's true.

Have a link on installing wsl 2 on 1903? Last I checked it was only on insider builds.

> - Windows desktop is nice but is not for me. I would like to remove the task bar and install something like i3wm.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20895031

Fancy Zones is a long way off being a full tiling window manager like i3.

WSL2 works fine as an X client in my experience. If you want to run an X server on windows, vcxsrv works pretty well.

Haven't tested WSL2, but used WSL as an X client quite a bit. It works, but performance is pretty terrible. It's fine for 'static' GUIs, but far from great for any sort of interactive graphics.

> Windows really need a package manager. And not, Chocolatey is not enough.

What does windows really need a package manager _for_, that Chocolatey and nuget are not enough for?

Windows drivers being bad is the fault of the hardware manufacturer; at least they provide some drivers!

Ironically windows has had a kind of package manager for years in the form of MSI and the "add/remove programs" system. It just didn't wire this up to a repository.

NTFS performance is becoming a serious problem. That and process spawning are the two things that Linux systems inherently do much faster. The tendency of Windows systems to hook antivirus into everything that the filesystem does is also crippling but still seems to be mandatory.

> Ironically windows has had a kind of package manager for years in the form of MSI and the "add/remove programs" system. It just didn't wire this up to a repository.

They added a repository, they call it the Microsoft Store. In Windows 10 you can install Win32 and even command line apps from it. It has a lot of what I need at this point: Python, Inkscape, Paint.NET, VLC, iCloud Drive, WSL Linux distros, etc. I haven't used Chocolatey in years, because most of what I had been using Chocolatey for is in the Store at this point (or I didn't like how Chocolatey was installing them anyway, there were a lot of dumb PowerShell install scripts in the Chocolatey repository).

It would be great to have even more applications in the Store or as MSIX sideload packages (with update support) instead of old MSI/EXE installers, but that's a developer project that takes upgrade/installer rebuild time (as opposed to just about anyone just writing some silly PowerShell script or another and uploading it to Chocolatey).

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