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Comment by trm42 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been hearing quite a lot of praise for Win10 in the last few years, but in reality my colleagues are cursing it daily and bashing their heads against basic dev stuff that works nice and dandy with Macs or with Linux. Win10 may be ok for running Microsoft’s current flagship, Office and maybe games but otherwise I wouldn’t want to spend time with fighting against the OS.

And no, in my opinion WSL is not real solution if the OS still makes life harder and more weird. Just a new twist to the cygwin/mingw/virtualisation scheme when running the real thing would be a lot better option.

And no, Macs and Linux are not perfect either, but they both are more friendly and humane options for developers.

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I believe you, but my own experience could not be more different.

I dual boot constantly and sometimes I forget what OS I am running. Until I see one clock instead of the other.

Of course there are some specific tasks that are more suited to one OS over the other (a reason for restarting), but things like using the browser, the text editor, VPNs, Kodi, epub readers, Anki, etc, they basically work the same.

So, for some games-> Windows, for CLI -> Linux, for anything else, any of them.

I dual-booted or had two machines for dev work for almost 20 years. The Windows machine was mostly for Office.

Since VMs and containers because standard for development, I honestly have no idea what problems your colleagues are having. I haven't had a "Windows problem" other than the clunky UI since Win7, and the UI is 100% customizable.

So far this morning:

- a windows 2016 server for which we needed to dig deep in powershell so it wouldn't reset the clock every 6 hours - a user whose local account services is totalled and he can't access his desktop any more

Personally I would like the start menu search to only look for applications but I gave up on that.

I suppose using windows only for office would help, of course.

I use Windows for servers too (not my choice), and both of those things sound like a sysadmin who is making strange choices and not actual Windows bugs. I could be wrong, of course.

To be fair, I don't have full control of the domain for the server and I suspect a catch-21 regarding the clock setting and the domain sync thingy. I fixed it by "resetting a lot of time thing" but I am a linux guy before a windows guy so I ended up in Powershell (which i like).

I attribute the other one to a brutal shutdown of the PC that somehow corrupted a running update, some random clicking from the user in a misguided attempt to fix things behind the back of IT et voilà.

What problems are you having? The common complaints against Windows now vs back then are really vague. “I hate Windows (for no apparent or specific reason)!”

Why doesn’t WSL work? It’s Linux. It’s closer to what you’re deploying on for production than a Mac

WSL1 is emulated syscalls and a filesystem. It had some quirks.

WSL2 is a lightweight VM and is Linux. It has some new quirks.

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