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Comment by tbolt | Hacker News Reader

Other than some pains to get it all setup, it’s actually a fairly pleasant experience doing web development on Windows now. Edge (chromium), VSCode, WSL (Ubuntu), and Windows Terminal all feel pretty good.

Plus this was setup on my otherwise dedicated “gaming pc” with an i7 9700k and fast ram/storage so it’s nice being able to use all that power

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Hm, chromium is cross-platform, VSCode as well, WSL is literally another platform... So why should one use specifically windows?

To me this sounds less like an endorsement and more like "it is not strictly worse".

One thing that's uniquely advantageous for me with WSL is having multiple distributions at hand all atop Windows without the hard lines of traditional VMs. So I use Ubuntu on WSL for stuff like server/network admin. But if I want to work on some code for my RPi GPIO project, I can easily access Debian on WSL (where RPi libraries will actually install), all while still having the primary OS be Windows (which confers a lot of advantages in daily productivity app use, games, etc). I'm not sure that a Mac (for instance) can match that kind of flexibility as elegantly. I may be an edge case in not sticking to one distribution but I definitely see the whole system as a uniquely better environment because of that flexibility.

Some of that performance is negated by WSL. The storage in particular, if you're using WSL 1. I find node development intolerable.. npm likes to write many small files and installs take ages.

WSL 2 is probably an imperceptible difference for most tasks though since it's just a svelte Hyper-V VM.

What were the pain points getting it set up? Is this frontend or backend web dev?

I've started using hyper yesterday and it seems much more polished than this.

It does look like it, but isn't it based on electron? Personally I like this, but all the environments I've had to use windows on can't use this because they use an ancient windows LTS release. In an enterprise setting where I mostly see windows I always end up having to use a linux VM.

Actually in those environments I've had success using Electron[1]. But well, that's electron...

[1] https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/

Hyper is quite slow, isn't it? It definitely was when I tried it.

It's really slow if you spool a lot of output. It's unusable for me for that reason.

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