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Comment by jojo2000 | Hacker News Reader

jojo2000

It's a joke. Windows ? Never again.

I remember when I bought my XPS13 a year ago, to work while I traveled, I found that even with WSL, it was painful to get my toolchain working on windows (mostly unix based tools) I ended up putting ubuntu (and currently popOS) and never looking back.

Had the same experience, I was forced to use Windows for a while, it was all so cumbersome. Tooling does not work, permission errors, wsl <-> host system copy errors, line ending errors, docker errors, character escaping errors, especially quotes and double quotes, PATH errors. The list goes on and on and on.

Also, if there are are no hard requirements for Windows such as most webdev why would anyone use WSL instead of the real thing? Especially if the deployment platform is Linux, makes no sense for me.

Have you had bad experiences with Windows subsystem for Linux? In my experience it's useful, effective, and works out of the box with no configuration.

I'm being massively downvoted here, thanks for asking the why ! Been using windows 95,98,2k,7,10. I've had countless problems with it for more than 10+ years. Countless steps for system setup, bad/missing drivers, malware, spyware, performance degradation over time, system creeping more and more resources, cannot fix bugs upstream...

Since then I've switched to linux (less gaming) which has its own flaws and pains, but I love it.

Regarding WSL, why bother mixing two philosophies together ? Switch to linux and you've got it all, unaltered, and open source.

If you can, great. For a lot of us Windows is a reality we've made our peace with so having WSL is great. And tbh, W10 has been basically rock solid for me.

That's a self-fulfilling prophecy...

How is it a reality that you HAVE to make peace with? I've been interviewing a lot lately, and the vast, vast majority of workplaces have no problem with me running Linux as my daily driver. Most even offer Macs.

If you use ME or EE CAD apps or do anything in the space of measurement, controls and automation Windows is pretty much a given.

I can relate to your pain. At a previous position we had special windows workstations to deal with all of windows-specific software, and all of our personal workstations were using linux.

Now that I manage teams, I don't care about what OS people use. The more productive they are the better. The only dev (over 15 people) that used windows told me after a few months he regretted keeping windows on his machine !

Just to add another anecdote to yours, I've had none of your 'countless problems'. The W10 machine that I'm typing this on hasn't been rebooted in 8-9 months (bribed IT into putting my box in a no-update GPO :D). Its been nothing but rock stable for me. Heck, until a month ago, I was using a old sony W7 laptop with the original W7 installed from 2011 and it was just as performant as it was on day 1.

I believe you, but I don't know what you're doing that makes it so unstable. Or maybe I'm just a bit more OCD than others. I am extremely selective about kernel-mode components and what I install on my machine.

Happy for you ! Win7 was a good release indeed, as win2k.

Well sometimes you can't choose (Work PC), in that case using WSL on windows is a much better experience than DIY on Windows.

Also chocolatey -> brew etc

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