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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Well, if you want to use multimedia and do web development on the same machine, what are you going to do? Linux support is somewhere between nonexistent and utterly broken for the first one and the same can be said for the second on Windows. So your choices are, 1. run Linux primary, put Windows in a VM 2. run Windows primary and put Linux in a VM 3. Give up and just run a separate Linux server.

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What problems did you experience in web development on Windows? I worked with Linux, Mac and Windows, but I didn‘t have any problems on any platform with a typical modern webpack/react/angular/typescript/elm etc.. stack. Even docker support with Hyper-V is okay imho.

The Linux multimedia story improves significantly if you avoid Nvidia GPU hardware. My work desktop (AMD Radeon) and laptop (Intel HD Graphics) work fine, and perform as the hardware should.

(Unfortunately) unless you're on a laptop and use a browser. Then things like YouTube or Netflix absolutely annihilate your battery

Sound and bluetooth , like , works now? That wasn't my experience back then. Both of them were entire stacks of spaghetti.

This seems like comment from early 2000s. I don't remember last time I head problems with BT or sound, and I went through dozen of installations in last 3 years (for me and others). I had to give up on Nvidia drivers but Intel graphics serves me great.

Bluetooth broke on me:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=204875 2015 November

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206032 2015 December

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=210685 2016 March.

And these were times when I needed community help, most of the time I could get it working by pairing again or some such nonsense. It never worked reliably, in general.

Note I switched to Windows as my daily driver in 2018 January.

It seems sound is still a gigantic mess of PulseAudio and ALSA https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio

If you things to just keep on working Arch might not be the distro for you. Have you tried something like ubuntu?

Canonical broke wlan and OpenGL for many of us when they decided to replace fully working closed source drivers, with work in progress open source replacements.

So even Ubuntu isn't necessarily a guarantee of stability.

Sigh - I hear you.

Yes. Yes, I did. At least with Arch I could keep on working because only one of BT / printer / scanner broke on update, most of the production bits kept working. When I ran Ubuntu the system shattered every six months so badly I couldn't work for 2-3 days.

I have fairly linux friendly laptop (Thinkpad T480) with Fedora, and GPU driver was broken for whole 5.3 kernel tree...

I have a T480 as well and both the nvidia (closed source) and intel drivers work for me on Kubuntu.

Most of that wiki page isn't important, Pulse largely just works these days without much or any configuration

Been running some flavour of Debian for > 10 years. Now on my dell XPS 13 9350. Upgraded to Debian 10, a kernel regression broke the brcfmac driver for my Broadcom wireless. Now I need to disable power saving on the WiFi card. Still, sometimes the WiFi card just dies. Sometimes reloading the kernel module works, sometimes only a hard reset will do.

Bluetooth has never worked.

Broadcom unfortunately has never been well supported on Linux. I've always used ThinkPads for running Linux and have never had these sorts of hardware issues (and I keep laptops for at least 8 years). You need to buy a machine with running Linux in mind (or more specifically, Debian, which has even less out-of-the-box hardware support for laptops).

You’re right. A new WiFi card is cheap, apparently. Just not available anywhere near where I am :/

I don't understand this sentiment. I have VS Code and a fantastic file manager (Explorer). What more do you need for web development?

Most decent languages work great cross platform. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be missing.

To be frank, the only think that bothers me about web dev on Windows is that the Elixir repl doesn't support "up" for editing the previous command.

Or use macOS ;)

The devil on the shoulder has appeared

He said macOS not FreeBSD ;)

I will the moment you give me a mac with a seven row keyboard and a trackpoint.

Since you did not specify a laptop, you can plug in any arbitrary USB HID to desktop Mac. (MacBooks too - though I'm sure this isn't what you meant.)

Most people choose their laptops based on the OS, not on the pointing device.

There are about 5000 of us who did choose a laptop for its keyboard and pointer: it's the ThinkPad 25 Anniversary Edition. I have an SK-8855 already and also ordered the new TEX Shinobi so my unwavering stance on my laptop needing a proper keyboard+pointer might change but for now my choice of weapon is the TP25.

Unfortunately I missed that.

However my T420 and X220 still perform excellently even after 9 years.

I also have a T420 and a T420s , the latter hacked to full HD, yes. :)

That’s an interesting claim to make, considering how many people love the Mac’s trackpad and non-butterfly keyboard.

Web development on Windows has been like surfing for those of us doing Java and .NET web development, since like ever.

2006 was for me the turning point where Linux was only used via VMs or some remote box.

WSL2 is just fine, I don't need to mess with VMWare any longer.

And if I am not doing Linux deployments, I can do plain Windows development, like I have done since Windows 3.0.

For the Linux desktop experience I have a surviving ASUS netbook.

> Web development on Windows has been like surfing for those of us doing Java and .NET web development, since like ever.

This similitude baffles me. Do you mean "had to wear protective equipment, had to drive constantly between locations, we were knocked over every few seconds, and we risked drowning several times"...?

It means riding the top wave while enjoying the Sun, hearing the cool background music coming from the loudspeakers on the beach, and feeling like a champion.

I've never had any issues doing web development work on Windows

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