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Comment by chmln | Hacker News Reader

In genuine amazement at a lot of the comments here - why not just dual boot Linux instead of using it in a VM? Productivity on a Linux machine can be so far ahead of Windows, especially if you've got a terminal-based workflow an maybe a tiling WM

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I've been using WSL for the last year. No complaints at all so far. I don't want to dual boot because of the hassle of restarting my computer every time I want to do something different - like switching between a video game (say Age of Empires) and development. I don't want the hassle or overhead of dealing with a VM, allocating resources permanently to that whether it needs it or not.

This way, it feels like I'm on Linux the whole time with a Windows themed desktop, great support for games and no hardware issues. This isn't about ideological purity for me. If everything works, I'm happy.

My workflow is mostly terminal based, and I used to use tiling WMs, yet I am now back to Windows + WSL.

Why? Because GPU driver compatibility is still so bad on Linux that I can't get any of the popular distros to work properly on my setup (laptop with hybrid Intel/nVidia GPU setup, thunderbolt dock, external display with different scaling than laptop display).

And yes, if I spend a weekend fiddling with Nouveau drivers I might get it to run somewhat decently, but really I don't want to spend that time on my work setup. Window + WSL works out of the box, so I'll use that.

Sounds fair, I didn't mean to come off snarky or anything.

I've got Nvidia too and Nouveau works only well enough to download the proprietary drivers

I have been on Manjaro with XFCE for the past couple of years and it's a dream. Haven't had one driver problem. Zoom, Slack and Beyond Compare all work without issue as does VS Code. Installing and updating all software via the package manager UI is so much better than Windows that I'll never go back. Furthermore, I think that XFCE provides a better Windows experience for developers than Windows does - at least I don't have to find, download and install 7+ taskbar tweaker or hack the system configuration registry to get the features I want out of it.

Mixing business and gaming on the same machine caused problems for me even when I was fully on Windows, so I've always kept separate machines for that.

I used to use Linux as my main OS for ~5years and I would dual boot for maybe 1-2y of that time.

In the end, I just found that I am more productive with Windows. On Linux, I really hated driver compatibility issues (happens quite often on laptops), core programs are not so stable (KDE window manager) and skype sucked on Linux.

Also, I could not game on Linux so that sucked even more. On Windows I have steam with 0 worries about registry and dll hacking with WINE.

Because I don't want to have to reboot every time I want to do something else with my computer.

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