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Comment by friedman23 | Hacker News Reader

> Dev here, the burden of Apple far exceeds any claimed time savings.

I have the complete opposite experience. I don't feel any burden from apple when using a mac. MacOS being a unix like operating system makes developing on it a breeze. On windows i need to use archaic developer tools like powershell. Linux commands I use on my production servers don't work on my development environment. If I want to use git in a sane manner from the command line i need to install an emulator that has its own issues.

There is a reason almost all companies in silicon valley use macbooks for their developers.

> but it's not like a hobbyist is going to buy an Apple computer for embedded, web dev, gaming, PC applications, etc...

As someone else has said, this is exactly what people seem to be doing.

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> On windows i need to use archaic developer tools like powershell. Linux commands I use on my production servers don't work on my development environment.

I mean, you can dislike Powershell and love Unix tools, but your choice of words is remarkably funny.

If anything, Unix tools are archaic, generally organically grown and not that designed or designed based on principles from 50 years ago, in many cases principles that have been superseded.

Powershell actually has a design and a modern one.

Again, you might like one and dislike the other, it depends a lot on personal preference and familiarity.

But... Poor choice of words :-)

> On windows i need to use archaic developer tools like powershell.

What makes PowerShell archaic, in your opinion?

It's not bash. It's proprietary garbage. It's not what I'm going to be using on my production servers. Why it exists? I have no clue.

Hey Apple stuff is also proprietary garbage, why are you using it for your development work then?

Two weights, two measures?

Apple's terminal environment is POSIX-like. PowerShell was always a bit of a lame duck, or Microsoft wouldn't have bothered with WSL to get real power users to stick with their platform.

Powershell is the only mainstream shell that is close enough to the Xerox PARC workstations REPL experience.

As for WSL you got it all wrong, after the failure of Project Astoria (running Android apps on UWP), Microsoft found a business opportunity in selling Windows to folks that buy Apple devices to do GNU/Linux work instead of supporting Linux OEMS, unhappy with Apple no longer caring for them as they no longer need their money.

So they picked up the infrastructure, redone it as WSL, and start selling the feature to that crowd, now they can get the hardware that Apple doesn't sell them, while keep paying proprietary garbage vendors instead of supporting the vendors in the Linux community.

I'm not sure what you're referring to specifically when you say "proprietary", but most of PowerShell is available under the MIT license.

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell#legal-and-licensing

I don't use windows but in your case it solves this problem better with wsl2 since you can have the same real linux that runs on your servers.

I really wanted to like WSL 2 but it has a lot of bugs that may take years to get ironed out (unusably slow disk IO, memory leaks, virtual disks that grow forever, etc.)

I think it would probably work for web development as long as you keep everything inside WSL, but for other development tasks you're going to run into issues real quick.

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/873

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4166

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699

Anecdotally I've been doing development in C++, Rust, .NET and other languages just fine in WSL2.

I use WSL 2 for full time development on the stable release of Windows 10.

The last 2 issues are an issue as of today but you can workaround them where it becomes a non-issue in the end by setting 1 config file value and running 1 command maybe once a month.

Also if you keep your source code inside WSL 2's file system then the first 2 issues are non-issues in practice.

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