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Comment by hibbelig | Hacker News Reader

It's very interesting. I used Emacs for a long time, but slowly got weaned off it.

- I used it for email, then I had to collaborate with people who wrote "please see my comments in orange below". (Of course, they were Outlook users.) Emacs did not show that orange color, so I didn't know... Maybe these days it's possible to read Outlook emails nicely in Emacs.

- I used it for development, then the Java software I worked on got too big to internalize all APIs and Eclipse completion and refactoring really helped. I did try to build the Eclipse "quickfix" thing in Emacs, but all I got done was to add a missing import (because JDEE, I think it was, provided that functionality).

- I switched from Linux to Windows because the world around me was like that, and so I could help junior colleagues with their EOL problems...

- I used Mercurial (hg) for a while and TortoiseHg was really nice, so I didn't feel the need to use Emacs for this.

It's a pity, really. Some aspect here, some aspect there, and then you get pulled away from Emacs.

Now, with LSP, perhaps Emacs could offer code completion and refactoring, but the Java app I work on builds with gradle, and I have no clue how to tell the Java/LSP thing about the class path... So I'm on IntelliJ...

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I don't understand why people are moving Linux --> Windows. At the company I work for everything is native to Linux--I am floored by the number of interns we get who are using Windows (it's all of them). We have an intake script for getting them up on WSL2 with our stack on top but man these graduates are CompSci people and they did 4 plus years of CompSci using Windows? I can only imagine the pain. Or rather, I know the pain since I have occasionally dipped my toes back into that world of hurt.

A non-WSL2 Windows person doesn't get the benefits of Nix, usually doesn't live life on the shell (since every Windows program is gui first), doesn't do dotfiles management (you can but paths for the git Atlassian method are non-obvious), ssh password protected keys are a PITA...good God I could go on ad nauseum.

I work in this industry because I love computing. But these Windows jockeys I dunno I get the feeling they don't necessarily love computing? Or in the way that it's this mundane tool for the production of money-points that they can then exchange for money. I also am receiving the money-points and it is good. But lemme crack open your head and pour in the magic y'know?

> But these Windows jockeys I dunno I get the feeling they don't necessarily love computing?

When I was younger, I wanted to work in places that had a passion for these types of things.

Older me realized that was a bad idea. It inevitably seeps into things unrelated to doing the actual work (even performance reviews via 360 feedback). People are paid to do a job, and I've found that whether they love computing or not is mostly orthogonal. Sure, there are some that are wiz's because of it, but they're usually neutralized by those who become ideological and inflexible because of it.

Tangentially related: I'm a Linux guy - it's been my primary OS for almost 20 years now. However, at my current company, I prefer roles that don't involve Linux. The reason is they typically will not give me my own machine - I'll merely get an account on some server, with a poor window manager, and missing a lot of the nicer tools I use on my home machine, and no superuser privileges. In the last job I had, their provided Emacs was a little too old for some of the features I used, and I had to compile my own Emacs from scratch (along with tens of other dependent packages). This was time wasted for me and the company. At least on my Windows machine at work, I have Admin privileges and can make things nicer.

Paradoxically, it is because I'm a "hard core" Linux user that I prefer Windows for work. I've optimized my Linux workflow, and if my work cannot provide me my preferred tools/window managers, I might as well just use Windows.

I don't even use WSL. I use xonsh, which works fairly well on Windows. I have multiple desktops on Windows. And most importantly, I live in Emacs which for the most part works just as it would in Linux :-)

(And no, using/installing Emacs on Windows is not a pain, despite what you often hear - the last time I did it some months ago, it was literally "Download and unzip into directory and you're good to go.")

What I often hear is more about Emacs on windows having performance issues in some areas, magit comes to mind. Did you run into any issues?

There is one case I know of where Emacs (via Cygwin) has performance issues on Windows: listing directories in remote volumes. Per StackOverflow [0], dired is slow because `df` is slow on NTFS. So, you can eliminate df to speed up dired by a lot.

`(setq directory-free-space-program nil)`

0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26128693/emacs-dired-slo...

Main issue is magit. Currently the repository I work on is small enough that I put up with it. But I can see this being a real deal breaker for many.

There are certain Emacs features that may require some UNIX tools like find or grep. Often I've found ways to configure it to use ripgrep and fd instead (both are trivial installs in Windows, and generally faster than grep and find anyway).

I think git is slow on Windows, and magit doesn't make the problem better or worse.

Nope - git is mostly fast on Windows. It's magit that's the problem - or rather how magit does things. It launches several git processes to do basic things like status or commit, and that is fundamentally slow in Windows.

See https://magit.vc/manual/magit/Microsoft-Windows-Performance....

So you are saying git is slow on Windows, but only because starting any process is slow on Windows. Interesting. I've heard there is work in progress to have magit use libgit2 instead of running the git executable. That should help.

Speaking as someone who regularly attempts to switch back to Linux, I did that because the Windows desktop is a genuinely nicer experience. In no particular order...

- The traditional start menu / taskbar is genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. OS X is also genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. I'd take either over Gnome.

- The Linux desktop environment is laggy. This is difficult to measure objectively, but nothing moves smoothly and responsiveness is through the floor. I'm using a 144Hz screen; why can I see windows jerk from position to position when I drag them?

The Zen kernel helps with some of that, bringing it about to the same responsiveness as Windows -- which is still well below OSX. No desktop environment provides it by default, and in most it's difficult to install. On NixOS it's just "boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_zen;", but it's still not the default.

- nVidia's drivers are poor, and there are a lot of sharp edges. I'm using one of their GPUs. No, I can't switch to AMD; I need it for CUDA, and anyway GPUs aren't exactly cheap.

- AMD's drivers are of inconsistent quality, and I couldn't buy a 6800XT even if I'm willing to sell my first-born. Ok, that's also true for nVidia's newest GPUs, and Zen 3, and... different rant entirely.

- HDR basically doesn't work.

- Mixed-DPI screens basically don't work.

- HiDPI in general is glitchy.

- kanjiTomo doesn't work on Wayland, because there's no solid story for the screen capture protocol.

- Bluetooth audio basically doesn't work.

...

Windows isn't perfect, but for me the Linux desktop died to a thousand paper cuts. Every two or three months I make another attempt at getting it up to the same standard I get from Windows, and every two or three months I fail.

Does the above sound kind of entitled? It's not. I'm not demanding that anyone should make this work for free; I've never paid for the Linux desktop. The fact is, however, that it isn't good enough to use without unpleasant consequences, and I've spent far too much of my life fiddling with it already. At this stage I just want something that doesn't eat my evenings.

While I have to use occasionally Windows for work, on my own desktops and laptops I have used only Linux for almost 20 years and I have not seen any of the problems encountered by you.

Your problem with Wayland I could not have seen, because I have not attempted to use Wayland yet, but most of the others seem to be Gnome related.

I have never used Gnome, as I have never liked what I have briefly seen in the Linux distributions that default to Gnome.

Perhaps that is the reason why I did not have your problems.

(While KDE 3.5 was much better than Windows was at that time, I have been hugely disappointed by the unbelievable regressions in KDE 4, so I have also abandoned KDE at that time and I am using XFCE since then. XFCE imposes very little restrictions on the desktop applications, allowing the free mixing of graphical applications that were designed for either Gnome or KDE, so I can choose whichever works better.)

Linux is much more diverse than other operating systems and there are a lot of alternatives for most components.

Almost all complaints that I have seen about Linux, were in fact not applicable to Linux in general, but only to certain specific configurations that I would not attempt to use, because I agree that they are bad.

Unfortunately, choosing a Linux configuration good for a certain purpose and for certain hardware frequently requires either a lot of experience or the wasting of much time with trying various variants.

"Unfortunately, choosing a Linux configuration good for a certain purpose and for certain hardware frequently requires either a lot of experience or the wasting of much time with trying various variants."

This is why I stay with windows for my dev machines and either use WSL or ssh to a linux box. All my machines at home have WSL2 installed and I use it as my default shell, I never open powershell/cmd, they may as well not be on my machine, for all my development needs and use all the linux tools that I would be using if I was on a native linux desktop.

I can be up and running on a windows dev machine in the time it takes me to download VScode and open it, or I can spend weeks trying to get a linux environment to the same place. With my setup I still have all my linux toolset that I would use on a linux desktop, but I don't have to contend with all the issues of getting a linux desktop environment running.

I have run into all the same problems as the parent of this and more, I have tried different desktop environments including Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cinnaman, and XFCE. I have moved between xorg and wayland more times then I care to count, each ended up giving a different set of problems.

At the end of the day, I want to spend my time being productive and getting work done, not fighting with my OS to get the basics running. I love linux but it's just not ready to replace windows on the desktop.

I have also 20 years of Linux experience. XFCE (I love XFCE btw) does not solve this points mentioned. I think you're biased and this are valid points OP mentioned:

- nVidia's drivers are poor, and there are a lot of sharp edges. I'm using one of their GPUs. No, I can't switch to AMD; I need it for CUDA, and anyway GPUs aren't exactly cheap.

- HDR basically doesn't work.

- Mixed-DPI screens basically don't work.

- HiDPI in general is glitchy.

My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0, offered with the Unleashed Linux book, before I had already get to know UNIX via Xenix and DG/UX.

For a couple of years I subscribed to Linux Journal, faithfully reading every issue, became a Stallman missionary, trying to spread the gospel, even though most of our university assignments were to be done from Windows (W95/WFW 3.11 back then).

Eventually I got tired of choosing configurations and taking care OS distribution bonsai trees, and nowadays just use Mac/Windows/Android (where the Linux kernel use is an implementation detail), leaving Linux for the server room.

  > The traditional start menu / taskbar is genuinely nicer 
  > than what Gnome attempts to force on me. OS X is also 
  > genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me.

This is definitely subjective, and if Windows jives for you that's cool. To provide a counterpoint: Gnome for me is worlds better than Windows and slightly better than OS X. It definitely takes a little getting used to if, like me, you literally grew up with Windows, but I vastly prefer Gnome nowadays. Not to mention, you have choices besides Gnome -- although if you dig Windows mostly they'll just be either wildly different than what you want, or a clear imitation.

Truthfully, if you need HDR or specific AMD/nVidia features, you're right you're probably gonna have a rough time. (Bluetooth has worked just fine for me, though.)

It's definitely not all roses over in Desktop Linux land. I miss having real third-party app support -- sometimes you just need After Effects or actual Word/Excel -- and MacOS' consistency in keystrokes (Cmd+, as the "preferences" hotkey in every app is just so good) but for 90% of what I do it fits me really well.

I used Linux (XPS15) at work for a 3 month period (Pop_OS!), mostly because I really enjoy using Emacs (and the performance on stock Windows is lacklustre). With the exception of bluetooth, which is absolutely tragic on Linux (I have issues with bluetooth everywhere, but this is next level), 40% of my job was actually very good using that computer.

On the flip side, my job uses Office and Teams quite extensively, and the browser experience is subpar. OneDrive sync is also spotty (InSync works ok, but it's not "set and forget" at least for my use-case). Everything works, but it's less easy than on macOS or Windows, so you have the added cognitive load. I ended up having a VM with Windows when I really need it. It got ridiculous when I needed to join Teams on my phone and my laptop to get sound and share my screen.

On top of that, Linux works very well for the fun work. I don't especially like doing PowerPoint decks or blazing through emails, but because the tools are less friendly, I end up spending more time doing stuff I don't enjoy doing. It means that my productivity gets lower. I miss i3, the familiar command line, all the goodies I got to discover and enjoy on my "play" machine, but the 60% remaining got more tedious.

I ended up moving back to a macbook air (which is less powerful than my Dell) because of the "lack of configuration" to get it to somewhere where I feel "peak productive". Some stuff at work I just want to get "done", and ultimately Linux (or the lack of good Linux compatibility with some of the tools my workplace mandates) went in the way.

I used WSL1 a little while back. It was nice, but it was another thing to get setup which I am not familiar with. I'll get windows back on the XPS and try, maybe it'll strike the right balance.

A bummer, really.

Vanilla Gnome is terrible. You must embrace extensions. At first I loathed the idea, but it's just become part of life. One for a dock, one for weather, one for tray icons, and if you prefer, one for top menu that gives you your more traditional start menu type thing.

Or, there's always Xfce or KDE, of course.

AMD drivers are now open source and finally working well. Nvidia is not, granted.

Bluetooth audio works well, even on rando cheap noname devices I've tried. My primary speakers are some Logitech bluetooth pair.

Don't use wayland. Run gnome in xorg mode.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say I'm blown away by how much -just- works on Linux. My printer is autodetected on the network and print. My wireless mouse works. My monitor runs at 1440p.

If you're open to it, I always suggest using a modern distro that stays up to date because you get better hardware support(if using new hardware, that is). Typically, that means something Arch based, but there are distros around making that simple.

This all highlights is a lot of choices and “do this don’t do that” kind of things I don’t like about the Linux Desktop environment, I don’t want to think about these kinds of things in my usage of a desktop. It’s a summation of everything I find lacking in the Linux desktop community

Sure, but there are a lot of distros out there that do these things for you. Solus Gnome is probably my favorite out of the box experience. It's basically pre-configured exactly how I tune Gnome myself.

But how would you know to use that particular distribution, before becoming an expert first and know exactly what pre-configuration to look for? Knowing this pre-configuration is as difficult as knowing how to make such pre-configurations imho.

On windows, there's no choice. On mac osx, there's no choice (unless you try to mod it yourself after the fact).

I ended up trying Solus.

It turns out I can't install it, because the installer bundles an old version of the nouveau driver, the nouveau driver crashes on my hardware, they've deleted the nvidia driver package for the version of Solus that's on the ISO (along with every other package), and there's no terminal-mode installer or any other workaround.

If you want to install Solus, and the year-old installer doesn't work in GUI mode, then you're SOL.

> Don't use wayland. Run gnome in xorg mode.

Interestingly, for me, I only see some of the issues the GP mention when using xorg instead of wayland.

> AMD drivers are now open source and finally working well.

Only for those using modern cards, my old APU is stuck in GL 3.3, whereas the fxgl supported 4.1.

At least I can use it for GL ES 3.0 coding.

That's very weird.

I'm using both, Linux for 8 hours at work and then Windows for my personal computing needs.

I live mostly in the browser. Both OSes basically work. I can move my windows around lag free, entirely, always.

Bluetooth audio works. This 4k screen I'm using now for the first time on Linux just worked.

Which browser? I find Firefox performance unacceptable on ubunutu. I’ve got an nvidia gpu, it feels like Firefox isn’t using it.

Chromium works ok, but I don’t like using chromium.

Do you only have the one 4K display? I guess it depends on the apps you use, but I’ve had to set special scaling settings for individual apps, and that breaks down with multiple mixed-DPI displays.

Yes Bluetooth audio works, but at least on ubunutu I get a long list of MAC addresses and not device names, which has poor usability IMO.

I’ve also noticed Ubuntu with gnome in particular is slow to start apps, and doesn’t give any indication of whether the app is just slow to start or has failed.

Until very recently, Firefox on Linux did not have GPU Acceleration or WebRender. With Firefox 80 and 81, they were added but both were not enabled by default. It may very well be the case that Firefox is not using your GPU.

Regarding mixed-DPI displays and scaling, I have not had issues with GNOME on Wayland.

Bluetooth Audio also works quite well for me, and it shows device names rather than addresses.

I will agree that GNOME tends to be slow to start apps after a while, although it is very quick on fresh installs. I am not sure why that is.

I feel like GPU accel is disabled for most configurations in Firefox on Linux. I had to force-enable it, and perf got quite a bit better (even with dinky Intel graphics).

I use windows for work and as soon as im done I reboot on a linux partition. My daily driver is linux as I hate the lack of control I have and the insecurity (i feel that microsoft does whatever behind the scenes) i get on windows. For example after an update windows shoves me an edge icon on the desktop. I removed all the bloatware on the laptop and multiple times things are re-enabled after an update. I also cannot turn off updates if i want to. There are a few services for which I as an admin have no way of turning off or even change any settings. Wtf! I was able to gain some control of my machine with some registry settings but at the next update everything was overwritten. F that, i don’t wanna play whack-a-mole anymore. If i need to use some windows software i boot the windows partition, then when done boot up on linux. Ubuntu these days is low friction, most Hw works out of box, etc.

You are doing it wrong. If you are using Linux, use a window manager (sway or i3 are a good start). I'm running Archlinux with Nvidia and it's going great. No problems with the card, performance, and I have 3 screens of different DPI. I'm yet to try Bluetooth, though.

ps: If you are using an Nvidia card, you can't, unfortunately, use Wayland.

if it doesn't work out of the box, Linux is doing it wrong.

why should I have to install an os, then change my desktop environment, then spend weeks learning keyboard shortcuts for said new environment, to get basic functionality working.

Having used all 3 major platforms, for me the developer experience in Linux really is the best. And I say this as someone currently trapped on MacOS. For personal hacking I use an older Dell XPS15 w/Ubuntu and it’s like a breath of fresh air every time I dig into a project. Containers just seem to work so much faster, there’s fewer weird things, no hiccups, and things like git and Emacs scream compared to Windows.

I totally get why people prefer Mac and Windows outside of software development. But as a working developer it’s really worth the effort, if given the option, to invest in learning Linux and developing on it.

Interns doing the whole WSL thing makes me cringe. Not great for your career IMO unless you plan on making a quick exit from the dev side of things.

This might be a controversial take, but I feel like A “worse” developer with a solid workflow in Linux will appear more productive than a somewhat more skilled developer getting dragged down by WSLisms.

I always felt that Mac struck a good balance between my programming productivity and “the rest”, because I could use some great applications that were otherwise unavailable on Linux, sadly.

What pains did you have? Docker support was a big one for me, but otherwise I haven’t encountered anything too bad.

Docker and occasionally periodic sluggishness that includes my pointer skipping on some websites. Also, despite a faster CPU and an SSD at only 14% utilization things like emacs and Sublime seem more sluggish in terms of I/O.

I would probably benefit from a reinstall of Big Sur: this machine has gone through 3 OS upgrades.

What I really appreciate on Linux tho is workspace ordering and switching. Which I don’t think you can customize to the degree you can on Linux anymore in Big Sur.

That's why I work at a place where devs are basically required to use Linux. It's a great filter and training mechanism.

I work at a place where developers have no problem switching between different OS’es. And I would not hire and prefer to not work with developers who refuse to work on anything but a specific OS.

I could be wrong, but it seems like someone who is happy to frequently switch between macOS, Linux & Windows is probably not actually taking advantage of all the features of any of them, and hence is not actually terribly productive (assuming arguendo that those features actually aid productivity).

For my part, I use emacs on Linux because I believe the power of computers is in crafting a personalised productivity enhancer. Free software which can be customised down to a very low level is part of that.

> probably not actually taking advantage of all the features of any of them

Yep they are probably too busy doing their job: creating value for customers. Instead of having fun fiddling with their OS.

> I don't understand why people are moving Linux --> Windows.

Which Linux?

With Windows you can use the Home edition and still have a decent workhorse of a computer.

> A non-WSL2 Windows person doesn't get the benefits of Nix

You greatly overestimate the benefits of Nix to any person. Nix is a fringe on the margins on the footnotes of the world. Even among developers it's barely a curiosity.

> I work in this industry because I love computing. But these Windows jockeys

First thing you have to do is stop being dismissive of people for their choices.

Most of the world uses Windows.

If you're building software targeted at most of the world it makes sense to use Windows.

Most of the world uses Android to run their browsers, right? Should I develop on Android?

Are you suggesting that most of the existing Windows SW out there could be developed on Linux and would just run fine on Windows? Can MS reasonably develop MS Office on Linux? Can Adobe develop Lightroom on Linux and it'll just work on Windows?

For most Windows SW, the answer is no. So the analogy with Android doesn't make much sense.

Actually according to Google own statistics, most of Android Studio users are on Windows.

Not really. Android, Web, Embedded, Networking can be done in Linux.

I meant desktop software, but even so most Android users also use Windows, and pair Android with Windows. Most Android developers use Windows.

Back when I did my degree in the mid-90's, our labs were running a mix of LC III, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, the recent Windows 95 and terminals for the DG/UX server.

The only classes using UNIX were the ones specific about UNIX content.

A the end of the 5 years, the DG/UX server had been replaced by a Red-Hat one and most terminals, were dual booting between the university own distribution and Win95/95 OSR, some of us also had access to the freshly released Windows NT.

The large majority of students was still only booting into GNU/Linux for the UNIX related labs.

Anything related to graphics programming, Smalltalk, databases, AI, engineering tools (UML, Boochs, CASE), digital circuits, was done on Windows/Mac OS (System).

When I started the job, the little team I was on had a special deal that allowed them to use Linux; the rest of the company was on Windows. When I switched from Linux to Windows, it was partly due to outside pressure and partly due to a desire to help team members in India who did not have that special deal and were thus forced to use Windows. But a couple of years later, the special deal evaporated and everyone had to move to Windows...

I suspect that it is still common to be forced to use Windows at $BIGCO.

I use Linux at work for development (10+ years) but prefer Windows at home. I can’t stand any of the Linux desktops. And believe me I have tried hard to like them. I love programming and have been programming since I taught myself machine code programming when I was 11. I recommend not assuming that people who choose to use Windows somehow don’t get it or don’t see the “magic” of whatever you happen to like. People are different with different tastes and experiences.

There's a whole galaxy of small and medium (and actually quite large) businesses automatizing the boring shit in a boring way. Its my experience these shops nearly always use Windows. Note that most regular people do as well, so there's a fertile ground. Think of how things like Embarcadero and Pascal survives.

That's what they teach them in University.

It's really not. I was forced to do everything on *nix systems in university. I mostly work in C# on Windows in VS today, which is not something a single class in my university was taught in. We run our code on Linux, but I really don't need to interact with it much. We model everything in our stack using Terraform. I do use WSL-2 a bit when I need to, especially when interacting with the AWS Cli or Docker and similar.

It's just a good desktop and dev environment that stays out of my way, has sensible defaults, and doesn't require endless twiddling to be productive in.

> I switched from Linux to Windows

This is where many people leave Emacs. It's not that there's better tools on Windows, it's that Emacs on windows is terrible.

Magit is orders of magnitude slower, for instance, and external tool integration is grossly impeded by the poor availability and quality of package management on Windows.

Maintaining Emacs on windows takes considerable effort.

Personally, I make do with WSL1 and Emacs. WSL2 is intolerably broken when working on NTFS folders, so it's a nonstarter. This means Docker is broken (mounts don't work) but Emacs works well.

Yah, it sucks.

> it's that Emacs on windows is terrible.

I use Emacs on Linux and Windows equally. I've used Emacs on Windows at work for a decade. Other than magit, there's virtually no difference in experience between the two platforms.[1] Of course, perhaps you use a different set of features than I do.

> Maintaining Emacs on windows takes considerable effort.

I install it on my work laptop every 2-3 years, and for the last 5 or so years, it's literally been "Download, unzip and run." Occasionally I have to make registry changes to get org-protocol to work. Even 10 years ago, it was still fairly simple - just a bit of extra work to get some GTK related stuff installed as well. But right now it couldn't be easier.[2]

And I don't even use WSL. This is native Windows.

[1] Of course, if your Emacs is calling out to tools like grep/find, etc, you'll have issues unless you install those tools. Although these days, it's not hard to configure it to use ripgrep and fd, which has excellent Windows support.

[2] And perhaps installing LaTeX if you want to export org files to PDF.

For whatever it's worth, I've found the same thing: that the amount of effort required to use Emacs on Windows is minimal. Since Windows is non-POSIX, inevitably some things are different, but it doesn't take much to deal with this.

My .emacs.d folder (now 15 years old, and a bit of a monster, a whole git repo with thousands of lines of nonsense plus a pile of submodules) has no more than a few spot hacks for Windows vs POSIX vs macOS.

(The most annoying bit has probably been keeping on top of the font names! - but interestingly these are actually super easy to deal with on Windows. It's Unix that's the pain in the arse here.)

Mostly issues with lsp servers; particularly ccls and omnisharp.

I've been using the mingw windows version every day for years. I used to spend time now and then to make new things work, recently I switched to doom emacs, and almost every new functionality or package I try works out of the box.

It's true that Magit is slow, but I still prefer it to the command line.

I'm going to give Doom a shot; I ignored Spacemacs because rebinding native keys and forcing evil-mode was a nonstarter for me. If I wanted to use Vim then I would, and did for a time.

... and that was an immediately disappointing experience.

1. Saving customizations didn't work.

2. Launching Emacs as a client that auto-launches a server _always_ failed the first time.

3. I really don't need a custom package manager built on top of another custom package manager to replace the core package manager. straight.el would've been enough, thanks.

4. My batteries-included Emacs launches a server in a few seconds, a client almost instantaneously; doom took minutes to launch a server on my Pinebook Pro and clients took a few seconds.

5. Another needless dotfile dir in my home. ~/.doom.d could easily have been ~/.emacs.d/doom.d

"forcing evil-mode"?! Spacemacs asks if you want to use "evil", "holy", or "hybrid" mode early in the process.

Interesting, I suppose I missed that when skimming the GitHub repo readme.

Well with wsl2 I gave windows a go for my work dev environment. And so far emacs had been amazing via wsl2 and a x server.

I should note I did modify the xserver to allow me to toggle individual windows going fullsceen. And am running native emacs (which is blazing fast)

WSL2 + X server was my go-to for a few weeks, but then a rather large repo I access, with git-lfs, became corrupted due to WSL2 + NTFS bugs. They've been mentioned on HN before.

Thereafter, every day or two the same bug would arise and I'd have to lose an hour or two recovering the repo. Just a week or so ago I switched back to WSL1, and I ssh into an RPi4 to access docker containers, using qemu and binfmt to execute x86 code slowly.

Yah, it sucks. ;)

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