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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

Well not to be inflammatory, but aren't you making your life more difficult by doing development on Windows? You could just run Windows in a VM if you need any Windows specific software, and have your main OS be something more suitable for software development.

Of course ideally everything would just work on Windows, and there's nothing wrong with running Windows as your main os, but the reality is that especially bleeding edge software development tools will never be as good on Windows as they are on Linux or MacOS, just because bleeding edge open source software developers generally do not use Windows.

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It's just a personal reason. I make my living on linux and my personal computer is windows os. I like to turn off my work computer as a symbolic gesture and do my hobbies on personal computer. Just to divide work and personal headspace.

I play a lot of games and use lab software for electronic engineering so Windows is a must.

And try to convince my wife I need a third computer.

In my experience Windows is the generally the best supported for general embedded work, video, graphics, audio, hobbyist, IDEs, etc. Linux has the best for server and server related hardware but is often pretty equal..ish?

MacOS...has a monopoly on developing for Apple products, but I can't imagine the embedded toolchain is particularly good?

I do enjoy the image in my head of some hipster guy in a coffee shop with a macbook, scope, power supply and a bunch of wires sticking out a pcb trying to debug something though.

It's the best supported for "official developement" with "official toolchains", but Rust is very much not that. If you're going to do non-official programming of the devices with a language that is not the officially supported language, don't use the OS that doesn't have any of the community supported tools.

I'm not sure of the situation with ESP but in many embedded environments you HAVE TO use Windows for development.

Not the situation for ESP, but the C++ pain is real. Once that is sorted, it works great on mac.

I do ESP and ARM (NRF52) dev on Linux with no issues. I haven't had a chance to try the Paduak tools under Wine yet.

esp32-rs works fine on linux

I think more embedded devlopers should insist on only using linux tooling. Windows is a broken platform for software development. Programming an embedded device should be as simple as using GCC and a flashing tool.

Requiring some kind of insane windows IDE seems like such a 1990 way to develop software, imo.

That's only true if you're using the officially supported toolchain. Rust is not that, so there's no point in using Windows.

I've found the Rust embedded tooling is equivalent on Windows and Linux. Ie the same tools and programs work, and in (almost) the same way. More broadly, Windows is more popular for embedded. My anecdote here is limited to Cortex-M.

>bleeding edge software development tools will never be as good on Windows as they are on Linux or MacOS

Personally, I've never experienced any better IDE than Visual Studio. I would call it bleeding edge.

In general, Rust development on Windows, including at least the embedded platforms I work with (ARM), is identical to Linux or Mac.

As sibling says, for embedded toolchains Windows is often the best supported platform.

Nothing like proprietary tooling to really make everything 1000% more painful

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