Comment by SteveMoody73 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SteveMoody73 | Hacker News Reader

I know the main issue with Windows here on HN is usually around the telemetry that Microsoft collects but I don't have an issue with that.

Windows 10 for me has been a rock solid OS for years. I think I've had 2 bluescreen issues since i've been using it. One was plugging in a very faulty USB device and the other was caused by code I wrote.

WSL2 is a great addition and has replaced the places where I used to use a Linux VM or even a dual boot system.

I've only tried Windows 11 on a spare laptop so far and while I didn't like the changing of the start menu, it seems like a decent OS.

I have to use windows for my job as I still need to use some old embedded development tools that are only available on Windows. MacOS has some nice features but I've never got on with Macs that well and now I have a full Linux command line I can use.

Unless you devleop iPhone/iPad apps, I would say that windows is becoming one of the best operating systems for development these days.

I mean... if you're comparing it to Linux and MacOS, then I think Windows is just about dead last for most uses. WSL is great, but it's slow and has tons of edge cases where it just breaks (like IPv6 for example). That's not to say that Windows isn't getting better for development, but if the only thing you care about is development then you'd probably be better served by a lighter-weight operating system.

It's not last for gaming performance, driver compatibility, ease of use, or stability. Linux is last for all of those.

Gaming performance is consistently poorer on Windows than Linux[0] simply due to the overhead of running a more complex and demanding system. Driver compatibility is hit or miss admittedly (at least you can use CUDA), but I wouldn't consider it worse than Mac. Ease of use is entirely subjective and impossible to quantify, and stability is, unlike Windows and MacOS, up to the user. You're given the option to run newer, cutting-edge software at the expense of stability, but even rolling release isn't that bad these days now that most repos have testing branches.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=11900k-w...

You linked to an article about benchmarks and then talk about gaming performance.

The (sad) reality is that all pc games have been heavily optimized to run on Windows, which does create a pretty big performance difference which favors windows.

I prefer Linux for productivity work myself, but saying that it generally runs games better is just lying and setting people up for disappointment.

Generally, games run worse. That's separate from the performance your system has while running games though, which is decidedly higher (as demonstrated) running Linux. Even still, the translation layers being used for most games are ludicrously quick, oftentimes to the extent that it's really a tossup. Look at how Overwatch runs these days[0], where it's genuinely trading blows with the Windows version. While Windows still hits a 10% higher max framerate, but Linux drops 25% less frames on average. It's remarkably close, and this is the case for many Linux games these days. Earlier today I bought Ziggurat 2, and out of curiosity I compared the framerate in Wine with the native build. The results surprised me, as Wine had noticeably less input lag and only lost 3-5 fps compared to the Linux native version.

If you haven't tried Linux gaming in the past year or so, you should probably give it a second look. Even my horrendous Skylake laptop manages to run the scope of my indie library through Wine, along with whatever other lightweight Linux native titles I want to take on the go. For my money, I'd say the experiences are mostly comparable at this point. Ditching Windows only cost me a handful of DRM-ridden titles, so I see it as a wash.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voXc1nCD4IA

I haven't run into any WSL edge cases. What's the IPv6 issue? Does networking break if your router tries to assign an IPv6 address? Or does it gracefully fall back to IPv4 (making it a trivial issue for most people)?

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