Perl (Strawberry Perl for Windows) is much faster than native Powershell (or CMD) scripts. A few Perl one-liners and I have 2 GB processed in a couple of minutes.
Big fan of Perl here.
This matches my experience: my task is IO bound, processing tens of GB in a matter of minutes.
> I'm working in Windows (employer's choice)
Work prefers MacOS, Windows is my personal choice :)
Windows 10 and 11 are a pleasure to use: between the Windows Terminal and tools like AutoHotKey, there's no Linux equivalent, even for a commandline geek.
Using Windows (and Perl, and other weird things I like) may not be fashionable, but it's hard to beat.
* Would miss too many amazingly useful utilities like arsclip.
* Easier to patch into my home network, which is NTFS-based.
* Employer is now wedded to Microsoft and Azure, so having Powershell and native access to NTFS AD on my native desktop is proving more useful.
* I actually like the Windows interface, even with the Control Panel and other system utilities caught in a weird split between Windows XP and WIndows 10 UIs.
* Some things, like certificate management and hosting a personal database, I do in Ubuntu or Debian as a VirtualBox guest under Windows.
* Wife uses Windows on her laptop. She doesn't know it, but it's actually running as a VM on Debian, very stable, and can easily take her Windows to a new machine.
* [I keep coming back to add items to this list] Remote Desktop Services have improved vastly, and I can manage remote servers or 12 year old client machines at a remote site with equal ease. (XP/7-era machines got a second life when I converted Windows OS disk to SSD). Also find screen sharing via 3rd party VNC (TightVNC) useful.
* The keystrokes have become second-nature. Try as I might, I can never get fully comfortable on a Mac OS desktop. Now get off my lawn.
Same, that's one of the biggest reasons - but I also agree with the rest of your list: what I like the most in Windows is the UI! I run most of my programs fullscreen, with shortcuts. I rarely use the mouse, and Windows plays along, while I have to fight other systems.
Even when run baremetal, Windows has improved so much over the board that once you add RDP/VNC, it's a no brainer.
Huh. Windows is usually anywhere between bad to horrible at IO compared to alternatives. 2GB processing (usually mixtures of regex, summarizing data, summing fields extracted) shouldn't take more than a few seconds. Even on a slow disk, say 100MB/s, we are talking 20s. On faster SSDs, and NVMe, its very snappy.
If you are waiting minutes ...
> Windows 10 and 11 are a pleasure to use: between the Windows Terminal and tools like AutoHotKey, there's no Linux equivalent, even for a commandline geek.
Huh. I'm happy that $dayjob gave me the option of getting off my horrible Dell workstation laptop (8 core, 64 GB ram, nvidia graphics) and onto a mac pro m1. While the keyboard diff is annoying, karabiner elements fixes most of that. I still ask for a linux laptop at ever opportunity though, as this is what I'm most functional with. Easily the best/fastest experience I've had for dev/admin, and the most stable. Mac is a close second.
What I miss it's a "strings(1)" replacement for Perl.