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Comment by unxdfa | Hacker News Reader

It’s Unix but it’s not Linux. When Linux is your target it makes sense to use it on your development stack entirely. The irony being that Microsoft seem to make the best Linux OS for development for my use cases of docker / server side / cloud operations.

And it runs Office better than Linux or Mac.

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"And it runs Office better than Linux or Mac"

Yup, been doing that for decades. It's called "vendor lock-in". And its unethicality has been discussed comprehensively for decades as well.

And when countries tried to move into an open document format - they'll bully the country, using the strong arm of the Uncle Sam, until they're back to MS Office again.

So when people are amazed by Bill Gates' charities - I don't. His money comes from the sufferings of countries.

I understand that corporations are bastards and built on foundations of the crushed skulls of children and involuntary human sacrifice but Office on the Mac is not a bad product and is improving. But the windows version has just been around longer and had more work done on it. And don’t get me started on LibreOffice - it’s buggy as hell. Even more than Office on a bad day

I’ve met Bill. He wouldn’t be out of place among HN’s defective half: the dubious pro SaaS VC funded US university alumni…

I wasn't talking about the product - I was talking about MS using the product to lock the whole world into its own =proprietary= format (so no one could reliably open & process it - and then others got blamed for it, not Microsoft), AND then aggressively attack those who try to escape from its lock, even countries.

All the protocols and standards are documented here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/main/ms-openspec...

> The irony being that Microsoft seem to make the best Linux OS for development

WSL?

Yes WSL2

while WSL2 is great for what it is it just doesn't compare to working in a linux distro. there are a lot of pain points where external tools wont always work well with WSL.

I also like the productivity customizations posseble in Linux while the same are difficult or impossible on Windows.

of course if your work is tied into the windows eco system having WSL is good to have.

Completely agree. For me it’s a trade off. I’d rather use Linux on the desktop myself but it doesn’t work for me or the business I work for.

That's interesting to hear. I've not used Windows in over a decade (I primarily work on mac) but I've heard that WSL was quite compromising and not a great experience for people who primarily use Linux tools.

bash (and other shells), coreutils, pipes, git, text/cli utilities etc. work just fine on WSL, I'd call them Linux tools. My in-shell workflow consists of using mainly those + VSCode (with the WSL plugin) + ssh'ing somewhere now and then, and it's entirely sufficient for this purpose. I haven't tried running typical webserver/db services on it though.

I’ve run 120 containers in native docker on it and it worked fine :)

WSL2 is great if you're stuck on Windows, but it's still really not there yet. For example:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8725

Better to run docker native than docker desktop. Doesn’t leak.

Controversially, I have a better development experience on Windows using msys2 + zsh (basically "git-bash" on steroids). I would put that development experience almost on par with MacOS.

WSL2's virtualized workflow just causes too many issues for me. WSL1 was better IMO but it wasn't significantly better than msys2 and also had issues (like you still need remote development tools to mount codebases inside editors) - unless you want to run/develop Linux binaries while on Windows.

For anything that isn't making basic non containerized applications (simple web applications, web servers), Windows is pretty good.

For anything more involved, requires multiple containers/compose/etc, I prefer Linux as it has the tools I need available natively and no gotyas or performance penalties.

That said, credit to Microsoft on WSL2. The auto-scaling hardware provisioning inside the VM has made containerized workflows on Windows much better. To me, it's just not better than running Linux inside VMWare/Hyper-V/VBox and "DIY"ing WSL2 yourself, something I had been doing for years before WSL2 anyway. WSL2 is more fool-proof then hand-rolling a Linux VM, so there is that.

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