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Comment by bongodongobob | Hacker News Reader

Waaaaaay more people use Copilot than WSL. Like probably 100000x more.

Most businesses run everything on Windows and Microsoft. That's their business. They don't give a shit about Windows Home edition or nerds crying and switching to Linux. You're not their market.

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Unfortunately there are lots of devs stuck on windows, wsl is very popular.

Stuck on corporate Windows, but WSL is verboten.

Lots of people prefer Windows + WSL over Mac. I can’t fathom why anyone would choose Windows over Mac or Linux.

I’m mostly on Mac but I do prefer WSL to the Mac terminal experience.

Most things end up happening in Docker regardless, but things are just smoother in WSL. Not to mention that Windows has proper Window management and multiple display support.

I use Rectangle for window management and have 3 monitors. I’m really not sure what you mean by the multiple display support. The window management is easy to rectify with Rectangle or Spectacle.

Not OP but Mac doesn't support daisy chaining via display port alt mode over usb-c. It's a little ridiculous cause a hackintosh does so we know that they can support it. I assume they don't because it drives sales of their absurdly priced monitors.

Windows (and to a lesser extent Gnome) have much better Window handling. Shortcut keys for tiling, snap to grid, snap to fill, window-walking (I don’t actually know what this feature is called but it’s when you cycle through window snaps and the window will “walk” across each position of each display in order).

Meanwhile macOS has none of these things and struggles to remember my display arrangement between restarts.

Sure I can download Rectangle/Spectacle/Amethyst and solve some of these problems (while giving screen observing permission to a third party) but it’s far from ideal and not at all what I used to have on Windows.

I’m with the other poster, I don’t understand what you mean by multiple display support. I use my Mac Studio with a two monitor setup and it works beautifully. Even better, when I set my MacBook next to it, some kind of Apple magic happens in the background and I can move my mouse over to it like it’s a third display, letting me drag files between the two machines, control windows, use my keyboard, copy/paste, etc.

For what it's worth, I'm seeing more and more common people using Macs to run their business/office and daily life needs when last decade and prior they would have been using Windows.

Honestly macos is in my opinion, a worse system in every regard, the only good thing is apple doesn't annoy you with ads, but if you can ignore that or just work around it somehow, I think windows is a better, more flexible OS.

The only advantage macos has for me is the battery life, and that's gone when the X elite drops, hopefully with great Linux support too (though I'm worried about X86-64 emulation on Linux)

That's all without mentioning the absurd pricing of Mac devices (in usable configurations, no, 8gb isn't enough).

I want to use my own hardware - Hackintosh requires too much effort to boot, let alone work reliably.

For Windows: Visual Studio, familiarity

Against macOS: Not wanting to fight the OS when I want to do something like attach a debugger to a program I didn't build

Against Linux: Having an NVIDIA card in my desktop

At work I spent 13 years on the Mac. Then 5 solid years on nothing but Linux. And the last two years on WSL+Windows. My home system is an M1 Macbook Air. I'm an SRE so I mostly write lots of code and bash scripts and run 50+ tmux panes/day in parallel. I run 3 monitors - 35", Laptop, 27" to my left. All three monitors are in constant use.

All three have something to offer - the "Why" of Windows+WSL.

- WSL offers a pretty pure modern Linux experience - which takes an awful lot of brew effort to replicate on a Mac.

- The windows GUI is far superior to anything Linux has to offer - PowerToys/Fancy Zones offers snapping and window control I could never replicate on Linux - despite multiple years of trying to.

- I spend 80% of my time in tmux/terminal.

- Bare Bones Windows Terminal is absolutely rock solid and high performance.

- Linux native is more stable than Windows+WSL - I would go months without rebooting my Linux system. My windows system rarely makes it more than a couple weeks.

- I use my laptop as a workstation (Precision 5560 - it only get ~80 minutes battery, even with all the discrete NVIDIA stuff turned off) - so the (significant) superiority of Mac Laptop Portability doesn't do anything for me.

If Microsoft can dial in the stability of WSL -speaking as one who has spent at least 1/2 decade on all three platforms at work - My preference for work is Windows + WSL for GUI + Linux experience reasons. If I didn't think Microsoft was going to fix WSL, I'd probably switch to Arch.

For personal use - I have a NUC11 with a Decent RTX2060 video card for Steam Gaming, and would never consider anything for a personal laptop than a macbook in one form or another.

> - The windows GUI is far superior to anything Linux has to offer - PowerToys/Fancy Zones offers snapping and window control I could never replicate on Linux - despite multiple years of trying to.

Fvwm ? I won't comment about Windows.

At this stage it's because office on Mac sucks.

With the push to the new fisher price version of unified office that benefit will go away.

Microsoft products, while better than they were 10 years ago, are still terrible on Mac. Completely agree with you.

Plenty of us also know UNIX, and rather not use it more than what is needed to the extent of job requirements.

We rather enjoy our IDEs and graphical workflows as much as possible.

Right, but there are a lot more non devs that use windows, probably 100000:1 ratio.

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