WSL has been god send for corporate employees who get a windows laptop but need to do real work.
But everyone knows that performance of WSL is nowhere near native linux on the same machine.
But everyone knows that performance of WSL is nowhere near native linux on the same machine.
Sadly the rest of Windows 11 suffers from those unasked, opt-out feature drops. Unbearable. So, I'll go pure Linux again.
Other than that, I believe the productivity tooling is better on Windows.
I myself fall in the SaaS category, so Windows doesn't give me anything. On the contrary for whatever reason after mainly using Linux/OSX for 15 years, Windows just feels clunky and like it "gets in the way". WSL is a good hack/workaround, but unless I MUST have Windows as OS (because of a work provided Laptop that cannot be Linux), i dont see a point of using WSL.
Luckily my IT staff allowed me to dual boot windows and debian+cinnamon. Everything was going great until I needed to compile and test a legacy firmware using Keil uVision... Gonna be on windows a while longer unfortunately :(
This doesn't make any sense. I regularly use Windows for a few things, and do not have this problem. Sane corp group policies disable all the annoying things folks complain about on the default consumer install, and there are few things you can't do just using a keyboard and keybindings.
I still prefer Linux and KDE is my daily driver but most of the comments I read here about Windows seem to be people regurgitating second-hand comments they read and passing them off as their own, and it's always the same small list of things every time.
> fighting against the annoyances
Because they're trivial annoyances. I spend just as much time disabling or changing annoying things on KDE (or MacOS), I don't see the difference other than "Microsoft bad!" At the end of the day the same amount of my time is wasted. I'll save my moral outrage for actually important things.
Linux to me feels like it's designed for multi-user systems and servers, where I use it as a single person to launch software.
Working with files in the default Windows instalation (corporate) is an exercise in masochism. In Windows XP they had a progress bar when you were searching for files, now you have a message which doesn't even tell when it changes itself.
A lot of stuff in WSL 2 is often faster than doing it natively on Windows as a result.
Even Copilot can't figure out code pages, LF and BOM if you don't switch to the flagship models.
Microsoft's own "apps" are JavaScript.
Games run on SteamOS.
We were tied to Windows for the Office suite slop but now we have to deliver markdown slop.
We're one telemetry leak to "the enemy" away from the death of the Windows desktop.
The shell grows not old, as we that are left grow old:
Aix shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of Sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Maybe those are interesting as teenager hobbies as well.
We are not talking about a properly configured Windows workstation. We are talking about corporate PCs configured by an IT department that is completely oblivious to the needs of developers, most likely because developers are not their bosses. WSL is effectively an escape hatch.
Usually the stated reason is "security", and developers tend to do the greatest sin of corporate security: they run arbitrary code, and they even have the nerve to call it "their job"!
I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid and they are fully aware of the "shadow IT" aspect of WSL, but they give it a pass because they are also aware that people have "real work" to do that would be impossible otherwise, given company policies.
No, not stupid, per se. I generally don't like to blame people for the situations in which they find themselves. But there is something else going on.
I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs. One potential reading of this is that it is not the people working in the jobs' fault, it's the design of the corporate leadership by not paying well enough for the job to get better people.
But the knock-on effect would be, if corporate paid better, at least my IT department would look completely different. The people we have now would be replaced by much more competent people. These more competent people would also generally be folks who shower and wear clothes that fit, that they don't let one corner of their shirts hang out the waist of their pants, that didn't show up to a service call wreaking of cigarette smoke. I'm not expecting people to spend more money on nicer clothes, I already established they don't have that money. I am expecting people to take care of their basic hygiene and present themselves as best they can. That they don't is a signal they don't really care about their own professional development. If corporate paid better, IT wouldn't be staffed by a bunch of literal slobs.
Though they are in a bad situation, I don't have a lot of respect for the folks in my IT department, because the only job they have, the one they have been sticking to for some time, they are only doing the bare minimum. I've been poor. I've been in jobs I hated. The only way out was to suck it up, present myself well, get better at my job, and go somewhere better. I have a hard time respecting anyone who just gives up.
(To be fair, there actually are a few who do appear to be doing this, but they are few and far between. They also don't last long, because again, they go on to something better. I'm talking about the kind of people who don't put in the effort and then complain they never get anywhere.)
Because their job is keeping their job, not making the 50 developers in the 5000 person org happy, as those are not their bosses.
You judge their competency from the perspective of a dev in the trenches, but the way management judges their performance is vastly different: keeping IT cost center spending as low as possible(hence a lot of IT offshoring) and security as tight as possible (hence MFA, EDMs and MDMs shoved everywhere that don't led you run anything besides notepad and Edge). Whether this hampers the devs or not is irrelevant for them or for management (outside of purely tech companies) since this is the devs' problem to deal with, not IT's problem. The moral is as long as it's seen as a cost center and not a profit center, there will never be right incentives to have a competent IT department staffed by competent people.
And keep in mind that a lot of the hidden champion engineering companies that make the world go round still function on excel sheets with VBA scripts as their "tech stack", and as long as that runs, management is happy. If you tell them you want to run linux, python, node, docker on your notebook, they'll probably laugh in your face thinking it's some hacker alien gobbledygook.
I definitely agree with that part though I've not used Windows at home for many, many years...and I'm a gamer.
Recently I needed a certain agent to help me automate some Excel stuff. Getting it to work in Windows was significantly harder if not impossible compared to WSL.