More OT than most, but wanted to share, and maybe do some compare and contrast - About a week ago I added a new SSD to my PC and installed Linux on it. Everything works great and I can access all the data from my windows hard drives. I had to boot into windows only once since, to export my browser profile. I know WSL has been trying to set itself up as a viable alternative, but I must say getting set up in Linux was easier and simpler. Development works as I'd expect, media and games work (thanks wine). GNOME took some getting used to, but I can always move to KDE. At this point I'm wondering why not just use Linux, unless some particular program ties you down, or you just like macs for some weird reason

It's down to personal preference now. They are largely equivalent if you exclude specific dependencies.

If you like Microsoft hardware, going with windows is a good reason. I guess drivers are more up to date

Same is true for apple if you like their hardware

I'm on Mac for some years now. But considering going back to Linux for my next machine. Several reasons.

I’m a long time Linux fan, but IMO it has worse battery life, font rendering, security, HW and SW support than both macOS and Windows. Switching to mac after years on Linux solved a lot of issues for me, except freedom (as in the free software definition), which is much worse, of course.

I think using a macbook as a thin client against a beefy unix box (haven't decided which yet) has a lot of advantages - mac niceties (trackpad, iTerm) are preserved - one can physically separate maven/rubygems/nodejs programs (which always can sniff your clipboard etc) from his personal data - better performance also I'm sick of homebrew 🙃

This is basically what I'm doing with my maxed out PC (128GB, Ryzen) https://blog.michielborkent.nl/2020/07/26/remote-wsl2-clojure/ I'm not using it all the time, but for heavy jobs, I work remotely on it and then transfer the results to my laptop again

I guess it's very subjective. Performance depends on context, font rendering it also depends (recent wayland vs X, etc), same for battery life, it varies a lot depending on hw. As I said imho it is quite personal

Yeah using a beefy machine for heavy tasks is always better

I intended to work remotely on it all the time, but this hasn't been as ergonomic as just working directly on the machine as I had hoped, so out of inertia I fall back on my laptop most of the time

But if I have to, in case my main laptop breaks, I can still continue to work, using a "thin" laptop for a while, which makes me worry less

I am tempted to move most of my dev heavy stuff on a beefy (work) vm personally. Not sure about ergonomics but it's worth an experiment

I used to connect to work machines which ran a VNC client. It wasn't bad

my next machine might be a windows machine. I'm kinda looking at Windows as a really great DE (multiple monitors, rock solid, etc) and run everything through WSL. But i've heard that there are some slowdowns with file systems so just watching for now.

Rock solid? Every other update is liable to bork your files or something similar and windows will update itself when you go grab a cup of coffee without asking. How many monitors are you using?

Maybe I'm just letting the accumulated frustration with windows explode now that I switched

that's fair i guess. I haven't used windows in a while but everyone that uses it seems to have no problems with a multimonitor setup. I use two 4k monitors with my macbook and it is pretty good. I haven't even bothered to try to use a multi monitor setup with linux as i expect it to have weird scaling issues

so perhaps its a grass looks greener from this side

Scaling works fine in my experience

I just use stock Ubuntu, nothing exotic and it just works. I don't bother using a fancy distro or even a tiling vm anymore, I'm becoming more of a minimalist with age I guess

My wife's 2020 mbp recognizes my 4k monitor as keyboard (via usbc, I think it picks up only the usb hub and doesn't pick up the rest... ) :) so yeah, ymmv applies

I've been on Windows Insider builds for about six years now and I've never had it restart to install updates while I'm working on it, even when stepping away for an hour or two. You can configure the restart window to be any time you want or you can manually restart for updates when you feel like it. And on the "dev channel" (formerly the "fast ring"), you get a new Windows build almost every week.

The automatic restarting is really annoying to me and super hard to turn off, if at all possible

I am using my Windows box as a remote dev station and restarting while you are remotely working makes it impossible to re-connect. Bad.

I have one process that can take up to an hour or longer to fully finish. I leave this running for usually longer than a month. This doesn't fit well with Windows.

Other than that, WSL2 works well for my purposes.

I still have a Mac desktop but it's nearly nine years old now and when I replace it, I'll get a Windows desktop. I'm already doing a lot of dev work on my Windows laptop via WSL2 (I recently replaced my eight year old Dell XPS 12 -- Windows 10 with WSL1 -- with a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, initially with WSL1 then I installed WSL2 instead).

It's probably worth mentioning that I started with Macs in the early '90s (with System 6) and although I have used every version of Windows from 3.11 on up, I never liked Windows until 8 and I consider 10 to be much better than OS X / macOS these days.

@seancorfield, don't you miss the X-like terminal on windows? It was a major breakthrough for me for osx: X-like terminal and general public os in the same OS.

I still have difficulties on windows with terminals. Even Powershell or gitshell. Same for directory structure I find much more simple to use in devs.

@caumond Just use WSL2 and Terminal

ignore the Windows filesystem

Something else, a bit off topic. My talk was chosen for a workshop. Now they want me to register through some site and I'm confronted with "non-ACM members pay $60 to register". This is quite unusual for me as a speaker, and honestly, it rubs me the wrong way. I'm already investing a lot of time in this talk which I will give for free. Why pay to talk? Thoughts? It's this workshop btw: https://graalworkshop.github.io/2021/.

@caumond I'm not sure what you mean about "X-like terminal"?

Unix like

or linux like

WSL2 running Ubuntu is what I run in Microsoft Terminal by default

MS terminal can also start Powershell or cmd.exe stuff.

For me the terminal was the main reason to go away from Windows to macOS. Now that there is WSL2 it's starting to become tolerable.

yes I know that last two, but find them much less powerful.

I've just bought a mac!!! I may have doubts if I had that in mind

This is MS Terminal: tabbed, multiple shells:

@caumond To be honest, I still prefer macOS. It's just the hardware price that is steep compared to the PC that I've built. But now with M1 the mac hardware will also be interesting again.

@caumond When you mentioned "X-like" I wondered if you meant X11 -- and I run VcXsrv on Windows so that I can run X11 GUI apps from Ubuntu and have their UI show up on Windows. That's how I run Reveal on my laptop: started from a REPL on WSL2/Ubuntu -- and the UI pops up on Windows alongside VS Code (so I have the exact same dev experience on macOS and Windows/WSL2).

So, why WSL and not a Linux desktop directly I'd ask? Preference or regulations?

Because the Linux desktop UI/UX still sucks as far as I'm concerned.

(so I guess that's "preference" 🙂 )

Even back in my early days with Macs -- System 6/7 -- I ran BSD Unix for my development experience at the command-line while still preferring the Mac OS UI/UX (Tenon Intersystems' MachTen -- a paid product that provided a BSD shell based on Mach kernel).

Back to square one. A mixed experience. Best of each world !

I wanted to ask the other day, what editors were you using in the 80's/90s @seancorfield?

@claudius.nicolae I used ed at first I think. Then vi. I also used Emacs in the 17.x era through to the start of the 19.x era -- I'd have to look up when that actually was.

My university ran Prime minicomputers but we were a test site for Primix prerelease builds -- so I learned a *nix-style O/S back in '79.

I've been a Linux user since the early 1990s, so I'm simply most comfortable there. That's literally all I've run at home for decades. But I've not been a remote-only user until the pandemic. For the first time, I've actually been able to work full time in Ubuntu, and I'm really enjoying it. I had to use a Mac (current employer) or Windows (previous employer) for last 20 years, and it was always a bit of a struggle to reproduce what I have on Linux in those environments... I realise I am very much an odd case...

Then I'm odd too 🙂

(apparently that's '85 to '93 roughly for those Emacs versions)

I stuggle with Windows, not due to what it can do, but what I loose. For me, I always feel llike I'm having a "conversation" with my computer when I'm on the terminal. I ask it to do things, it does it (or not!) and we make a good team.

I never really "got" emacs... I guess I'm more of a vi(m) guy.

My first introduction to "Unix" was Xenix back in the day

Today, I run Arch Linux with i3(gaps) window manager and my hands hardly touch the mouse

Years ago, I worked for someone who was Windows based. I had to install Cygwin to get things done. I felt otherwise that I just couldn't "talk" to my computer, to have a dialogue of development 🙂

Cygwin isn't that bad... But nowdays when working on my windows laptop, I use an ubuntu VM inside that to feel comfortable. Vscode can ssh in the virtual box instance, so it's pretty neat.

Absoutely, if I was forced to use Windows then I would absolutely use WSL or a VM.

At my previous employer (more than 5 years ago now, so pre WSL), we did all of our development on big Solaris or AIX machines with 100-200 processors, and we were issued Windows by the IT department. So we installed X on the local PCs and used them basically as X Servers. We logged in via Windows/Active Directory and then straight into X windows. It worked, but it struck me as unnecessarily convoluted if our target environment was always going to be Unix. The Macs at my current employer, at least, are a bit more similar to our target environment.