@mitchellh WSL convert for like 4 years now. Mac's UX has gone downhill for me and wasnt offering anything, and Linux limits what I can do. I think if I didn't game or have any other uses of Windows I would care less, but Microsoft has done a great job in recent versions.

@mitchellh Oddly this is a typical perception of someone without broad enough experience across the board. A symptom of having not been in the enterprise world where half of everything is Excel, SQLServer and internal apps. It actually works the other way around where they dont understand

@mitchellh What kind of engineers are you talking about? Pretty much all electronics and mechanical designs are Windows based, and have been for 30 yrs. Most professional low level firmware tools and compilers are Windows based. Structural engineering, building design software, all Windows.

@mitchellh I use Windows with WSL. I write mostly C++. I left macOS because I wanted GPUs for experimentation. I hate Linux desktop, it is buggy and hideous. VSCode has great support with WSL, I barely notice there's actually two OSes.

@mitchellh Used to be a Windows dev (as in using Windows to develop) for ~5 years, earlier in my career, developing for the MS stack. Back then Visual Studio had no alternative on other systems. These days, I struggle to see how Windows can offer a better dev experience than MacOS or

@mitchellh Windows renders text much clearer than either Linux or MacOS due to the patented ClearType font

@mitchellh It’s more or less required for game console dev… the SDKs are windows only and are all heavily integrated with visual studio

@mitchellh Game development is traditionally Windows-centric, a lot of tools and middleware around game-dev only exist for Windows, and even game console development toolchains are typically Windows based. Also, I think it's good to work on the same system your users are.

@mitchellh WSL is probably better than Mac in terms of Linux compatibility. macOS is unix, but a lot of stuff just expects linux.

@mitchellh Anyone who says "just use WSL" has never tried to work with containers or building networks within WSL. What a nightmare.

@mitchellh Happy to screen share and walk you through my world. I use the Windows operating system to do backend development of Linux based services and have for 8 years. VSCode + WSL makes the process seamless. Never had a single problem. On the other hand I’ve tried moving to a full

@mitchellh There are much more affordable purchasing options in the Windows space. When I lived in Ecuador everyone used Windows because it was what they could afford. Choice is a luxury.

@mitchellh I once had a ThinkPad. After using it for just 3 years, its battery drained within 40 minutes on Windows, but could survive for an entire day using Ubuntu. 😂 Same story happens to a colleague using Windows now, where his laptop's (< 1 year) battery drains within a couple of

@mitchellh Windows is a horrible OS for dev work. Even for development on Windows! And that says a lot…

@mitchellh He said the thing. 🫨

@mitchellh Windows rules. Proper window management, sensible keyboard navigation in your editors, peripherals and software just work, multiple options for terminals, functioning display drivers. MacOS and Linux are kind of crap.

@mitchellh The amount of time I've spent debugging things caused *entirely* by windows using a different path separator is immeasurable

@mitchellh It’s totally fine and convenient using WSL and Ubuntu. It all just works, including using Nvidia GPUs and CUDA with torch and similar. I just prefer web browsing and doing code editing in Windows.

@mitchellh I developed for about six months on WSL2 trying to make Tailscale work better on windows. It’s… fine, though from a networking perspective WSL does some really odd things that are poorly documented. At the end of the day though, I was a dev living in a VM.

@mitchellh WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) rocks. Also, Windows still has the most robust tooling, solid native debuggers, etc. There's no way I would work without a Windows machine on my desk, even with its faults.

@mitchellh Windows has a lot more small utilities and if you’ve collected them for decades then it’s very hard to switch

@mitchellh the best linux is windows.

@mitchellh Windows app developers excluded, the folks I see on Windows want/need one of the following: * Custom hardware (specific GPUs etc) and upgradability over time. * Integration with business world (majority Windows) or straddling dev/biz line. * Existing infrastructure. …

@mitchellh I've switched to WSL, it's quite nice.

@mitchellh from reading the comments it looks like you tried the original WSL, rather than WSL2. the original one was super slow, but WSL2 is great — it's quite fast and integrates pretty deeply with windows (ms even shipped a wayland compositor in windows, so many gui programs work and you

@mitchellh i can't bear to use windows, when i need to test something on it, even if for just a couple of minutes, i get intrusive thoughts about abandoning civilization and go live in the woods

@mitchellh Spoken like an apple fan Linux is buggy as hell and requires a lot of config and debugging time to do what you can on windows or mac tho I want to support it. but I can't stand Mac UI/UX. use win to code, idk what advantage with a mac i would have tbh, performance similar

@mitchellh https://techblog.bozho.net/my-... 🙂

@mitchellh Some of us need GPUs, CUDA, tools that only work on Windows, good IDEs (XCode for C++ is really bad) and have tons of users on Windows 😆 Yes, there are some sharp edges, but it also works very well

@mitchellh And I cant understand people not using Windows. I think most people havent tried it for many years. It is like so much better than osx at this point as it has more native linux support.

@mitchellh The wip nix on windows might eventually change the game for some. But all in all, I’d prefer not to use windows even with nix for engineering (unless my target was windows)

@mitchellh WSL2 actually makes it the least bad option for me. I hate MacOS for silly but annoying reasons, and dailying Ubuntu for a couple of years left me needing another option for the occasional bit of PowerPoint/Excel/Photoshop etc.

@mitchellh 100% agreed. The one thing that slightly redeems Windows is WSL. If macOS would have a built-in hypervisor that can run a Linux Subsystem (maybe even Docker images?) that would be amazing.

@mitchellh Debugging native languages with Visual Studio (UX) and WinDBG (features) is a far superior experience than in any other platform.

@mitchellh cc @AmirSakhravi

@mitchellh You just remote in to a Linux virtual desktop to do real work