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Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

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Re: Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

#51

Post by alexvoda »

I'll pitch in since some of the things I recommend are not on this page yet:

- Generally Windows 10 is better than 7 other than the privacy and forced update issues. (Windows has a tick-tock of good and bad releases so forget about 8.x)

Management:

- As others said, the typical way to remotely manage Windows is not to SSH into the machine you want to manage. Instead, you do one of 2 things:

- - Use RDP/Remote Desktop Connection/Terminal Services to connect. RoyalTS from www.royalapplications.com makes it even better

- - For anything that used the MMC (Microsoft Management Console) you can just open it locally and connect to the target computer. The MMC is one of the things I miss on Linux. A single coherent graphical interface to control so many parts of the system and you can even use it remotely. YaST is the maybe the closest thing I know on Linux.

Apps:

- Use portable apps from PortableApps.com and maybe a few other sources. Most of the essential apps I use have portable versions. Portable apps is another thing I miss on Linux. They are apps that have everything contained in a single folder. The intent is to carry them on a flash drive but you can also keep them on the computer. The effect is that, if for whatever reason you can no longer boot/need to reinstall/need to move to a different computer/etc., you can just open the case of the PC, connect the HDD/SDD to a working windows PC (optionally copy the folder with all your portable apps) and just use those apps with all the settings you had before. There have been attempts to bring this to Linux but without success.

- Use chocolatey.org This is the Linux package management concept brought to Windows

- If you need the tools you are used to on Linux look into either Cygwin (both Win7 and Win10) or the Ubuntu subsystem for Windows (Win10 only, also there are ways to change it to Arch or OpenSuse)

- Win10 only: right now there are rather few non-Microsoft apps on the Store that are actually great. The Microsoft apps however are quite cool.

- Win10 only: don't bother with the Edge browser YET. It is not ready. Sure rendering is fast and battery efficient but we expect much more from a browser. Right now it is still very limited and there are very few extensions available.

- Some other apps I use: RamBox, F.lux, Visual Studio Code, Shazam, QTTabBar

- Use Alternativeto.net to find alternatives to the apps you use.

Security:

- No.1 rule: be very careful where you download stuff from and what you install.

- Some may say otherwise but I no longer see the need to have third party anti-virus software for On-Access scanning . Some third party AV products may even make your computer less secure. Win10 comes with AV by default, and on Win7 there is Microsoft Security Essentials available.

- Use the VirusTotal Uploader for On-Demand Scanning. You upload the file and it is scanned with most antivirus products (69 of them at the moment).

Development:

- The Microsoft tools are great and may may be free for your use case:

- - Visual Studio is top notch (Community edition is free)

- - SQL Server is also great (Developer edition is free for development, Express edition is more limited but free for any use)

- - Learn PowerShell

- - Use the Tortoises (Tortoise Hg/Tortoise Git/Tortoise SVN) for version control. They integrate great with Windows Explorer.

Other:

- - Enable showing the file extensions in Windows Explorer. This is a stupid default.

Re: Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

#52

Post by WayneBro »

muddysky wrote: post #25
zamalek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* VSCode: open source, multiplatform. * Powershell: open source, multiplatform. * .Net: open source, multiplatform. * MSSQL: running on Linux, but there's always Postgres. * Clang: works beautifully on Windows. * Node: first-class citizen. That statement is nothing more than dogma.

> * Node: first-class citizen. Yes, but what does it help when 99.9% of Node deployments is on *nix and they don't match the Windows dev environment 1:1?

I've had way, way, way more problems deploying Node on all the various and fragmented *nix distros than Windows, since none of them match the dev environment 1:1 either.

As a matter of fact, just setting up Node on my dev machines is way simpler and easier on Windows when compared with Mac or Linux. It's the same on every Windows box - download the Node.js installer, run it. Done.

Meanwhile on Linux and Mac I have to jump through hoops and deal with things like package managers not being up to date, Brew getting broken after updates, lack of standards for installing apps, installs just not working, no easy upgrade path, etc.

Honestly, if I have to type out any commands to install stuff then the situation is already fucked. Commands that I don't run very often are subject to being forgotten. Then when I go to do an update, I have to remember how I installed it in the first place or I have to find some tool to completely clean it off my system (or I have to use Node to update itself with something like https://github.com/tj/n, which was invented for this exact situation.)

Re: Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

#53

Post by blacksmythe »

Retozi wrote: post #45

I'm using a MacBook Pro with Windows on it as my main development environment except for iOS native stuff obviously. 1. install chocolatey https://chocolatey.org/ , and install everything with it 2. install conEmu for a decent command line 3. install git for windows, which comes with a bash shell that brings you all the linux commands, inlcuding ssh. This brings a Windows PC relatively far. You can even get ssh-agent…

  >> 3. install git for windows, which comes with a bash shell that brings you all the linux commands, including ssh.
Thank you!

I often wished that each HN user got one '10x upvote' a week. I would give it to you this week.

Re: Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

#54

Post by treehau5 »

zamalek wrote: post #19
treehau5 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*highly efficient meaning you stick to the full Microsoft-paid stack. Otherwise, not so much.

* VSCode: open source, multiplatform. * Powershell: open source, multiplatform. * .Net: open source, multiplatform. * MSSQL: running on Linux, but there's always Postgres. * Clang: works beautifully on Windows. * Node: first-class citizen. That statement is nothing more than dogma.

> That statement is nothing more than dogma.

And this statement is nothing more than a mischaracterization.

MSSQL: "running" on linux. If you think anyone runs business critical code that uses MSSQL on anything other than windows servers I got a bridge I'd like to sell you , and the "open source" version of .NET is laughable, and already way behind the MS version. Yes, VSCode is actually wonderful -- I use it daily on my machine! Grouping VSCode with the rest of these (it's telling that you placed VSCode as your first example) is a little disingenuous, considering it was built using open source technologies (primarily, electron), and none of the rest of the traditional Microsoft stack.

Node being a first class citizen? That's news to me, I need to check that out. Last time I tried to develop any serious node application and deploy it (a couple weeks ago, if my calendar is right) it was still downright abysmal.

Clang working on windows is not surprising, being that processor architecture is what matters more in that world, and not so much operating system.

Got any better examples?

Re: Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

#55

Post by udp »

tyfon wrote: post #37
udp wrote: post #5

Tried this recently as an exercise in broadening my horizons. - Expect not to be able to SSH into your machine, for example when you really need to remotely make that git push you forgot before you left work. - Expect either a very slow unix emulation through Cygwin, or a very glitchy one through the new Ubuntu subsystem for Windows. - Expect installing software to be a royal PITA, and expect to start trusting binary…

For SSH: https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/Install-Win... For "unix", you can actually run linux on windows now: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_gui... If you want to use windows store, it acts like any other walled garden store regarding "binary blobs", but personally I have never used this. The only software I have in windows is Steam which acts like an "app store" for games.…

> If you want to use windows store, it acts like any other walled garden store regarding "binary blobs", but personally I have never used this. The only software I have in windows is Steam which acts like an "app store" for games.

Have you ever used an installer? Because that's a binary blob.

Re: Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

#56

Post by philonoist »

ropeladder wrote: post #43
philonoist wrote: post #35

I am very happy that I am the first one to comment here about https://www.listary.com/ which is the best suggestion which again, I got here. Install it.

Yes. Listary is the one thing I miss from Windows after I switched to Linux Mint. (well, that and running Foobar2000 natively) Also I wanted to mention 7+ Taskbar Tweaker ( http://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker ), which is a fantastic little util that helps you make your taskbar just the way you want it. Mousewheel over taskbar for volume control, middle click closes programs, etc...

Thanks! these things make me feel like God!

Re: Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

#57

Post by xenophonf »

udp wrote: post #48
xenophonf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty easy to SSH into a Windows PC. Install Cygwin, install OpenSSH, run the ssh-host-config script as an admin, and open the port in Windows Firewall. I use OpenSSH and rsync to transfer data from a Windows web server to a Linux database server, initiated from the Linux side via cron and logging into an Active Directory domain account using RSA public key authentication. I have never noticed any performance…

> I have never noticed any performance problems with Cygwin. What have you been doing with it? Even just running a configure script is very noticeably slower than on Linux or OS X. You can actually see the pauses while it executes each test binary.

Aside from the ETL stuff I mentioned, we also use Cygwin for the X server (although we're phasing that out in favor of something more multi-user friendly like X2Go) and for Unix tooling that hasn't been ported to Windows (mostly bioinformatics stuff, and which is becoming less and less of an issue).

Re: Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

#58

Post by p-st »

pandemicsyn wrote: post #17

So, whats the best windows ssh client these days? Still putty ? bitwise? other new hotness? I've been getting pretty frustrated with my new mac and im supe r tempted to try out a Razer Blade.

You could check out WinSSHTerm, a wrapper for PuTTY
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