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Windows for Linux Nerds

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Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#221

Post by blauditore »

rbanffy wrote: post #195
thinkxl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More snarky than usual, i don't know why. "why not just" or "just use" kind of comments that you see more in reddit. Even someone recommended an Electron alternative, on HN! the #1 Electron hater community. Interesting.

It's not snark, or feeling threatened. It's just that lots of people (me included) fail to see the point of running Windows at all (unless you are developing for Windows, in which case it's foolish not to). If you want a Linux experience, use Linux. If you want polished applications and a Unix experience, get a Mac. Windows has somewhat polished apps (with very lax UI consistency rules), a convoluted overall experien…

Frankly, I don't understand the unix-like argument. I keep on hearing it from devs, but if your work happens mostly in IDEs and occasionally on the command line with tools like npm or gradle you never get in touch with potential "unix-ness" of your system.

The reason why I switched to Linux for work is its focus on power users, e.g. great configurability or well thought-out command line applications, but not because it's close to unix.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#222

Post by Tuna-Fish »

ikurei wrote: post #213
ulyssesgrant wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I primarily develop on Linux, but lately have been working on Windows porting. In many ways the WSL has been a massive savior. It makes developing on Windows at least possible for Linux users. But it's sooo slooow. The performance bottlenecks I hit seem to be disk i/o related. Things from path tab completion on the command line, to Vim's YouCompleteMe compiling code in the background, to a plain "git status", ar…

> The performance bottlenecks I hit seem to be disk i/o related. Would it be possible to mount the folders with the code on RAM? They aren't, usually, very heavy. May be a small-ish 500mb volume on RAM could help? Is this even possible on WSL/Windows?

It's possible, but it wouldn't help. The problem is all the metadata lookups, which generally take several orders of magnitude more time on Windows than they do on Linux. The Windows implementation of NTFS just really isn't optimized to act as an unix filesystem.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#223

Post by JoshMnem »

watwut wrote: post #170
JoshMnem wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux still sucks shit on the Desktop... Linux distros are ugly and the people making them have no taste. Linux is hard to beat for a fully customizable programming environment. You can easily customize the look of a Linux desktop, but can't with Windows or Mac. Windows and Mac have both taken UI ideas that have been around on Linux for far longer.

Yeah, but that is the thing ... I never wanted to customize the look and have zero willingness to spend more then a second on it. I want it to look acceptable out of box, but dont care about details. I suspect most people are like that. I thought I dont care how things look until I installed linux distro at home years ago and seen how it looks without tweaking. And I was unable to make it nicer, not because configura…

>I am not artist and dont know how to make nice... It does matter how the whole looks to the user and linux was never really good at.

It sometimes takes a little bit of work, but it isn't that complicated. Linux is great at it, but you might have to do a little research.

An example of how to find that information: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+make+linux+look+good

Example desktops: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-looking-Linux-desktop-y...

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#224

Post by rbanffy »

crowbahr wrote: post #201
rbanffy wrote: post #197

Correct me if I'm wrong, but WSL looks more like an attempt at stopping developers from moving to Macs in order to get a polished app environment with a Unix-like OS underneath and to keep them in the Windows ecosystem.

"a polished app environment" If you're meaning XCode then no. XCode is never going to draw in developers... or at least no developer I've ever talked to liked XCode. I changed from iOS to Android development because I couldn't stand XCode anymore. Constant crashing, walled garden bullshit where I couldn't even get plugins running every time they updated, inexplicable code changes to my apps which were un-diagnosable…

I'm talking about iTunes, iWork, all IDEs that count with the exception of Visual Studio, Skype, the built-in apps and even Microsoft Office if you are so inclined. I've done some development in ObjC using Xcode and didn't notice the problems you mention. Must be luck.

And one thing that others never replicated is the quality of the laptops. I've had Dell XPSs and Thinkpads and the MacBook Pro is still my favourite laptop.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#225

Post by hnlmorg »

qquark wrote: post #192
Zardoz84 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's open source, it have a long history and is called WINE.

... Which, despite what I imagine is an incredible amount of effort on their part, struggles to run acceptably not even half the software you throw at it ... Wine is unfortunately not a reliable solution for a huge number of tasks mostly populated by windows-only software (e.g. professional CAD & PCB software - and no, open source "alternatives" in those domains are NOT able to compete, which is perfectly understanda…

Personally I've found my success rate with WINE to be more around 80 to 90%. In fact in the last year I've only needed to use it for for 3 different tools, all of which worked flawlessly (in fact it later turned out that one of those tools officially supports WINE for their Linux support).

My convoluted point is that it really depends on what you throw at it. Anecdotally I've found stuff that ties into DirectX to be the most awkward and since you've mentioned 3D packages I'm not at all surprised you have had less success with WINE than I.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#226

Post by monsieurbanana »

blauditore wrote: post #221
rbanffy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not snark, or feeling threatened. It's just that lots of people (me included) fail to see the point of running Windows at all (unless you are developing for Windows, in which case it's foolish not to). If you want a Linux experience, use Linux. If you want polished applications and a Unix experience, get a Mac. Windows has somewhat polished apps (with very lax UI consistency rules), a convoluted overall experien…

Frankly, I don't understand the unix-like argument. I keep on hearing it from devs, but if your work happens mostly in IDEs and occasionally on the command line with tools like npm or gradle you never get in touch with potential "unix-ness" of your system. The reason why I switched to Linux for work is its focus on power users, e.g. great configurability or well thought-out command line applications, but not because…

"focus on power users, e.g. great configurability or well thought-out command line applications"

Yeah, because it's an UNIX-like.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#227

Post by rbanffy »

monkmartinez wrote: post #119
blunte wrote: post #116

Want to _really_ impress us, Microsoft? Give us a Windows Subsystem for Linux. I chose a maxxed out Dell XPS15 laptop with Windows 10 to replace my 3 year old rMBP with the (foolish) expectation that it could replace my Mac. Apple had lost sight of what mattered to developers, and I was angry. But now, 2 months later, here I continue developing and existing on my old rMBP. Bash in Windows is incredibly slow on some a…

Why not dual boot linux and windows 10 or use a Linux VM? It takes like 10-15 seconds to reboot a machine these days. I am about to take the plunge toward a ThinkPad after many years with OSX (I haven't upgraded my 2011 17" to macOS). My plan is to try dual booting linux and/or using a Linux VM. I think the biggest hurdle will be changing my mindset. That is, looking for the OSX version of whatever it is I am looking…

Microsoft must hate the dual boot to Linux idea. Once you experience a modern Linux, you'll eventually look at that NTFS partition and decide it'd just be better used as free disk space.

For the times you need Windows, there's always VirtualBox.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#228

Post by fetbaffe »

rbanffy wrote: post #197

Correct me if I'm wrong, but WSL looks more like an attempt at stopping developers from moving to Macs in order to get a polished app environment with a Unix-like OS underneath and to keep them in the Windows ecosystem.

I can't really tell if this is criticism or just stating the obvious. Software companies want you to use their software. Yes, shocking, I know.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#229

Post by discordance »

latencyloser wrote: post #133
monkmartinez wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not dual boot linux and windows 10 or use a Linux VM? It takes like 10-15 seconds to reboot a machine these days. I am about to take the plunge toward a ThinkPad after many years with OSX (I haven't upgraded my 2011 17" to macOS). My plan is to try dual booting linux and/or using a Linux VM. I think the biggest hurdle will be changing my mindset. That is, looking for the OSX version of whatever it is I am looking…

I'm in a similar predicament to OP. I prefer Linux in most cases, it's what I'm used to. But I need or would vastly prefer one or the other depending on what I'm doing. A VM is fine for just checking outlook..or using Skype for chat and things like that. But the second I need to use an IDE for Windows development, it's too slow to bear. Having better interchangeability between these two would make my life significant…

How is the attitude/atmosphere internally at Microsoft towards people using a competing OS (Mac or Linux).

Does the group working on Windows OS feel alienated at all?

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#230

Post by glax »

teekert wrote: post #214
blunte wrote: post #116

Want to _really_ impress us, Microsoft? Give us a Windows Subsystem for Linux. I chose a maxxed out Dell XPS15 laptop with Windows 10 to replace my 3 year old rMBP with the (foolish) expectation that it could replace my Mac. Apple had lost sight of what mattered to developers, and I was angry. But now, 2 months later, here I continue developing and existing on my old rMBP. Bash in Windows is incredibly slow on some a…

MS Office for Linux. That's all I need, that's all I would miss in my current work environment (in the browser is just not cutting it atm).

Have you tried PLAY ON LINUX ?? MS Office works great in ubuntu.

Writers in our company were not very fond of Libre Office.

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