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Windows for Linux Nerds

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Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#241

Post by distances »

disiplus wrote: post #191
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 was in the same boot as OP, ordered maxed out XPS15 whiped windows from them and installed latest version of ubuntu. but i had problems with 4K display, hdpi support in ubuntu is shit if you want different dislplays with different dpis, and wayland is still not really production ready. And then is the support for GPU, drivers for nvidia, it would get so hot that i could almost burn my hands. so i returned the XPS a…

XPS machines look nice, but I'd recommend the Dell Latitude line for those who plan to potentially use Linux. The compatibility is just on a different level, and they are pretty nice work horses hardware wise.

Latitudes lack that infinity display, sure, but at least I'm almost always using an external monitor anyway. Some of the other features are more subjective, but I also like the matte screen, better keyboard, camera on lid upper edge, support for a docking station, and so on.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#242

Post by romanovcode »

21 wrote: post #54
bactrian wrote: post #2

This post was interesting in a morbid way but you can count the Linux nerds that want leave the open world of Linux for Microsoft very easily. They all work at Microsoft. Microsoft is losing on mobile, desktop, servers, and IoT. Their entire ecosystem is a technological deadend. If you're a Linux Nerd, you should probably keep using Linux if you care about having a good career going forward.

I guess you didn't get the memo on Azure being highly successful. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/microsoft-azure-growing-fast...

Azure is also superior product then AWS in any way. I wish I would use Azure instead of AWS at my job.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#243

Post by m_fayer »

Joeri wrote: post #159
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…

From what I understand the WSL team is small, with only a few people working on the kernel parts. I'm sure they honestly intend to deliver blazing performance but they're still busy delivering basic compatibility. Maybe microsoft should allocate more resources, since it is probably the cheapest way to gain developer mindshare. I do node development on windows, but not in WSL. I would advise doing as much as you can w…

Huh, why is that? I do a wide range of web development in WSL - npm, gulp, and webpack all work just fine for me. This works great for vue dev, with browsersync and everything. I also have to do a little WP work, and the required LAMP stack in WSL works great.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#244

Post by romanovcode »

tkubacki wrote: post #73

WSL is waste of time if you work with docker - Linux desktop experience (not laptop) is just good enough these days (and future seems even brighter since Ubuntu goes back to Gnome)

Docker works pretty great with Windows nowadays using Hyper-V.

Because of that your point can be reversed: If you work with Docker there is no point in switching from Windows to Linux.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#245

Post by robertlagrant »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #109
seiferteric wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean, but you will never see MS contributing to Wine will you? Will we ever see office for linux? Why can't we get a proper POSIX layer for windows (like they used to offer)?

You've got a good point. I believe personally that there are great people working at MS (because I know one or two... so I'll just take a leap and assume in general) -- so it seems like a problem of reining in the beast. Hell, Gates seems like a generally good person. It's the default nature of a corporation [read: monster] so large to consume as much as it can and become as powerful as it can. Such organizations are…

Yeah I like Gates, much more than Jobs or Ellison, for example. I'm sure he was far from perfect, but he's pumped more money (and convinced others to pump more money) into big causes than probably most others on the planet.

Ballmer on the other hand - both an idiot who stopped Microsoft doing much good for ten years, supported a stupid HR manager in her talent-scaring practices, and also helped give MS its bad reputation. Good job mate.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#246

Post by majewsky »

freedomben wrote: post #134
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 did almost this exact thing a few years ago and I've been super happy. Two points of advice: 1. Check hardware compatibility _before_ you order your laptop. Intel video drivers and wifi drivers are open source and reliable. Stay away from Broadcom, and unless you plan to do gaming, stay away from Nvidia (tho modern Ubuntu makes nvidia pretty darn easy). 2. Pick a DE (I recommend Gnome 3, but KDE is great too) and l…

> unless you plan to do gaming, stay away from Nvidia

The newer AMD cards work very well with the mainline kernels and Mesa. (My desktop PC has an R9 Nano from 2015.) Haven't tried compute or Vulkan yet, though.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#247

Post by romanovcode »

badminton1 wrote: post #167

It's hard for Windows to realistically compete with Linux as a developer environment. GNU/Linux and userland software is made by developers for developers, and a lot of it is open source. If you are a developer, on Linux sky is the limit. Everything can be played with. On Windows that's not the case. Many areas are off-limits and you don't get to see how they work, and you cannot change them if you need to. Then, Mic…

> It's hard for Windows to realistically compete with Linux as a developer environment.

That's the whole point of WSL

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#248

Post by AsyncAwait »

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…

Just wondering, why not put Linux on the XPS directly and keep your old MBP for office and such?

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#249

Post by kalleth »

I've recently (~1y) moved back to Windows as a primary 'desktop' OS for development. By day I'm a rails developer.

I've worked extensively on windows (back in PHP days), Linux (when I was doing HPC software) and Mac (most of my rails career...).

Generally the code always runs on Linux -- and WSL isnt' there yet for background processes and the "platform" your code needs to run on; most of the stuff I need needs worker processes, elasticsearch, mysql, et al, all of which need to be running long-lived in the background which WSL isn't great at supporting -- it's "user mode" after all.

It's also closer to prod environments, which is a theoretical argument against OSX.

I clone and do terminal operations on either a VM or a physical ubuntu server in my house, and edit locally using gvim or visual studio code using an NFS or Samba mount. Nginx proxying using port forwarding over ssh. Long story short; it works for me, but this is a frankenstein-ish setup made familiar solely because I've used all 3 OS's day in, day out for ~20 years. When I explain it to Junior devs they look at me funny.

WSL with ConEmu and openssh is close to replacing PuTTy for me, but that's it. You still can't use it to have a painless node, ruby, etc development experience on windows.

Microsoft should be focusing on optimising for someone who's in a coding bootcamp, not people who've been in tech for decades already and already have the solid technology base.

Right now, people grow up using windows for day to day office work in other careers and at school, and for PC gaming and browsing at home, but have to switch off it when they enter a development career because the native tooling isn't there. If Microsoft can address that shortcoming, probably through further development of WSL and (hopefully) implementing Bash as a "first order citizen" in Windows, then they're home.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#250

Post by throwaway613834 »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #222
ikurei wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you know what exactly the fundamental barrier to this is? I've always wondered. What's so different about Linux and Windows that Windows has to do so much more work for file creation/deletion? It seems to be half an NTFS issue and half a Windows issue, because even on Linux I'm pretty sure NTFS is noticeably slower than ext[234], but not as slow as on Windows.
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