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Windows for Linux Nerds

blog.jessfraz.com

331–340 of 393 posts

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#331
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.

Linux still sucks shit on the Desktop. I try it every year, and every year it sucks very slightly less. It goes beyond drivers and application compatibility, Linux distros are ugly and the people making them have no taste. The Desktop/Laptop market is not nearly as important as it used to be, but within that space, Microsoft's dominance is about as strong as ever. Apple might have been able to take a dent out of it i…

Have to agree. As a mostly linux sysadmin I absolutely can't stand Linux desktops. It seems that Linux desktop users never even look at "the other sides". Sorry, but usability is laughable. There is no consistency over time. New version? Oh boy, hang on to your helmets - there goes all your customization you had to do to make your environment tolerable for you.

I've used pre-1.0 KDE (and compiled it myself), seen Gnome pop up, tried a ton of WM's, and I try out some WM's and GUI-distro's at least once a year. Every time it comes down to: usable, but not great, and requires quite a bit of customization which I could redo for newer versions. When all you need is a terminal and a browser, it's probably fine, but I need a bit more than that to feel comfy.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#332
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. It was one of the reasons I came back to windows, but it proved useless. Sure I've just discovered it after having a corrupted filesystem. I dreamed to edit a movie in a video editor, pass a filter using ffmpeg, but can't even edit a file in notepad and run it in Python. VMs or remote access are still the best solution for development. Even cygwin and using setup.exe to edit files are better.

Huh? You just have to be careful not to use the linux filesystem from windows. It's hidden under %localappdata%\lxss anywax. Editing test.py in your Desktop and then running it with python /mnt/c/Users/Neves/Desktop/test.py should work fine. I honestly do not understand your problem here. If you need to access a file from windows and linux, it must be in the windows fs. That's it.

Agreed, I do Ruby development like this and it is seemless. The code, editor and git live on Windows while Ruby and MySQL run on wsl.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#333

I totally agree with his points about how terrible the Windows console is. Scrolling past the current line into blank space makes no sense. Having two identical settings menus (Defaults and Properties) that affect the current terminal vs every terminal makes no sense. Having no color theme support makes no sense. As far as third party terminals go, ConEmu is pretty good but crashes a lot for me. I don't see why I sho…

Seriously. This has been the one major stalling point for me as well. Setting up a Python environment and installing programs with Chocolatey were trivial, but the damn PowerShell terminal is ugly as sin.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From my experience, both KDE Plasma 5 and GNOME 3 work pretty well on high DPI displays, not so much Unity 7.

> KDE Plasma 5 and GNOME 3 work pretty well on high DPI displays

Not so well on displays with non-integer scale factor (1.25-1.5x).

I've somehow managed Plasma & Qt apps to have acceptably sanely sized windows decorations and widgets, but failed to e.g. teach the browsers to calculate sizes correctly (e.g. make a block with `width: 50mm` to have correct size).

Biggest GNU/Linux problem is having way too much of the completely different solutions for the roughly the same thing that can't interoperate with each other.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having dabbled in enough Linux over years and still preferring Windows for most of my work, even though I make sure there is a Linux box up and running in the corner, I would say this Linux excels at extremes, i.e. powerusers and novice users who need "restricted" usage. For the rest of the people who fall into the range of not poweruser but want enough autonomy to install and uninstall various software applications,…

How so? Virtually every linux distribution has package mangers - which mostly also have nice graphical user interfaces. I would argue this is a much nicer user experience than having to search on the web for the installer, dealing with incomplete uninstalls, each application doing their own thing in regards to updates, etc.

Not to mention the sketchiness associated with downloading and executing arbitrary installers from the internet. I bet most of us can get by OK in that situation, but your average user is not going to be able to differentiate two identically-looking installers for their desired software, where one is malicious and the other might be legitimate.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux still sucks shit on the Desktop. I try it every year, and every year it sucks very slightly less. It goes beyond drivers and application compatibility, Linux distros are ugly and the people making them have no taste. The Desktop/Laptop market is not nearly as important as it used to be, but within that space, Microsoft's dominance is about as strong as ever. Apple might have been able to take a dent out of it i…

I disagree. Just my personal bias but I don't care for Windows on the desktop at all. It's just... annoying. The slashes face the wrong way, can't resize a terminal. Weird file system. WTF is this registry thing? What's wrong with config files? Too much junk in the interface. It's just not... clean. I like clean. I suppose it comes down to what one knows and is used to, but for my part I don't see myself ever working…

Oh, the registry isn't that bad. It's just a hierarchical config file that's very well hidden, requires using either a separate tool (sort of like dconf-editor) or weird tricks like cd'ing into it like it's a directory (thanks Powershell), and that has several versions that get overlaid to give the actual contents you're looking for. Totally normal and sane. /s

WAY more fun is getting file associations working, on corp systems where they fail to persist. I can't double-click a Python script and have it run, despite having the exact same registry settings that I have at home for .py, Python.File, etc.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#337
Stop dangling your rotten carrot! You can't impress me with these stale gimmicks. The choice of operating system is not a purely utalitarian, but also and mostly a social choice of morality and utopia.

And the choice has been made already, for freedom, not corpdom. Therefore, i'll stick with even the shittiest desktop and OS imaginable, as long as it's open for me to any change i can think of.

There is simply no going back from freedom to corpdom. It's one way only. You need to understand this.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#338
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't said it is complicated. I complained that it takes time (aka "takes a little bit of work"). And most of that work is "try color after color and width size after width size and it still looks ugly while I don't know really why". Specifically, if I knew how to make things look nice, I would likely do different job then tech. And I don't really care about researching tons of schemes and about futuristic artist…

You don't need to try color after color -- just find a theme you like and install it. It's very simple. :) Make a visit to any Linux user's group, and someone can help set it up. If you want to experiment with different kinds of windows managers (like xmonad or i3 for keyboard productivity), you have the option. With Windows or Mac, you lose many options. Linux often has desktop features far before Windows and Mac, f…

I guess it is hard to explain, but I don't mind not having those options - if in exchange I don't have to do what you suggest. It is an annoying chore and obstacle to me.

Virtual desktops were available in previous Winows if you care to install app. I don't think it is terribly important, I used them but most people did not cared even if they knew about it.

I know there are good friendly linux communities (and less good ones too).

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#339
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…

Try to use docker for Windows. Hyperv is extremely performant. In my day to day work I'm using Windows, but I'm constantly using a mixture of WSL and docker. I set up things like Cassandra, MySQL, debugging sessions, nginx using docker. For small Unix tools/launching my applications I use WSL. For other small tools I use powershell. It took some time getting use to it, but now I actually do feel like in an utopia. No…

Sorry, but can you please share any recipes for mixing WSL and Docker, or you just meant that you use one or another on project-to-project basis (not together)?

I know I can do basic commands (even building images with `docker -H 127.0.0.1 build -t foo .` works), but I failed to find any way to share WSL filesystem with the containers (`docker run -v $(pwd):/foo ...`).

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running OpenSUSE on my Dell, IMHO, it has better hardware support then Ubuntu. Visual Studio is available on linux: https://code.visualstudio.com/download

Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are two different products.

Visual Studio for Mac also exists, but it is another different product (basically a rebranded MonoDevelop with some additional features)
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