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Actually you just reminded me what Windows is good for in web development - testing on the 'Edge' or 'Internet Explorer' browsers.

Rather than run Windows native you can download and run the Virtualbox version Microsoft offer for free just for web developers to test browser compatibility with.

With Windows the file system is nowhere near as fast as Linux due to design considerations made in the MS-DOS and Windows NT days. If your code base has thousands of files then reading them across the file systems is a pain meaning that everything runs slow in Windows, the VM or both, particularly with Vagrant type setups. Native Ubuntu is like a breath of fresh air if you have had to work with compromised development arrangements where company policy dictates a slow Windows machine.




I can believe that NTFS is slower than most Linux filesystems, though I'd be curious how much of that relates to things like use of ACLs, etc. Regardless, both security-related and filesystem-related speed differences on developer systems should be effectively negligible except in edge cases.

If filesystem differences are making a significant difference, it's time for someone to suck it up and spend a few hundred dollars on SSDs for the developers (and not the cheapest ones available, which frequently lack DRAM and can have their own speed issues).




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