Wsl 2 is incredible. Got a 1000 dollars dell desktop and it is insanely faster than my Mac. Windows has improved a lot, and Linux based development on windows is a lot easier now.
5 years ago I would have quit a job if they asked me to use windows.
Macos is still marginally better but not worth the cost IMHO.
Windows (the technology) is okay. Not good, but okay. Windows (the experience) degrades every day. Everything is slow even though the specs are good. Granted, corporate “additions” like O365 ATP don’t help and aren’t part of the core system. But many users have to bear with them nonetheless.
And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks? They get live notifications when you add or remove hardware, software, when an application has crashed (even when error reporting is off), …. The data contains unique identifiers for your system and user. I don’t even want to know what’s sent when you select full diagnostics.
Windows is a privacy and performance nightmare. It’s good for two things only: corporate environments (manageability) and games.
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Well, sorry about that. Just had to get this off my chest.
> Windows (the technology) is okay. Not good, but okay. Windows (the experience) degrades every day. Everything is slow even though the specs are good. Granted, corporate “additions” like O365 ATP don’t help and aren’t part of the core system. But many users have to bear with them nonetheless.
It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hide it, but of course it's still harming performance, just less noticeably. Plus who knows what other bad resource-use patterns have crept in, if that has.
> And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks?
I've done the hacks and still don't feel confident it's not spying on me—which, why is my OS spyware now? WTF. Plus it still shows me ads on my lock screen. And, it's a small thing, but having to unlock my lock screen before I can start typing my password is incredibly stupid. No if I just start typing it doesn't go in the password box, it misses the first 2-3 characters. Yes I'm on an SSD and have a ton of RAM and all that.
1) it hardly matters since the point is that excessive disk access by an OS when, essentially, "nothing is happening" (opening the start menu, say) is a bad sign for generally giving-a-shit about performance and spinning rust just exposes the error,
2) they pushed Win10 upgrades on a bunch of well-performing spinning rust Win7 machines back in the middle of 2015, not 2020, immediately making them much worse,
3) most normal home users don't replace hard drives, don't replace their computer very often, buy the cheapest thing they can aside from that they think higher number = better and are often up-sold a large (=spinning rust) drive they don't need and can be up-sold because they buy them at real stores (yes, really), and only very recently did SSDs mostly displace magnetic platters on base configurations of cheap mass-market desktops. I guarantee a high percentage of home users are still booting off traditional HDDs, yes, even in 2020, and they're exactly the same sort not to have been able to figure out how to not upgrade to Win10.
>Everything is slow even though the specs are good
Have you tried running without antivirus? Some parts of Windosw are still slow eg the filesystem, but the main thing making everything slow is antivirus software IME, including Defender.
From own experience this is 99% corporate shenanigans.
You should have a serious talk with your IT department. Sometimes they are not aware how much garbage they are throwing at people through Active Directory.
In my experience, the best way around such issues is to force IT to dogfood their own system instead of having special laptops for IT employees.
For the IT department it's a tradeoff though; they'd rather have everyone be inconvenienced or their hardware not working at 100% than to risk a virus wreaking havoc on their networks, or ransomware crippling their whole organization. Even without the restricted Windows machines they struggle with enough shit already, because people can't behave on company hardware on the one hand, and every employee is a target.
This is such a huge pain, I keep having to turn off the antivirus because it will often slow "npm i" so much that it'll just fall over and report a crash. I shouldn't have to disable my built-in antivirus just to do basic development!
I'm surprised that you're having performance issues, since for me it's the complete opposite. I assume it's driver issues, but on my comparatively powerful machine linux still feels laggy.
Would it be feasible to run a Windows Pro or Server version in a laptop?
Pro runs just fine on a laptop.
When people talk about Candy Crush they mean they see it first thing when they start Windows Store as a recommendation. It is definitely not pre-installed on Pro, if it is I haven’t found it in 4 years...
I use a Mac. I spun up a windows server image on AWS and I've been doing all of my development on that. It's cheap if you turn it off and it has snapshots. And it's available from any machine with remote desktop.
I think it depends on the region or maybe even the time period (maybe those promotional deals only run for a certain period of time and eventually get renewed, if you're unlucky enough to reinstall while in the correct region/period you get it).
No, I specifically looked to remove any crapware and was surprised that there wasn't anything. I also just did a search for candy crush and I only got the website.
I'm on Pro and while Candy Crush was removed, I now have Farm Hero's Saga and something called "Groove Music". Netflix also somehow made its way there even though I've never once tried to watch it on this PC.
They are less brazen about it, I had to look in my Applications list.
I don't know about Server but my fresh Home edition installed a few months ago doesn't have Candy Crush or anything similar pre-installed. And same for my corporate laptop with LTSB - no pre-installed stuff.
I moved to Windows after 5 years of Mac this month. Because I knew I will be working from home, decided to build a good workstation (Thank you Ryzen ) and I Couldn't agree more WSL is very helpful for people who like windows UI and functionalities of Linux. There are few quirks but it works great.
My Linux setup is usually like this, but inside out. When I need Windows functions (which is not often), I fire up a VM (either with VirtualBox or KVM). WSL makes Windows useful for Linux development (my software will run on Linux, not Windows), but the rest of Windows is usually a bit of a pain.
I usually find the text less readable on Windows than it's on Linux or a Mac. Not sure it's an issue with Edge, my monitor's Gamma or what, but it just looks better on Linux (and perfect on a Mac).
I've tried both ways there too; at least a few years ago (may be different now) running windows as a HOST worked way better for me since Linux in a VM was way more well behaved than Windows would be.
Curious what kinds of problems you used to run into here that made you give up on Windows guest/Linux host. I've been running my daily driver that way for the past 3 months and haven't hit any issues aside from 2 nits:
- Windows 10 basically requires an SSD to get reasonable responsiveness. You could maybe get away with putting a disk image on an SSD, but for serious use it's best to dedicate a whole disk or partition to it.
- QEMU's default display adapter started "leaking" pending IO requests at one point, which grinds the VM from full speed to a halt over the course of an hour or so. I ended up disabling the display adapter and moving to just RDP, which is basically an even trade since the RDP client can do everything the SPICE client can.
It was probably closer to 8 years ago, so SSD's weren't really available. Given the time I really don't remember the specifics but it was a work-from-home job so we did a lot of video conferencing pre-Zoom, and used Skype and other tools a lot. IIRC, the windows apps we used didn't like not being close to the video hardware.
Running a Linux VM was pretty friction-free, and I could use all the company mandated tools that had to be run in Windows simultaneously without performance issues. WIth a windows guest, I wouldn't run it unless I needed one of those tools, but that required a fairly long spin-up time.
Like I said... almost a decade ago so they probably aren't problems now. I'm running Linux native right now, but again for the ease of corporate support, I may go with Windows + WSL2 for my next refresh.
> and used Skype and other tools a lot. IIRC, the windows apps we used didn't like not being close to the video hardware.
Indeed. I used to keep a Windows box for the smartcard reader bureaucratic obligations with the Brazilian government that I never managed to accurately emulate on VMs.
This is true. I have found text not so "crisp" and readable on windows compared to MAC. I have an LG Ultrawide monitor and used both Mac and Windows with it, there is a difference in the sharpness.
+1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux. I have noticed a few issues with it that don't make sense seeing as it's meant to have a full Linux Kernel (such as sockets not appearing) but that could be Ubuntu-20.04 being the one at fault to be fair :)
Sometimes i read thing like this and I feel they are from a different universe.
I am the first port of call for IT issues of the whole family, including grandma. Like 10 people, and the last time we had issue caused by windows update was like 5 years ago when a laptop was trying to update to W10 from W8. That required a bit of manual intervention.
Game icons certainly arent there for me any more.
Whats the issue with Onedrive? I mean, its preinstalled, but you dont have to run it.
Lucky you! In the last 6 months Windows tried to install an upgrade, failing endlessly, on both my mother's and sister's laptops.
It just tried to upgrade, failed during the reboot, reverted back and booted on the old version, just to start the whole process again after a few hours. And all the Microsoft Windows Update Assistant tools or whatever didn't work at all, so I just clean installed in frustration.
TBF though, my 2013 desktop never gave me a single issue on Windows..
Paradoxically, driver issues and update issues never show up on any desktops I had, they only show up on laptops with carefully selected and entirely manufacturer-controlled supply chain and parts.
WSL2 is a Linux VM, what's your use-case for native over that?
- You can disable updates
- I'm on the insider version and this has never happened to me, let alone for 'normal' users.
- You can uninstall all of that stuff
- It's not that bad, I work on a decentralised database and we have similar performance across Windows and Linux. Windows was a bit tougher to do but it got there :)
I'm honestly baffled that you've never experienced an update that bricked your system - how long have you been using Windows?
Two years ago Microsoft released an update that killed Windows on my brand new (at the time) desktop (i7-8700k, gtx 1080). I thought "no big deal, I'll boot up my old desktop and deal with it later" but when I turned on that machine (i5-2500k, rx480), it applied the same update and also killed the Windows install. At that point I gave up on using a desktop for the day and booted up Windows on my laptop (i7-7700HQ, gtx 1050m), only to have that also install the update and kill the install.
I'd had Windows updates break before that, but always on one machine so it was easy to write off as some driver quirk or something weird I had installed.
Not the parent, but I've been running Windows for decades on multiple machines (4 different ones at this time) - never once had an update brick a system.
You seem to be assuming everyone else is frequently having a problem because you have had it. In reality, these events are rare, which the overwhelming majority of people not having any issue.
I’ve only worked in tech for six years but I started as a sysadmin and managed a network of ~50 windows computers for two years, and then worked in a windows dev shop for three years, and I’ve never once seen an update brick Windows.
I’ve bricked windows by being dumb but I’ve also bricked Linux by being dumb. Sometimes I feel like it’s cool to hate Windows, like it’s cool to hate Java.
That's harsh but I agree with those points, Windows is still a consumer oriented operating system at its core, which has a lot of undesirable features for a developer.
Is macOS so different? You have to disable notifications manually every day to not have your developer workflow interrupted. The login screen is a 3D cube (weird, random and ugly). Icons in the dock wiggle. You delete applications by dragging them to trash bin. Maximizing Safari is impossible. The list goes on and on.
* shitload of failed updates: bricked OS, deleted user data etc
* stupid non-uninstallable game icons in start menu, a lot of vendor-forever-locked garbage like cortana & one drive
* bad fs performance in general
I'll add a couple of my own (and be a more restrained in my opinions)
* Windows + WSL is a hybrid environment. Files are on different places depending on from where you are looking. It feels like developing within Docker containers, without the power and flexibility.
* Low observability: very few programs log things and, while there is excellent system wide plumbing for that, very few programs are using it.
* PowerShell makes some questionable choices. For instance, "curl" is a built-in command that has different switches from its Unix homonym. It'd cost absolutely nothing to have a different name for that.
I'm wondering is there a Live Tile use-case that improving developer productivity?
I usually Win+Q or pin to taskbar to run program, almost never look at the default Live Tile.
PowerShell's syntax make me mad too, some Office 365 enterprise management tools is only available in Windows PowerShell only (You cannot run it in PowerShell of MacOS or Linux), so wired.
I was considering moving back to Windows since the new MBP lineup is so disappointing, but no TimeMachine, too many useless feature (Live Tile and so on) made me stick on MacOS.
Until a feature update ago, I was quite disappointed with Win10 as a dev platform. I'm running Win 10 Pro. Especially Windows Update was just plain intolerable.
However some time the past months I realized I don't think about Windows much... which means it's no longer constantly annoying me.
There are still stupid things, like Apps display language not being tied to the OS display language setting (wtf?!), but I can live with that. On a day to day basis my machine stays on, is performant, and does what I ask it to.
Why was Solitaire bundled even with the NT (i.e. enterprise/business) versions of Windows? No one ever questioned that, but everybody takes issue with Candy Crush? Weird...
And why is that? I never even once played Solitaire and uninstalled Candy Crush without even looking at it.
What's the deal with this sudden hatred towards nonsense that was installed 35 years ago as well and had a way bigger impact on system resources (in terms of disk space and screen real-estate) than Candy Crush?
Is it because it's a mobile port - too colourful and too in-your-face about it being a mindless pastime than a boomer-style virtual card game that even came with a "boss-key"?
If you leave some task processing overnight, that's probably not your 'core hours', unless you set it that way and not in the day. But then what if all your work is lost when an update is installed in your lunch break? It's ridiculous that there is (or was? Not sure if it's changed) no way to never automatically install an update.
Remember when Windows 10 was released and there were reports that Windows 8 would literally automatically update to Windows 10 without user intervention [1]. My mother's laptop did that and it bricked her install.
The OS taking over control of updates is totally user-hostile. 'Core hours' is just giving a little bit of that control back, it's not a solution.
Yes of course - saving work regularly is good. However apart from long-running tasks you can still lose things like the current state of your desktop and applications. Consider if you were working on something involved and had many applications running all with some complex state set up. You might not lose any data but you have lost the 'working memory' of what you were doing.
There is a problem on Linux with some software not being available or not being as well tested. Despite all the problems with Windows this means that sometimes having it is helpful.
It's really amazing. I don't know much about Linux, but whenever I need to use some Linux only tool(or works best on linux tool), I just use wsl. Tried using a couple of linux desktops but the user experience is just terrible compared to windows for day to day work and there aren't many softwares available.
> +1 for WSL 2. I'm a huge advocate of it at work where people are very pro-Linux
So your co-workers already use Linux (for free, I guess), but now you're trying to convince them to use a restricted Linux version that also costs money. How's that?
We develop cross-platform projects in an environment where Windows is a second-class citizen but accounts for the vast majority of our user base. WSL2 is a really nice stepping stone towards having both operating systems treated equally.
I use both extensively but settled for windows + WSL2 for now. In the end it's the little things:
- (fractional) scaling actually works quite well.
- the shell works a big better. Feels like a good compromise between gnomes simplicity and KDEs over the top customisability to me. KDE has actually been the most stable out of the three though.
- (Nvidia) driver support. Using Manjaro I had to reinstall the Nvidia driver every couple of months because a kernel update broke things. Again, not huge but annoying.
- Working hardware video decoding in firefox. On Linux playing videos results in significantly higher CPU load, noise, slowed down browser, etc. Even on a fast machine.
With wsl2 I can now do all my development in that environment and don't need to live with windows slow file system, missing package manager, etc. The remote development features of VSCode with wsl (and other ssh hosts) are also simply amazing.
Because the experience is terrible for the uninitiated. And this is coming from someone who ran Arch as their primary OS since I was 10. Laptop Linux on the whole is not a fun experience for those who just want a machine to work (which was what MacBooks were supposed to be about).
I just bought a Surface Laptop 3, and the machine is great. The hardware is nice, Windows on a laptop has improved tenfold since I've last used it. WSL2 means Linux isn't left out.
It's one machine/OS combo that does everything for me, including light gaming, whereas Linux and macOS both have significant compromises when using them.
It's simply not true. Install Ubuntu or Fedora, run Gnome 3 and everything "just works". You can't use Arch as an example here - it is intentionally very basic, and takes a lot of effort to learn as you do almost everything from scratch. While many people appreciate that level of control, it is unnecessary if you're just trying to get work done.
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on a built-for-it new Intel-based machine. The amount of "just works" is surprisingly good. But when it goes downhill, it goes downhill steeply. Took me a day to figure out why it wasn't connecting to my Exchange server (TLS 1.3). No screen sharing on Wayland. Etc.
> that simply don't occur on Windows, mostly because of MS superior QA
You're comparing an OS that hasn't had a major release in almost 5 years to a bleeding edge Linux distribution. Install an older LTS version of Ubuntu or Debian and things will be quite stable.
With laptops, you need to buy hardware designed for Linux if you want a good experience with it. System76 and Purism make great machines. With Proton, Windows games run effortlessly from Steam on Linux.
I must disagree with you.
I have been installing Linux for people who barely know how to use a mouse and the experience was always successful.
Of course, I choose a distro with simple UI and software with GUI every time.
I don't want to get into the typical "if my mom gets it everyone can" (also because she is a power user) but trust me, the people I installed it for had the same problems they would have had with any OS (some quite funny).
It's been Xubuntu for almost a decade, I think.
I tried Lubuntu but, at least at the time, it had no pulse audio which wasn't great.
I tried Budgie but it has some paper cut bugs that I couldn't live with (some might).
I run Ubuntu on my work Dell Latitude (i3wm), Debian on my personal System 76 (Mate) and both work more or less flawlessly, although I do agree with the guy who said Battery is not great.
I also have a Desktop with Windows and Linux dual booting, and while I agree Windows is quite polished when it works, I also find a million little annoyances.
I made the jump and it's been mostly smooth (7th gen X1 Carbon with Fedora).
The one thing that is annoying is when using multiple monitors of different resolutions, Wayland doesn't seem to scale resolution on a per-monitor basis. With the laptop being 4k this is an issue when working anywhere but at home, I tend to just use the laptop screen (which is excellent btw).
Stuff that worked without any extra config that in the past might not have been so smooth: wifi, fingerprint reader, thunderbolt dock with keyboard, mouse, monitor, external USB soundblaster and network cable plugged in), sleep, hibernate.
Any other laptop will boot linux, but you'll end up with a lot of rough edges...
For example, on the laptop I'm typing this on (latest Ubuntu, old Acer 511G):
* Random hangs every few days - some unpatched processor bug related to sleep states.
* Wifi diconnects randomly.
* Hotkeys don't work
* Screen sometimes dims itself to zero, and since the hotkeys don't work, it's rather tricky to fix.
* Bluetooth doesn't work
* Hibernate and sleep are disabled by default and you have to go into a config file to enable them. SD card doesn't work after sleeping more than 3 times.
* Fans don't work at all. System throttles almost immediately under any load.
* There must be some issue with the SSD losing writes because even journaled ext4 seems to get data corruption after an unclean poweroff.
* External monitors don't support hdmi audio.
* of the 3 USB ports, 2 don't work for anything more than charging devices.
* webcam LED state seems random, and does not correlate to webcam usage at all.
All on one device!
Linux on Thinkpad is great. Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.
> Linux on any other hardware that core kernel devs don't use day to day is almost unusable due to these thousands of rough edges.
Running on 2 old Dells and an Asus with no problems (Ubuntu 18.04, upgraded in place from 16.04). Your statement is absurd on its face just based on its generality.
Of the things you've listed, I can't say anything about external HDMI audio because I don't have one, and the default hibernate thing I can confirm. Every other one I've never had, much less daily.
From personal experience, I've only had that many issues once on a bleeding edge MSI. It took about a month to work out the issues. Every other system I've used has had a much smaller subset of those issues (I'm not using a Thinkpad). Namely Bluetooth or the fans not working, and individually resolvable.
A huge number of small annoyances during "normal" usage of a computer. Issues with sleep, displays, hi DPI, even my wallpaper and fonts don't always display correctly...
I have issues with Sleep and Displays on my macbook, and I had to pay extra for the privilege of having windows snap to the sides, easily the best innovation in window managers since being able to put them over one another.
All x86 servers, PCs, and laptops are designed to run Windows by adhering to a specification issued by Microsoft and certified by running a suite of compatibility tests provided by Microsoft (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/hlk/). The free OSes are piggybacking on that; there is no independent, neutral standard for the architecture of x86 PCs.
> "My Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both work flawlessly for many years. They are designed for GNU/Linux."
I had Lenovo T530 and it worked OK, but with half the battery life. Then I had XPS 15 and I got it working after a lot of fiddling, but with a third of battery life and with hidpi issues on wake up.
For me, it limits the laptops available, with Windows I am pretty confident that any reasonable config laptop from Dell or Lenovo will not give me any issues. With Linux I have to be extra cautious while buying it. Also I am used to MS Office and occasionally play Age of Empires and Minecraft.
My experience shows WSL is passable, but it often feels "hacky" and incoherent. For professional work it just doesn't feel right to me. Plus the usability of Windows OS itself is just a complete mess... Honestly, I'd rather just run a regular VM with linux and full-screen that, rather than deal with Windows with Linux bolted on to the side.
If work is paying, I'm still going macbook, as I don't really care about the reliability aspect of the machine nor the insane cost of peripherals/the laptop itself. If I'm paying, I'll probably go for a Dell or Lenovo machine and install Linux. I just can't stand using windows any more.
