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by yummyfajitas 3536 days ago
Out of curiosity, do any long term Linux users have experience with the new windows? I.e. is windows now an acceptable Linux?

I've been using Linux for > 15 years and my emacs config is older than git. (Repo was converted from svn to darcs to hg to git over many years.) Now windows purports to run Linux binaries, has a tiling window manager and good command lines. Is it worth considering as a primary os?
4 comments
randomsearch 3536 days ago
Depends what you're doing.

For most technical work, hacking, most coding, Linux is the way to go. .NET being a notable exception. I don't have experience of powershell but it doesn't make much sense to me to use anything but *NIX if you're hacking, eg bash is the de facto standard shell.

If you're using a laptop, Windows still has big advantages in terms of drivers, "just working" etc. But then I'd buy a MacBook anyway.

The general UI is fine with Windows 10. I actually prefer the task bar to OS X's dock and definitely to Unity.

But overall I find things still don't work here and there. Stuff randomly crashes still, you do find yourself restarting and reinstalling things. And I've only been using it rarely (colleague insist on using Windows).

In a word, I guess, "no".

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philtar 3536 days ago
I switched. The customizability of linux isn't there which I sorely miss, but now my laptop runs quietly and gets 8 hours of power as opposed to 4-5
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patates 3535 days ago
Having to log out and back in to refresh ENV is the biggest annoyance IMHO.
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calferreira 3535 days ago
Have you tried tlp or powertop on your linux installation ?
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lj3 3535 days ago
I've been using linux since 2001, but I do hop around from OS to OS depending on what's mandated at my current place of employment.

If you just focus on the LXSS, windows 10 isn't bad[0]. It's still effectively beta, so there are things it can't do, like list running windows processes and kill them from the command line or launching a windows app[1].

Development is identical between my ubuntu machine and my windows machine. I use ack, vim and other command line tools as my IDE and I haven't noticed much difference between the systems. I do occasionally run into an issue with live code reloading systems (like middleman-livereload). It looks for a valid ip address to use instead of just using 127.0.0.1, but the networking subsystem hasn't been exposed to LXSS yet, so it errors out. webpack-livereload works fine though as does apache and mysql.

[0]: there are many, many other complaints I have about the OS. I use it right now because of the better driver support and video games.

[1]: I think they added that just recently, as per https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/interop?f=2...

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patates 3535 days ago
Wow, Windows has a tiling window manager? You don't mean window snapping hopefully, or do you?
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