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by modernerd 2798 days ago
I intend to slug it out with Windows 10 if I switch from MacBook to ThinkPad.

I love Linux (Arch/KDE enthusiast) but there are benefits to Windows too: it generally has better support for gaming, gamedev (all the gamedev live streamers I follow seem to be perfectly productive with Windows), C# development, Adobe apps, and deeper hardware integration (biometrics/Windows Hello and touchscreen support). There still seems to be a huge stigma with using Windows in some developer communities, but I think I can live with that…
1 comments
mcv 2798 days ago
Does Windows come with a better command line shell yet? That's the big thing keeping me away. There's just so much unix-based tooling (works on both Linux and Mac) that I don't want to go without.
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modernerd 2798 days ago
Yes, there is the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which is a compatibility layer for running Linux binaries natively on Windows:

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheYearOfLinuxOnTheWindowsDes...

https://github.com/sirredbeard/Awesome-WSL

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

I haven't switched to Windows 10 full-time yet, but WSL works remarkably well whenever I've tried it.

Cmder (http://cmder.net/) and ConEmu (https://conemu.github.io/) are pretty decent terminal emulators and Terminus (https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/#header ) looks promising too. (It's hard to beat iTerm, though.)

My other concern with Windows 10 was security and viruses. Last time I used Windows every day (~1999!) that was a huge concern, but it seems to be less of one now. Most seem to consider using the standard Windows-supplied virus checker just fine if you're not torrenting dodgy stuff and opening strange email attachments.

The following guide (from the @SwiftOnSecurity twitter author) was helpful:

https://decentsecurity.com/#/securing-your-computer/

It contains much the same advice for Windows that you'd expect to see for keeping macOS secure too — keep stuff up-to-date, encrypt your drives, don't try to disable User Account Control or Device Guard (like Gatekeeper on Mac).

I've found that chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/) is a great replacement for brew, Laragon (https://laragon.org/) is a good alternative to Valet, and Autohotkey (https://autohotkey.com/) is unrivaled for general system automation. (See Tom Scott waxing lyrical about Windows and AHK here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFE7h3m40U ).

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