[astrodust]

WSL could have avoided all of this. Windows has never, ever been a friendly place to install programming languages of any kind.

With WSL I've been able to use Windows for actual development. Want Node? Got it. Python? Done. How Windows has never come up with something as slick as apt baffles me. That shouldn't be hard!

It used to be a good day to wrangle it into submission, with all sorts of ridiculous things like restarting or logging out/logging in depending on the package in question.

[JPKab]

Anaconda would have avoided this. It's a breeze to install on Windows.

The Windows answer to apt is chocolatey, BTW.

FYI, Windows 10 is actually pretty easy to deal with. The primary issue I see these days is around certain numerical libraries not building unless user has CPP compiler installed.

[astrodust]

Windows 10 + WSL is a dramatic improvement over the experience on Windows 8 and earlier, but it just goes to show how good things could have been all along if Microsoft had ever committed to making a Windows package manager.