[toast0]

I haven't used this Xserver, but I've used most (all?) of the free Xservers for Windows over time.

As background Windows is my preferred desktop environment for about the last ten years[1], but I do most of my "real work" on FreeBSD or Linux; having an Xserver on windows means I can do graphical work and have it mostly work.

Utilitywise, I can do things like running an image viewer to see what pictures I have in a directory.

I run mythtv; most of the administration can be done through the TV facing interface or the web interface, but some things need to be done with mythtv-setup; it runs terribly over remote X (for no good reason), but at least it runs.

I was writing a terrible NES emulator for fun, having an Xserver meant I could write it where I'm comfortable writing software, and display it where I'm comfortable with a desktop.

I'm writing a terrible operating system, which I run with QEMU for the time being; the VGA console is an X window (I support serial console and it's better than VGA, but I like to keep an eye on the VGA, because I'd like to run it on some of my home systems, and they don't all have serial ports).

[1] Although Microsoft seems to be trying to push people away again, running on the default platform has a lot of benefits.

[datnoblesavage]

What benefits do you see from running windows? I really see none as a software dev and os enthusiast. The only reason I kept windows so long was for a game that I stopped playing 2 years ago, and the only reason I have to use it now is because the company I currently work in has made us use it. WSL makes me embarrassed to show my work colleague how good linux/vim/tmux really is (but that might be because the laptop's 8gb is almost totally used up by invisible processes (whereas the wsl portion uses around 500mb!))

[_ph_]

Well, you list one of the benefits of running Windows, you can keep working at your company :p. Many companies don't allow running Linux natively. For example, because Office and Outlook are considered mandatory tools. There is other software, which is only available on Windows or the Mac. Also, it is still not a trivial thing to buy a random laptop and get full hardware support, especially with very new hardware. Not even to mention NVidia...

As a consequence, Mac+VMware is my currently preferred way of running Linux, and Windows+WSL is an increasingly attractive alternative to this.

[stragies]

In some business sectors I see increasing demand for bottom-up-open-stack, going as far as inquiring about "Open-Firmware-no-BLOB" computing devices for all important tasks, including network and domain control, where "legacy client application systems like Windows/Outlook/Office" are relegated to isolated TS-Servers, and are being replaced by glorified thin-clients, with a local browser, media-decoder, and RDP-RemoteApp-client, all running open stack. Currently the problem here is the availability of ARM system with user-configurable TrustZone support.

But O.K., I admit, we also have a lot businesses wanting less paranoid data security practices for the sake of convenience, or other legacy Apps/Hardware.

[toast0]

> What benefits do you see from running windows?

I get to use the most tested version of all the cross platform software. Things that work for others, usually works for me. I can buy software off the shelf (games, TurboTax, whatever --- if they sell it at the store, it will run on Windows, unless I'm in the wrong store). Most desktop oriented open source is targetted towards Windows, unless it's specifically Mac focused.

When I was getting tired of my laptop running Linux was right around the release of Windows 7, which was a very nice release. I'm not sure I'll stick around with Windows 10, but at least for now, things mostly work, and I fight less with my computer than before.

[stjohnswarts]

There are lots of professional software that only runs on Windows. I don't understand why you can't run windows programs/OS and also still be an open source advocate/fan/user?

[jiggawatts]

It's always bemuses me to see some Linux developers talk like there is literally no other option, and that all 'real' development is done on Linux.

Meanwhile, in the Real World(tm), something like 80% of all software is developed for Windows or other non-Linux operating systems.

Linux is just the most popular, at the moment, with a small subset of developers in a certain age-range. Mostly web-developers working outside of the enterprise environments, such as startups. These are people that think MySQL is a real database, PHP is a proper programming language, and Bash is the only shell.

I have the same reaction when I see some documentation with instructions on "how to set up Kerberos support" that doesn't even mention Active Directory. It's as if the authors came from some alternate reality, a parallel Earth where Windows Server isn't quite literally 99.9% of all deployed Kerberos authentication systems.

I'm a consultant that gets to visit many different types of organisations, big and small, many with on-site or outsourced development teams. Almost all of them use Windows, develop in C#, VB, or Java and deploy on IIS or various Java platforms, but still on Windows. There are a handful that use the LAMP stack or WordPress, but these are few and far between.

Try Visual Studio and C#, focusing on its strengths like the "async" keyword. Try writing a little web app using the latest .NET Core and MS SQL Server 2019. Try adding some ColumnStore indexes on your data and point PowerBI at it. The performance will blow your mind.

PS: All of the above are free, and/or free for developers:

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downlo...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-serve...

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

[_ph_]

Yes, the "desktop" is basically Windows with some traces of Macs :). For server-like systems, Linux has pretty much "won" though. Which probably is the reason why MS is working on WSL. There are also a lot of GUI applications, which run mostly on Linux because their work domain fits in a server-like setup - and be it even for data protection reasons where the applications are running on a server cluster accessed by a remote protocol like Citrix.