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by NotTheDr01ds 1531 days ago
I am truly curious what terminal app in Linux you feel is better than Windows Terminal at this point. While the terminal experience in Windows languished for many years, Windows Terminal has quickly evolved to be one of the (if not the) best there is on any platform.

But I certainly could be missing out on a great Linux terminal. If there's one that is better than Windows Terminal, I could switch to it under WSL/WSLg on Windows 11.

Bonus: Windows Terminal's release notes occasionally include some fun nuggets like:

> You spoke up about the scroll bars being WAY TOO THIN, so we chonked them up

> Our confidence in the settings UI's Save button has led to us no longer backing up the settings JSON file. We won't be deleting the 61,000 backups we did leave on your hard drive, but what's a couple thousand kilobytes between friends?

> The breadcrumbs have been picked up and will no longer navigate you to strange cottages

> No longer will dropdown menus and combo boxes fly wildly off the screen if you scroll or drag the window! Rejoice!

:-)

5 comments

I use Konsole. Yakuake for quick access. Yakuake just runs Konsole in a drop-down application made with Qt. I like Qt and KDE a lot, so I'm probably biased in that sense.

Ive been using tmux with these two for years. It's everything I need and more. Ive never tried windows terminal, i usually only boot up the windows PC for gaming, and honestly once EAC and Proton work together I won't even need to do that anymore. I'll have to check out windows terminal next time im on that PC though, thanks for sharing. Always curious to hear what others are using.

Oh man, Windows Terminal is a wonderful thing! I've used Konsole extensively; I've been a filthy dual booter for many years now.

But I never did much development on Windows until a particular job I had about a year ago. It was a Windows shop and we did everything between WSL2, VSCode, and Windows Terminal. It was actually... a really nice developer experience. I was very pleasantly surprised by how well things worked. WSL2 isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but the newer WSLg on Windows 11 solves some of those problems.

If I could have the Windows Terminal in a Linux desktop distro, I would take it in a heartbeat. I think you're in for a treat if you give it a try!

From a slightly broader view, Windows + WSL2/WSLg + Windows Terminal is a pretty great experience that manages to combine a lot of the best of both Windows and Linux worlds, IMHO.

Been considering a switch from Gnome to Kubuntu (coincident with an uplevel to 20.04) based on trust in reports here on HN that recent KDE is much improved. Would you second that praise?
Yeah I'd say give it a shot and see if you like it. I hopped for years until I landed on Kubuntu and I've never had the urge to leave, it just feels right for me. I still play with VMs sometimes to explore, but Kubuntu has been my home since 18.04 was released. If you're looking to switch to the next LTS, might as well wait a few weeks for 22.04. If you're not sure mess around with a Kubuntu VM until 22.04 is available, then you can make a choice based on that experience.

KDE connect is also very cool, if you give it a shot definitely check it out. I really enjoy the customization plasmashell offers, and it's all integrated very well. You can also set window behaviors to keep on top and remember scale / position, which i use when debugging GUI applications so I can click around my IDE without having to shuffle windows. There's just a ton of great functionality to explore.

Seems 22.04 may be where Ubuntu at last does make Firefox installable by Snap only.

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2473114

Gross. I very much dislike snap. Thanks for sharing though, i will probably just have to postpone the jump to 22.04 a bit longer. Im doing fine on 20.04 without any snap packages.

Very disappointing news.

> I am truly curious what terminal app in Linux you feel is better than Windows Terminal at this point.

I like suckless terminal. It emulates a terminal in X11. It adds copy/paste and a few other conveniences. It does nothing else. There is no scroll bar, there is no configuration, there are no menus and no combo boxes. It's just a terminal emulator, and it works.

Kitty is the most superior Linux terminal. Ones like gnome-terminal are outstanding too, but not that much better than the stuff you'll find on Windows, e.g. PuTTY. The way I judge them is this: can the terminal render 60fps mpeg videos as ansi without delay using printvideo.com?
Last I used Windows was Windows 7 and the terminal was serviceable but not as useful as kitty. It wasn't as fast for sure. I also don't think it used a text-based configurtion file I could edit and check into my configs repo.
I would say kitty is still better than Windows Terminal - although the gap is narrowing, for my use cases.