[WD-42]

You'd rather see another crappy, slow editor packaging an entire browser? Because that seems like what people are using for "cross platform toolkits" these days. I'm glad Zed is being ambitious, it's truly a joy to use because it feels native. And to be honest, it's Windows, who cares. If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway.

[perching_aix]

> If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway.

This is so often repeated, but I genuinely don't understand why. Could you try selling me on it? I ended up going the sysadmin/devops route instead after college, but the more I learn about Linux, the less I understand why anyone would choose it for personal, active manual use.

I can understand server deployments, it works well enough. It's available at no cost, Windows Server is way out in the far other end in terms of current desired behavior, and whatever pains it has you get paid to make up for. None of which applies on a personal device level.

The most common selling points I see are more performance and less "spying". I find neither of these very persuasive, and I'm not interested in ideological rationales either (supporting free software). If you have anything else, I'm all ears.

[skydhash]

Not selling you on it, as I find that, if you're using IDEs, OSes don't really matter. And windows can be actually beneficial as you'll get prime support from most vendors. Where Unix shine is adhoc automation. Almost everything is fully hackable and that makes some solution easier to implement.

As in case for the desktop, you can switch out your audio stack, alter the display of any element and many other things. Using windows is borrowing some shoes while Linux can be your favorite slipper.

[perching_aix]

Do you have any easy automations in mind that would be broadly appealing and one really needs to go out of their way to implement on Windows / is impossible to do so?

I have a few things here and there, but it's more a scheduled script or two than anything more elaborate, and I don't think they were difficult to make and deploy.

> you can switch out your audio stack

Why would I want that? Isn't this more for someone doing live audio production (e.g. due to latency concerns)?

In general, the customizability angle is also another that doesn't resonate with me much. It's less that I want to customize my stuff, and more that I want my stuff to be to my liking from the get-go.

[skydhash]

> Do you have any easy automations in mind that would be broadly appealing and one really needs to go out of their way to implement on Windows / is impossible to do so?

There’s no broad stroke here. It’s more about the possibility to adjust something here and there. I don’t have anything against windows technically (I’ll use it with no complaints if it’s work provided).

When I notice something I don’t like (workflow mostly instead of appearance), I want to be able to fix it instead of suffering it (unless I’m being paid).

[wolvesechoes]

> if you're using IDEs, OSes don't really matter

Unless you are using Visual Studio that blews out every other IDE out of the water if you consider debugging and profiling experience.

> As in case for the desktop, you can switch out your audio stack, alter the display of any element and many other things. Using windows is borrowing some shoes while Linux can be your favorite slipper.

Ah yes, biggest Linux advantage - being a mud hut.

[Aeolun]

Well, the thing I absolutely love about my linux setup, is that I can literally leave my computer running for a year, come back after that one year, and find it in exactly the state I left it. The system will never attempt to do anything for my own protection. No updates without me confirming them, never suddenly having it shut down because there’s a “critical” vulnerability. When it updates it never magically reverts a setting I had set.

Everything it does or doesn’t do is my responsibility.

[mudkipdev]

Try compiling anything in C

[wolvesechoes]

Are you saying that it is somehow complicated to press Build in the VS window?

[mudkipdev]

Visual Studio uses MSVC along with its own project format. Most C projects depend on specific tool chains or compilers.

[steve_adams_86]

No, there are good reasons developers are on Windows. Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based, for better or worse. Heaps of games are developed on Windows. Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows.

[com2kid]

Being ~2 weeks into migrating from Windows to Linux for my dev machine, there are a lot of good reasons why people use Windows, and I keep learning more each and every day!

From a lock screen that appears ~3 seconds after my desktop does (during which time I can interact with my desktop...) to getting Nvidia GPU passthrough working in Docker being harder running on Linux natively than what it was making it work on WLS (...) to absurd amount of time it takes my machine to come out of sleep.

Oh also the popping and clicking over my BT headset every time someone speaks in a meeting. That was wonderful.

Despite using an older model MB, I needed to install some kernel extensions to get system temperatures working.

Also if I want to develop desktop software, I'm going to be writing against Windows anyway because at least that is somewhat documented, vs the ever changing landscape of Linux desktop software development. (Windows used to be the OS for desktop software, but Microsoft shot themselves in that foot, then removed the entire leg, long ago, by constantly changing and deprecating frameworks, ugh, 20+ years of API stability down the drain...)

[saghm]

> to Nvidia GPU passthrough working in Docker being harder running on Linux natively than what it was making it work on WLS

To be fair, assuming you're using WSL2, you're running docker on a VM, so it doesn't sound that crazy that it might be more work without the abstraction around the hardware that defines. If there were a built-in VM for your Linux distro, it might end up being easier to expose the GPU through that to things running on it than directly too. I can't say I've ever had any need to access a GPU from a container running on a VM then, so this is just conjecture.

[inetknght]

> Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based

I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices.

> Heaps of games are developed on Windows

Inertia.

> Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows.

Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine.

[delta_p_delta_x]

> Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine

The overwhelming majority of software written against MinGW (or worse, Cygwin) are bad/lazy ports of Linux-first software. Case in point: Git and Perl, both of which drag along an entire coreutils ecosystem (each, so you have two copies of `ls`) along with the main binaries.

First-class Windows programs that are used every day like Office, Chromium and its forks, the Adobe suite, and tons and tons of internal administrative programs for HR, inventory, and more are written on Windows, for Windows, using C# or C++ and 'boring', so-called enterprisey frameworks like WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI 2.

Anyone remotely serious about taking advantage of the large (albeit shrinking) market share of Windows users should at the very least fire up a VM to test their release binaries, rather than just 'use Wine'.

[WD-42]

Ironically it was the act of doing that: spinning up a VM to test a release on Windows, which really turned me against it forever. During installation, I counted 4 un-skippable EULAS about "sharing data" and then asked me what my ad preferences were. To add insult to injury once I finally did get it installed, the start menu was full of Xbox apps and the taskbar had some news headline about the Kardashians on it.

I don't know how people put up with it. It feels disrespectful.

[delta_p_delta_x]

> I don't know how people put up with it. It feels disrespectful.

I install the Enterprise/Education versions.

[WD-42]

No. I’ll install Linux which doesn’t make me the product.

[steve_adams_86]

> I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices.

I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial.

> Inertia.

I think that's a tough case to make. Windows offers legitimate technical advantages for gaming and game development. Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge. There are real workflow benefits.

> Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows.

You know more about this than I do. That sounds kind of wild to me, like it could be a pretty awful work flow at times for no good reason. It looks like you don't have access to native debugging tools and Wine itself introduces potential compatibility risks. I would rather just develop on target, personally

[atiedebee]

> Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge. There are real workflow benefits.

This seems very much like something that happened because it had such a large market share, not because of any inherent technical advantages

[broodbucket]

>Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge.

This is a product of inertia. If Windows didn't have inertia it wouldn't have ecosystem advantages, it's not inherent to Windows itself

[rstuart4133]

> I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial.

Maybe he's thinking of more modern devices. There was a time when Microsoft flogged WinCE as an embedded solution, and yes a lot of people producing embedded stuff drank the kool aid.

I watched one instance of this happen first hand. They asked me what OS should they base their shiny new product (that I would be the first customer of), I said I would use some 'nix, but they should chose what they were comfortable with.

It turned out to be bad advice. They were comfortable with Windows desktop of course, so they chose WinCE. WinCE is not the stable WinNT they were familiar with, despite what Microsoft's marketing said. I've used a number of WinCE based devices in the past, they were all about as reliable as Windows 95/ME, which is to say most wouldn't last the day without rebooting.

In the end they could only get it working by shipping the product to a team in Germany that had access to the WinCE source. It cost them a small fortune, and lost them over a year. The delay lost me as a customer.

Most (I hope all, but it's never all) of todays experienced software engineers wouldn't make that mistake, but these people where (pretty good) hardware engineers, with a vision for a product they built the hardware for. Developing software was something you hired people to so for you, like plumbing and legal work. And they wanted those people to provide them with a familiar environment.

WinCE has long since been retired, or course. May it soul burn in hell. Yes, those same hardware engineers who insist on sticking to what they are familiar with might turn to Windows 11 instead. But that comes with costs - no ARM or other CPU's, huge resource requirements, insistence on TPM's, so little lack of control of the platform that you lose control of the USS Yorktown [0]. Those costs are large. In fact so large they would have overwhelmed the budget of my engineering friends years ago, and they would have just gone with Linux. I haven't seen a new embedded Windows design in quite a while, so I suspect that's true for most embedded projects now.

[0] https://archive.is/aKrml

[steve_adams_86]

Sorry, it is my mistake. I was more so talking about software for working on industrial embedded devices (machinery, robots, or similar), which often use bespoke software for editing ladder logic or similar things for devices like PLCs.

I've never encountered a robot that didn't require windows to program. I know they're out there, but they don't seem common in my experience. Building them yourself is possible, but you regularly encounter cases where common, well-supported components require Windows to program. It's a drag.

I'd love to see it — Windows is far from my preferred OS. But my original point was essentially that there are tons of reasons like this which makes Windows a very productive and useful platform for many developers. I totally agree that there are cases where Linux or macOS are better (I prefer them both when possible) and yeah, WinCE was a total mess even by consumer standards. I had a pocket pc (ha, I was so excited about it) and it was a tremendous letdown largely because of the OS.

Side note, thanks for reminding me of that era. As bad as the software was, those devices were so god damn exciting. A pocket computer! I still remember how incredibly futuristic it felt.

[cholantesh]

As someone who's ambivalent about the experience, I'd say "because that's what my employer issued to me" is perfectly acceptable.

[steve_adams_86]

It's also probably one of the most common explanations for why anyone's using it. It's 70% of the market, and even more if you focus on enterprise. Us Linux and Mac folks are weirdos.

[psyclobe]

Was a windows dev for 20 years-but then I got a job where I didn’t have to use that ad infested joke of an operating system.

Never going back.

[pjmlp]

I use computers since 1986, UNIX variants since 1992, and yet Windows is where I spend most of my time.

I find hilarious this FOSS concept that developers only use Linux, I wonder who writes software for all other operating systems in the world.

[wolvesechoes]

> You'd rather see another crappy, slow editor packaging an entire browser?

Windows still offers other options, even if MS itself tend to ignore them.

> If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway.

Developers is much broader set than web developers, and even then advantages of Linux escape me.

[vovavili]

>If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway.

These days, WSL2 effectively eliminates a need for that for most developers.

[pjmlp]

And cheaper than VM Workstation, or easier than Virtual Vox, my solutions since 2010, I never dual booted again in 15 years.

[LtWorf]

If you write a very narrow category of high level server software or command line utilities.

Otherwise no.

[jamwil]

Some people work for large corporations and can’t just use whatever computer they want.