[delta_p_delta_x]

> All the major tools for advanced work are Linux-based

No, they aren't. Linux hasn't yet got anything remotely close to PDB symbol servers and WinDbg's record-replay debugging. perf is... an attempt.

Source: worked on Windows and Linux drivers and user-mode applications. Windows tooling blows the competition out of the water in actually advanced developer experience. Vim is cool to the ricing hackerman types but not people who actually earn salaries. Windows doesn't need Docker because it has a stable user-mode ABI.

[ikidd]

You could exhaust Windows networking or filesystem features in an afternoon. Linux could give you a career.

I spent 20 years supporting Windows server and server applications like Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, etc, etc, and when I left that industry and got back to Linux, I was absolutely floored about what I had been missing. No wonder Windows had it's lunch eaten in virtually every facet by Linux server applications.

[warshinder]

I know you’re joking, but there is a very small sliver of truth in there somewhere. There are some tools on windows that stand shoulder to shoulder with better os’s.

[frollogaston]

If I couldn't afford a Mac, I'd certainly try Linux, but there's a chance I'd fall back to Windows. In that case would be doing a lot in WSL. Been earning salary writing code in Vim for quite a while now (pre Claude), idk what else I'd have been using.

[theamk]

advanced work != advanced tools

You can have basic and not very user friendly tool, and work on very advanced topics, such as new forms of networking, innovative database, cool filesystem or storage devices, etc...

Or you can be an advanced windows developer with very nice tools, and yet work on something utterly mundane, like an internal app which tracks time off in your company, schedules delivery of parts, or provides a (granted, very nice and polished) UI to the backend database server which runs Linux.

In my experience, most of the advanced work is done on Linux nowadays. Just look at HN front page - how many posts are Windows-only and are not "new UI over existing library/service"?

[frollogaston]

What about Windows prevents you from dealing with advanced concepts like networking or databases?

[delta_p_delta_x]

Windows does plenty of 'advanced work'. Almost all video games are written primarily on and for Windows.

> In my experience, most of the advanced work is done on Linux nowadays

That's because your experience probably hasn't ever included work on Windows internals. Take it from someone who has—the complexity and 'advancedness' of the stuff running on Windows is at least equal to that of Linux or any other OS. The fact that Windows can so thoroughly abstract the computer away from the user is in itself a massive feat that few other OSs have really managed.

> Just look at HN front page - how many posts are Windows-only

The overwhelming majority of posts on the HN front page are now LLM slop or web development. I seriously dislike this insinuation that work done on Windows is, as the grandparent claims, 'unserious' or less advanced.

[theamk]

I have no doubt that Windows internals are at least as complex as Linux internals. Actually they are likely much more complex - all that backward compatibility won't shrink the API surface or make it easier to program.

But are they "advanced", in the sense of "to make progress or improve"?

Take filesystems for example... Linux has zfs (this one actually came from Solaris, but the latest versions come from ZfsOnLinux), btrfs, bcachefs was pretty cool if not for all that drama. What about Windows? It has NTFS and ReFS, the latter is for enterprise segments only, and is less capable than ZFS. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that ReFS is very complex - it has many lines of code and managing it is hard, it's just it has less features than zfs.

So if you love filesystems, and want to make a difference there, which OS should you work with? Linux, or some sort of BSD.. anything but Windows.

Now, what about networking? I've read about some marketing blurbs about Windows networking features that could mean something innovative. Unfortunately that was it - marketing blurbs. No technical designs, packet formats, no blog posts... You have to go to Linux/BSD for this.

Maybe security? There is a lot of information about Windows security, because it is such a popular target. But what about active defenses? Kernel hardening, sandboxing, lightweight VMs, etc...? This all originated outside of Windows.

Now, I am happy to admit that Windows is a very complex system, and that Microsoft did a great job polishing everything and presenting it to user. Microsoft is also great at taking an experimental systems and getting them in front of everyone (all that GUI hardening comes to mind).

But if you are interested in progress of operating systems and adjacent things, the projects which advance state of the art and introduce ideas no one has implemented before... Don't look at Windows.

[silverlimetea]

> people who actually earn salaries

Maybe a hot take but the world's "most advanced software engineering" is not happening in W-2 employment scenarios.