Ask HN: Has Windows improved for Unix-based workflows?

9 pointsthrowaway02557y ago7 comments

I’m impressed with the Surface Pro hardware and could see myself dropping Mac hardware entirely.

What stops me is Windows. I’m very comfortable in Unix-like environments and I’m not giving that up.

Last time I used Windows (~8 years ago?) it wasn’t really possible to achieve a comfortable Unix-like workflow in Windows, and the quality of tooling and ecosystem for Windows devs was abysmal (unless you were doing Windows platform dev specifically). But their recent activity with VS Code and support for open source and acquisition of GitHub etc makes me think maybe that situation has improved recently.

Have any of you switched from Mac (or Linux) back to Windows recently and kept a Unix-based workflow? What solutions did you find, and how painful has it been?

7 comments

mrdependable7y ago

I have recently switched from Mac to Windows using WSL. It works, but isn’t quite as intuitive as I had been hoping for. The Linux part kind of lives on its own separately from Windows and you have to make a choice whether you’re going to use the WSL or use Windows. There isn’t really any mixing of the two as far as I have seen (eg installing Ruby vía WSL and running commands from Windows won’t work). Probably better explained and expected from people who understand the architecture better than I do.

useiuser7y ago

I did and its fantastic if u use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which let's u actually just use a headless Ubuntu within windows seemless integrated.

throwaway0255OP7y ago

Looks interesting. Can you go into some detail on what your workflow is like? Is your dev environment pure Linux then, able to install everything in aptitude, etc?

How does using an IDE like IntelliJ work?

t3rabytes7y ago

Has disk I/O gotten better with WSL? I tried moving from MacOS to Windows, but WSL was just too slow because of the I/O issues.

aosaigh7y ago

This is the real issue with WSL. I also tried to move to Windows with WSL but any heavy IO operations (npm install for example) that would take < 1 minute natively took 10 minutes on WSL. I thought I could just use virtual machines within Windows instead, but every configuration I tried had short comings and I just couldn't get a productive work environment up and running so I've switched back to Mac.

__MatrixMan__7y ago

Ubuntu on a Surface Pro 3 is my daily driver. The install requires a bit of jumping through hoops, but once you've managed to boot into the right partition everything works as expected. Everything I use at least.

slipwalker7y ago

this sounds very exciting, a refurbished one for a travel machine might be a good bang-for-the-buck ratio.

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