Clearly Windows is trying to remove the stigma of using Windows for development, adding WSL fairly recently, acquiring GitHub (which has Co-Pilot), extending their relationship with OpenAI and along with this, creating their new dev home system - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-home/<p>What are your thoughts on Windows getting rid of this stigma?
I use Windows at work and dual boot windows + distro hop in home desktop (currently: Fedora)<p>The good:<p>- In the past 5 years my Windows development experience went from garbage to pretty good.<p>- VS Code + devcontainers + Docker / Podman Desktop using WSL 2 as a backend was a productivity game changer for my company.<p>- scoop and Winget made tooling much easier to install. I do most of my sysadmin tasks on Windows, not WSL.<p>The bad:<p>- WSL 2 still has rought edges, and you're still using a VM.<p>- Native app / Desktop development is a mess of SDKs, 90s development patterns and for some reason it's tigly coupled to visual studio (the crappy one, not code).<p>The ugly:<p>- My home desktop sports 24 cores, a decent gpu and 128gb ram. Teams still feels slow. Same for some parts of the UI.<p>- Ads / telemetry. C'mon MS, I'm paying for Windows Pro.<p>Overall, I prefer using Windows to most Desktop Linux distro nowadays (although one could argue that's a pretty low bar).
Most free and open source development tools work better on Linux.<p>This is not due to some kind of discrimination against Windows, but because open systems with standardized APIs are easier to use and build tools for.<p>Windows will continue to be the lesser platform for developers because it is closed source, full of ads and telemetry, and ultimately less free (as in user freedom) than Linux:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57</a>
Windows has been great for development for a while. Once WSL became set-and-forget it was pretty seamless for me. I only needed SSH and support for a few Debian tools. Having that in a slim hypervisor is a <i>godsend</i>.<p>I since moved on to just using pure Linux, but I don't really lament using Windows like I used to. For personal use I avoid OSes that have ads built-in, but for development purposes Windows is "fine" now.