I have been out of windows ecosystem since XP. I am wondering what's the experience like moving back to Windows ecosystem for a developer. I mainly work with web apps (NodeJS, PHP, Rails, MySQL, Postgres, React etc) and occasionally have to work on some React Native or Ionic mobile apps.<p>Anyone switched from Apple ecosystem to MS Windows recently? Pros? Cons?<p>Also, I would need to continue working on a laptop so what's the best comparable laptop that can replace my MacBook 15inch M2 machine?
My personal experience is that Windows is lacking.<p>WSL works, but there's always some "impedance mismatch" between the Windows side and Linux (in VS Code, you might be running your code under Windows or it might be running inside a WSL VM, or a Docker container running on Docker's WSL VM).<p>Updating Windows is a lot less clunky than on Windows XP, but there's still a divide (and some overlap) between what is Windows and updates in Windows Update, what is application software acquired via their store, and software that wishes to update itself. There is nothing like the seamless experience of a Linux package manager where one tool updates everything. I spent two years on a corporate-issue Windows laptop and I cried in happiness because my job was mostly writing documentation and very little code. Just making the applications run locally was a major endeavour, and many teams just ended up using shared development servers (yikes!).<p>This is especially odd with VS Code - the app pesters me on Windows and Mac when it finds an online update, and just goes with the flow with Fedora and Ubuntu.<p>The Mac environment is comfortable, even though you have the same splits for updating, but, at least, the base OS behaves like a Unix, which is a lot closer to a Linux laptop than a Windows one will ever be.<p>As a developer, I wouldn't move to Windows unless my work was to write code exclusively for Windows.
I don't want to immediately jump off-topic, but the last agency I was contracted at used Digital Ocean for "local dev". There's a Visual Studio Code extension that uses an SSH connection to let you edit remote files in your local instance of VSC.<p>The only downside, obviously, is you *must* always have an internet connection; and there's some $ overhead (but to me that's can be offset by not needing a lot of hardware on your desktop). Once you get used to it, you'll barely notice the difference.<p>Once the contract ended, I went back to working with my traditional local set up. I'm not happy about that. It's a 2024 resolution to get back to using DO.
I have a few colleagues that develop on windows. They all work in a WSL2 environment, and it seems like they really like it. It seems like they have good compatibility with linux dev environments with the bits of windows they like.