Is WSL actually ready for developers?

36 点作者 carlosbaraza大约 6 年前

21 条评论

strictnein大约 6 年前

The question isn't "Is Windows ...", what he's actually addressing is the question "Is WSL actually ready for developers?"Windows is. All of his issues either seem to be from WSL, complaints about keyboard shortcuts, or not setting up his monitors properly (his claim that Windows doesn't properly support 4k monitors is a strange one).To be honest, I don't get why he's installing VS Code on top of WSL, when you have native windows VS Code. This seems completely unnecessary, but maybe I'm missing some benefit?

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m_mueller大约 6 年前

Agree with all of these. But compared to Macs you get a couple of things:* native and fully supported MS Office* ecosystem of professional windows apps (atm. I need MS SQL Management Studio as an example)* much much better connectivity on laptops. bye bye dongle land.* a wide variety of hardware options to choose from, including ones with great keyboards. even the latest Thinkpads have vastly superior keyboards compared to 2016+ MBP.* gamingAt the end for me personally, the tradeoff was worth it. I switched last summer and by now I'm not missing much. Same with iPhone - switched to an S10e last week and I'm already used to it. There's a couple of things still stuck in Apple land, such as our photo share - not yet sure what I'll do about that.I was an Apple customer for 13 years before - at some point I had to cut it off, it made me too angry.

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ChrisRR大约 6 年前

I stopped reading at the second line: "As you may all know, developers are a social tribe that is well known for using MacBooks with stickers on them"I don't know if this is an American thing or the industry I'm in, but I've never seen a single developer use a Macbook or have stickers on their laptops. Is this is a silicon valley, web developer kind of thing?Edit: Just to clarify, I'm a low-level C developer in the UK. Most everyone I know uses Windows/Linux and laptops are mostly Dell/HP

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Crinus大约 6 年前

I do not think Windows ever stopped being an option for developers. Perhaps web developers prefer to use a Unix-like OS since a lot of the work they do is running on Unix, but not all developers are web developers and not all web developers are using a Unix-like OS (FWIW none of the web developers i personally know are using Linux or macOS).I think this sort of perspective is a bit of a bubble, considering that Windows has something around 85-90% desktop/laptop market share and developers aren't really any sort of special snowflakes to expect anything different (even if Unix-like OSes are more likely among developers, it will only be a bias towards them, not something that inverts a 9 out of 10 statistic).

pixelpush大约 6 年前

"Windows high DPI screens support sucks. I have a 4k screen and everything looks very small. There is an Accessibility option to increase the size of the windows. However, when you do that, most of the applications look very blurry and it is even more annoying."In my opinion, Windows 10 has the best High-DPI support of all systems. It allows you to change scaling in fine increments on per-display basis. Moving windows from one display to another scales them pixel-perfect, if supported. Pretty much all applications I use regularly work fine.On Linux, the only thing I found to work out reasonably well is 2x scaling. I can't speak for Mac OS, but in my recollection the non-2x scaling isn't pixel-perfect."The text is rendered very poorly in Windows, creating a kind of chromatic aberration around it."This is ClearType sub-pixel rendering and again in my opinion it's the best font rendering of all platforms, though FreeType on Linux works about as well. Font Rendering on Mac OS is just blurry by comparison. With Retina displays it doesn't matter so much anymore, but it was really annoying on the lower res displays.Perhaps the author has it misconfigured for his displays and needs to run the builtin "ClearType Text Tuner" tool."Microsoft has made great efforts to support the needs of developers and creators, but as of 2019, I think OSX is still a stronger option for developers."If you implicitly rely on a lot of UNIX-specific stuff, Windows will suck. That probably won't ever change.

robmaister大约 6 年前

As someone who develops primarily on Windows and occasionally uses a Mac Mini to build iOS binaries, I feel vastly less productive when I'm using macOS. I've also come to realize I use my Home/End keys a lot since my Magic Keyboard doesn't have them.It's not that macOS isn't "developer ready", it's that I'm used to the Windows way of doing things and have those keyboard shortcuts in muscle memory.The main reason I like Windows as a development environment is Visual Studio. I wouldn't trade my data breakpoints, variable watch list, memory views, and Intellisense for anything. Then again I'm working on games, i.e. multi-million line C++ projects that run on 4+ platforms. Most of that stuff is unnecessary in other situations.Also good luck getting any of the console devkits/SDKs to run on anything but Windows.

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orev大约 6 年前

It has always bothered me that developers insist on using Macs for development. Sure, it’s Unix, but how many servers are running macOS? Zero.You need to develop on a platform that matches what’s running in production. Production almost always uses some form of Linux, so you at least need a local VM running Linux. Then it doesn’t matter if you have Windows or Mac as your main OS, and you can use the tools you need in those platforms, but otherwise actual builds and testing should be happening on the VM.

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Areading314大约 6 年前

I develop on windows using wsl and jet brains suite, and I've never been more productive. In general I find windows to have much better keyboard shortcuts than mac, because of universal alt key menu navigation. I've also learned over time that the more you can script away your cli workflows, the less RSI you'll develop. Plus the hardware is much cheaper.

davidhyde大约 6 年前

I find Windows to be more and more hostile towards development these days. Windows 10 may have a very impressive kernel but the UI (aka Explorer) is a nightmare of "simplified" screens. Something like UI spaghetti.Windows search and windows defender constantly spin your laptop cpu fan to max speeds because, you know, nobody minds a noisy laptop that they are not actively using.Windows updates are constant, slow, often fail altogether and completely out of your control. Your machine may reboot at any time so good luck with that long running task. It's like they shipped a swimming pool that was actually a sieve and they are madly patching it every day.Windows doesn’t respect the users desire to put the laptop to "Sleep". It will wake up at any time and often just stay awake and drain the battery.Windows has also become some sort of hybrid advertising and tracking device which you can, admittedly, disable although some things like the search listening service Cortana really does not like being disabled.Not everything is doom and gloom however. The virtual machine engine HyperV is extremely fast and easy to manage making things like Android development is a pleasure. Visual studio keeps getting better too.

shawnz大约 6 年前

> The text is rendered very poorly in Windows, creating a kind of chromatic aberration around it. Coming from an Apple MacBook, this turned out to be quite annoying, because I didn’t know if my design looked bad or if it was just Windows messing up with it.I think the OP is describing an intentional feature (subpixel antialiasing). Mac OS Mojave disabled this feature by default because you don't need antialiasing if your screen resolution is very high. The chromatic aberration is ugly, granted, but the technique allows you to get a higher effective horizontal resolution which ultimately improves readability on low-resolution displays. And if you don't need it, well, it can be disabled on Windows too: <a href="https://www.isunshare.com/windows-10/turn-off-or-on-clear-type-text-in-windows-10.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.isunshare.com/windows-10/turn-off-or-on-clear-ty...</a>

gfiorav大约 6 年前

I use WSL for NodeJS professionally, and I can't find any troubles. It was hard to get to the point were my terminal was easy to look at, but that's it.There's also a great community of Windows employees bettering Windows Console, with honesty and humbly (they even created a themer that reads iTerm2 style files).With a bit of patience, you can get it to the point where you never look back.Also, very important: my employer disables real-time protection, which otherwise would make WSL unbearably slow. Make sure you test on an old PC before committing fully to it.

hunta2097大约 6 年前

IMO there is a slight history of people wanting to "look the part" by having a Mac. This seems to be changing though, my company has shifted to XPS-15s running Ubuntu and people seem to be loving it.If your company relies on MS Office (we use G-Suite and Confluence) you might not have such an enjoyable time.

GnarfGnarf大约 6 年前

The article refers specifically to Web development.I manage & develop a Win32 desktop app (because that's what my customers use). I am converting to Qt so I can also run on macOS.I cannot imagine why I would ever consider an option that does not run on the Mac, such as WPF or WinRT.(My customers hate Parallels, VMWare Fusion and Wine).

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dariusj18大约 6 年前

I used to use a mac, but moved to Windows when it became obvious that Apple isn't making top of the line laptops anymore. My old MBP was one of the best computers out and stayed at the top, spec wise, for a while. Eventually I needed more, but when I looked at what I could get for the money, Macbook Pros were ridiculous.Moving to Windows had its hurdles, when an program doesn't support font scaling it's a pain in the ass, I bought a non-4k monitor just to make sure I would always have the ability to use apps that broke on my 4k.WSL is amazing and easy to use. Mostly I found I missed the Windows ecosystem. OSX has a few nice programs, but does not compare to the options available for Windows.

avryhof大约 6 年前

Just moved from Linux to Windows at work.It's not WSL I find myself using to have a good shell experience. It's MinGW/mintty. I even got a plugin to wrap it around WSL, since the Windows console experience is pretty painful. I miss my middle-click pasting and nice color schemes.I just wish I could setup the path translations in PyCharm to use the same mapping. Things work, (and not too bad) but I just hate having to rewrite all of the paths in my environmental variables.My other gripe is with the Cisco VPN client running all internet traffic through it, rather than having OpenConnect sort it out ahead of time.... but that's not really a Windows issue.

scarpino大约 6 年前

My company doesn't allow Linux machines, and I prefer a Unix-like environment for the work we do, so it's Mac for me. I could do most of what I need on Windows, but I feel like doing my work on Windows takes ten more steps than it does on the Mac.I prefer using Windows at home, and I can write software on it just fine.

dwags大约 6 年前

I've got a pc and mac and I web develop on both -- Normalized hotkeys in vscode and I use git bash. Have to hop in to cmd for some very specific things but I could really care less which machine i'm on if i'm just developing

modzu大约 6 年前

yes, we're in a more cross-platform world now than ever before!! you have WSL and git bash, intellij tools are class-leading, etc. that said, if you're not a gamer, why not linux?EDIT: oops, thought this was an ask-hn.

smrtinsert大约 6 年前

I don't understand the Mac dominance. The last few updates on MacOS have bricked so many coworkers machines. Unbelievable.Font rendering, yeah ok, still seems to be nicer, literally that's the only advantage I see.

austincheney大约 6 年前

I typically write Node apps. My build step, test cycles, and application commands all execute identically on Windows and OSX.

nnq大约 6 年前

As someone who kept switching Window -> Linux -> Windows -> Linux -> finally Mac, I can say that a MacBook is a breath of fresh productive air for anyone developing software intended to run on a Linux server somewhere but still wishing to have photo/video-editing and ms office software at hand:- all Linux stuff you'd want is available and "just works"- default Terminal is amazing and enough for me and most (iTerm 2 is there for whoever wants more) you'll get a sane Linux-like experience where copy paste just works in the terminal etc. (not the hellish terminal experiences you'd have on Windows even with smth like WSL) - also, even things like the touchbar play well with Terminal, you can open a man page from touchbar, change terminal bg color shade from TB to mark a production server ssh terminal tab as "dangerous" with a shade of red etc. ...lots of "small touches" that matter a lot- mac keyboard is amazing for developers (you'd get the wrong impression that it's bad for developers from people complaining about the touchbar upgrade, but disregard that):-- having Cmd and Ctrl keys be different means that you can have all you unixy/emacsy ctrl-p/n/b/f/a/e just work in all your desktop GUI apps too (the feel of having ctrl-a/e work in Chrome, VSCode, and other "regular apps" is amazing!), and the same time you can Cmd+C/V copy/paste in the terminal same as in other app - it's hard to put in word the nice warm fuzzy feel this good mixing of unixy-world with GUI-world gives you! (it's the opposite of Windows where the "two paradigms" feel like locked in a cold war with each other and you always have to switch your brain when switching tools)-- Fn key is in the right correct place you'd expect it, bottom left, just like on the Thinkpads you know and love!-- OS settings allow easily remapping things like CapsLock -> Ctrl that lots of people will do (if you're more into Vim than Emacs you'll do CapsLock -> Esc, that's in standard settings too)- multiple virtual desktops + external monitors etc. works productive and intuitively: if you love Gnome, you'll likely love MacOS too! (Also, tools like Divvy give you some features of tiling window managers if you're into this, and they also enable windows-like split-left/right shortcuts. Btw, there's an equivalent tool for Gnome/Gnome-based-Unity on Linux side too).I'd urge all developers coding for Linux or Android to leave Windows for a while and try either (1) Linux on a Thinkpad (preferably a Gnome-based desktop if you're a developer new to Linux: Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Fedora etc.) or (2) a MacBook: both experiences are slightly annoying to get used to at first, but dramatically increase your "feel good" factor and productivity! Windows may seem enticing hardware-wise (SurfaceBooks are amazing with their nvidia gpus etc.), but unless you write software targeting the Ms ecosystem, they are horrible machines for both developers and creative people imho... Window should be your last option in 2019 if you're a developer!