Hey! Writer here. I discuss the software at length in here, but as I point out in the piece I've already covered why WSL and Bash work very well at length, so didn't want to muddy the water too much:

1. How to use Bash on Windows to retain your previous setup: https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-d...

2. Why WSL/Bash is good enough these days: https://medium.com/charged-tech/why-i-left-mac-for-windows-a...

Although WSL is great, having a system that could lock itself and start updating at any moment even ignoring user preferences is unacceptable. Trust is at the core of a lot of complaints against Windows, and Microsoft is not helping by forcing updates or reinstalling applications/ads the user specifically removed.

I use windows 10 on several computers and while I did see that updates-mid-day behavior in the beginning I haven’t seen it in a long time. I’m not sure whether this is a real problem anymore, especially with windows pro where you can defer updates.

I tried Bash on Windows and it was absolutely not good enough. Not yet.

What problems did you find it with it?

I've been using it for the past 6 months after dual booting and running VMs for a long time and found I haven't found a reason to boot into my VM yet.

I have the same problems as most people: it's a separate subsystem, which means you either need special integration or simply can't do what you want to do. The filesystems aren't the same, the devices aren't the same, the networking isn't the same, and all three are pretty much needed for daily work.

I suspect that most things that you can do in mingw64 will work the same in WSL, but things you need to do beyond that are basically broken in WSL and sub-optimal in mingw and almost always gets you to a point where you need a VM.

At the same time WSL has super limited benefit if you don't need any of the windows stuff, it basically means you are using linux inside windows but not using windows. When you use 'shell oriented workflows' on macOS, it just works, be it with BSD vs. GNU diffrences, which are easy to overcome by either learning or installing GNU versions of the tools you want (using a package manager like brew). In this setup, everything is the same system, what you do in the GUI also exists in the CLI, they interact directly with eachother, maintain state equally well, integrate directly with the rest of the OS, and basically has desktop functionality that isn't in the way of your development capabilities.

The only downside you can expect is if you need native windows development or windows-only tools, for everything else, windows doesn't really count anymore in almost all environments where I work (which is mostly retail, ecommerce, FOSS, infra). Only a small subset of things (large in quantity, small in configurations/versions/specific needs) that are managed by MSP's are still embedded windows or enterprise windows.

We do have a few people that actually like windows (be it the GUI, long time experience or simply brand affinity), but that's about it.

Can you provide some examples? I've used the fs and networking without issue, so I'm wondering where you hit issues. I can host a server in WSL and hit it from windows via localhost. I can download a repo in windows and access it from emacs, I can download a repo using Linux git into a windows file system and edit it from either OS. Is it that some parts of Berkley sockets aren't implemented fully (or weren't last time I took it for a spin last year)?

IO performance is atrocious. git status on a Linux tree takes a 10s of seconds.

I don't know when you last tried it, but IO performance is much better in the new (Fall Creators Update) version. I had the same problem with git status but after updating it's much quicker. Things also seem like they're faster in the WSL file system than when you're using WSL in the Win32 file system.

It is much better (and even better if you disable Windows Defender on your WSL stuff), but it's still not nearly as fast as actual Linux. I switched from WSL to a Linux VM primarily due to IO still being slow enough to be a problem for me.

Git works perfectly in PS, why would you need to run it in WSL?

Not the original commenter, but I do everything else in bash, and zero things in PS. Why would I want to remember which shell runs which program best?

That makes sense, however if you are Windows user, bash is not an obvious choice for primary shell there.

I don't think that is correct. If you install WSL you are not a typical Windows user.

I didn't mention "typical" Windows user. WSL will always be a second-class citizen in Windows, so if you are power user trying to improve your performance, what's the point in choosing a second-class solution after choosing this OS? Learning one more shell, just like learning one more programming language, has some benefits.

Because I like Windows for myself but my company uses Linux based servers and bash as our shell. It's not just about ME switching to PowerShell, but getting 30 other people to do it too. Not gonna happen.

Because compiling the Linux kernel doesn't? And well, that's another big thing with WSL, you can't share files.

I periodically boot into Windows 10, mainly for join.me calls with customers, and I'm always curious to see how the WSL is progressing. It's clearly come a long ways, and I'm encouraged by the recent support for multiple Linux distributions. But for development purposes, it's doesn't yet come close to replacing a native Linux environment.

The performance is frankly terrible by comparison -- for example, running `bundle install` in a moderately complex Rails application will take nearly an order of magnitude longer (not to mention the Windows virus scan process soaking up 30% of your CPU the entire time).

Another issue is with background services -- I've had numerous issues running PostgreSQL, Redis, and other services (e.g. some services fail to start, or cannot be cleanly stopped, or I'll encounter strange network errors). However, these issues are all documented extensively in various GitHub issues, so hopefully they'll be resolved going forward. For PostgreSQL, the usual suggestion is to install PostgreSQL in Windows, and then access it from the WSL, but that kind of defeats the purpose.

I don't mean to be overly negative, but at least for my purposes, the WSL just isn't quite there in terms of being a viable alternative for daily development work.

file corruption was the worst, incomplete apt package support second.

It says officially: don't edit ubuntu files from windows editors, so it's not their fault. But not ready for work.

I can't open files in VSCode that live in the WSL virtual file system. Which is a huge problem for setting up the same exact dev environment I have on my Mac.

It's honestly dumbfounding. VSCode works great on Mac with the existing terminal but the WSL team can't figure out a good way to allow you to edit WSL files from a normal Windows application.

The way you do this is to cd into your Windows system from within WSL. WSL can see files from the Win32 subsystem just fine.

That is not a solution. I want to work on files in my WSL home folder. Lots of language based package managers like npm and composer "live" inside a folder in your home directory. It's very important that VSCode running as a windows application be able to read/write to these files.

As it is right now I can't even edit my ~/.ssh/config from VSCode without jumping through hoops.

If you want to access your home folder in both, all you have to do is first create the folder in Windows, for example, create a wslhome folder inside your user folder in windows. Copy everything in your current WSL home folder, including hidden files, into that one. Then rename your WSL home folder to back it up and replace it with a symbolic link to the Windows folder. In WSL, use ln -s /mnt/c/Users/[your Windows user name]/wslhome /home/[your wsl user name]. The real folder exists in Windows and is usable in either environment.

This is exactly right. Having interop is great.

> I want to work on files in my WSL home folder. Lots of language based package managers like npm and composer "live" inside a folder in your home directory. It's very important that VSCode running as a windows application be able to read/write to these files.

No. You don't want this. Linux and Windows are different platforms; if your Windows application could use your packages installed through Linux (and vice versa) then none of the native modules would work without a reinstall.

The side effects suck and they can make it better IMO but not sharing dependencies isn't an issue at all IMO.

> As it is right now I can't even edit my ~/.ssh/config from VSCode without jumping through hoops.

Yeah that sucks though for some things like git bash, etc, they use the proper windows home directory. So I end up just keeping those there and straight up copying or aliasing them to the WSL home folder.

It's not a great experience but it works.

Of course I want this!

Globally installed npm and composer packages live in ~/.npm/ and ~/.composer/ and they both have a global packages.json esque file that I need to occasionally edit. The packages installed in those folders MUST be parsed by VSCode for intelesense to work properly.

All I'm saying is I'm not gonna jump through all these hoops. I'd rather just keep working on my mac.

Hell I'd rather hackintosh a surface pro rather than deal with these issues.

Running VSCode through X is annoying.

npm/node works fine in Windows (and I'm pretty sure it's the same with composer), so why do you want to use it in WSL?

Edit: this is a genuine question of an engineer, who uses Git/npm/node for fullstack development on Windows 10 every day. What kind of setup do you have and what UX do you expect, that requires running the tools in WSL?

I just don't want to use Windows to test my code when production is in Linux. There are things all those tools do when running in Windows that is specific to Windows. And I'm not some anti-windows Microsoft hating guy. My main desktop is running Windows 10 and I was quite excited for WSL to come out so I had Windows 10 Insider Preview running on my machine for more than a year. But at the end of the day when I want to do "real" work I keep going back to my Macbook.

Windows command prompt compared to bash is simply horrible. I personally find Powershell to be just as bad. The console app in windows is still light years behind Terminal in OS X. In fact VSCode's built in terminal wrapper is orders of magnitude better.

Things like wkhtmltopdf to generate PDFs or ffmpeg to work with videos should run as they do in Linux on the production server. In OS X I can use brew to set things up. In windows I have to hunt down binaries, put them in the right place, and set the path manually via an OS level GUI many clicks down in Advanced Settings.

The extra work I need to do to make all those tools work in windows makes setting up a windows dev environment cumbersome and annoying. The way it's laid out in OS X gives me way cleaner interoperability with the way the code actually runs in a Linux environment.

It's one of the reasons I love WSL! Finally I can have a ~/.ssh/config in Windows! But I still can't edit the file from a Windows text editor.

Finally if I'm on a team where the production environment relies on some of these linux binaries being available I don't want to waste work hours researching and writing on boarding documentation for the one dev that feels like working in windows when the rest of us are on macs.

C:\Users\Windows Username\AppData\Local\lxss\home\WSL username\.ssh ?

Unless i'm misunderstanding the issue

Stuff in lxss is treated "special" - files in that directory have unix numeric permissions on NTFS instead of ACL permissions. Windows doesn't know how to set those, so if win32 subsystem is updating permissions (for instance, on file save) and the linux subsystem is updating metadata (for instance, on file save), it's possible to end up in a state where neither subsystem is able to get permission to touch the file again.

For this reason, it is recommended to only edit files outside this directory from both subsystems (not to say this isn't issue-free, but it's relatively reliable.)

The file becomes invisible to WSL right after it gets edited in Windows. It's because it's doing weird tricks to associate UNIX permissions to files stored in Windows. The Windows app will break those permissions so instead of mitigating that in WSL it simply stops being able to "see" the file.

There's a perf hit. You may have noticed disk access in WSL outside this directory is slow. Inside this directory, wsl should be the same speed as w32 native, because it doesn't hit the magic layer.

Do you have more detail about this? I edit files in VSCode/Notepad++ and execute them in WSL daily and have never run into this issue.

Would drvfs and symlinks solve your issue with ssh and npm?

I'd install vscode in wsl and run it through a Windows X server.

Did you raise any issues on GitHub for the problems you hit?

How about stuff like defragmentation, Windows registry issues, malware, adware and all the other stuff I vaguely remember? 10 years ago, I used to be a power user at Windows before that (as a gamer/kid) but really though I forgot what time I needed to put into the laptop just to keep it up to performance.

Have you not used a Windows computer in 10+ years?

> defragmentation

No longer an issue. I'm honestly not up to date on why not, but nobody ever mentions it anymore.

> Windows registry issues

What issues? I haven't gone into the registry for anything in a long time.

> malware, adware

Not an issue as long as you run a modern browser and avoid going to sketchy websites and installing random things from them.

If you haven't used Windows since early XP, it's really worth another try. It's a whole lot better now.

A point to add about malware. Make sure your user account your use is a standard one and not an Administrator account. That goes a long way towards cutting down on potential malware.

> No longer an issue. I'm honestly not up to date on why not, but nobody ever mentions it anymore.

SSDs, primarily. Depending on who you ask, defragging an SSD ranges between only slightly beneficial, totally pointless, and actively harmful.

> Depending on who you ask, defragging an SSD ranges between only slightly beneficial, totally pointless, and actively harmful.

Fragmentation will slow down your SSD. For non-server workloads, the SSD is very likely still plenty fast. Running a hard drive defragging program on your SSD will only address one of the two forms of fragmentation that SSDs are subject to, and thus will not help performance much. It will also unnecessarily burn through some of the SSD's limited write endurance, but that is almost never worth worrying about.

Windows Vista started running defragmentation as a background process nightly. Then SSDs happened.

Defragmentation is something from prehistoric ages of Windows (if I remember correctly, they made it automatic in Vista). Malware, adware etc are the same class of problems as unprotected sex: if you are careful, you are safe and will never see it. It's not a Windows "feature".

I've always felt this was just the law of large numbers: The world has more PC users running Windows, so people who are writing malware would be casting the widest net by attacking PCs running Windows and since the bad guy is also likely using/familiar with a PC running Windows.

The second the paradigm changes, the value equation changes for everyone involved.

I second the WSL recommendation. I use it every day building a large SaaS product that is Rails (backend and legacy front end), Vuejs, C# (WinForms app for deep system integration on point-of-sale computers).

That's exactly the problem: they work well enough for some limited applications. Thing is, "well enough" isn't a reason to get people moving to MS's platform - if I already have a great dev environment that runs on Mac or Linux, why would I switch? I already have perfect integration between my CLI tools and the OS, first-class support in a lot of FOSS projects, and a strong community around the platform, all of which I'd lose if I switched. In exchange I'd gain nothing but the numerous headaches (forced updates, spyware, in-OS ads, general cruft and legacy baggage, etc) of Windows.

"Good enough" might stop people switching away from the platform, but it's not enough to bring back those who've already left. If Microsoft wants to bring people back to Windows as opposed to just stopping the bleeding, they'll have to deliver an experience that's actually superior to the other platforms. Given the current state of Windows 10, I don't think they'll have an easy time pulling that off.

Have you tryied ignoring the annoyingyang major points of opinion popups with <microsoft-product-placement>?

The windows is dead, but the M$ Fish-trap attitude exists on in the Eco-system, being natural opposed to all things open to the source.

My previous setup was “any modern os except the windows trash fire”. I’m not sure how WSL is going to solve that.

Windows keeps breaking with every update. My touchpad randomly stops working. Startup is excruciatingly slow even on an i7 laptop with 16GB of RAM. Starting up from sleep takes nearly as long, and for some reason, it takes at least 5 minutes for the machine to work at normal processing power again.

The search function is still as broken as ever. There is a useless "People" tab near the clock that hogs my memory. Then there is that other useless thing - Cortana. There are random noises for whatever error or notification that keeps playing in the background. Permission control is still completely broken. The Control Panel is a confused mess.

If I could go back to Windows 7, I might still be interested in keeping a Windows laptop. But 10 just keeps getting in my way. I just want to launch Chrome and use Google Docs, but Windows wants to distract me with a million little nuisances.

I had similar issues with a home-rolled desktop(nothing ridiculous! intel CPU, amd GPU, adaptec raid card, stack of ram. No old or weird hardware) and eventually just gave up and sold the entire lot. The last straw for me, after many update issues, is when it decided to update on its own in the middle of the night and then refuse to boot due to some date/time mismatch error killing the windows activation so much it wouldn't even start up beyond the error message. I googled it, and it ended up being faster to reinstall than fix since i had an install USB on hand.(it was some huge mess of "mount the boot drive on another system and then...")

I just use my(pre-current design/mk1 retina) macbook pro with the same monitor at my desk now

That’s not normal behavior (random sounds, slow startup and wake). You should check the event viewer for errors, something is wrong with your system. I’ve had problems like that in the past with bad drivers. Once the driver was upgraded the problems went away.

Yeah, you can turn off that "People" tab. Just right click.

In my experience it comes back after every major update. I've installed StartIsBack[1] to get rid of this nonsense for good but it's a pretty awful out-of-box experience.

[1] http://www.startisback.com/

It's never come back for me. Turned it off once when it first came out. I wonder what the difference in our setups is? Never had to resort to third-party programs either.

Chromebook is nice here.

But software preference is a very subjective thing - it's better not to venture into analyzing it if you've mostly been working with a single OS.

As a Linux user (who also owns a Macbook), I find OSX to be a weak substitute. Many features (that we take for granted in Linux-land) require downloading binaries from unknown sources, vastly inferior package management, can use 32 gigs of RAM, relative lack of server-side packages, installs and updates take longer, poor support for NVidia etc. But this is all just my opinion - I'm quite used to running Linux.

Windows is actually a fine OS too - just different. In fact, running on an uncountable number of hardware configurations is a feat of engineering. Not to mention backward compatibility.

> In fact, running on an uncountable number of hardware configurations is a feat of engineering. Not to mention backward compatibility.

They are feats of engineering that are remarkable externally, but mean absolutely nothing to me as a user of only one of those uncountable number of hardware configurations.

High Sierra has had some bad bugs, some that made my stomach churn even more than root access. One's that directly impacted my work flow make me the most angry: regular screen flickering, occasional computer falling asleep, and two times a complete logout. This is on the current model 13" Macbook Pro touchbar. I bought it in december to upgrade from my 2012 model.

I keep up to date on the software, but I sincerely hope after High Sierra Apple poured the necessary resources into making Mojave different. The thing about OS X is when it's working in my opinion it blows every other operating system out of the water. Clean. At least for my own workflow.

I don't buy a macbook for it's hardware. It could be two pounds heavier, have half the RAM for twice the price and look like a shoebox for all I care. OS X is what I'm paying thousands of dollars for.

I've had more issues with high sierra than any release since lion, but still less than i've had with windows 10(and i even own a surface pro!). I really hate having to choose between two bad options, but it's more a borderline unacceptable option with 10 and a begrudgingly workable one with HS.

I'm completely with you, and i don't understand how it seems to have peaked in reliability somewhere around 10.9-10.11 and just slid downhill since. 10.9-10 was probably the most reliable release since 10.6. I would pay significant extra money for some kind of ESR/enterprise release that was that stable just to get stuff done.

Couldn't agree more.

From a usability perspective peak Windows was 7. Despite years of use I still dislike Windows insistence on extreme flatness, and still find it counter-productive. Even with the huge gain from WSL and some other newer features of Windows the horrible privacy model, ads in menus, and a return to commonly occurring BSODs cancel out the improvements.

I could have failing memory, but I don't recall ever seeing a blue screen in 7 across a selection of machines.

Over on the Mac peak seems to have been around Mavericks, most of the changes since have been rearranging the furniture, and adding pointless flatness (thankfully not to the extreme variant of Windows). The number of minor annoyances and niggles has been growing steadily. Reliability has been trending down to the point that High Sierra during my 6 month ownership of a '16 MBP actually felt more flaky than Windows - a first I never thought I'd see. Back on Sierra with a '15 has fixed that.

Like you I'd vote with my wallet for an ESR or Mavericks with security and driver updates. I'll take dark mode on that though. :)

Windows 10 is really annoying. Tons of notifications and random stuff preinstalled. Even on the Enterprise version. I also don't like the Edge/IE split. Now we have two half baked browsers.

And on my HP blue screens are back. I thought that was a thing of the past.

> and random stuff preinstalled

It's less horrible if you buy MS hardware like the Surface - only a few games come pre-installed, unlike the misery HP & Dell inflict.

An OS should not have any bloatware at all.

This should not exist and yet it does: https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10

Holy shit. https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10/blob/master/sc... is actively harmful - it's one of the better pieces of security software these days.

That's one of the ones I don't run but I can imagine why someone would want to rip it out for various legit reasons.

If you're running another product, Defender is disabled.

One persons bloatware is another persons answer to "So .. what can I do?"

Every major OS distribution I know of come with at least 1-2 games

Personally.... I feel that if I don't use Onedrive I shouldn't see a prominent Onedrive icon always visible in Explorer or have onedrive.exe constantly running in the background using resources.

So I guess I'm stuck with using hacks to keep my operating system from shilling products at me.

It's no different than Apple's integration with iCloud, but I agree with you. OneDrive is one of the first things I uninstall.

I don’t understand this complaint. What notifications are you getting? The only thing I get is the notice from windows defender telling me a scan completed.

With the latest Windows update that notification had a button with something like "see fewer of these" which took my into the settings where I could turn off that specific notification.

Also the focus notification when using a fullscreen app. Had to turn it off in two different places. Granted my mac gets a ton of notifications too so its not that big of a deal. Microsoft could just use with a little better notification management screen to quickly turn them off.

Is ironic how all, Apple, MS & Google sabotage theirs efforts with the PRO crowd.

Everyone agree we are a small niche. So anything below will have a minimal impact in the so important shareholders pockets, and win a enough love for us, IMHO:

- Apple hate to give better, more powerfull hardware with enough flexibility (change SSD, Memory, so not more glue. End). Make a limited true mac pro, heck, make it semi-ugly, non-thin so most will not want that, and VICTORY.

- MS give the hardware but refuse to give away the spyware. Give a solid Windows 2000 Server alike thing without cruft, give it with a LTS edition and even ask money for it, dammit. VICTORY

- Google could give a combo chrome machine/linux with the hardware/LTS edition, stick to it, VICTORY.

Apparently you can now run Linux apps in ChromeOS/Pixelbook.

I spent a minute trying to figure out what PRO stands for.

Care to spare other people some time?

My assumption is Pro, as in professional. Why it's in all caps is beyond me.

> Pro, as in professional

Yes, no idea PRO will be confusing :)

I think they thought it was an acronym, but the commenter just meant "pro," i.e. a dev or designer.

Agreed. Windows updates and the fact that it still doesn't have a viable shell after 30 years make it a no go. Powershell and Ubuntu Bash on Windows10 isn't as nice as having built in native support.

Ubuntu bash is a huge step up for me. I recommend using cmder too, which will give you a massively configurable shell with a tabbed interface.

I mean, this article in particular was written by a developer who can develop in any language they want, and chooses PHP. Of course they don’t pay attention to how important software choices are.

> If only Ubuntu could have native MS Office (needed for docs from lawyers)

Crossover by Codeweavers works very well with Office 2016 on Ubuntu.

FWIW, the article does talk about Windows vs MacOS and the software ecosystem nearer to the end.

Libreoffice has some ms office compatability, and a surprising (and rapidly increasing) amount of stuff works fine in wine. I think an old but relatively recent photoshop version (cs6?) has an almost perfect rating.

In Ubuntu I use WPS office, and it does an OK job. Not perfect, but native office is just out of the question.

Hey, at least you can dual boot!

> If only Ubuntu could have native MS Office

I'm using Google Docs and it works perfectly

Between Google docs and libre office I haven't used Microsoft office since they destroyed the UI with the stupid ribbon. There simply is no need for it personally or professionally anymore.

>try edge

So exactly what safari does, no?

Other users can report their experiences, but I've never been prompted to try Safari in three years of using OS X daily. Default web browser is available in the first page of system preferences and all the stock applications (Mail, Notes, etc) open links in there, unlike Windows settings opening Edge if you click something like "Learn more".

Just google “try the new safari notification”

Have you ever tried something else than Ubuntu?

Honest question

My work machine is a Debian with KDE Plasma 5 and it's everything you ever dreamed of plus I can go back to Xfce whenever I feel like life is moving too slow

LibreOffice works perfectly well for 99.9% of MS Office documents.

I’ve had to work with, presumably, the same types of documents from layers as the GP. LibreOffice is fine if everyone is using it. It ends up being a bit of extra work to actually use in practice in a mixed environment. Some legal documents have a lot of formatting that imitates creating a layout with a typewriter and the structure is important. LibreOffice can be slightly off in meaningful ways from a WYSIWYG standpoint, but not necessarily a file format standpoint. So while you can open and edit, the output you will print may be off in subtle ways because you added some extra spacing, you have a different version of a font, etc.

While it’s possibly to make documents that work correctly in both editors with this formatting, you’re simply not going to get people out of their flow. It’s received as well as if the legal team started telling you what your Vim config should be ;).

It ends up being cheaper in terms of time saved for everyone to just buy office. I have a copy of Office just for Word based legal interactions and Excel and use LibreOffice for everything else out of preference for the “old school” UI.

I've been a Linux user for ages, and I disagree. Readable yes, but the formatting is almost always off (in Writer and Calc).

Basically unusable if the docs have to be shared back with MS Office users.

Make sure you have exactly the same fonts available (Cambria, etc) as the Windows machine. That solves many of the formatting issues.

Same here, fonts are very important

Even MS Office is not always compatible with MS Office.

Some time ago (shortly after MSO2016 for Mac release), I had to fill in a certain document, which I did and returned. Except it wasn't filled correctly, because Word 2016 for Mac didn't support the form controls, the document used them and I had no idea about that.

The other party called, we met, compared what we have both seen on the screen, corrected the document and closed that with "word acting funny for whatever reason" (the other party used 2013 for Windows). If I was using LibreOffice and something similar would happen, despite that they do a great job, the blame would be distributed in another fashion.

Fast forward several months and I see in the monthly update release notes, that the forms feature was added to the Mac release.

More like it spoils the layout of 99% of documents. It works perfectly well for really simple stuff. Like letters and a little bit of what-if doodling in the spreadsheet.

My experience differs drastically.

Unless it crashes and loses your document like it happened to me a year ago. Auto-save apparently exists but is not turned on by default or something. Infuriating when it happens.