And still Windows is a mess.

Windows is a mess and I hope it will stay that way.

The real strength of Windows is backwards compatibility, especially dealing with proprietary software. Its messiness is a relic of the way things were done in the past, it is also the reason why my 20+ year old binary still runs. And it does without containers or full VMs.

I much prefer developing on Linux (I still miss the Visual Studio debugger), but different platform, different philosophy.

Note: I don't know much about mainframes. I heard they really are the champions of backwards compatibility. But I don't think the same principles are applicable to consumer machines.

Your 20 year old statically compiled binary still works on Linux, probably.

I've been on both Windows and Ubuntu for a while. I'd say Ubuntu has a ton more issues and requires a ton more initial configuration to behave "normally".

I don't even remember the last time Windows got in my way, in fact.

I guess the difference is that you can put in a weekend of effort on an Arch Linux installation and get a machine tailored to your workflow, few bugs, fast boot times, easy to maintain for the future, etc.

But no matter how much work you put into your Windows install it will be just as slow/fast, uncustomizable, and unoptimizable as it was out of the box.

I'd bet money that the VSCode and Windows teams are basically on different planets and Microsoft.

I bet there are people that use Windows to develop VSCode and use VSCode to develop Windows, so some people probably know each other internally. I think what escapes HN is how massively successful Microsoft is. Sure, the search built into Windows sucks. There are many, many more complicated components of a platform and OS than that, and those seem to work as well as any other platform and OS.

Compared to what other operating system(s)?

wsl on windows 10 has been amazing to develop and work on.

> wsl on windows 10 has been amazing to develop and work on.

Now imagine how amazing it would be just on Ubuntu ;-)

The problem is that not many IT departments support ubuntu. They are making lots of improvements to the UI and application management, but it can be cumbersome to get some applications working on linux. Having windows to install whatever gui apps you need or whatever other apps that aren't needed in linux, then having linux there to develop on has been pretty great. It's almost like a hybrid linux+windows operating system and not at all like running a vm on windows.

e.g. this is in my .bashrc in wsl, it writes stdout to my windows clipboard:

function cb () { powershell.exe -command "\$input | set-clipboard" }

Windows gets tons of hate in our community, but I gave it a chance a couple years ago after being frustrated with osx and it has been amazing and I think a lot of people would come around to it if they gave it a chance. I am biased towards linux though since I'm an sre, so maybe that is why I never could quite get comfortable on osx. I really disliked having to learn how to do something once on a mac, then do that same thing again on linux to get something into production.

For enterprise adoption of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 21.04 now start supporting AD Group Policy thanks to samba. I wonder how does it help.

Every other OS. It's full of legacy APIs and scrapped new APIs. Every release is like two steps one step forward, one step back and one two the side. Just because thousands of companies have written software and drivers for it, it's still existing. If it were released today it wouldn't stand a chance.

Are you talking about developing for windows or developing on windows? I'm talking about developing on windows. I don't really care what the apis look like underneath it all. wsl on windows is a lot more intuitive to develop on when you have a target environment of linux compared to something like osx where its almost like linux, but not really at all.

WSL was slower than dialup internet last I used it...

IMO a lot of what Windows does isn't something you can apply Copilot-style tech to. The only thing you could train it on would be Windows, really.