I don't know... everything works so well on linux out of the box nowadays, and over time you can setup everything exactly as you want.

As an engineer I feel like it's a great investment and loving my setup has a big impact on the enjoyment I get from work.

If you spend the time, can all the annoying stuff be turned off in Windows?

I loved my Linux setups so much I automated them with some Ansible and a bunch of scripts and config files in a git repo to set up my user profile too.

I can't seem to get two Windows installs to be functionally identical the same way. I also can't believe winget is a relatively new invention.

You can turn off most of the annoying stuff, for a time. I'm convinced that sometimes settings just change on their own.

A couple of days ago, I give a very brief workshop of Arduino. All the students with Linux boxes have some kind of problems, like the user was not a member of the dialout group or the group does not exist at all. I still prefer Linux, but no everything works "out of the box".

> All the students with Linux boxes have some kind of problems, like the user was not a member of the dialout group or the group does not exist at all. I still prefer Linux, but no everything works "out of the box".

This (requiring elevated privileges) is a very niche thing, though (raw access to the serial port).

But the students with Windows laptops did not have these kind of problems. Although I can think of a lot of issues, in this "very niche thing" Windows worked "out of the box" and Linux didn't.

> But the students with Windows laptops did not have these kind of problems. Although I can think of a lot of issues, in this "very niche thing" Windows worked "out of the box" and Linux didn't.

Yes, for this very niche thing Windows works out the box. For other not so niche things, Linux works out the box. For the not so niche thing of "set up a LAMP stack" and similar, Windows is pretty poor at it, compared to using apt-get.

Also, for this very niche thing, I'm pretty certain that the arduino IDE I installed from the repository worked out the box for serial port access.

I'm guessing that you pretended the Linux boxes were Windows, and installed on Linux by downloading it off the arduino distribution site?

> I'm guessing that you pretended the Linux boxes were Windows, and installed on Linux by downloading it off the arduino distribution site?

Yes, that was a mistake. But it was not as simple as saying "install from apt-get" because some where using Arch-based distros (pacman), a few were using Fedora (yum) and others Ubuntu. Even so, not always that the user is added to the right group. Also, we wanted to show the new 2.0 IDE.

I hardly remember doing any kind of special fighting or annoying stuff. What's your pain points here?

Had some issues after Win10->Win11 beta Insider build updates, but that's other story.

I don't really notice the annoying stuff.

Win + WSL gives you both Linux and Windows tools at your disposal.

I'm one of those weird people that genuinely enjoys using windows as my main OS. vc++ and c# stuff is very nice on that OS, but I still feel like wsl is a bit like shoving a square peg into a round hole. too often, things that "just work" on a full-fledged linux install fail on wsl for some obscure reason.

my solution is to use windows for GUI things, and a remote linux instance for actual building/running/deploying services. vs code server is really nice for this, you can essentially run it as a GUI thin client locally that controls a headless remote that does all the heavy lifting. it's pretty seamless if you're willing to accept that you need a network connection to get any work done.

Is running a VirtualBox and sharing the work folder too slow?

probably not for most use cases, but I build some fairly large projects. it's nice to interact with a 16C/32T xeon node through an ultrabook. downloading tools/assets runs at the speed of the datacenter link rather than coffeeshop wifi. if nothing else, my battery lasts longer this way.

Ubuntu + VSCode?

Not sure where powertools come in, but I’m personally agnostic wrt. shell scripting flavours.

PowerToys may be? I'm using it with couple of plug-ins

1) find my mouse

2) search through windows titles (I tend to have 15-30 terminals with ssh)