Recent Thoughts on Windows for Developers?

Question

Clearly Windows is trying to remove the stigma of using Windows for development, adding WSL fairly recently, acquiring GitHub (which has Co-Pilot), extending their relationship with OpenAI and along with this, creating their new dev home system - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-home/What are your thoughts on Windows getting rid of this stigma?

pid-1 · Accepted Answer

I use Windows at work and dual boot windows + distro hop in home desktop (currently: Fedora)
The good:
- In the past 5 years my Windows development experience went from garbage to pretty good.
- VS Code + devcontainers + Docker / Podman Desktop using WSL 2 as a backend was a productivity game changer for my company.
- scoop and Winget made tooling much easier to install. I do most of my sysadmin tasks on Windows, not WSL.
The bad:
- WSL 2 still has rought edges, and you're still using a VM.
- Native app / Desktop development is a mess of SDKs, 90s development patterns and for some reason it's tigly coupled to visual studio (the crappy one, not code).
The ugly:
- My home desktop sports 24 cores, a decent gpu and 128gb ram. Teams still feels slow. Same for some parts of the UI.
- Ads / telemetry. C'mon MS, I'm paying for Windows Pro.
Overall, I prefer using Windows to most Desktop Linux distro nowadays (although one could argue that's a pretty low bar).

thesuperbigfrog · Answer

Most free and open source development tools work better on Linux.
This is not due to some kind of discrimination against Windows, but because open systems with standardized APIs are easier to use and build tools for.
Windows will continue to be the lesser platform for developers because it is closed source, full of ads and telemetry, and ultimately less free (as in user freedom) than Linux:
https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57

smoldesu · Answer

Windows has been great for development for a while. Once WSL became set-and-forget it was pretty seamless for me. I only needed SSH and support for a few Debian tools. Having that in a slim hypervisor is a godsend.I since moved on to just using pure Linux, but I don't really lament using Windows like I used to. For personal use I avoid OSes that have ads built-in, but for development purposes Windows is "fine" now.