I think the article is a little out of date. These days, learning programming on Windows is best done via VS Code (not Visual Studio) and optimally, though optionally, through devcontainers. Also WSL2 is very useful in running Linux on Windows with very little effort.
Not really. It combines the best of the two words. You have good UI and operating system that requires very little maintenance and Linux command line with tools where helpful.
Yeah, it has better UI then linux. There is nothing controversial about it.
And when it comes to maintenance, yup there is less of it. Linux users are constantly dealing with this or that hardware not working, not working after update and what not.
Linux is better on the server. But for a user, nope.
> Yeah, it has better UI then linux. There is nothing controversial about it.
Few examples (Windows 11):
- You cannot move taskbar to different edge of the screen.
- By default, search shows results from bing.
- Three finger swipe gesture animations to switch desktop or open task view are jarring.
- Explorer window shows partial UI first and then fills in the rest of UI.
- Ctrl+F or F3 doesn't focus on the search field in Settings app (and other MS apps that have search bar at the top of the window).
- Connect to external monitor and close the laptop lid, the laptop screen doesn't get disabled, it is still enabled and you can move windows to it.
- In tiling mode while resizing a window, causes other windows to show the app icon instead of their content.
Here is another amazing thing: All operating systems (even chromeOS these days) have a system settings to configure keyboard shortcuts, for some reason Windows doesn't (probably because all system level keyboard shortcuts are hard-coded in things like dwm.exe or explorer.exe).
Older versions of Windows have some aspects of UI better than Linux, and others worse. Newer versions of Windows are often worse in other ways too (although there are also a few benefits, but mostly it is worse).
What's the "best" you are talking about when it comes to the Windows world?
Also, while I cannot really speak to how Windows contributes to the experience, I know for certain that the integration comes with a tall bill to pay. You don't get to manage your computer with Linux, which is, ultimately, what it was built for: to empower the computer owners to take ownership of their hardware. And you don't get that when running in a VM. You are totally missing the point if you do that.
The best in the sense that it is less hustle to have working UI, headphones and what not. The UI is just comfortable and working. Not having to deal with this or that maintenance issue that prevents you from working once every two months. That is something I see colleagues having to do with fairly often.
Linux command line is great, when it is in wsl I get to have it without having to sacrifice the comfort.
Unless you need a gui application, or DinD, in my experience. Yes windows has 'native' support for x11 apps but ime it's slow and the fonts are super messed up. Also configuring a volume/directory to be shared between wsl2 and windows itself is still more painful then I'd like.
Not out of date, the author is probably planning on teaching how to program Windows via WinAPI. WSL2 and VSCode will probably be outside the scope of discussion when it comes to coding Windows apps from scratch
That's a good reason to look at devcontainers. You would create a dockerfile configured to provide an out-of-box development environment with a fully configured build
