
Ask HN: Switched from MacOS to Windows for Daily Driver. Any Advice? Tip/tricks? - akulbe
I do DevOps work. Ruby stuff mostly. I bought a &#x27;16 MBP, and had all the GPU issues people have been talking about. 
Can&#x27;t have my daily driver wigging out, so I bought a second machine. The new Dell XPS 15&quot; model, running Win 10 Pro.
I&#x27;ve been considering putting Linux on here, but that brings its own set of hassles.<p>It&#x27;s been &gt;15 years since I&#x27;ve used Windows as a daily driver. Today, I&#x27;m having issues with env vars that seem like they&#x27;re not set. I know <i>where</i> it gets done, but &quot;echo $FOO&quot; or &quot;echo %FOO%&quot; doesn&#x27;t output anything.<p>I&#x27;m just curious to know if 
a. any of you made the same switch away from Mac? (how is it so far?)
b. do any of you have advice&#x2F;tips&#x2F;tricks on making the move?
c. do you use the Windows Subsystem for Linux at all? how&#x27;s it working?
d. what issues have you encountered since going back to Windows?<p>Thanks!
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Eridrus
The Windows Subsystem for Linux should work well for DevOps work that involves
administering remote machines, rather than local VMs; I use WSL + Ansible to
control AWS VMs semi-regularly. You won't be able to do things like run local
Docker instances through it though; Docker on Windows is still done through
VMs (afaik).

WSL devs are pretty communicative; I've filed issues on GitHub and had them
resolved; I won't say it's the fastest process in the world, but you can
actually communicate with them and they do fix bugs, which is more than I can
say when I've filed tickets with Apple. They also have a user voice where you
can see what people are asking for that doesn't work yet:
[https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-
con...](https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-console-bash-
on-ubuntu-on-windo)

If you already have the computer you should definitely give WSL a try.

~~~
akulbe
Are you running only stable builds, or are you on the Slow/Fast Ring of the
Insider Previews? I've been impressed with their response too.

~~~
Eridrus
I'm on the Fast Ring. I have run into some (mostly UI related) issues every
now and again, but nothing that's a blocker and getting faster patches has
been more useful, mostly to get WSL patches faster. The Slow Ring may be a
good compromise; I was going to switch to the Slow Ring a while ago, but at
the time Ring switching was broken ;)

------
cholmon
A few tools I'm fond of on windows:

[http://cmder.net/](http://cmder.net/)
[http://www.heidisql.com/](http://www.heidisql.com/)
[http://www.sublimetext.com/](http://www.sublimetext.com/)

------
akulbe
To add some details... I do Chef development work.

I'm using Chocolatey for package management.

I used both VMware and VirtualBox+Vagrant for VM stuff.

Using Xshell for SSH.

VS Code for a text editor.

Tower for a git client.

It's mainly the how do you do dev _for_ Linux _on_ Windows that I wonder
about. I've been living in a *nix world for the past several years, and this
feels like a paradigm shift, for sure.

