
Ask HN: Has Windows improved for Unix-based workflows? - throwaway0255
I’m impressed with the Surface Pro hardware and could see myself dropping Mac hardware entirely.<p>What stops me is Windows. I’m very comfortable in Unix-like environments and I’m not giving that up.<p>Last time I used Windows (~8 years ago?) it wasn’t really possible to achieve a comfortable Unix-like workflow in Windows, and the quality of tooling and ecosystem for Windows devs was abysmal (unless you were doing Windows platform dev specifically). But their recent activity with VS Code and support for open source and acquisition of GitHub etc makes me think maybe that situation has improved recently.<p>Have any of you switched from Mac (or Linux) back to Windows recently and kept a Unix-based workflow? What solutions did you find, and how painful has it been?
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mrdependable
I have recently switched from Mac to Windows using WSL. It works, but isn’t
quite as intuitive as I had been hoping for. The Linux part kind of lives on
its own separately from Windows and you have to make a choice whether you’re
going to use the WSL or use Windows. There isn’t really any mixing of the two
as far as I have seen (eg installing Ruby vía WSL and running commands from
Windows won’t work). Probably better explained and expected from people who
understand the architecture better than I do.

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useiuser
I did and its fantastic if u use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) which let's
u actually just use a headless Ubuntu within windows seemless integrated.

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t3rabytes
Has disk I/O gotten better with WSL? I tried moving from MacOS to Windows, but
WSL was just too slow because of the I/O issues.

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aosaigh
This is the real issue with WSL. I also tried to move to Windows with WSL but
any heavy IO operations (npm install for example) that would take < 1 minute
natively took 10 minutes on WSL. I thought I could just use virtual machines
within Windows instead, but every configuration I tried had short comings and
I just couldn't get a productive work environment up and running so I've
switched back to Mac.

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__MatrixMan__
Ubuntu on a Surface Pro 3 is my daily driver. The install requires a bit of
jumping through hoops, but once you've managed to boot into the right
partition everything works as expected. Everything I use at least.

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slipwalker
this sounds very exciting, a refurbished one for a travel machine might be a
good bang-for-the-buck ratio.

