
Back to Windows after twenty years - ductionist
https://m.signalvnoise.com/back-to-windows-after-twenty-years/
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jiofih
Interestingly, if you have a 4K display, text in Windows looks much better
than MacOS (which requires scaling). Unfortunately that only applies to the OS
interface, it still looks like a monkey’s ass in the browser.

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stephenr
macOS doesn’t “require” scaling, it’s an optional feature if your display PPI
is low enough that straight 2x rendering makes things look “too big”.

~~~
jiofih
It does require scaling at 4K, no misunderstanding there. The system is unable
to scale the UI itself like Windows does and is unusable at either base
resolution or 2x - unless you find (and want) an odd 20in 4K monitor.

~~~
stephenr
> is unusable at either base resolution or 2x - unless you find (and want) an
> odd 20in 4K monitor.

Or, - and stay with me here, I know it's a big concept to get your head around
- if the person's preferences for display resolution are different to yours.

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mntmoss
A strange thought process. If you wanted Unix on not-Apple, a Linux desktop
remains the more reasonable option(sub the perpetual caveat of having to vet
the hardware for compatability).

And my first inclination would be to see how things go with Msys2 before
banking on WSL. You will eventually end up navigating build processes in some
depth - but I don't see that as a Windows problem so much as a Unix/libc
monoculture problem that gets swept under the rug by never leaving that
environment. You won't have quite the same experience with a fully MS stack or
with not-specifically-Unixy tools.

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nwallin
Same. This is utterly bizarre.

He somehow thought being a second class citizen in a second class OS would be
better than just biting the bullet and buying one of the Dell developer
edition XPS 13s that ship with Linux installed. I don't get it.

Font rendering in Linux is hilariously one of its strong points these days.
Whether you prefer the OSX way of font rendering or the windows way, it's just
a config setting. You change it to the way you like it and then it's the way
you like it. There's no giant faceless organization trying to convince you
that the "other" way of rendering fonts is objectively bad.

Also the Linux machines Dell ships all have 4k displays, and it's objectively
difficult to render fonts poorly at those DPIs. That probably helps.

I use msys at work, despite WSL. It's just... easier. Haven't been able to get
into powershell, but were I to go all in on the windows platform, I'd probably
try to start there.

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tolger
Interesting write-up, but it sounds like he didn't want to succeed. I have
been using WSL for two years now as my primary development environment and it
works great. Yes, file I/O is slow, but unless you do a ton of I/O it really
isn't that big of a problem for dev work. I like having access to Ubuntu
repositories and I actually prefer it to MacOS/Brew.

He also spends time complaining about Edge when it just takes a few minutes to
download and install Chrome as your default browser.

Finally, Linux is pretty good these days. I have a System76 laptop running
Pop!_OS and it's super nice, everything works out of the box. Why he decided
to use Windows if he wanted a *nix environment is a little strange.

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stevenwliao
> The first version of WSL is marred with terrible file-system performance...

Does anyone know why this is and how it can be fixed? (Either by the Windows
team or by end users)

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
As I recall, WSL1 uses NT's built-in personalities functionality to provide a
Linux-compatible environment, but it still used NTFS which is much slower in
the lots-of-small-files use case.

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ncmncm
People I know have given up on NTFS, and use Linux file systems served to
Windows (WSW?) via SMB for anything not read-only. Amazingly, that's faster
than native, at least for their uses.

Ultimately, to bring Windows into the 21st century, Windows will need to be
transformed to a gossamer-thin Wine-like wrapper stretched over a sturdy non-
Microsoft frame.

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rb808
Lol MS must be p*ssed.

Half the problem is that rails doesn't work on Windows. I'd put that a Rails
problem rather than Windows.

~~~
WorldMaker
I think at the core it's a Ruby problem. Ruby is the programming language
ecosystem I've never been successful in using Windows native builds of it.
Ruby on Windows has long been a nightmare of kludges and it really seems to
show how few Ruby developers must use Windows as a daily driver given how poor
the support has always been for it.

(I say this as someone that used NodeJS when Windows native builds of it were
an unsupported community project around the time of the IoJS fork and no one
was sure Windows support would survive, much less be officially adopted. That
was still a better situation than any time I've tryed to bootstrap a Ruby
environment on Windows.)

Ruby is my primary and sometimes sole usage of WSL.

~~~
bluedino
When I worked at a Ruby shop, we hired a Windows developer. He ended up
leaving the first week because he refused to use a Mac and coudn't get Windows
going with Ruby

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tomjuggler
Dude if you need Linux, just get a Linux laptop. They sell them now, System76
comes to mind, but I think Ubuntu partnered with Dell and/or Lenovo to make
one as well.

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jc_indy
How can a usually intelligent, sometimes very insightful guy like DHH be so
foolish as to buy something, spend some short time trying to make it act like
something else, and conclude it's no good?

Does the Mac have a Windows subsystem? Would you investigate that and use it
as the sole determinant of the Mac's quality?

Sheesh!

~~~
vips7L
Yeah to me this just sounds like another case of trying to force Windows to be
Unix. Its ok if you want Unix and are used to it, but to say Windows is no
good because it isn't Unix is just wrong.

The author didn't even seem to try to learn the Windows ecosystem or tooling
at all. He didn't check out Windows package managers (scoop or choco), he
didn't try to learn powershell (which has a ton unix tools built in), and he
didn't even try to use git on windows which can check out a repo just as fast
as any other system!

Additionally, I dont think its fair to blame Windows for the Docker company's
failure at making their product work on Windows.

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fuu_dev
i am confused about font rendering, this article states the exact opposite:
[https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/](https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-
fonts/)

~~~
dvhh
this is quite a subjective opinion, some people prefer crisp rendering, other
prefer smoother edge (even if high dpi screen render this comparison moot).

Then with font hinting, I would agree, but I am mainly working on windows,
doing non graphic work and looking at wall of text all day long.

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java-man
The first time I launched Windows 10 on my machine my eyes bled. The font
rendering is just awful, the OP is right.

After much effort had the anti-aliasing disabled and system font switched to
Tahoma. Guess what? Next update reverted them all back to the terrible
blurriness of whatever the default font is.

While, after much registry patching later, the fonts are not changed, but the
damn thing still changes the default associations after what appears to be
silent updates.

What? The user explicitly told me to use Notepad++ as a default app for .txt?
Change that - to the full Notepad idiotic glory! Prefer to use Foxit for PDF?
Back to Edge you go, stupid user!

I am not going to start about telemetry. Whose problem is Microsoft solving?
Certainly not the end user who plopped $200 for Win 10 license. Whose then?

~~~
smacktoward
They are solving _Microsoft 's_ problem, which is that they are frustrated
they only get paid by this customer one time every five years. They would much
rather this customer pay them every month _ad infinitum_ or lose access to
Windows altogether, which is what the whole push of Windows 10 towards
"Windows as a service" is about.

But it'll take a long time to wear people down to the point where they'll
accept renting their operating system, so in the meantime they're hungry for
any other way to have Windows bring in extra revenue above that one-time $200
-- which is where things like Candy Crush ads in the Start menu, intrusive and
inescapable data mining, etc. etc. etc. come from.

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jdjdjjsjs
If the payments is the issue then MS chose a really terrible solution
considering upgrades are free for the life of the device which is usually far
greater than the cadence of paid upgrades in the past.

I agree it's solving MS's problem, but the problem it's solving is the need
for MS to support 10+ years of OSes at any given time.

