Comment by ikidd
18 hours ago
I've gotten to the point that if you're trying to show me something and I see you're using Windows, I just assume you're an unserious person and it's worthless.
All the major tools for advanced work are Linux-based, and there's maybe a Windows version, but it's probably a kludge like Docker Desktop.
> All the major tools for advanced work are Linux-based
No, they aren't. Linux hasn't yet got anything remotely close to PDB symbol servers and WinDbg's record-replay debugging. perf is... an attempt.
Source: worked on Windows and Linux drivers and user-mode applications. Windows tooling blows the competition out of the water in actually advanced developer experience. Vim is cool to the ricing hackerman types but not people who actually earn salaries. Windows doesn't need Docker because it has a stable user-mode ABI.
You could exhaust Windows networking or filesystem features in an afternoon. Linux could give you a career.
I spent 20 years supporting Windows server and server applications like Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, etc, etc, and when I left that industry and got back to Linux, I was absolutely floored about what I had been missing. No wonder Windows had it's lunch eaten in virtually every facet by Linux server applications.
I know you’re joking, but there is a very small sliver of truth in there somewhere. There are some tools on windows that stand shoulder to shoulder with better os’s.
advanced work != advanced tools
You can have basic and not very user friendly tool, and work on very advanced topics, such as new forms of networking, innovative database, cool filesystem or storage devices, etc...
Or you can be an advanced windows developer with very nice tools, and yet work on something utterly mundane, like an internal app which tracks time off in your company, schedules delivery of parts, or provides a (granted, very nice and polished) UI to the backend database server which runs Linux.
In my experience, most of the advanced work is done on Linux nowadays. Just look at HN front page - how many posts are Windows-only and are not "new UI over existing library/service"?
Windows does plenty of 'advanced work'. Almost all video games are written primarily on and for Windows.
> In my experience, most of the advanced work is done on Linux nowadays
That's because your experience probably hasn't ever included work on Windows internals. Take it from someone who has—the complexity and 'advancedness' of the stuff running on Windows is at least equal to that of Linux or any other OS. The fact that Windows can so thoroughly abstract the computer away from the user is in itself a massive feat that few other OSs have really managed.
> Just look at HN front page - how many posts are Windows-only
The overwhelming majority of posts on the HN front page are now LLM slop or web development. I seriously dislike this insinuation that work done on Windows is, as the grandparent claims, 'unserious' or less advanced.
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> people who actually earn salaries
Maybe a hot take but the world's "most advanced software engineering" is not happening in W-2 employment scenarios.