Comment by isolay
1 day ago
It would have to be the 2nd option. Who in their right mind would voluntarily choose Windows as their dev env? It will have to be those who are already there.
1 day ago
It would have to be the 2nd option. Who in their right mind would voluntarily choose Windows as their dev env? It will have to be those who are already there.
Most people don't have a choice. Corporate IT has choosen what I run my machine on. I have used a native linux machine, but since my email is still on outlook, everybody uses teams, and all the non-code documents are on windows I end up having to have a windows machine. Linux in a VM under windows ends up being the easiest workflow (though I'm just starting to try WSL and so far it is looking good)
> (though I'm just starting to try WSL and so far it is looking good)
WSL is really nice, as is Windows Terminal. I particularly love its fonts (but that's probably just me).
Did they ever fix terminal performance?
2 replies →
Outlook and Teams are both web apps, or at least they were when I last used them. Even if you download the "native" app it's just Electron. I haven't had trouble using either of them on Linux.
Outlook is native. There is the new web version that it says don't use (yet)
1 reply →
This kind of stuff is why its hard to have good conversations about tooling. Windows is the best place for many kinds of software dev, but perhaps not the kind you are doing.
When it is not the mandated option, under what circumstances is Windows the best choice for software dev? The only domain I can think of is gaming, and Valve is seemingly coming up fast to eat Microsoft's lunch in the next few years.
As mentioned: gaming, most of enterprise dev, graphics/gpu/cad, desktop, certain classes of embedded. Broadly speaking, outside of hacker/web/creative culture, the default is windows.
Regardless of how evil gigantic companies can be, or what the ideal world should look like: from a pure usability perspective, windows is top of the list.
If I got 5$ every time a linux/mac enthousiasts has to tell me they just cannot run something, and proposing a myriad of workarounds to stick to their ideology, I could buy an apple vision pro and let it collect dust in the corner of my basement.
Valve is certainly increasing the viability of Linux as a platform for gaming, but I can't see developers targeting Wine or Linux for a major game over Windows directly. Not for a decade, if ever.
Game development, graphics programming and GUI tooling.
The alternative being macOS, if Apple actually had competitive prices for all kinds of world economies.
Plenty of us do, so far Valve has failed to make native builds for Linux appealing for game studios, even though they already have to deal with similar APIs on Android, iDevices and PS/Switch.
Visual Studio brings a lot to the table for C++ development. Specifically the Debugger, although IntelliSense also often succeeds at queries that stump clangd.
If they can replicate that capability, I think it can be a draw.
I was a mac / Linux guy before my current gig, but Visual Studio is so much more capable than XCode that I basically only use the Windows machine except to debug mac-specific issues. Less so, now, admittedly, that the malware scanner process is literally always pegging a CPU core.