Comment by vouwfietsman
21 hours ago
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.
21 hours ago
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.
No disagreements on things not working right on Mac/Linux, it's definitely a frustration!
I would argue against the idea that it's the default for most enterprise dev. What you refer to as creative/web culture I would refer to as a newer generation of enterprise dev written in (I know) JS, TS, Electron etc. There is a lot of cross platform stuff out there, at least for clients, and Linux has taken up a lot of ground in the server market as well.
With CAD and GPU programming you have a point - proprietary drivers written for Windows has more technical sticking power.
I guess my feeling is that, especially with all the headlines saying European countries will move away from American software giants, Windows seems less attractive as a long term target for investing my time. Not to mention it's buggy and slow these days.
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.