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Comment by mands | Hacker News Reader

Looks like great hardware let down by poor software.

I just gave Windows 10 another try with a view to purchasing a Surface 4 if successful (OneNote + Stylus = :)) - but after a few weeks reverted back to Linux (Fedora).

Apart from the inferior development experience (outside of VS - which is top-notch), there are just too many bugs, unfinished pieces and a general lack of polish. Updates wouldn't install, the Store kept crashing/disappearing, Modern Apps would interact badly with virtual desktops.

Win 10 should never have been released in such a state. I'm hoping the Threshold release out this week will go some ways to repairing the damage and presume will be a better fit for the Surface Book.

Maybe I'll look at the Surface line again in a few months.

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Anecdotally, I've used every Windows release since 3.1 and Windows 10 is pretty much on par with Windows 7/8. I don't have updates that fail, I don't have store apps crash (not that I use them) and generally think the polish is on par with most Windows releases over the years - which is to say, it's .. meh. I didn't even have a problem with Windows 8, because like most professionals, I don't live in the start menu, don't use touch apps and generally use Windows to just get shit done which means most of my time is spent within the application (which is what an OS should do right?)

I do think that if I switched to Linux for "a few weeks" I'd have the exact same reaction as a Linux user switching to Windows. In fact, this is how I've used Linux for the last 15 years and pretty much every experience since 2000 has been just that "it's nice but lacking polish".

Everyone has their own favorite flavor of OS, Windows 10 is no better or worse than previous releases.

I think it has 100% to do with what is your purpose.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE my OpenSUSE desktops. I have a tiled window manager with means zero menus. Everything is shortcut keys (The way I use Windows 8). Windows PowerShell and CMD are catching up SLOWLY but I love my rxvt-unicode terminal. I love using Ranger (Comand line file manager) and VIM works perfectly.

People need to stop seeing Fedora as anything but a test bed for Red Hat and use another distro. Fedora is always unpolished and has a ton of hiccups. (My own biased opinion)

Windows at work stinks (I use 2 desktop computers that are Linux) one laptop Windows 7 and one desktop Windows 8. I have issues with updates on both windows machines and they are a PAIN to fix. It gets permissions wrong all the time and I can actually be locked out of removing icons from my desktops let alone the horrible exchange server. So I got permission to use Linux since I get things done much fast on it. Also the email gets blocked due to spam from all the stupid stuff my co-workers do.

My personal computer at home has not been able to upgrade to Windows 8.1 and my 8.0 won't install more updates. (Wife HATES Tiled Window Managers and hates when she has to switch between Windows 7 or Windows 8 or KDE). My memory gets used up all the time and I can't htop in command line and kill apps. I have to three finger salute and wait for the graphical interface to kick in. Hangs and is sluggish at random times. Still prefer Windows to OS X just for sane OS grammar sake.

Actually, out of the box, the last few Fedora releases (22, 23) are way more polished than RHEL 7.

It does not change the fact that they are testbeds, but the Gnome 3 did really wonders.

Might just give a VM a test. I still can't find a better balanced distro for Linux in terms of stability and packages. Zypper package manager is best in class and the build.opensuse.org is lightyears ahead of ppa.

That's absolutely true. I've gone back and forth between Linux and Windows over the past 10 years or so - using Linux at work and Windows for casual/office/music production. I used Windows 8.1 for my last job and it was a nice experience overall.

Although the latest Fedora 23 is perhaps the most polished version yet ;)

Though its funny-at least in the Bay Area (I know I know, we're in our own little world here, etc) Windows has a very minimal mindshare amongst devs (except for having to use it for work).

Huh, that's odd. I haven't had any of those issues. In fact, apart from a few difficulties with NPM (which were NPM issues, not Windows issues), I've never had any issues with Windows 10.

I admit to missing SSH, and a nice text-centric command line (sometimes), but Powershell is a decent shell that's built in. Chocolatey is a decent package and app manager that takes 15-20 seconds to install. And Atom and Sublime work wonderfully on windows.

Also, VS, which has a awesome free community edition, can be used to develop in most languages and frameworks. If you think it's top notch you should use it.

Part of the problem I've noticed with linux users complaining about Windows is that they try and develop linux applications or web servers on windows, then complain that it's difficult. This shouldn't really be surprising. The opposite situation is trying to develop a windows application or server on linux to deploy on a windows server. It's doable with Mono, but it's difficult. But I've never heard anyone from Windows land complaining about it.

I agree, a lot of people tend criticise Windows simply for not being Unix, which is unfair, and I like the design of the NT kernel.

And this is slightly off-topic but I have tried several times to fully embrace the Windows way, learnt PowerShell (ISE rocks), and even spent significant time building a startup using F# in VS and hosting it on Azure. In retrospect it was nice but there were just too many rough edges for me,

* Setting up a nice console environment means using a 3rd-party system like cmder/conemu + Cygwin/Msys/etc.

* Getting git working along with ssh-agent is still hit & miss

* Installing, for instance, Python packages that rely on C bindings requires extra trickery to set up,

* Chocolately isn't bad, but it is just downloading and running installers for you, it doesn't really have a dependency solver like yum or other Linux package managers do (NuGet does but don't think Chocolately uses those features). Plus it's more for packaged software than libraries/tools. OneGet may fix that in the future.

These are all surmoutable issues, for sure, but in the end it was just easier to move back to Linux. Not just for familiarity, but also convenience and ease - for me Windows was like death by 1000 papercuts. A shame, as I much prefer the Windows/PowerShell data model of communicating objects to text. I just wish MS would spend some time working on the overall dev experience outside of VS.

(I'm sure enough people will say desktop Linux has it's fair share of issues and I totally agree. Wireless drivers, Wayland still not quite there, battery usage, and much more. Which is why I'd be happy to pay for Windows if the dev experience was improved.)

Installing python packages that require C bindings on Windows is pretty straightforward, provided that:

- you have exact MSVC version, that was used to build your python (and yes, they are ancient, and no, you cannot purchase them anymore),

- it is possible at all to build the given package by the required MSVC version (see also: icu, boost, qt5 and the minimum MSVC version required),

- there are no dependencies on many additional libraries (i.e. building GDAL for Windows python is a real pain),

- the extension does not use some kind of home-brew build system that the author never tried to run on Windows (hello, py2cairo),

- you don't need some other compiler (scipy, I'm looking at you and your fortran).

But for simple extensions like psycopg2, it is a piece of cake. It is building packages, that are not native in Windows, but you have them in dependency chain, that are the problem.

As a comment on git setup. I've never once had a problem by using Github for windows, and then summarily completely ignoring the UI. It adds `git` to your PATH.

> Getting git working along with ssh-agent is still hit & miss Git for Windows support ssh out of the box, any particular reason you want to use ssh-agent?

I use pretty much all 3 main platforms as daily dev enviroment. Mint for work, Windows for hobby and OSX for when I work outside my house. And I find that they are all pretty equal as dev experience(outside of VS, which I avoid because it locks me too much on windows). What would you classify as a better dev experience on Fedora than on windows? I think it might come down to just being used to it or personal preference. They all have strong/weak points but mostly I can get a productive experience on all of them.

Cannot speak for OP, but the thing, that makes Fedora better developer experience than Windows is dnf (yum) and especially -devel packages.

Windows or MSVC does not really have a standardized way how to cope with third-party SDKs. It is basically unzip the libs and includes somewhere and configure that path that in your project (good luck making other people build your solution). It kind of works with shallow dependencies, but not when your dependencies form a nice graph.

In Fedora, these things work out of the box and you don't have to waste your time.

Absolutely. Being able to install a -devel package and just get on with things is incredibly important.

Same experience here. There are basic stuff that can't be approved by a junior tester. For example, when the operating system asks you to select an application by default but when you approve the action an error appears saying that you need to go the control panel...

> Updates wouldn't install, the Store kept crashing/disappearing, Modern Apps would interact badly with virtual desktops.

Sounds like a hardware issue. Cannot reproduce. Are you running the mainline release or did you opt in to the experimental builds?

Mainline release on a modern Dell/Intel laptop with all drivers installed. Same laptop runs Linux fine so unlikely hardware issue.

Updates would crap out with random errors like 80074005 - which a casual user should never see. I got it working again by stopping the update services from the console (net stop ...), deleting the cache and re-running.

The store would be running, then you'd Alt-Tab out and back again and it would be gone. Same happened with other Universal apps, OneNote in particular.

It certainly got more reliable over time, and I have tried the insider builds on a spare laptop and they're better - but the initial 10240 release was sub-par.

>>Same laptop runs Linux fine so unlikely hardware issue.

That literally means nothing. You can have CPUs which run Prime95 for days without fail and then die after running a proper memtest.

Perhaps, but I'd suspect that would manifest itself with a BSOD/kernel panic rather than the same user-level applications breaking in a reproducible manner without affecting the rest of the OS.

>> Apart from the inferior development experience (outside of VS - which is top-notch), there are just too many bugs,

>> unfinished pieces and a general lack of polish. Updates wouldn't install, the Store kept crashing/disappearing,

>> Modern Apps would interact badly with virtual desktops.

>> Win 10 should never have been released in such a state.

Sounds like El Capitan.

Are you sure your installation is OK?

In El Capitan, I've never had Store crash, not sure what would be equivalent to Modern apps, but the virtual desktops are ok-ish, etc.

The only thing that is really bugging me is non working IPSec/IKEv2.

Are you running Fedora on your Surface?

No, on a small 11in netbook. I needed a mobile dev environment, and it was either a Surface that could double as a tablet and run Linux VMs, or a netbook running Linux.

You can run Linux natively on the Surface, SecureBoot isn't a problem, but the bigger issues are drivers and a touch-unfriendly UI.

(I went with an Acer Aspire E11 - $150, 8hr battery, and fanless - it may be the best Linux netbook every made!)

And that doesn't even scratch the Surface of the issues related to privacy that Windows 10 kicks up...

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