Comment by cpfohl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpfohl | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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?

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.

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