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Comment by eklavya | Hacker News Reader

Despite the focus on cloud in the article, there are a lot of ubuntu desktop users. I mean it has become rare to see a dev running Windows in my experience. Could be a regional thing but it seems popular here.

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Windows isn't so bad. I had a legit prejudice against it for the longest time, and did literally everything in my power to avoid it even as my team began working almost exclusively on .NET projects.

Now I've bootcamped my mac and swapped out my desktop Arch installation in favor of Windows 10. There are undoubtedly things that I miss - and I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't primarily writing C# - but it's not quite the purgatory I'd imagined / remembered it being.

You meant wasn't so bad (Win7). The Win10 privacy issues are a showstopper on desktop.

IIRC, nearly all of that behavior can be disabled during installation (so before any user activity exists). And if you're talking about backdoors/hidden privacy behavior, there's been a risk of that since Windows 95. I think that the defaults of Win10 are bad, but it's not all as bad as the FUD that's floating around.

Nearly is not nearly good enough.

That behavior that you set will be reset back to defaults with the next update.

Thanks, but I have better things to do with my time than chasing settings in the system, whose vendor does not respect my choices.

The worst features can only be disabled on Enterprise editions of Windows. That is not the attitude I want in the most important piece of software on my computer.

Does the registry tweak not disable Telemetry?

> There are undoubtedly things that I miss - and I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't primarily writing C# - but it's not quite the purgatory I'd imagined / remembered it being.

Yes, I keep telling myself that I'm going to dual-boot my Surface Pro 3 with Arch, but I never get around to it, in large part because Windows 10 just isn't that bad.

VS also has nice Python tools. Powershell competence is going to improve your Windows experience. I figured out I have been looking the world in the wrong way. We all complain about the annoyances, but I think to use both Windows and Linux competently makes you a better over all developer.

I've really embraced Powershell in a big way recently. A fairly expressive language, full backing of .NET, gives you total control of Windows.

I always hated that Windows didn't have a [useful] terminal, cmd doesn't really cut it, but once I realized how deep you can actually go with Powershell, I've integrated it into our companies build process.

I didn't mean that, it's perfectly usable. But having a unix like system has it's advantages. I use a mac myself :)

They gave me a Mac at work, but... it's not for me. I got a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu as soon as they let me.

Couldn't install Ubuntu on a Mac? Technically, it works.

Technically? I've done it for a few years now and am happy. I daresay, ...it just works.

Well, some things don't, but it mostly works. Sleep is always dodgy for me (won't wake up properly), the camera doesn't work, and the brightness adjuster is spotty, but it's nothing I can't live with.

I'd rather see the money go towards a company that's actually working to support Linux, will deal with the machine under warranty, and so on. Also, the keys are in the right place, there are two mouse buttons, and so on.

I just tried install in Ubuntu 15.04 on my new XPS 15 and it turned into a brick--can't even get into BIOS. Nor can I boot from USB because the interwebs told me I needed to disable them to get them working again--somehow they were disabled during the install process.

Hopefully, I can return and get an inspiron or HP.

I bought the model with Ubuntu preinstalled to ensure it would "just work". It does.

For primary desktop in my environment most run OS X. Few developers around me run Debian or Mint. Some openSUSE. Ubuntu no so much.

I go to a fair number of conferences and it really depends on the conference and its represented tech. AWS Re:Invent was about 50% Windows, 30% Mac 20% Linux, Mobcon (mobile dev) was 30% Windows, 65% Mac, 5% Linux, but PhpTek I would say was 10% Windows, 60% Mac, 30% Linux. I was actually taken back by how many Linux laptops I saw.

30% is that surprising to you?

Can't tell if you are joking. Op gave a 30% for each OS, once per OS per conference...

And OP only expressed being surprised or "taken back"[sic] for one OS. Why are we talking about the other OSes?

Emberconf 2015 was (as near as I could tell) 95% mac.

Mac hardware is modestly popular among Linux users.

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