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Comment by owenwil | Hacker News Reader

As someone who made the same jump, Windows wasn't really a viable platform for non-dotNet developers until that happened. The state of Linux on the desktop is, frankly, a disaster — I spent months on trying to make it work, but wow, it's not worth the time.

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Windows has been a viable platform for software development since always.

I have been developing Windows software since Windows 3.1 and my first UNIX was Xenix, followed by DG/UX, Aix and many other variants.

Windows is perfectly viable developer OS for C++, Delphi, Tcl/TK, Perl, Python, Java and .NET developers.

Microsoft did a mistake not following up on Windows NT POSIX support, because that is what many care about is POSIX shell utilities and C APIs, the actual kernel is irrelevant.

However now GNU/Windows fixes that problem.

Exactly I spent many years with a windows desk top as my pc developing for Solaris and before that Primos (an ITS derived os) and for Unisys A Series mainframes.

> GNU/Windows

I LOL'ed.

That's crazy.

I must be doing something wrong. I've been using Linux for my primary desktop since 1995 (started with TurboLinux 2.0, then jumped to RH v5.2).

Was it a cakewalk over the year? No. Even today there are times where I'm in WTF mode about something or another (my favorite is when I do an update to the NVidia drivers and it borks my system hard enough I have to restore my X config in some manner or another at the command line because I have custom crap in it).

But I don't regret anything about my 2+ decade decision to ditch Windows.

Linux on Windows is still a disaster? It's been something I want to play around with but haven't had the chance yet.

I read it as a standalone Linux on Desktop is a disaster. Not Linux on Windows.

Hardly a disaster ok open office isn't as good as Office but its a perfectly workable solution.

The fact that there is a wall between the Linux stuff and Windows stuff (“You can't edit a file that originates from the Linux userland inside Windows.”) sounds very hacky to me.

Just do a samba share from the Linux vm to windows

It's not a VM, it's like the inverse of WINE... it's a compatibility layer... and that one piece (not being able to edit files in the LSW from windows/gui) is what keeps me off of it.

Oh why not use windows pro and hyper-v then and run a Linux vm then that's assuming you don't run a small whitebox server to do your dev on?

I do.. and samba to use a GUI editor against files in the VM. That said, there's the overhead of a full VM... some of the same reasons one would use WINE instead of a full Windows VM.

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