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Comment by worble | Hacker News Reader

If the WSL is the only reason windows is a decent development workstation, then why not just use Linux in the first place? What unique factor is Windows offering here?

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In a word, drivers. We’ve come a long way since the dark days of the 90s, but hardware support on Linux still lags far, far behind Windows. This shows up in all sorts of ways on a daily basis. Graphics drivers, I’m looking at you Nvidia, are noticeably buggier and slower. Lots of little random errors crop up that are simply unfixable because the hardware mfr isn’t interested. Example: My USB controller resets itself every 15m for some reason. And good luck getting sleep/hibernate to function correctly unless you went out of your way to choose a hardware combination that is known to properly handle PM on Linux (I’m talking every peripheral here). For server-class stuff you’re generally in good shape but desktop Linux is still mostly an afterthought.

> you went out of your way to choose a hardware combination that is known to properly handle PM on Linux

This is no different than with windows. Except that more vendors sell you windows compatible pre-built systems. With macos the situation is far worse.

If you want more Linux enables hardware it will help to vote with your wallet and buy hardware from manufacturers that do provide support for Linux.

no different ... except...

very funny

Being able to run two OS'es at the same time seamlessly is pretty cool. Many programs I use are either Windows or Linux exclusive so it saves me a lot of time rebooting compared to double-booting.

It was a long time ago I had reason to start Windows specific software, but even back then wine did a really good job. It even had functionality for things like running IE versions in parallel, good for the frontenders in the team. And development hasn't slowed down since then.

I would rather not fuck with the OS on my Surface. Not only does it have a bunch of oddball hardware that may or may not have fully-functional drivers on Linux, but Windows has a really good touchscreen UX that I'd rather continue using.

If I need to do serious work, I'll snap the keyboard on and open WSL, but for anything else, I'll detatch the keyboard and just browse the web with Edge.

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