Hacker News Reader

Comment by humbfool2 | Hacker News Reader

I moved to Windows after 5 years of Mac this month. Because I knew I will be working from home, decided to build a good workstation (Thank you Ryzen ) and I Couldn't agree more WSL is very helpful for people who like windows UI and functionalities of Linux. There are few quirks but it works great.

View on HN

My Linux setup is usually like this, but inside out. When I need Windows functions (which is not often), I fire up a VM (either with VirtualBox or KVM). WSL makes Windows useful for Linux development (my software will run on Linux, not Windows), but the rest of Windows is usually a bit of a pain.

I usually find the text less readable on Windows than it's on Linux or a Mac. Not sure it's an issue with Edge, my monitor's Gamma or what, but it just looks better on Linux (and perfect on a Mac).

I've tried both ways there too; at least a few years ago (may be different now) running windows as a HOST worked way better for me since Linux in a VM was way more well behaved than Windows would be.

Curious what kinds of problems you used to run into here that made you give up on Windows guest/Linux host. I've been running my daily driver that way for the past 3 months and haven't hit any issues aside from 2 nits:

- Windows 10 basically requires an SSD to get reasonable responsiveness. You could maybe get away with putting a disk image on an SSD, but for serious use it's best to dedicate a whole disk or partition to it.

- QEMU's default display adapter started "leaking" pending IO requests at one point, which grinds the VM from full speed to a halt over the course of an hour or so. I ended up disabling the display adapter and moving to just RDP, which is basically an even trade since the RDP client can do everything the SPICE client can.

> You could maybe get away with putting a disk image on an SSD

You can preallocate the disk image for the VM. It's reasonable. YMMV and I don't do anything resembling heavy lifting on the Windows machines.

It was probably closer to 8 years ago, so SSD's weren't really available. Given the time I really don't remember the specifics but it was a work-from-home job so we did a lot of video conferencing pre-Zoom, and used Skype and other tools a lot. IIRC, the windows apps we used didn't like not being close to the video hardware.

Running a Linux VM was pretty friction-free, and I could use all the company mandated tools that had to be run in Windows simultaneously without performance issues. WIth a windows guest, I wouldn't run it unless I needed one of those tools, but that required a fairly long spin-up time.

Like I said... almost a decade ago so they probably aren't problems now. I'm running Linux native right now, but again for the ease of corporate support, I may go with Windows + WSL2 for my next refresh.

> and used Skype and other tools a lot. IIRC, the windows apps we used didn't like not being close to the video hardware.

Indeed. I used to keep a Windows box for the smartcard reader bureaucratic obligations with the Brazilian government that I never managed to accurately emulate on VMs.

I'm happy things are much better now.

This is true. I have found text not so "crisp" and readable on windows compared to MAC. I have an LG Ultrawide monitor and used both Mac and Windows with it, there is a difference in the sharpness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com