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Comment by shados | Hacker News Reader

> Rebooting is so fast these days it isn't an issue

Rebooting still means you can't do both things at once. And even if its instant, losing all my state is annoying. Sure, a proper window manager can restore state, and a good tab manager will preserve those too, but its a freagin pain in the ass. Plus the pre-boot sequence is slower than the actual OS booting, so I still consider that a pain.

Maybe I'm petty (to each their own), but rebooting once a week would drive me nuts, nevermind once a day.

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Using Windows only for gaming means there is not a lot to gain from having work things opened while having the game running.

If you are going to use Windows for work alongside gaming, wouldn't game launching being so convenient affect your focus?

Also, if you even think about compilation/rendering, if those are supposed to take long enough to complete so as to let you game long enough, wouldn't the game also use some of the system resources, maybe just enough to make the work even longer to complete?

Probably depends on the game you play. I like to hack on some code while waiting for groups to form in MMOs for example.

And I'm not building 10 million lines of C++ on the side. For moderate sized apps (<100k LoC) in higher level languages (JS, Java, Python), building and/or running the code is mostly unaffected. While actually going through the code with grep or ag, cloning repos, reviewing PRs, making a commit, those aren't super CPU intensive.

And well, my gaming machine is so far beyond the macbook pros my employer provides, it's still going to be faster by a factor, game or not.

Lastly, even if there was a significant perf impact, being able to close the game and immediately fire up a terminal is still a lot better context switching experience than having to go through a reboot cycle.

That was actually part of it for me as well. Just running what you need in i3 is super productive. Windows is for gaming, with the occasional quick SSH to get something done (mintty though, Windows Terminal is slower for me).

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