I dev every workday on Windows 11 and I don’t get why people feel like it’s awful to work on? I dunno what everyone else is doing but it’s basically just switching between the IDE, Slack and the browser. The OS never seems to be an issue for me. My only real gripe is that even I click update and shutdown at the end of the day, it updates and restarts.
It very much depends on what you’re developing for.
Back when I did server-side development (which almost invariably is targetting Linux servers), having Linux as my dev environment was much better if only because I could run parts (or even all) of our server code directly in my machine configured as a Dev Environment.
However, for example, for Game Dev running Linux is much more of a problem because some tools are for Windows and you have to jump through hoops to make it run in Linux, if at all.
If you’re doing development on internal frontend systems for use by the Business side of a non-Tech company, then Windows is almost certainly the best dev OS because the software is meant to run in Windows machines (as that’s what the Business runs, unless we’re talking about creative companies, in which case it will be Mac) so the very same reasons why Linux is better for server dev apply here for Windows - it way more straightforward to develop in a machine where you can directly test at least parts of the code within the OS it will be running in.
Yeah, you can run virtual machines or deploy to a dev server, but that just adds extra steps and hence extra overhead for frequently done things like running small snippets of code whilst developing just to check it’s working as expected.
Then there’s the whole big company vs small company side of things: big companies have dedicated IT Support people and those will naturally try to standardize things for the obvious reason that it’s way more effective (same thing in dev, by the way, good Technical Architects try to keep the number of programming languages used low because its generally more efficient to have libraries, frameworks, maintenance and hiring practices around a smaller number of languages than it is to do it for many languages) which in turn means that in large companies “everybody gets the same” is an almost unassailable policy except for top-level management.
You have to install extra crap to get the terminal to work like unix and I always had to fight with it to install things. Not worth the time. Maybe if you don’t need a terminal though?
You install git and you get git bash that works great in the Windows terminal. That’s something you do once. I use the terminal daily, not an issue at all.
Cool, and then there’s NEVER any problems with different paths? With back and forward slashes? With the limit on path length? With missing permissions on the file system requiring weird workarounds?
Most importantly, your server is likely not Windows, yet you test on Windows, and that’s never ever been a serious source of issues?
And don’t say WSL. That’s like saying the fix to using Windows is to use Linux, but fiddlier. Not to mention you still get issues with the mounted file system.
Cool, and then there’s NEVER any problems with different paths? With back and forward slashes? With the limit on path length? With missing permissions on the file system requiring weird workarounds?
Nope. The language we use handles that for us. I don’t think path length has been an issue for a while now?
Most importantly, your server is likely not Windows, yet you test on Windows, and that’s never ever been a serious source of issues?
We use serverless functions using Linux and it’s never an issue. My previous employer, we had Windows servers and Linux based containers, and that wasn’t an issue either.
I never had to do anything on my Mac it just works every time
Also some of the libraries I use aren’t even supported on windows. I know a bunch of node libraries that I had to change in project repos to accommodate engineers using windows specifically. Windows is shit
If IT cant trust software engineers to have full admin rights on a work computer, either the calibur of your co workers is so bad that no one should want to work there, or the IT department has such a god complex, no one should want to work there.
No IT should trust devs to have full admin rights. Y’all know enough to fuck everything up and then blame IT for not knowing how to fix your weird ass edge case in 30 seconds before crying to the CIO.
It obviously depends on the environment, but if I am supposed to develop tools that, in theory, can fuck up everything, then I also need access to everything (on my machine). There’s no point in testing, if the elevated access rights on the server suddenly surface a fuckton of extra bugs.
Heck, I need admin just for the basics of installing developer tools and opening web ports.
They tried to lock our stuff down once. After a couple of days of absolutely zero work being done because all our tooling was missing, and the poor IT guy had to somehow learn how to install every tool we needed and taking forever, we just got sudo rights.
Im in firmware. IDEs change often depending on the chip i am working with. In some cases, the tools are better on windows, or have been in the past. It has gotten alot better recently.
Teams has recently decided to stop working on any browser except edge. I don’t know if this is intentional (at least chromium should work similarly) or if it’s a wayland thing, but I’m just assuming malice since webrtc works fine in all other instances.
I use it in Firefox. I think I had to make some cookie exceptions or something like that to make it work, but it’s functional. Still buggy, but Teams has always been buggy for me no matter the platform.
Windows can add some complications as a dev, especially in the corporate environment when really strict group policies are implemented that stop Devs from installing or configuring systems as they need.
One company I worked at remained on Windows LTSC for security reasons, and a lot of Devs that were working with Java hit a snag if for whatever reason an IDE they were using really wanted a system environment variable configured a certain way and it would straight up ignore user environment variables. They would be restricted from basically being able to configure anything without getting IT to remote on and make the changes for them.
I was forced to use a Mac for the first time years ago for work, I still hate working on a Mac but I can’t deny how much more flexible it can be compared to working in a Windows environment that is locked down.
This isnt a windows issue, its a company policy issue. If developers dont have full admin rights on their systems, its a failure of managment. If you cant trust your developers enough to give them admin rights, thats not a co worker i want to be around.
It’s slow, it’s unstable, it’s slow, it’s hard to customise, it’s slow, it’s bloated, it’s slow, it’s counter intuitive. Did I also mention that it’s slow?
Sure, if you just use Linux for dev, with a Windows hypervisor, you won’t notice the difference.
We devs also have a serious issue of performance blindness, because generally work and test on pretty beefy machines. Windows 11 is undeniably heavier on the system than Linux, and Mac hardware flies anyway. If your dev machine is beefy enough, you won’t really notice though.
We have a very strict build, and while there is bloatware I could do without, they’ve always been great about handing out new machines, so we generally stay ahead of it.
The issue I run into is that at our company, I’m very much “That guy”, who needs all the exceptions and special software.
While they’ve created some AD groups for me that provide most of what I need, transferring to a new laptop is a major procedure as I never know what new restrictions have been put in place that I’ll need exceptions for. It’s a constant battle between security and having the tools I need to do the job. I always have at least three laptops, one that I’m using, one I’m working on setting up, and the old one I can’t let go of.
All that being said, yes, win 11 is an absolute pig compared to other options, once my machine is dialed in, I really don’t mind the environment.
Course, it helps that my lab shares space with the end user IT support team, so all I have to do is call over my shoulder to have something fixed.
Have been working on moving what I can to a VM, but the systems I develop require physical access, and when I’ve asked, I’ve been told there is no way to give a VM access to the laptops ports.
Many of the systems / devices are on physically isolated networks, use RS-232 or USB for access, etc.
If there are netsec approved ways of passing physical ports to the VM that would solve a ton of my issues.
God damn powershell. I use my terminal daily! More than daily even! I love my posix compliance and my gnu utilities! I like it when env vars, such as path, take effect without having to restart the top of tree process again.
I like that my OS UI isn’t a react native app. I like that my laptop has a longer battery life. I like that sleep works reliably on my machine. I like that I can manage my packages and apps through a package manager (yes, I know you can now do it with winget). I like that I have control over what updates in my system and when and how I am affected. I like that I can use the multiple desktop/spaces features in a nice way and it is not finicky (Mac and Gnome do this particularly well). I like that my system search actually works well. I like that my system doesn’t show me ads when I try to use features of it. I like that when I change defaults on my system, I don’t get reminded to use something else than what I choose. I like that my defaults don’t reset after an update. I like that I can trust my os and that it doesn’t collect all possible data about me. I like that I have the ability to turn features off entirely and avoid them easily, and that those features aren’t straight up spyware.
I dev every workday on Windows 11 and I don’t get why people feel like it’s awful to work on? I dunno what everyone else is doing but it’s basically just switching between the IDE, Slack and the browser. The OS never seems to be an issue for me. My only real gripe is that even I click update and shutdown at the end of the day, it updates and restarts.
Same for my colleagues using a Mac.
I’d be more bothered about using Teams over Slack
It very much depends on what you’re developing for.
Back when I did server-side development (which almost invariably is targetting Linux servers), having Linux as my dev environment was much better if only because I could run parts (or even all) of our server code directly in my machine configured as a Dev Environment.
However, for example, for Game Dev running Linux is much more of a problem because some tools are for Windows and you have to jump through hoops to make it run in Linux, if at all.
If you’re doing development on internal frontend systems for use by the Business side of a non-Tech company, then Windows is almost certainly the best dev OS because the software is meant to run in Windows machines (as that’s what the Business runs, unless we’re talking about creative companies, in which case it will be Mac) so the very same reasons why Linux is better for server dev apply here for Windows - it way more straightforward to develop in a machine where you can directly test at least parts of the code within the OS it will be running in.
Yeah, you can run virtual machines or deploy to a dev server, but that just adds extra steps and hence extra overhead for frequently done things like running small snippets of code whilst developing just to check it’s working as expected.
Then there’s the whole big company vs small company side of things: big companies have dedicated IT Support people and those will naturally try to standardize things for the obvious reason that it’s way more effective (same thing in dev, by the way, good Technical Architects try to keep the number of programming languages used low because its generally more efficient to have libraries, frameworks, maintenance and hiring practices around a smaller number of languages than it is to do it for many languages) which in turn means that in large companies “everybody gets the same” is an almost unassailable policy except for top-level management.
You have to install extra crap to get the terminal to work like unix and I always had to fight with it to install things. Not worth the time. Maybe if you don’t need a terminal though?
You install git and you get git bash that works great in the Windows terminal. That’s something you do once. I use the terminal daily, not an issue at all.
Cool, and then there’s NEVER any problems with different paths? With back and forward slashes? With the limit on path length? With missing permissions on the file system requiring weird workarounds?
Most importantly, your server is likely not Windows, yet you test on Windows, and that’s never ever been a serious source of issues?
And don’t say WSL. That’s like saying the fix to using Windows is to use Linux, but fiddlier. Not to mention you still get issues with the mounted file system.
Nope. The language we use handles that for us. I don’t think path length has been an issue for a while now?
We use serverless functions using Linux and it’s never an issue. My previous employer, we had Windows servers and Linux based containers, and that wasn’t an issue either.
I never had to do anything on my Mac it just works every time
Also some of the libraries I use aren’t even supported on windows. I know a bunch of node libraries that I had to change in project repos to accommodate engineers using windows specifically. Windows is shit
Also it’s riddled with ads
Enterprise Windows does not get all those ads. I haven’t seen a single ad on any of my Windows machines.
Apple doesn’t sell a Mac version with ads and a version without so that seems better to me too. Why do I have to pay extra for that?
Because you’re already paying more for the hardware with a Mac.
Or you could just use a cross platform terminal such as Powershell? I also use Terminal to have nice UX.
This sounds more like IT babysitting.
If IT cant trust software engineers to have full admin rights on a work computer, either the calibur of your co workers is so bad that no one should want to work there, or the IT department has such a god complex, no one should want to work there.
No IT should trust devs to have full admin rights. Y’all know enough to fuck everything up and then blame IT for not knowing how to fix your weird ass edge case in 30 seconds before crying to the CIO.
It obviously depends on the environment, but if I am supposed to develop tools that, in theory, can fuck up everything, then I also need access to everything (on my machine). There’s no point in testing, if the elevated access rights on the server suddenly surface a fuckton of extra bugs.
Heck, I need admin just for the basics of installing developer tools and opening web ports.
They tried to lock our stuff down once. After a couple of days of absolutely zero work being done because all our tooling was missing, and the poor IT guy had to somehow learn how to install every tool we needed and taking forever, we just got sudo rights.
What ide are you using?
Im in firmware. IDEs change often depending on the chip i am working with. In some cases, the tools are better on windows, or have been in the past. It has gotten alot better recently.
How do you audit your IDEs extensions?
Teams has recently decided to stop working on any browser except edge. I don’t know if this is intentional (at least chromium should work similarly) or if it’s a wayland thing, but I’m just assuming malice since webrtc works fine in all other instances.
Fuck all of microslop on principle.
I use it in Firefox. I think I had to make some cookie exceptions or something like that to make it work, but it’s functional. Still buggy, but Teams has always been buggy for me no matter the platform.
That doesn’t seem to be a generic issue, I am still running Teams through Firefox as a PWA on Ubuntu.
I’m usually on LibreWolf, but I tried FF, Chromium, everything in an X session, no luck.
I use teams in Vivaldi with wayland. No problems beyond standard teams jank.
Windows can add some complications as a dev, especially in the corporate environment when really strict group policies are implemented that stop Devs from installing or configuring systems as they need.
One company I worked at remained on Windows LTSC for security reasons, and a lot of Devs that were working with Java hit a snag if for whatever reason an IDE they were using really wanted a system environment variable configured a certain way and it would straight up ignore user environment variables. They would be restricted from basically being able to configure anything without getting IT to remote on and make the changes for them.
I was forced to use a Mac for the first time years ago for work, I still hate working on a Mac but I can’t deny how much more flexible it can be compared to working in a Windows environment that is locked down.
This isnt a windows issue, its a company policy issue. If developers dont have full admin rights on their systems, its a failure of managment. If you cant trust your developers enough to give them admin rights, thats not a co worker i want to be around.
It’s slow, it’s unstable, it’s slow, it’s hard to customise, it’s slow, it’s bloated, it’s slow, it’s counter intuitive. Did I also mention that it’s slow?
Personally I’ve never experienced any performance issues with it, seems fast and responsive to me.
Same here. I primarily use WSL2 as my dev environment. Everything outside that is native apps for collab and tooling.
Sure, if you just use Linux for dev, with a Windows hypervisor, you won’t notice the difference.
We devs also have a serious issue of performance blindness, because generally work and test on pretty beefy machines. Windows 11 is undeniably heavier on the system than Linux, and Mac hardware flies anyway. If your dev machine is beefy enough, you won’t really notice though.
Yeah I always have high end systems.
I dont disagree that windows sucks. I just don’t see it as a major issue for doing dev. As you say, that’s correlated to my high end system
I think a lot of it comes down to the build team.
We have a very strict build, and while there is bloatware I could do without, they’ve always been great about handing out new machines, so we generally stay ahead of it.
The issue I run into is that at our company, I’m very much “That guy”, who needs all the exceptions and special software.
While they’ve created some AD groups for me that provide most of what I need, transferring to a new laptop is a major procedure as I never know what new restrictions have been put in place that I’ll need exceptions for. It’s a constant battle between security and having the tools I need to do the job. I always have at least three laptops, one that I’m using, one I’m working on setting up, and the old one I can’t let go of.
All that being said, yes, win 11 is an absolute pig compared to other options, once my machine is dialed in, I really don’t mind the environment.
Course, it helps that my lab shares space with the end user IT support team, so all I have to do is call over my shoulder to have something fixed.
You sound like you need some VMs. Particularly for whatever is on that old laptop.
Have been working on moving what I can to a VM, but the systems I develop require physical access, and when I’ve asked, I’ve been told there is no way to give a VM access to the laptops ports.
Many of the systems / devices are on physically isolated networks, use RS-232 or USB for access, etc.
If there are netsec approved ways of passing physical ports to the VM that would solve a ton of my issues.
God damn powershell. I use my terminal daily! More than daily even! I love my posix compliance and my gnu utilities! I like it when env vars, such as path, take effect without having to restart the top of tree process again. I like that my OS UI isn’t a react native app. I like that my laptop has a longer battery life. I like that sleep works reliably on my machine. I like that I can manage my packages and apps through a package manager (yes, I know you can now do it with winget). I like that I have control over what updates in my system and when and how I am affected. I like that I can use the multiple desktop/spaces features in a nice way and it is not finicky (Mac and Gnome do this particularly well). I like that my system search actually works well. I like that my system doesn’t show me ads when I try to use features of it. I like that when I change defaults on my system, I don’t get reminded to use something else than what I choose. I like that my defaults don’t reset after an update. I like that I can trust my os and that it doesn’t collect all possible data about me. I like that I have the ability to turn features off entirely and avoid them easily, and that those features aren’t straight up spyware.
I never use Powershell and I use the terminal daily.