You can accomplish the same with Distrobox on Linux, but there's definitely something to be said about having the best of both worlds by running Windows + WSL.
I honestly think Microsoft could win back some mind share from Apple if they:
* Put out a version of windows without all the crap. Call it Dev edition or something and turn off or down the telemetry, preinstalled stuff, ads, and Copilot. * Put some effort into silicon to get us hardware with no compromises like the Macbooks
I'm on Mac now, and I jump back and forth between Mac laptop and a Linux desktop. I actually prefer Windows + WSL, but ideologically I can't use it. It has potential - PowerToys is fantastic, WSL is great, I actually like PowerShell as a scripting language and the entire new PC set up can now be done with PowerShell + Winget DSC. But, I just can't tolerate the user hostile behavior from Microsoft, nor the stop the world updates that take entirely too long. They should probably do what macOS and Silverblue, etc. do and move to an immutable/read-only base and deploy image based updates instead of whatever janky patching they do now.
Plus, I can't get a laptop that's on par with my M4 Pro. The Surface Laptop 7 (the arm one) comes close, but still not good enough.
I'm not saying it's a perfect solution, but with Windows 11 Pro and group policy I was able to disable all of the annoying stuff, and because it is group policy it has persisted through several years of updates. It is annoying you have to do this, and it does take some time to get set up right. But it's a solution.
That said I'd pay for a dev edition as you described it, that would be fantastic.
You can make your own clean version, legally, with this file. https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator.
I get customers and most people don't know about it but it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it.
it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it.
Why? HN has traditionally always largely been a macOS and Linux crowd. Why do we have to care about fixing an OS that is broken out of the box (that most of us don't use anyway)?
Because someone cannot make informed comments about the "other" party unless they have a reasonably deep knowledge of it, too.
Far too many Linux users, especially, make fun of Windows and if you dig a bit you see that most of their complaints are things that are solved with 5 minutes of googling. Some complaints are philosophical, and those I agree with, but even in that case, I'd be curious how consistent they are with their philosophy when for example Linux desktop environments due weird things.
Summarizing a bit: Linux users with years or decades of experience of tinkering as sysadmins with Linux frequently make junior-level user complaints about Windows usage, frequently based on outdated information about it.
I say this who has been using both Linux and Windows for a few decades now and has a fairly decent level of sysadmin skills on both.
I didn't know about this. My knowledge of Windows is very limited. I use it every day for work, but it's managed by our IT and Security departments. It's locked down. You cannot use external drives. You can't install applications yourself and you can't run un-approved applications. So, I learned over the years to never touch anything that already hasn't been approved, even settings. If you want to apply for something to be approved, you can submit a written justification co-signed by your manager. My manager has never rejected anything I requested, but it's a huge hassle. Most of us just don't bother, even developers.
This seems pretty useful, thanks! I had certainly never heard of it.
Thanks for this! I didn’t know this tool existed
There is no flavor of Windows 11 that is acceptable. Even the UI itself is a disaster. A cornucopia of libraries and paradigms from React Native to legacy APIs as if an interdimensional wave function of bad ideas had collapsed into an OS, but with ads.
There are literal ads for apps in the Windows 11 start menu. That's unacceptable. Even if one day they roll it back, it will still have been unacceptable. The fact that anyone ever green-lit that decision is unforgivable for a corporation.
macOS isn't perfect but the issue you point out is more of a docker problem, not an OS one. I'm told https://orbstack.dev/ is the solution.
I hear this a lot, and I do seem to remember back when I first got Windows 11 I might have seen something stupid like Candy Crush, but I'll be honest, I literally never see ads anywhere in the OS. Truth be told I hardly ever use the start menu since they ruined it, but this complaint about ads everywhere make it sound like a typical webpage. I just don't see it. Maybe because I'm on Win11 Pro?
Windows LTSC already exists, but Microsoft, in all their wisdom, restricts it to enterprise licensees only, and seems to actively discourage using it as a desktop OS. The first problem is of course fixable with some KMS server shenanigans, but the second can be kinda painful when it comes to keeping drivers up-to-date, installing apps that rely on features LTSC excludes (and doesn't provide an easy way to install manually), etc.
I've often said that if Microsoft had just iterated on Windows 2000 forever I'd probably still be a full-time Windows user. If Microsoft had maintained an LTSC-like Windows variant that was installable from the normal retail installation media and with a normal retail product key (at the very least Pro, but ideally Home), that also likely would have kept me on Windows full-time instead of switching to Linux as my daily driver.
I use Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC, which as far as I'm aware has all the features that Pro has (plus the IoT Enterprise stuff) and zero bloat. I switched to it from my already de-bloated 11 Pro installation (because it removes some telemetry you're normally unable to disable) and have had 0 issues with it. I can't say I activated it using a normal retail product key, however, there are easy solutions to that.
Ya I totally get that. The way I view it is that windows is a glorified driver support layer and any actual work i do is almost exclusively in the Linux container.
When I used to have free time it was great for games too
IMO Linux is better even as that glorified driver support layer these days, at least on x86 hardware (I can't attest to anything ARM-based besides various SBCs). I have to fiddle with drivers much more often on Windows (usually because of Windows Update shenanigans, like "lmao let's silently downgrade the manually-installed AMD GPU driver for no fucking reason at all").
> I can't get a laptop that's on par with my M4 Pro.
This is the only reason I have not requested a windows laptop from my company. WSL is better for docker development in basically every way than a mac can be (disclaimer: haven't tried orbstack yet, heard good things, but my base assumption is it can't be better than WSL2) except it is literally impossible to get hardware as good as the M3 or M4 for any other OS than macOS.
I replaced my m1 with a snapdragon laptop running Win11 and upgraded that to pro. For what I do with it, it runs great with very long battery times, for less than Apple quoted to repair the m1. I don't use the copilot features and haven't seen any ads so far, except maybe for office during setup.
(Used 15ys OSX, now Win11)
The biggest difference between OSX and Windows is, Apple adds (some say steal) functionality from competition, and open source. They make it neat. On windows to have something working, you need a WezTerm, Everything for search, Windhawk for a vertical taskbar on the right, Powertoys for an app starter, Folder Size for disc management etc. If you spend a lot of time, Win11 can be ok to work with.
If Powerpoint and Affinity would work on Linux, I'd use Linux though.
Maybe just for your specific preferences. Terminal is plenty fine. Vertical taskbar on the right is straight up user preference. PowerToys for an app starter? Like Alfred? The start search does a decent enough job of that. Folder Size is nice, but enumerating all files is very taxing.
Oh running Ice to wrangle the menu bar app icons or Rectangle to properly manage windows ('cause Apple screwed that one up) must be unnecessary.
Each OS is going to have extension applications to improve on the OOTB experience. This is an invalid argument to choosing one over the other.
>Windhawk for a vertical taskbar on the right
Huh? Windows supports vertical taskbar.
It was removed in Win11, when they rewrote the taskbar to pretend that it's macOS dock (icons centered by default). Today your only options are horizontal taskbar along the top or the bottom edge, and icons aligned left or center.
Last time I checked, Windows 11 lost this capability and 3p solutions like Windhawk are needed. I'd be very happy if they brought this back though, feel free to share a link to some info about how to do it natively.
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
"natively" is the key word here, this looks like a 3p hack.
That was my impression too.
Outside US and countries of similar income level, Windows is doing quite alright in mindshare, and will keep doing that unless Apples stops pretending being the computer version of audiophile.
I on the other hand cannot get an affordable Mac that has the same GPU, disk space and memory size as my workstation class laptop.
To the tech savvy, there is essentially only one advantage to running Windows, and that is the ability to run Windows-only software. In all technical respects - control, performance, flexibility - it is inferior to the alternatives. Don't confuse vendor lockin with technology.
I find it dismaying that people on Hacker News willingly submit to incredibly user-hostile behavior from Microsoft and call it "the best of both worlds". Presumably a nontrivial proportion here are building the next generation of software products - and if we don't even respect ourselves, how likely is it that we will respect our users?
"I find it dismaying that people on Hacker News willingly submit to incredibly user-hostile behavior from Microsoft"
And I find it funny that the crowd that spends whole days implementing user-hostile features in yet another SaaS crapware has so much to say about Microsoft's bad behavior.
There is an additional reason: Some (many?) people simply prefer the Windows UI conventions (once you remove all the enshittifications post Windows 7).
I'm not aware of any particular UI convention that's in Windows that isn't available in, say Plasma. Day to day usage is extremely similar, and where they diverge it's usually because 1) Plasma has a feature that Windows doesn't, or 2) someone at Microsoft opted for senseless change for change's sake - a toy interface is layered over a functional one, often (but not always) grudgingly allowing access to the old behavior with extra steps, in a tacit admission of no-confidence. This behavior is pervasive - the "new control panel", the new context menu ("show more options" to get to the original, an extra click that yields a menu with many of the same options but in a different order with different icons), and best of all moving the "Start button" to the center - a change which more than any other exemplifies the silliness, because it 1) at best achieves nothing, and 2) flies in face of the original UI research based on Fitt's Law that informed 30 years of Windows UI tradition.
I honestly can't imagine anyone preferring all that. </rant>
I don't think Microsoft losing the mind share has anything to do with software. Macbooks are winning the laptop war because of superior hardware.
Only on countries where people earn salaries big enough to pay for the Apple hardware tax.
What Apple hardware tax? The macbook air is the best value laptop there is. If the latest version is out of the budget, you can buy older generations used. Even m1 air would be better than any windows laptop at a comparable price point.
Yeah, because only being able to afford used stuff is such a great place to be.
Better than buying a new but crap product for sure?
70% of the world doesn't think it is crap.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Superior hardware with terrible software. Also they straight up artificially limit their hardware so they don't cannibalize their sales, which is slightly understandable, but they do it in the dumbest ways. My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor, even though it has the same specs as her work Pro. Oh and good luck actually getting that external display to work, I swear only like 50% of USB-C docks work on the platform.
> Superior hardware with terrible software.
Funny how that was the other way around just a few years ago. Macs had inferior hardware, but they were supposed to have better software. At least that's what the Mac users claimed.
I fell for that, years ago. No the software wasn't superior either. I remember having to manually install codecs, which on linux had been a problem many many years before but had been solved already.
My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor,
The MacBook Air M4 supports two external displays now (with the lid open):
https://support.apple.com/guide/macbook-air/use-an-external-...
My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor, even though it has the same specs as her work Pro.
The MacBook Pro with the non-Pro/Max chip (i.e. MacBook Pro M3) has the same limitations as the corresponding MacBook Air (i.e. MacBook Air M3).
>Macbooks are winning the laptop war because of superior hardware.
No. This is just you repeating marketing.
No Nvidia chip = B tier at best.
I have a $700 Asus with a 3060 that is better. Go ahead and scale up to a $2000 computer with an Nvidia chip and its so obviously better, there is nothing to debate.
No one cares about performance per watt, its like someone ran a 5k race, came in 3rd and said "Well at least I burned fewer calories than the winner!"
> No Nvidia chip = B tier at best.
Nvidia chip = 45 minutes of battery life
Not the one you talk to, but I'm a dev that does not need extensive battery life. All my dev computers are desktop.
You know they can be turned on or off depending on need right?
Yes, but a few problems:
1. Turning them on/off ala bumblebee isn't a solved problem. It's buggy, especially on not-windows. Even on windows, it's going to be buggy especially in regards to sleep.
2. You obviously lose the advantage of a nvidia GPU that way. If you have to always have it off to get decent battery life, which you do, then it's kind of moot. If you turn it on for your 30 minute workload then there goes 70% of your battery.
And you can never ever plug it to the power grid because?
You can, I just think it's inconvenient so I favor laptops with better battery. Besides, I almost never find myself being on the go and needing a dedicated GPU.
If you're never on the go you don't even need a laptop to be fair…
Well, I'll have to hardly disagree. You want a laptop that its battery life is not 1 hour at best. That wasn't a thing in Windows/Linux laptops until M1 started using arm64. 6 Hours of intense work? Good luck with that.
Not only that, but being able to run very intensive work (Pro Audio, Development...) seamlessly is an absolute pleasure.
Its screen is one of the best screens out there.
The trackpad (and some keyboards) are an absolute pleasure.
The robustness of the laptop is amazing.
I don't care about the marketing of Apple, I don't buy anything new they launch, and I condemn all of their obscure pricing techniques for the tech they sell. But my M1 is rocking like the first day, after four years of daily use. That's something my Windows laptops have never delivered to me.
Apple has done a lot of things wrong, and I will not buy another Apple laptop in the future, but I don't want Nvidia on a Laptop, I want it to be portable, powerful and durable.
That is changing now, and it's amazing. I want my laptop to be mine, and to be able to install any OS I like. New laptops with arm64 and Intel Lake cpus are promissing, but we're not there yet, at least not that I have experienced.
Each to their own for sure, and for you, the nvidia requisite is important. For me it's not about brands, but usability for my work and hobbies.
The 6 hours of real work battery that Apple manages with ARM is genuinely impressive, and finally I think shifted the landscape to take ARM seriously as a CPU for consumers.
But it's just not that big a deal. Sure, I COULD spend a day working without power, but it's 2025 and USB-C power delivery is a mature spec. My desk has power. My work desk has power. My living room has power. My bedroom has power. The coffee shop has power. Airplanes have power. My fucking CAR has power.
Where are you working that you need a full 6 hours of hard working power without occasional access to a power outlet and a battery bank won't meet your needs?
I would be satisfied with 2 hours of hard working battery, which is what Ryzen powered Windows laptops deliver. My girlfriend uses her $800 mid range Ryzen laptop to play games and other power hungry things off charger every single day. It's also what work laptops other than Macs have always provided. Sure, my Thinkpad from 2012 needed a giant tumor of a battery to provide that, but it was always an available option, and you could swap it out for a tiny battery if you really wanted to slim it down.
Never an option in apple land. Battery not good enough? Fuck you, too bad.
I can do 6 hours of work on my 10 years old thinkpad… It's nothing special really.
Please tell me which laptop.
Also, is it powerful enough to have it run a development environnent (docker compose/k3s with db & cachd, intellij/vscode, etc) without having issues?
Genuine questions, I am no fanboy of anything
I have a Thinkpad T560 with only 8GB. I develop using docker and I use kate with python3-pylsp for completion. And of course the occasional zoom/teams.
Instead of slack I normally use localslackirc, so that alone probably saves a ton of battery rather than using the electron one.
When I compile a lot I still manage to get half a day on battery. If I want to save power I just ssh to a server and do everything there :)
edit: that model has also hotswap battery so if you really really need more battery life you can buy a spare.
> *You* want a laptop that its battery life is not 1 hour at best.
But why?
I mean I can see why some want that. But why would I or most or devs in general want that? I very rarely code on laptop, and almost never when not at a desk.
Why would I need an Nvidia chip in my laptop?
For some groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence work, obviously.
In reality, he probably just want to play CS2 :D
This would be fantastic. But Microsoft doesn't have to do this. Their users are captives.
Some of them are.
But the increasing market share of Macs and even Linux these days plus the ever increasing of OSS initiatives from Microsoft points out that Microsoft knows a lot fewer of their users are as captive as they were in the 90's, for example.
More specifically: a lot fewer developers are as captive as they were in the 90's. And while normal users vastly outnumber developers, Microsoft has figured out that those normal users ain't inclined to stick around if those developers jump ship and stop developing for Windows.
In other words, specifically those of a former Microsoft CEO (who understood the problem but not the solution):
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS ... YES
Even for regular users, a big chunk of regular users are looking at other platforms:
- "creatives" have always been a core Apple market and they've grown, so that market has grown; plus, since Windows is globally less dominant, a lot of "Photoshop/video editing software/3D modeling + Windows" folks are now on Macs
- gamers now have Proton + Steam on Linux + SteamOS so quite a few more of them are on Linux now, especially since Valve is pushing in this direction to keep Microsoft honest
- large number of regular office workers have iPhones, especially as you move towards the top of the hierarchy, and are far more tempted than they would have been in the past to try or use a Mac
- in many schools there are now Chromebooks instead of Windows laptops; this is primarily a US thing, but it does pop up in some other places, too
Windows is sort of stable but probably still bleeding users slowly.
There's a dedicated settings page for quickly setting popular dev settings such as showing extensions and full paths. Getting rid of the rest just involves tweaking a few other settings like don't show tips or welcome screen. I also hide the weather and news widget because it's tabloid rubbish but many people seem to love it.
> nor the stop the world updates that take entirely too long
Interesting enough, that beyond release upgrades, happening may be once a year, all or may be 99% of updates took ~5 minutes of interruption of me, including needed reboot. I really wonder how others manage to have "entirely too long" updates.
5 minutes is too long. My Debian systems never demand that I update them. When I update them, it never even takes two minutes.
That can't be helped. I go for a smoke and when come back system is already upgraded.
I've not being using Debian setups lately, but on Ubuntu, alert on need-to-reboot packages after daily unattended upgrades run is happening almost every month. I'm kinda sure that Debian is on similar schedule here.
> a version of windows without all the crap
LTSC is a version like that
> "Microsoft doesn't make any release from the Long-Term Servicing Channel available for regular consumers. The company only makes it available to volume licensing customers, typically large organizations and enterprises. This means that individual users cannot purchase or download Windows 11 LTSC from Microsoft's website."
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/what...
Just use mas
> without all the crap
as far as MS are concerned, that crap is their business.
Or, possibly, that crap is the multitude of little software empires build by the management layer now in control..