You literally answered my question of "what do you use Windows for?" with "there are programs that I use in Windows". Can you say what? I'm trying to understand what my Windows use cases are going to be; this will dictate a lot. I was pretty prepared to go 100% Linux, hard drive wipe, no Windows at all until I went home last night and realized my hard drive was so much bigger than I thought that it would be dumb not to just keep Windows in some form.

I get your (and everyone else's) prior experiences and recommendations, but I feel like no one is trying to put themselves in my shoes or help me figure out what my shoes even are. I'm wondering what I will be using Windows for at all. I envision 100% Linux. Why would I use WSL if I want to be 100% in Linux? This speaks to Kerowo's VM comment as well.

If you don't use windows programs, then you don't. There's not a secret gotcha, if there aren't any programs from windows/osx you have to have, then do whatever you want

On a regular basis I use Adobe lightroom, photoshop, and illustrator. I use Fusion 360 and Rhino CAD and sometimes solidworks. I use programs/drivers from laser cutters that are windows only.

I do all my dev at home on my windows gaming machine

Cool - thanks for the info! Yea I'm just always curious what people's use cases are. And maybe I'm forgetting something that I'd use occasionally myself.

Things I prefer about Linux: a lot of little things I guess. General design philosophy, terminal, package management, and customization all come to mind immediately. Are any of those things a huge deal that I'm really missing? No, but since Windows isn't doing anything for me I figured I'd optimize. WSL works well, yes, I've used it before, but it only gets me some of the benefits. Also, again, the why be in a Linux environment in Windows when I can just be in Linux.

In a previous reply you said you bought your Windows laptop for gaming. Quickly after that you said you won't be gaming on it at all. That's kind of strange, and from someone who doesn't know you that you makes me think you'll eventually be playing some games on it in the future.

Gaming support on Linux is pretty bad compared to Windows. It's not even comparable. So that's 1 reason.

For me I keep Windows around because of games, creating videos and it just feels like a pretty polished OS. If I spend most of my day working within it, I want to optimize for happiness and productivity. Most desktop Linux distros just feel clumsy and rough around the edges. You're constantly making compromises.

WSL fits all of my Linux needs. You can work with bash, install / run Linux tools and even launch most graphical Linux apps by running an Xserver.

Fair, I didn't actually mean that though. To be more precise, the gaming-related reason for buying Windows I'd more precisely state as "in case I want to play Windows" games. But I probably installed Diablo 3 when I first got the computer, played it for an hour for old times sake, and 2 years later have a grand total of <2 hours of video game playing on it.

But yea, if I wanna play a game in Windows at some point in the future, I'll have my Windows partition around still. I don't mind the "context switch" for that.

Your first paragraph really describes nicely why I actually want to be in Linux. It just feels nicer. I can craft the terminal and dev environment to feel exactly how I want it to feel. Most of my time is spent in terminal/tmux/vim (and a web browser). You can imagine how that's much more hacked together on Windows. I'll give a shot to cloning some of my development projects into WSL and Xming and see how that feels, since I've only done light terminal stuff in it before.

I'm just shocked such a high % of fellow computer nerds are recommending an initially more convenient but 80-90% satisfaction solution.

I just go by previous experience. I've tried everything and so far this is the best solution for what I want to accomplish.

There's a couple of pretty good Windows terminals too, which avoids needing xming. I would try those out initially.

The main problem with tmux on WSL is once you close a WSL terminal the entire WSL process goes away so you lose your session. But that's changing in the next big Windows update, however that's about 2-3 months away.

It sounds like you want us to tell you what to use your computer for, which is weird

You mean you don't need xming to use an Ubuntu-based terminal emulator, right? Yea, I've heard good things about cmder and WSLtty. I was planning on giving cmder a try first. FYI I will still need xming though, for example, when I plot graphs/images.

Also interesting to note, I loaded Ubuntu off a USB drive last night for kicks, and was surprised to see that the default settings worked far better with my 4k screen than the default (and non-default) Windows settings. Grain of salt though - I ran like 2 programs.

(Also note to anyone buying a laptop, I strongly regret getting 4k. I did it because it was on sale and actually cheaper than the 1920x1080)

What do you use your computer for? These are some general areas:

Web browsing (better on Windows and Mac than Linux, since that's what developers are optimizing for, font is occasionally broken on Linux, rendering is better and/or faster on Mac/Windows due to better hardware/driver support)

Productivity software (No Office on Linux; even where some options are available on all three, the experience is almost always superior on Windows/Mac)

Media Player (most things can eventually be made to work on Linux but getting things working smoothly on Linux can be cumbersome, have had issues everywhere from media codec to sound subsystem to hardware acceleration)

Games (not even close, Windows > Mac >>> Linux here)

Also consider that things you take for granted like wifi, power management, hardware support, etc can all vary from slightly worse to unusably bad on Linux in comparison to Windows/Mac depending on your needs.

I probably spend more time on software development outside of work on my home machine than most, but software development is actually one thing where it's rare to require a specific native platform (most things are cross-platform and if not, can usually be done in a VM).

More specifically:

These aren't actual use cases.

CB: I'd say my general computer use over the past 1.5 years of owning this laptop is: 80% programming, 15% web browsing in support of programming, 5% other web browsing.

You asked why I prefer Linux, not what I use my computer for.

Are you a freelancer? What kind of programming do you do? That is a very unusual split - I'm a developer and I'm pretty sure programming is nowhere near 80% of what I do on my work laptop. Edit: I only use my work laptop for work fwiw.

I phrased it poorly but I was wondering what you prefer functionally about Linux as a user. Like what do you do that is better accomplished under Linux?

Nah, I have a normal day job, my home computer is solely for hobby programming. I honestly would have zero need for a computer at all (smartphone aside obviously) if I didn't have personal hobby projects.

So I obviously also don't have to do any of the email/presentation work a work computer requires.

I generally do random scientific computing projects for brushing up my skills and general curiosity (machine learning, computer vision, other signal processing tasks) as well as some game programming.

That sounds amazing - kudos for spending so much time on hobby programming. Is your day job in software development at all? I will also say that in my experience, deep learning is the only thing that made me consider running Linux natively (as opposed to WSL/VM/etc), as some deep learning frameworks are poorly supported in Windows and CUDA doesn't work in WSL/VM.

I feel like there are some strange parallels here with ~2010-2012 H&F. Just SS + GOMAD and everything is solved saw.

Haha thanks man. Nah not software dev really, I do signal processing/algorithm development in radar systems.

Oooh, no CUDA support in WSL tensorflow...? I'll have to check that out, could be a dealbreaker though.

Lol true that... true that.

FWIW I run Linux (Kubuntu) exclusively on my primary system, and don't really agree with any of these aside from games (though imo there are better options than Windows here unless you're a PCMR-144Hz-or-die type).

And this, I don't even... I imagine from this phrase you haven't actually used Microsoft Windows and have only seen pictures of it in magazines or something... perhaps used it in the workplace with an army of IT dept sorting it out behind the scenes whenever a problem appeared? "Windows: it just works", "Windows: least likely to break randomly" oh my giddy aunt.

I do have a windows 8.1 + classic shell (best version) machine too, and I do use it every day. It's very useful for keeping my knowledge current for the times when I have to support people in my work whose windows PCs have randomly broken somehow...

Gtfo nerd

Basically - under WSL, those are going to be CPU-only. Tensorflow at least works ok in native Windows but I think for PyTorch I had to download some special version some random dude compiled to make it work in Windows. It's funny that literally this was the only thing in the past 10 years or so that made want to dual-boot into Linux (as opposed to VM) and that's the exact use case you have in mind.

Candybar, do you even use Linux? I use a very bare-bones install of Debian + i3. I'm sure those with full blown desktop environments probably have a better experience.

I did have an issue on one TurboTax page when filing my taxes, otherwise, I can't think of ever having any issue browsing the web on Linux.

LibreOffice Calc and Google sheets are decent options for simple spreadsheets. As for word processing, there is LaTeX (much superior than Word) and Google Docs. If MS Office is a must, Wine is always an option.

I use VLC and never had an issue playing videos. I've easily gone through 100G's of shows.

Ok

Never had an issue with any of these.


With that out of the way, the pros of Linux (Debian):
- Free
- Higher stability
- Security - no need for virus/spybot scanners
- Not forced to install bloatware
- Unix terminal and programs
- Effortless maintenance (apt-get, no need to defrag, not getting harassed about updates and restarts)
- Workspaces, customization (hotkeys, aliases)

Dear database pros:

My game is a lobby-style game in that players can enter a game room and leave and all that. I am implementing a player notes feature where a player can take notes on other players and those notes are viewable when a player enters a game where they have notes on that player and can click on them and see those notes and edit them etc.

In mongo, should I implement this as:

a) A new collection called "playernotes" should be made, whose schema is something like 1) playername 2) playerwhohasanote 3) note and when they enter a game mongo searches that collection, filters out where 1 != the player and 2 != is not seated and sends to the client.

b) A new collection that is more like 1) playerwhohasanote and 2) (assoc. array) of key: playernamewhomadenote and value: note and then when a player enters the game mongo sees if that player has a note on each player (4-9 possible players) and filters etc.

c) some sort of hybrid where you have a 1d array of player boolean names that the main player collection says "go get these values in a different collection because this player has a note on them"?

d) something I haven't thought up?

idk I have no idea. Leaning b? I mean this function needs to be fired not only on entering game but when a player enters the game afterwards as well. Iterating through objects in js is notoriously slow but maybe mongo doesn't do it that way?

e) go back in time and don't use mongo for relational data. Trolling but also serious.

I haven't used mongo much so idk the right terminology but you want the notes to be keyed by player who made the note, since that's the context in which they will be retrieved. For example, it will be cheaper to run a query like "get me notes made by player X about any of these 9 other players".