this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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I'm going to go with "be normal".
Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn't. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.
Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a
.cand a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.But that's kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it's often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.
That’s funny because IMO it’s the exact opposite. Every mainstream operating system is a Unix or Unix-like. MacOS, iOS, Android, the BSD’s, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, etc. etc.
Windows is the only non-Unix OS that has any significant marketshare.
Oddly enough I think that actually adds to the problem. Because there are so many Unix-like OSs and each is slightly to significantly different, the solution to a problem on one may or may not work on another.
I liken it to SQL, having worked with many different sql dialects, I can never recall what functions are supported by one versus another. However, I don't run into that problem with Mongo, cause it's so different.
In my experience, if you have an issue on a Unix-like OS it’s almost always possible to diagnose and fix the problem. There is almost always a log file with extensive information. Unices are built from collections of simple tools so it’s often easy to find what exactly is going on and to isolate the problem for an easy fix.
Windows on the other hand is a black box. If something doesn’t work, you’re screwed. Error messages are often cryptic to the point of being little more than a 432 digit number. Most subsystems are monolithic monstrosities and isolating an issue is a PITA. Troubleshooting usually isn’t much more than randomly changing things and see what happens, or googling the error and hope someone else found a fix. Even if you manage to fix it, it’s often unclear what the actual issue was. It kind of reminds me of the magic/more magic switch.
On phones Android is pretty typical, and on desktop Unix is also pretty typical because MacOS is it. But non-Mac Unix on the desktop is pretty unusual, and stuff built for Mac specifically often won't work on other Unixes.
Maybe POSIX-compliance is a better metric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX
Good point