edit: hey guys, 60+ comments, can’t reply from now on, but know that I am grateful for your comments, keep the convo going. Thank you to the y’all people who gave unbiased answers and thanks also to those who told me about Waydroid and Docker
edit: Well, now that’s sobering, apparently I can do most of these things on Windows with ease too. I won’t be switching back to Windows anytime soon, but it appears that my friend was right. I am getting FOMO Fear of missing out right now.
I do need these apps right now, but there are some apps on Windows for which we don’t have a great replacement
- Adobe
- MS word (yeah, I don’t like Libre and most of Libre Suit) it’s not as good as MS suite, of c, but it’s really bad.
- Games ( a big one although steam is helping bridge the gap)
- Many torrented apps, most of these are Windows specific and thus I won’t have any luck installing them on Linux.
- Apparently windows is allowing their users to use some Android apps?
Torrented apps would be my biggest concern, I mean, these are Windows specific, how can I run them on Linux? Seriously, I want to know how. Can wine run most of the apps without error? I am thinking of torrenting some educational software made for Windows.
Let me list the customizations I have done with my xfce desktop and you tell me if I can do that on Windows.
I told my friend that I can’t leave linux because of all the customization I have done and he said, you just don’t like to accept that Windows can do that too. Yeah, because I think it can’t do some of it (and I like Linux better)
But yeah, let’s give the devil it’s due, can I do these things on Windows?
- I have applications which launch from terminal eg:
vlcwould open vlc (no questions asked, no other stuff needed, just type vlc) - Bash scripts which updates my system (not completely, snaps and flatpaks seem to be immune to this). I am pretty sure you can’t do this on Windows.
- I can basically automate most of my tasks and it has a good integration with my apps.
- I can create desktop launchers.
- Not update my system, I love to update because my updates aren’t usually 4 freaking GB and the largest update I have seen has been 200-300 mbs, probably less but yeah, I was free to not update my PC if I so choose. Can you do this on Windows? And also, Linux updates fail less often, I mean, it might break your system, but the thing won’t stop in the middle and say “Bye Bye, updates failed” and now you have to waste 4GB again to download the update. PS: You should always keep your apps upto date mostly for security reasons, but Linux won’t force it on you and ruin your workflow.
- Create custom panel plugin.
- My understanding is that the Windows terminal sucks? I don’t know why, it just looks bad.
I am sure as hell there are more but this is at the top of my mind rn, can I do this on Windows. Also, give me something that you personally do on Linux but can’t do it on Windows.
Getting a C/C++ compiler on Windows is a menace. To my knowledge, there are two ways to do it. Either install Visual Studio which will also install the MSVC compiler, or wrangle with MinGW to get GCC.
In the first-year CS classes I attended, the instructions were usually to either get WSL and install the
gccpackage or to connect using SSH to the engineering server (CentOS 7) which has it pre-installed.Lmao my university also uses centos 7 for their ancient-ass SSH server. Even the professors just told us to use a VM because they didn’t want to use an old version of clang anymore.
First time i saw that i went mad, why the fuck i need to download 6gb to compile a cpp module, on linux gcc is only a few mb.
gcc and MSVC are only a bit over a hundreg MB each, but neither of them are very useful without an SDK, though. Add Qt5 and Qt6 to actually run a GUI and you start approaching Microsoft’s bloat real quick.
On my machine, the sizes are about equivalent, because every time I try to compile anything I found online I need to install
libsomethinghwhatever-dev. Windows just gives you the dependencies beforehand.but I just want libstdc++… what you described in the second paragraph is thee definition of bloat. You don’t always get every library you want in MSVC either. How the heck do you get stand-alone MSVC with only STL and less than a GB?
Last time I checked, the SDK installer had a whole bunch of checkboxes you could just disable. It looks like the 2023 version of the compiler is only packaged with Visual Studio, though, which is a bit weird. Luckily you can just download gcc for Windows.
Saying you don’t want libstdc++ on Windows is like saying you don’t want gcc on Linux, just g++. Almost every modern Windows API is built on C++, except for the driver part. It doesn’t make sense to just ship a C compiler for Windows.
You can pop in your legally acquired Visual Studio DVD or ISO image and install vc_compilerx64x86.msi if you just want the compiler. It doesn’t so anything useful, but you can!
If you’re writing new code for Windows, though, you’re better off with either C# or Rust. Those are the languages Microsoft themselves seem to be switching to at least!
Yes, there are checkboxes, but even if I only check MSVC v143 … build tools I need to install 1.57 GB,
while I only need 376.1 MB+175.3 KB to install GCC on arch,edit: my arch methology is flawed, just check niXman / mingw-builds-binaries, which is just C, C++ and Fortran and only 68.9 MB. 1.57GB is way too large.Yeah gcc and mingw took ages back when I learned cpp a few years ago. This was back in high school when I barely knew what Linux was, so it never occurred to me that I could do that. Eventually gave up on setting it up in VScode and used codeblocks and spent the semester dealing with that GUI.
Cygwin is great too! You can have a fully POSIX-compliant environment on Windows, no virtualization or anything needed. You can even distribute programs to other Windows users linked to their POSIX compatibility layer library.