Notably this article was written based on Windows Terminal 1.18. That was before WT 1.22, which included this PR: [^1] which roughly doubled the terminal's throughput. That combined with a couple of other PRs in 1.22 made some scenarios up to _16x_ faster[^2]
I daily drive a couple Macs and enjoy them but I can't help but notice they seem slower in the terminal than the alternatives. Can't get any kind of discussion on /r/mac as it's just 'Apple silicon is fast!'
You can run the tests yourself, he describes them in the blog. Used the Is It Snappy! app to measure frames.
I tried the throughput test myself just now between the native macOS terminal and ghostty.
Ghostty:
cat /tmp/lines.txt 0.00s user 0.02s system 36% cpu 0.069 total
Native mac terminal:
cat /tmp/lines.txt 0.00s user 0.02s system 18% cpu 0.115 total
Seems much faster than any of the OP's windows terminals tested except for MinTTY.
Likewise in one unscientific test with Is It Snappy, ghostty took 8 frames to render the output from pressing the key, but I didn't repeat multiple times.
So, seems faster, but I know what you are talking about, I experience it too. Something about using the terminal on macOS feels sluggish compared to alternatives. It's especially noticeable for me over SSH
This has been posted on HN a few times and seems to show that terminal.app is your best bet for most cases if you care about latency: https://danluu.com/term-latency/
Any chance of getting native support for Serial (DB9/RS232) communication in Windows Terminal? Would love to use it but I'm still using PuTTY and HyperTerminal.
Is there not a suitable CLI or TUI client for Windows that can simply be called from within Windows Terminal? Honest question. I just know that on Linux, it'd be really weird to ask for my terminal emulator to embed a serial client rather than call e.g. screen or minicom from my shell.
I think it has been discussed but not implemented yet. In the meantime, tools like https://github.com/fasteddy516/SimplySerial give what you are looking for instead of those alternative GUI tools.
Another aspect of this is which pipeline is in use for the GPU accelerated terminals. *WezTerm on Windows for example, specific rendering issues occur with default NVIDIA settings related to DXGI.
You will never interact with this pipeline if using the Web GPU vulkan renderer, which has its own issues. I personally experience some form of memory leak / latency when working in terminals that have been open for a 'good' amount of time.
Windows is not really just a gaming OS, at least after WSL was launched.
Development experience using Windows Terminal + WSL has been pretty great when I did it 3 years ago - I can only imagine it being better today.
Also note that the cost of Windows machines is half the price of their Mac counterparts, even with the specs doubled.
For many folks Windows is an all-round multipurpose platform (gaming included) and they wouldn't want to invest in other machines just for doing development work, so they stick to it as their main OS. Yes we know of the horrible bloat, tracking and privacy invasion that the OS does to us, but many people tend to just ignore it and move on.
> Yes we know of the horrible bloat, tracking and privacy invasion that the OS does to us, but many people tend to just ignore it and move on.
Or in the case of enterprises, Windows gets controlled and managed by a (hopefully) competent IT team or enterprise desktop group, and with LTSC versions Microsofts give them the tools to strip the bloat, tracking, and most of the privacy invasions (to then be replaced with corporate privacy invasions in a lot of cases).
Point being, Windows as an enterprise user desktop is a whole different beast from Windows on the laptop mom and dad just bought from Best Buy.
HN lives in a macOS/Linux bubble, but outside of SV it's a Windows world still. So much of the world runs on Windows in places that you wouldn't even expect to see Windows. And with enterprise purchasing agreements, you can get some good deals on bulk laptop purchases that you aren't getting from Apple. $1,000 or less per 32GB of RAM laptop, depending on how many you are buying. I've seen bulk purchases as low as $700/laptop for enterprises that buy thousands at a time for scheduled refreshes. You're not going to be able to buy everyone a MacBook Pro for that pricing.
Windows remains one of the best general purpose OSes for generic office worker productivity, and I don't see that changing anytime soon unless Microsoft really fucks it up with whatever Copilot garbage they are doing.
My work laptop is Windows and IT have removed the bloatware but the desktop is still a shitshow. Clicking on a window in the taskbar doesn't even reliably bring it to the front.
I've noticed it seems windows aren't allowed to foreground themselves/each other anymore, which seems reasonable (anti click jacking?), but this includes VS not being able to foreground my diff tool when I diff something, and Outlook not being able to foreground itself when I double click the new mail envelope in the notification area.
I also enjoy going to grab a maximised window by its title bar and somehow grabbing the window behind it.
Yeah, windows is pretty aggressive with the focus stealing prevention (I believe GNOME on Linux is also working on something similar, hopefully with a better implementation).
It seems to struggle with differentiating between what's a user initiated focus-steal and what's automated/originating from the app without user action.
I'll take that over what existed before, which was any app could just open a window and give itself focus at any time.
The quite sensible reason is that LTSC doesn't contain the windows store, and as a result a bunch of driver apps don't work because they moved to using UWP apps (eg. realtek audio console). Not to mention that you'll eventually get weird compatibility issues because you'll eventually be running a windows version 5-10 years old, whereas most devs assume you're using be using the normal versions which are at most 2 years out of date. All of these issues can be worked around if you're sufficiently technically inclined, but people who are hiring "Microsoft consultants" probably aren't.
I recommend LTSC for terminal services environments like Azure Virtual Desktop, where driver issues just aren’t a problem.
Windows LTSC has semi annual updates, the same as Windows Server. Speaking of which, that’s essentially what it is: a cut-down version of the Server Desktop Experience with pretty much the same defaults and capabilities.
Microsoft could implement App Store support for LTSC (and Served), they simply choose not to. It’s telling that this isn’t a problem in practice.
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 25H2 2025‑09‑30
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 24H2 2024‑10‑01
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 23H2 2023‑10‑31
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 22H2 2022‑09‑20
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 21H2 2021‑10‑04
Microsoft "consultants" are are usually just license auditors in disguise. We ignore them, and I suggest everyone else do the same. They "helpfully" reach out and offer to optimize your infrastructure and spend. That 'optimization' is actually "let's make sure you bought all the CALs you were supposed to, and when you inevitably didn't, because we make our licensing confusing, we'll charge you extra and threaten legal action for non-compliance"
Better to find a reputable VAR and get your licensing through them and don't ever deal with Microsoft directly.
Sadly, the one problem with WSL(g) is graphical rendering. It can't handle DPI scaling properly at all (yes, even with experimental settings) and the result is blurriness, gigantic mouse cursor, clicks not registered where the cursor appears to be, or itty-bitty icons and UI that you can barely see.
I can't stand that they haven't fixed it in all this time.
It has gotten better. The `vmmem` hyper-v process would regularly freeze up and require a reboot on my Windows 10 work laptop. I’ve successfully run WSL for days/weeks without issue on Windows 11. As a tradeoff, I’ve had the Weston container freeze up and be unrecoverable without restarting WSL.
Now spec it with 32GB of RAM, and try to get a bulk discount for ordering 1,000 of them. Try to get the price of said 32GB M4 Airs down to ~$700/laptop or less.
Not going to happen with Apple.
No company that's big enough is paying sticker price for windows laptops.
```
Now spec it with 32GB of RAM, and try to get a bulk discount for ordering 1,000 of them. Try to get the price of said 32GB M4 Airs down to ~$700/laptop or less.
Not going to happen with Apple.
```
Exactly. Thanks for explaining this.
Also one more point to note is Windows machines go on discount sales very frequently. It's usually way too easy to find one with 32GB and 1TB, with the latest Ryzen or Intel mobile processors.
Bonus when you find one like Lenovo Legion which allows you to buy and shove-in extra RAM/storage as you need them.
It's my go to machine, I also own a MBP m1 and an m3 max with 48 GBs, but my Windows desktop is by far the most capable machine of the three (a notebook cpu and ram, even the m3 max are still notebook hardware) and the OS I like the most for programming.
I program mostly in WSL2, so essentially in Ubuntu, but the terminal lives as a Windows executable.
MacOS is really a subpar development experience to me and it's plagued with issues, from very subpar docker support and performance to it's far from flawless experience on many languages I use regularly (e.g. Haskell) that are far from the Linux standard.
I love it as a notebook though, great hardware and battery life, but I'm at home most of the days.
> MacOS is really a subpar development experience to me and it's plagued with issues, from very subpar docker support and performance to it's far from flawless experience on many languages I use regularly (e.g. Haskell) that are far from the Linux standard.
Aside from that, the window management in macOS leaves a lot to be desired still without third party tools, and even with them it's not fantastic.
Don't get me wrong, I love my macbook pro, but bugs & privacy issues aside with Windows, I'd prefer to just use it on my macbook's hardware. I've been full time on macOS since the M1 air and I still can't grok the app v. window model macOS uses. I'm sure it made sense when workflows were centered around documents, but they aren't anymore, and over half the apps are just browsers. I prefer each instance to be standalone like Windows and Linux do it.
Then again, I'm not a dev, I'm an IT manager. My day to day involves multiple browser windows each with many tabs, spreadsheets, meetings, & notetaking on my iPad, etc. macOS's workflow of "focus on one or two "apps" at a time" doesn't work for me. I'll stand by my statement that Windows is still the king of "general business productivity."
You have to pay me to use Windows and Microsoft products.
There are so many alternatives that have higher standards. I keep having regressive issues with Visual Studio. The OS quality has been continually degrading. Microsoft is even pushing to have a @microsoft.com account on their Windows embedded IoT variants. There should be no reason an embedded OS requires an online account nor that XBox and other useless features baked in.
I wont event touch how bad the User Experience has become in their Office products and how much of their products have inconsistent key combinations. Ctrl+F ...
I can imagine your pain points, albeit luckily they do not overlap with my use case.
I'm not sure about the alternatives with higher standards though, and I say it as someone who operates two MacOS machines, a windows and an Omarchy one
They all have pros and cons, it's perfectly fine if we have different experiences.
As an SRE I did most of my work from windows as almost all of my jobs required it (only one provided a working Ubuntu laptop). Mostly used it only for firefox and PuTTY. At home it was W10 + WSL or virtualbox but mostly used it for games initially and then browsing.
BUT as from W11 which I tried for 11 minutes, I switched to Fedora and didn't look back. Everything felt buggy, start menu taking forever, buttons switching places, apps wouldn't start but then randomly would, and of course ads. I know there are debloat scripts around but didn't have the patience, I felt if I'm going to try a new OS I might as well try Linux before buying a Windows license.
Now Linux has its issues, the occasional icon disappears, sometimes shutdown doesn't entirely shut down the machine and I have to power the machine down (electrically from my outlet), sometimes updates don't go through, and of course I miss excel and a couple other things (although I was far from a power user and OnlyOffice fits my needs). But it's still better and with KDE there is almost no config to get a similar "feel" as W10. Amusingly I actually use MORE apps now that I trust installing new stuff more.
That said I would probably pay a premium to dual boot occasionally on a supported Windows OS without bloat, probably it would be my default boot even.
Well, for one, if you develop games for said gaming OS you’re probably doing it on the gaming OS in question and would like the tools to be nice to use.
Gaming OS? I guess if your gaming's heavy on online multiplayer games that insist on rootkits, and you're not willing to do that on a console instead (you can connect mice and keyboards to those now).
2025 is the year I finally removed Windows entirely from my life, thanks to SteamOS and Bazzite. It'd been solely for gaming for 25ish years, for me, having been (in various versions) my primary desktop OS for another sevenish years or so before that (3.1 was my first, and before that, MS-DOS) and now it's for... nothing. I truly have no use for it whatsoever.
Developing on Windows can be troublesome at times, but I still prefer how it feels to use.
For development alone, macOS is probably the best choice since it provides a native Unix environment.
I just happen to enjoy the Windows interface more, even if it means dealing with extra setup.
> macOS is probably the best choice since it provides a native Unix environment
And the first thing I do is install the gnu coreutils because it still ships really old BSD utils, and everything expects linux-isms now.
In that regard, macOS is worse than Windows+WSL which at least is real Linux with a real package manager. macOS being better OOTB was true Pre-WSL/Windows 7 era where your choices were macOS for a UNIX with a really nice desktop environment and working sound, or taking a gamble with Linux on your hardware and praying everything worked. Windows was a non-starter for any development that wasn't win32, lest you were a masochist that wanted to deal with Cygwin and the like.
I say this as someone still all-in on the "Apple Ecosystem" across all devices, Apple fans that are also developers all seem to be blind to the ways Apple has been slowly boiling the frog and making macOS hostile to developers in all other aspects of the OS outside of it having a unix terminal. Apple is outright hostile to developers at times.
With the amount of work Windows seems to need just to use it - decrapification, bypassing account creation, constant vigilance that your changes aren’t undone by Windows Update.. - it’s also a gamified OS ;)
Does it still pause scrolling and stop whatever's running if you click on the window or press a key? That's one big reason why I still live in a plain old DOS box. It didn't appear that the Windows terminal developers had ever heard of ctrl-s.
Dang, I've never heard of anyone who actually _wanted_ that behavior haha, I've had so much wasted time in school projects where I thought something was running but it wasn't because I had selected text in cmd.exe haha.
If you are waiting for the output as an indication that a task completed and you never see that output you may think the task is still running but it is actually done.
I am not sure that if it actually stops the program, but it does at least stop programs from printing, so for anything that gives feedback on stderr/stdout you are at least pausing the main thread. I have a mostly-non-threaded program that this happens to, and it does not continue to send messages to other systems until I un-pause it.
Ctrl-Z suspends the program in most UNIX shells. ("fg" to resume)
Ctrl-S may or may not end up stopping the program, depending on how much it's printing, and how much output buffering there is before it blocks on writing more.
All my shell RCs turn off xon/xoff -- that's a relic from the PDP-11 days we can all do without.
Windows has the Scroll Lock button that's supposed to do this if you need it, but typically, just selecting a character in a terminal emulator will stop the scroll while still buffering the output.
Notably this article was written based on Windows Terminal 1.18. That was before WT 1.22, which included this PR: [^1] which roughly doubled the terminal's throughput. That combined with a couple of other PRs in 1.22 made some scenarios up to _16x_ faster[^2]
[^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/pull/17510
[^2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-...
Thanks for the work on WT, it was really a massive step up I did not expect after all of these years.
You're most welcome! Working on it to help serve the whole developer ecosystem has been the delight of my career :)
Just want to say built in glyphs makes terminal ANSI art awesome.
I forked a colorscripts project and added some true ANSI art after conversion and the built in glyphs look so much better than any other font.
It's great but is there any special rendering for the built in glyphs that's not possible with fonts? Just curious
Any similar benchmarks for MacOS?
I daily drive a couple Macs and enjoy them but I can't help but notice they seem slower in the terminal than the alternatives. Can't get any kind of discussion on /r/mac as it's just 'Apple silicon is fast!'
You can run the tests yourself, he describes them in the blog. Used the Is It Snappy! app to measure frames.
I tried the throughput test myself just now between the native macOS terminal and ghostty.
Ghostty: cat /tmp/lines.txt 0.00s user 0.02s system 36% cpu 0.069 total
Native mac terminal: cat /tmp/lines.txt 0.00s user 0.02s system 18% cpu 0.115 total
Seems much faster than any of the OP's windows terminals tested except for MinTTY.
Likewise in one unscientific test with Is It Snappy, ghostty took 8 frames to render the output from pressing the key, but I didn't repeat multiple times.
So, seems faster, but I know what you are talking about, I experience it too. Something about using the terminal on macOS feels sluggish compared to alternatives. It's especially noticeable for me over SSH
This has been posted on HN a few times and seems to show that terminal.app is your best bet for most cases if you care about latency: https://danluu.com/term-latency/
seems like outdated info
Any chance of getting native support for Serial (DB9/RS232) communication in Windows Terminal? Would love to use it but I'm still using PuTTY and HyperTerminal.
Is there not a suitable CLI or TUI client for Windows that can simply be called from within Windows Terminal? Honest question. I just know that on Linux, it'd be really weird to ask for my terminal emulator to embed a serial client rather than call e.g. screen or minicom from my shell.
I think it has been discussed but not implemented yet. In the meantime, tools like https://github.com/fasteddy516/SimplySerial give what you are looking for instead of those alternative GUI tools.
Is there something lacking in PuTTY ?
I recommend Tera term. https://github.com/TeraTermProject/teraterm/releases
As much as I like PuTTY the ergonomics for "monitor this port as I plug/unplug the USB-to-Serial adapter" are so much better in TeraTerm.
Another aspect of this is which pipeline is in use for the GPU accelerated terminals. *WezTerm on Windows for example, specific rendering issues occur with default NVIDIA settings related to DXGI.
You will never interact with this pipeline if using the Web GPU vulkan renderer, which has its own issues. I personally experience some form of memory leak / latency when working in terminals that have been open for a 'good' amount of time.
(2024)
whats the point of using the terminal on a gaming OS?
Windows is not really just a gaming OS, at least after WSL was launched. Development experience using Windows Terminal + WSL has been pretty great when I did it 3 years ago - I can only imagine it being better today.
Also note that the cost of Windows machines is half the price of their Mac counterparts, even with the specs doubled.
For many folks Windows is an all-round multipurpose platform (gaming included) and they wouldn't want to invest in other machines just for doing development work, so they stick to it as their main OS. Yes we know of the horrible bloat, tracking and privacy invasion that the OS does to us, but many people tend to just ignore it and move on.
> Yes we know of the horrible bloat, tracking and privacy invasion that the OS does to us, but many people tend to just ignore it and move on.
Or in the case of enterprises, Windows gets controlled and managed by a (hopefully) competent IT team or enterprise desktop group, and with LTSC versions Microsofts give them the tools to strip the bloat, tracking, and most of the privacy invasions (to then be replaced with corporate privacy invasions in a lot of cases).
Point being, Windows as an enterprise user desktop is a whole different beast from Windows on the laptop mom and dad just bought from Best Buy.
HN lives in a macOS/Linux bubble, but outside of SV it's a Windows world still. So much of the world runs on Windows in places that you wouldn't even expect to see Windows. And with enterprise purchasing agreements, you can get some good deals on bulk laptop purchases that you aren't getting from Apple. $1,000 or less per 32GB of RAM laptop, depending on how many you are buying. I've seen bulk purchases as low as $700/laptop for enterprises that buy thousands at a time for scheduled refreshes. You're not going to be able to buy everyone a MacBook Pro for that pricing.
Windows remains one of the best general purpose OSes for generic office worker productivity, and I don't see that changing anytime soon unless Microsoft really fucks it up with whatever Copilot garbage they are doing.
My work laptop is Windows and IT have removed the bloatware but the desktop is still a shitshow. Clicking on a window in the taskbar doesn't even reliably bring it to the front.
I've noticed it seems windows aren't allowed to foreground themselves/each other anymore, which seems reasonable (anti click jacking?), but this includes VS not being able to foreground my diff tool when I diff something, and Outlook not being able to foreground itself when I double click the new mail envelope in the notification area.
I also enjoy going to grab a maximised window by its title bar and somehow grabbing the window behind it.
Yeah, windows is pretty aggressive with the focus stealing prevention (I believe GNOME on Linux is also working on something similar, hopefully with a better implementation).
It seems to struggle with differentiating between what's a user initiated focus-steal and what's automated/originating from the app without user action.
I'll take that over what existed before, which was any app could just open a window and give itself focus at any time.
> LTSC versions
Microsoft consultants very actively discourage the use of LTSC for... "reasons".
Translation: "It hurts our KPIs if our telemetry starts falling off and we can't push Minecraft and AI updates to as many desktops at will!"
The quite sensible reason is that LTSC doesn't contain the windows store, and as a result a bunch of driver apps don't work because they moved to using UWP apps (eg. realtek audio console). Not to mention that you'll eventually get weird compatibility issues because you'll eventually be running a windows version 5-10 years old, whereas most devs assume you're using be using the normal versions which are at most 2 years out of date. All of these issues can be worked around if you're sufficiently technically inclined, but people who are hiring "Microsoft consultants" probably aren't.
But you can install it?
>All of these issues can be worked around [...]
I recommend LTSC for terminal services environments like Azure Virtual Desktop, where driver issues just aren’t a problem.
Windows LTSC has semi annual updates, the same as Windows Server. Speaking of which, that’s essentially what it is: a cut-down version of the Server Desktop Experience with pretty much the same defaults and capabilities.
Microsoft could implement App Store support for LTSC (and Served), they simply choose not to. It’s telling that this isn’t a problem in practice.
>Windows LTSC has semi annual updates, the same as Windows Server
You mean biennial? It definitely doesn't get updates twice a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_11_version_history
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/semiannual#English
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biennial#English
The relevant link for LTSC version history is: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise...
Looks like annual versions..."IoT Enterprise" =/= "LTSC"
Microsoft "consultants" are are usually just license auditors in disguise. We ignore them, and I suggest everyone else do the same. They "helpfully" reach out and offer to optimize your infrastructure and spend. That 'optimization' is actually "let's make sure you bought all the CALs you were supposed to, and when you inevitably didn't, because we make our licensing confusing, we'll charge you extra and threaten legal action for non-compliance"
Better to find a reputable VAR and get your licensing through them and don't ever deal with Microsoft directly.
Yeah My company requires Windows. windows Terminal + WSL at least makes development bearable.
Why not run Windows in a VM?
Or run a VM in Windows? Hyper-V is pretty decent for many use cases.
We use WSL for development where I work.
Sadly, the one problem with WSL(g) is graphical rendering. It can't handle DPI scaling properly at all (yes, even with experimental settings) and the result is blurriness, gigantic mouse cursor, clicks not registered where the cursor appears to be, or itty-bitty icons and UI that you can barely see.
I can't stand that they haven't fixed it in all this time.
It has gotten better. The `vmmem` hyper-v process would regularly freeze up and require a reboot on my Windows 10 work laptop. I’ve successfully run WSL for days/weeks without issue on Windows 11. As a tradeoff, I’ve had the Weston container freeze up and be unrecoverable without restarting WSL.
You’re right but you’re responding to a troll.
>Also note that the cost of Windows machines is half the price of their Mac counterparts, even with the specs doubled.
Bullshit, MacBooks are one of the cheaper options for usable devices today. Esp in there entry segment.
Yeah. An M4 macbook air is about a grand.
Now spec it with 32GB of RAM, and try to get a bulk discount for ordering 1,000 of them. Try to get the price of said 32GB M4 Airs down to ~$700/laptop or less.
Not going to happen with Apple.
No company that's big enough is paying sticker price for windows laptops.
``` Now spec it with 32GB of RAM, and try to get a bulk discount for ordering 1,000 of them. Try to get the price of said 32GB M4 Airs down to ~$700/laptop or less. Not going to happen with Apple. ```
Exactly. Thanks for explaining this. Also one more point to note is Windows machines go on discount sales very frequently. It's usually way too easy to find one with 32GB and 1TB, with the latest Ryzen or Intel mobile processors. Bonus when you find one like Lenovo Legion which allows you to buy and shove-in extra RAM/storage as you need them.
I program on Windows every day.
It's my go to machine, I also own a MBP m1 and an m3 max with 48 GBs, but my Windows desktop is by far the most capable machine of the three (a notebook cpu and ram, even the m3 max are still notebook hardware) and the OS I like the most for programming.
I program mostly in WSL2, so essentially in Ubuntu, but the terminal lives as a Windows executable.
MacOS is really a subpar development experience to me and it's plagued with issues, from very subpar docker support and performance to it's far from flawless experience on many languages I use regularly (e.g. Haskell) that are far from the Linux standard.
I love it as a notebook though, great hardware and battery life, but I'm at home most of the days.
> MacOS is really a subpar development experience to me and it's plagued with issues, from very subpar docker support and performance to it's far from flawless experience on many languages I use regularly (e.g. Haskell) that are far from the Linux standard.
Aside from that, the window management in macOS leaves a lot to be desired still without third party tools, and even with them it's not fantastic.
Don't get me wrong, I love my macbook pro, but bugs & privacy issues aside with Windows, I'd prefer to just use it on my macbook's hardware. I've been full time on macOS since the M1 air and I still can't grok the app v. window model macOS uses. I'm sure it made sense when workflows were centered around documents, but they aren't anymore, and over half the apps are just browsers. I prefer each instance to be standalone like Windows and Linux do it.
Then again, I'm not a dev, I'm an IT manager. My day to day involves multiple browser windows each with many tabs, spreadsheets, meetings, & notetaking on my iPad, etc. macOS's workflow of "focus on one or two "apps" at a time" doesn't work for me. I'll stand by my statement that Windows is still the king of "general business productivity."
I program on Windows for work daily.
You have to pay me to use Windows and Microsoft products.
There are so many alternatives that have higher standards. I keep having regressive issues with Visual Studio. The OS quality has been continually degrading. Microsoft is even pushing to have a @microsoft.com account on their Windows embedded IoT variants. There should be no reason an embedded OS requires an online account nor that XBox and other useless features baked in.
I wont event touch how bad the User Experience has become in their Office products and how much of their products have inconsistent key combinations. Ctrl+F ...
I can imagine your pain points, albeit luckily they do not overlap with my use case.
I'm not sure about the alternatives with higher standards though, and I say it as someone who operates two MacOS machines, a windows and an Omarchy one
They all have pros and cons, it's perfectly fine if we have different experiences.
As an SRE I did most of my work from windows as almost all of my jobs required it (only one provided a working Ubuntu laptop). Mostly used it only for firefox and PuTTY. At home it was W10 + WSL or virtualbox but mostly used it for games initially and then browsing.
BUT as from W11 which I tried for 11 minutes, I switched to Fedora and didn't look back. Everything felt buggy, start menu taking forever, buttons switching places, apps wouldn't start but then randomly would, and of course ads. I know there are debloat scripts around but didn't have the patience, I felt if I'm going to try a new OS I might as well try Linux before buying a Windows license.
Now Linux has its issues, the occasional icon disappears, sometimes shutdown doesn't entirely shut down the machine and I have to power the machine down (electrically from my outlet), sometimes updates don't go through, and of course I miss excel and a couple other things (although I was far from a power user and OnlyOffice fits my needs). But it's still better and with KDE there is almost no config to get a similar "feel" as W10. Amusingly I actually use MORE apps now that I trust installing new stuff more.
That said I would probably pay a premium to dual boot occasionally on a supported Windows OS without bloat, probably it would be my default boot even.
You couldn’t quadruple my salary to get me to program on Windows.
It’s either Mac, Linux native, or I walk.
Docker Desktop app for macOS might be a shitshow, but Colima -- or, apparently, Orbstack which I'm excited to try -- should make that moot.
What’s the point of doing anything ever? Because we can, that’s it. Some people happen to use Windows for things other than gaming (remarkably).
Well, for one, if you develop games for said gaming OS you’re probably doing it on the gaming OS in question and would like the tools to be nice to use.
Also it’s not just a “gaming OS”.
It's worse than a gaming OS. It's the free or cheap version of a Fire tablet.
Gaming OS? I guess if your gaming's heavy on online multiplayer games that insist on rootkits, and you're not willing to do that on a console instead (you can connect mice and keyboards to those now).
2025 is the year I finally removed Windows entirely from my life, thanks to SteamOS and Bazzite. It'd been solely for gaming for 25ish years, for me, having been (in various versions) my primary desktop OS for another sevenish years or so before that (3.1 was my first, and before that, MS-DOS) and now it's for... nothing. I truly have no use for it whatsoever.
A better question: why are we optimizing typewriter emulation?
Developing on Windows can be troublesome at times, but I still prefer how it feels to use. For development alone, macOS is probably the best choice since it provides a native Unix environment. I just happen to enjoy the Windows interface more, even if it means dealing with extra setup.
> macOS is probably the best choice since it provides a native Unix environment
And the first thing I do is install the gnu coreutils because it still ships really old BSD utils, and everything expects linux-isms now.
In that regard, macOS is worse than Windows+WSL which at least is real Linux with a real package manager. macOS being better OOTB was true Pre-WSL/Windows 7 era where your choices were macOS for a UNIX with a really nice desktop environment and working sound, or taking a gamble with Linux on your hardware and praying everything worked. Windows was a non-starter for any development that wasn't win32, lest you were a masochist that wanted to deal with Cygwin and the like.
I say this as someone still all-in on the "Apple Ecosystem" across all devices, Apple fans that are also developers all seem to be blind to the ways Apple has been slowly boiling the frog and making macOS hostile to developers in all other aspects of the OS outside of it having a unix terminal. Apple is outright hostile to developers at times.
Why you throwing shade at my two best friends, Linux and Proton, like that?
With the amount of work Windows seems to need just to use it - decrapification, bypassing account creation, constant vigilance that your changes aren’t undone by Windows Update.. - it’s also a gamified OS ;)
Servers, in corporate environments.
What's the point on using the terminal on an artist OS?
In 2025 that would be iOS rather than macOS, several artists I know love Procreate.
Well, at least it's beautiful on macOS! (Not really, but that's beyond the point :))
presumably someone might want to write a game for it
Every single developer at my company programs a C# app using Visual Studio on Windows.
Does it still pause scrolling and stop whatever's running if you click on the window or press a key? That's one big reason why I still live in a plain old DOS box. It didn't appear that the Windows terminal developers had ever heard of ctrl-s.
Dang, I've never heard of anyone who actually _wanted_ that behavior haha, I've had so much wasted time in school projects where I thought something was running but it wasn't because I had selected text in cmd.exe haha.
It stops running? I thought it just stops the output.
If you are waiting for the output as an indication that a task completed and you never see that output you may think the task is still running but it is actually done.
Has happened to me quite a few times.
I am not sure that if it actually stops the program, but it does at least stop programs from printing, so for anything that gives feedback on stderr/stdout you are at least pausing the main thread. I have a mostly-non-threaded program that this happens to, and it does not continue to send messages to other systems until I un-pause it.
Ctrl-Z suspends the program in most UNIX shells. ("fg" to resume)
Ctrl-S may or may not end up stopping the program, depending on how much it's printing, and how much output buffering there is before it blocks on writing more.
That's called QuickEdit Mode and you have been able to turn that off for decades (and installing the new terminal fixes that too.)
Otherwise click the top left icon, go to settings, uncheck QuickEdit.
All my shell RCs turn off xon/xoff -- that's a relic from the PDP-11 days we can all do without. Windows has the Scroll Lock button that's supposed to do this if you need it, but typically, just selecting a character in a terminal emulator will stop the scroll while still buffering the output.