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Kind of a silly hill to die on with WSL, but it's not my career.


Mandatory Windows workstations correlate heavily with environments where you spend half the day watching your workstation sit unresponsive because it's doing one damn corporate-mandated background task or another. I wouldn't rule out an all-Windows place completely but I'd see it as an orangish flag demanding clarification. Software in general is bad and time-wasting enough as it is, I don't want all that extra frustration from a pile of poorly-conceived shitware using far more processor cycles and disk IO than my actual work does.


WSL still means you need to deal with Windows, which some of us don't want to do.

There's an abundance of jobs available to you if you're a decent programmer, so avoiding the places which prevent you from running your OS of choice is a good first filter to apply.


WSL doesn't help solve the lack of decent window management at all. I hate managing window sizes and overlaps; it's why I use a tiling window manager than handles such things for me. There is now tiling support for the others, but they are so manual as to be useless IMO.

The focus stealing proclivities of both macOS and Windows for new application windows can also go die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.


I've used i3 quite a bit, but to this day I still don't get where one would want a more complex window management than your standard L/R split? If I need more complexity than that, it's inevitably on the command line, and I'm in tmux anyway. I'd love to see a workflow with more splits where one wasn't on the command line.


Sometimes content is better as a top/bottom split (e.g., long lines). The ability to "rotate" the layout by 90° with a single keybind is very useful (I use XMonad myself). I can also put multiple windows on the "main" side and rotate between 2 "stable" and a larger set of "smaller" windows. This is handy when juggling RDP into N machines while waiting for Visual Studio or Xcode installations to do their thing.

I also enjoy the simple keybinds I have to sling windows between monitors and workspaces easily. I have no idea how I'd do that with any of the tools on macOS or Windows in a maintainable way (XMonad's configuration lets me cartesian product between (noun, key) and (verb, modifier) lists to make things very consistent).


I'm "devops" these days, but I before that I was sysadmin. I always preferred to run a similar OS to those systems I managed.

These days with immutable containers, etc, it matters less. But a decent shell, the ability to run automation tools easily, etc makes a difference.

I know that WSL allows most things, and many devops tools are written in golang/rust, which are available for Windows, but I started at a time when Ruby, Perl, puppet, cfengine, etc, etc were basically not decent options on Windows.

I keep up, I use AWS, kubernetes, etc, but I'm used to flexible, scriptable, and predictable working environment - and for me that means Linux.


Think of it as a brown M&M. A company that mandates a single environment is going to have other issues.




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