Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

My suggestion right now(from a Mac user), is a Windows 10 machine with the Linux subsystem installed. You'll have an entire Linux environment integrated into Windows, giving you the best of both worlds. Supported software, hardware, and your natural development environment. Honestly, I'm weary of moving anything to Google with their track record of just abandoning projects, and privacy concerns.


If you're unhappy with Google's surveillance surely you'd want to avoid swapping that with Microsoft's surveillance/telemetry?

MS Security have the right to dip into you machine anytime they fancy it too.


Don't have a choice if I want to play games. Might as well make use of the machine when I'm not, otherwise I'm on my 10+ year old MacPro because Apple decided they are abandoning the developers that made them billions.


Have you given Steam Proton a chance? I don't play PC games but it seems pretty stable.


> ... developers that made them billions.

Those are the developers creating macOS, iOS and watchOS applications in Objective-C and Swift, not the ones using macOS as pretty UNIX.


Crostini isn't as mature yet as WSL is, but Crostini is better in my opinion.


If Crostini gets USB support before WSL, though...

Once they add this and fix the lack of GPU support, I'll finally be down to one travel laptop.


Remind me, what's best about the Windows world again? Games?


Games, a 3D API that doesn't suck, an actual OO ABI, a kernel that isn't yet another UNIX clone, one of the best IDEs on the school from Xerox PARC workstations, a shell that uses structured data and integrates with OS APIs, user space drivers.


Pretty much. Does Visual Studio run well on a Mac or is it hot garbage like Office?


Is Windows 10's Linux subsystem capable of doing real development works yet?


With all due respect WSL will always be behind Google's implementation. WSL implements a subset of linux syscalls to get compatibility. Crostini's guest OS is a Debian image so there are less compatibility challenges than WSL.


Let's compare apples to apples, then. I can run a full Debian guest in a VM on Windows, too. That's not new, but that appears to be the demonstrated capability of ChromeOS here. WSL is a step further in that it's _not_ virtualized.


apples to apples- WSL is the implementation that's integrated with Windows not a random VM running Linux. Chrome OS has a VM solution that's integrated with Chrome OS (files, apps in the same menus). The comparison is fair.


I haven't run into any compatibility problems, and was able to get my environment running identical to the production server. So how does what you said affect my experience? It works without jumping further into Google's uncertain ecosystem. And when I'm not working, I can fire up my Steam library, all on the same machine.


And that's great. But there will be edge cases when it won't behave like stock Linux. If you do give Crostini a try would love to hear your views :) cheers


The only issues I have found that are inconsistent with stock Linux are on hardware and X11 support. For rails/node/Vue development, WSL is Linux through and through.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: