Drivers are much better now and many large companies supply their own drivers (though frustratingly often as binaries).
Some companies like Dell offer Linux specific SKUs with somewhat tuned drivers.
There are companies making Linux first desktops. Linux first servers are extremely common. There is a lot of hardware not just shipping with Linux but designed for Linux first.
It's a world better now than it was in the mid-late 90s.
I think it was meant in regards to refunding the Windowx tax or buying computers with Linux preinstalled universally.
Some like Lenovo were giving customers very hard time in getting a refund. And only very recently they started offering Linux preinstalled on some of their models for regular users.
Some things like you mentioned above are of course much better today. But Windows tax situation is still a mess.
In regards to lock-in, both MS and Apple can be quite irritating (DirectX / Metal instead of backing Vulkan are glaring examples). But Apple seems to be worse overall, they are more like MS from the '90s in their lock-in obsession.
MS did some positive things recently. Like freed up exfat for Linux to use. But when it comes to gaming for example, MS are still pretty unfriendly in their old ways.
> Is windows better or worse than macs/osx with Linux hostility? To me, it seems like Microsoft is less bad than Apple in this regard.
I'm not sure what you mean.
Personally I like the Mac because it lets me run Unix stuff in a no BS way from the command line. It also runs Docker fine (haven't tried it on the M1).
It doesn't have something like WSL, but it doesn't really need it because you can compile most things for the MacOS command line.
Windows needs to run Linux well because it isn't Unix. The Mac is BSD Unix.
I mean that you can't buy a computer with mac hardware and linux os. Microsoft isn't forcing hardware vendors to only use windows.
Osx unix is still vastly different from most production environments. I really like wsl because I can use whatever linux os that I'm comfortable with and have access to a wide range of supported apps on windows. It seems really elegant to me and its not just running a linux vm on windows like most assume. The integration between wsl and windows is pretty neat. e.g. this is in my .bashrc in wsl, it copies output to my windows clipboard (and note that its a windows exe that im invoking from wsl).
function cb () {
powershell.exe -command "\$input | set-clipboard"
}
I’ve done Django on MacOS, run Kubernetes Klusters, done Java Spring, Ruby, MySQL, Postgresql, MongoDB, Express.js, Koa, etc etc etc.
The MacOS shell is different from production Linux. So is WSL, so is whatever version of Linux you are running at home. If you want to mirror a product environment perfectly, you use Docker. Otherwise, most people aren’t going to see big differences.
No thanks to Microsoft, but a lot has changed.
Drivers are much better now and many large companies supply their own drivers (though frustratingly often as binaries).
Some companies like Dell offer Linux specific SKUs with somewhat tuned drivers.
There are companies making Linux first desktops. Linux first servers are extremely common. There is a lot of hardware not just shipping with Linux but designed for Linux first.
It's a world better now than it was in the mid-late 90s.