Why not use Linux directly? Set up one PC for games, and one for dev; I can't believe anyone uses Windows for anything but 'games.' But that's fair; just a subjective comment.

I've never worked somewhere that uses Linux dev machines. Almost always Mac these days, but otherwise it's been Windows. At least a good option exists for *nix tools on Windows now.

And WSL2 is good enough for personal development that I use it on my desktop as well -- I don't want to waste time fucking around with drivers or dual booting for something I do infrequently anyways.

Toorkit

I've never understood what drivers you people are "fucking around with". On Windows I have to go to netgears website and download a driver or use the included CD to get my WiFi dongle working. On Linux it works out of the box.

I've always found Windows to be the huge pain in the rear end, not Linux.

jamesgeck0

Windows:

Sometimes Windows Update can't automatically find an appropriate driver the first time a device is connected and I have to install one manually. Time lost: fifteen minutes, tops.

Linux:

Last time I bought a USB wifi dongle, I bought one with a Linux penguin on the box. It turned out that the driver was a realtek fork and I had to manually apply their patches and rebuild every time my kernel updated. Could never get DKMS working quite right. Time lost: two hours.

I have dual monitors, one running on an Intel integrated card, one running on NVidia. Either one can run on the open source drivers alone, but I cannot activate both at the same time. The Intel drivers output hot garbage when Nouveau is running. There's a "flicker free" mode which eliminates a similar problem, but the Intel driver appears to ignore my config in this duel head configuration. Time lost: eight hours.

diffeomorphism

Windows: Still has no package manager. Setting all software up takes time. Hardware was done by the laptop manufacturer, don't know how much work that would be. Works fine for the most part. Keyboard, mouse, wacom etc require a bit of fiddling.

Linux: Software setup is really easy. All hardware worked out of the box.

MacOS: Reading instructions, preparing installer etc. Got it "working" in a VM but without graphics accel, which makes it not really useful.

Time lost: A few hours more for windows, but quite comparable.

boogies

There technically is a “Windows package manager” https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli, though it doesn't manage installed packages yet (that seems to be planned for v1.0 sometime next year https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/blob/master/doc/wind...).