My take on Linux and Windows

Originally drafted 3/14

When I participated in MLH’s Cloud Week, I found myself interacting with the Windows and Linux command lines more than ever before. When I say Windows, I mean a combination of Windows PowerShell and Command Prompt, and when I say Linux, I mean Ubuntu via WSL. I noticed many differences in the learning curve that I wanted to talk about. This isn’t my answer to “Why do some people prefer Linux over Windows?”. It is my answer to “Why do I prefer Linux over Windows?” Anyway, here are my thoughts.

Learning Resources

My journey with Linux began when I tried to set up aleguy02.dev, my VPS. I followed a series of tutorials and guides from DigitalOcean (my VPS provider) and quickly learned that Linux is the operating system of servers. Nearly every tutorial was Ubuntu-based. Whenever I Googled anything about SSH, Nginx, or whatever else, most of the answers were for Ubuntu. Since I’m interested in working with servers, I naturally gravitated toward Linux.

I also participated in a bunch of live streams for MLH’s Cloud Week and those were very much Linux-based, so I got to listen to real human beings talk about it LIVE and interact with them. In other words, I’ve had a lot of help learning Linux. Windows… not so much. My experience with Windows involved a lot of head-scratching, excessive Googling, and thinking how much faster everything would be if I were just using Ubuntu.

Now let’s talk about man. Man oh man, do I love man. Whenever I’m confused on a command, I can use man [command] to read about it without leaving the terminal, and boy is it detailed. Each flag is carefully documented and a synopsis of the command is given. Amazing. Windows, on the other hand, does not have man but it does have HELP. I wanted to make a direct comparison, so I did man mkdir and HELP mkdir in a WSL and Windows PowerShell, respectively. If you do this yourself and observe the output, my point should be illustrated pretty clearly.

Installing Packages

It used to be the case that installing packages with Windows was just a sucky experience: you had to click through a bunch of menus to install one thing, and it was a pain. This paragraph was originally going to be me complaining about that, but while doing research for this post I found out that Windows has its own competent package managers, like Chocolatey or WinGet. I haven’t used them yet, and I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know about them until now–but that’s part of the learning process.

Skill Issue?

The more I challenge myself and try to use Windows, the more I learn to appreciate its differences. My biggest gripe now is the lack of good resources (outside of Stack Overflow posts), but I know more practice and experience will get me there. My final takeaway: Ultimately, both are tools and it’s up to their wielder to experiment and learn what they like and when to use what. Sure, Vim is awesome, but sometimes, I just want to use my mouse and use Notepad instead.