this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I don't play games, but I do plenty of dev work including a lot in Visual Studio & SSMS. I always have a few Linux boxes running & try every few months to live on Linux rather than Windows.
Visual Studio can be swapped out for Rider. Rider is quite different feeling than VS, but I guess a lot of devs use another Jetbrains IDE of some kind, in which case it's a fairly easy switch.
SQL Server runs happily on Linux. But SSMS is harder for me to do without. I have Aqua Data Studio & Jetbrains DataGrip, but they don't feel as seamless as SSMS.
In the end though, it's hard to beat Windows + WSL2 now that Windows VSCode & Jetbrains IDEs seamlessly connect to Linux projects. And if you enable nested virtualization and MAC address spoofing then Hyper-V can run anything WSL can't.
Usually I end up moving back to Windows because of font rendering. I far prefer Windows cleartype font rendering on 2160p desktop screens. One day Linux fractional scaling will be perfected or 200+dpi desktop screens will become affordable. Then I might stay on Linux.
I'm surprised this is still an issue. I remember it being an issue when I used desktop Linux 15 years ago. At the time, Linux devs didn't want to risk accidently infringing on Microsoft's ClearType patents, so the text smoothing techniques had to be completely different.
Those patents all expired in 2018.
Linux font rendering is generally very good now, so I think they've gotten past that. Apart from a System76 desktop, which was terrible, I haven't hated the rendering for many years. It's just that Microsoft's font rendering (maximizing clarity at the expense of destroying the font metrics) is exactly what I want to look at all day if I'm staring at code. When I look at screenshots of vscode on Linux and Mac the code looks beautiful, because the font renderer hasn't beaten the characters with a big stick to make them fit the pixel grid, but when I switch back to windows after using Linux/Mac then it feels like someone fixed the focus and de-blurred everything.
And now that I can have as many Linux installs as I like running concurrently via WSL2, I get to use Linux all day without losing the stuff I like about Windows.
I haven't used desktop Linux in a while, but I feel the same about MacOS font smoothing. It's way too blurry. I'm not sure why people like it.