It was time to update my desktop machine to something more capable than my over 11-year-old machine.
Though it was otherwise still perfectly fine and working well, modern software development tools started to feel sluggish on it - or at least sluggish compared to the modern M1 or M2-based MacbookPro laptops that I had become used to using.
Getting a modern desktop machine with really good specs that were also up to date with modern games was something which was not cheap, but then again, if this machine serves me well for the next ten years and gives me pleasure - then I could have spent that money also worse.
The surprise came when I started to feel what the modern desktop experience is in Windows 11 and how some development tools also work pretty well inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux. VSCode accesses the data inside the WSL system almost like it would be a local filesystem. Pretty cool.
Running Ubuntu in WSL gives you access to all the regular goodies that you usually need on the commandline. You can open multiple terminals to have multiple windows like on real Ubuntu box, or use screen or tmux to do well with just a single window.
But the thing that surprised me even more was that using Windows does not feel that bad anymore. It is just a bit different than what I used on OS X.
If I get a proper development tools environment on WSL Ubuntu and then get a proper desktop apps experience with native Windows applications - I might actually like this combination and not necessarily use my dual boot Linux setup that much.
The big thing for me is how fast evolution has been. It was about one year ago I tested WSL and VsCode the last time, and the experience was not quite yet there. I am still expecting things to go horribly wrong and glitches start to appear, but so far… So far, this is not bad at all.
I will get back to the topic later on when I have more concrete experience with this setup - and can compare it to the OS X and Ubuntu Desktop experience better.