Or, from the 99PI podcast a month ago…

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/

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 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.