Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)

You're most welcome! Working on it to help serve the whole developer ecosystem has been the delight of my career :)

Terminal app has no truecolor support, no highres mouse support, no kitty graphics protocol, no double height character support, i'm sure there is more but I now discard it from my tests.

This was a great article when it came out, but it’s very outdated. The laptop used is over 10 years old now.

seems like outdated info

As much as I like PuTTY the ergonomics for "monitor this port as I plug/unplug the USB-to-Serial adapter" are so much better in TeraTerm.

The PuTTY terminal has a few more features in certain areas but a lot fewer features overall. Also, of course, PuTTY does not share profiles/settings/window tabs+panes with WT, which is a bit of a pain.

It stops running? I thought it just stops the output.

> Yes we know of the horrible bloat, tracking and privacy invasion that the OS does to us, but many people tend to just ignore it and move on.

Or in the case of enterprises, Windows gets controlled and managed by a (hopefully) competent IT team or enterprise desktop group, and with LTSC versions Microsofts give them the tools to strip the bloat, tracking, and most of the privacy invasions (to then be replaced with corporate privacy invasions in a lot of cases).

Point being, Windows as an enterprise user desktop is a whole different beast from Windows on the laptop mom and dad just bought from Best Buy.

HN lives in a macOS/Linux bubble, but outside of SV it's a Windows world still. So much of the world runs on Windows in places that you wouldn't even expect to see Windows. And with enterprise purchasing agreements, you can get some good deals on bulk laptop purchases that you aren't getting from Apple. $1,000 or less per 32GB of RAM laptop, depending on how many you are buying. I've seen bulk purchases as low as $700/laptop for enterprises that buy thousands at a time for scheduled refreshes. You're not going to be able to buy everyone a MacBook Pro for that pricing.

Windows remains one of the best general purpose OSes for generic office worker productivity, and I don't see that changing anytime soon unless Microsoft really fucks it up with whatever Copilot garbage they are doing.

Yeah My company requires Windows. windows Terminal + WSL at least makes development bearable.

You’re right but you’re responding to a troll.

We use WSL for development where I work.

Sadly, the one problem with WSL(g) is graphical rendering. It can't handle DPI scaling properly at all (yes, even with experimental settings) and the result is blurriness, gigantic mouse cursor, clicks not registered where the cursor appears to be, or itty-bitty icons and UI that you can barely see.

I can't stand that they haven't fixed it in all this time.

>Also note that the cost of Windows machines is half the price of their Mac counterparts, even with the specs doubled.

Bullshit, MacBooks are one of the cheaper options for usable devices today. Esp in there entry segment.

> MacOS is really a subpar development experience to me and it's plagued with issues, from very subpar docker support and performance to it's far from flawless experience on many languages I use regularly (e.g. Haskell) that are far from the Linux standard.

Aside from that, the window management in macOS leaves a lot to be desired still without third party tools, and even with them it's not fantastic.

Don't get me wrong, I love my macbook pro, but bugs & privacy issues aside with Windows, I'd prefer to just use it on my macbook's hardware. I've been full time on macOS since the M1 air and I still can't grok the app v. window model macOS uses. I'm sure it made sense when workflows were centered around documents, but they aren't anymore, and over half the apps are just browsers. I prefer each instance to be standalone like Windows and Linux do it.

Then again, I'm not a dev, I'm an IT manager. My day to day involves multiple browser windows each with many tabs, spreadsheets, meetings, & notetaking on my iPad, etc. macOS's workflow of "focus on one or two "apps" at a time" doesn't work for me. I'll stand by my statement that Windows is still the king of "general business productivity."

I program on Windows for work daily.

You have to pay me to use Windows and Microsoft products.

There are so many alternatives that have higher standards. I keep having regressive issues with Visual Studio. The OS quality has been continually degrading. Microsoft is even pushing to have a @microsoft.com account on their Windows embedded IoT variants. There should be no reason an embedded OS requires an online account nor that XBox and other useless features baked in.

I wont event touch how bad the User Experience has become in their Office products and how much of their products have inconsistent key combinations. Ctrl+F ...

As an SRE I did most of my work from windows as almost all of my jobs required it (only one provided a working Ubuntu laptop). Mostly used it only for firefox and PuTTY. At home it was W10 + WSL or virtualbox but mostly used it for games initially and then browsing.

BUT as from W11 which I tried for 11 minutes, I switched to Fedora and didn't look back. Everything felt buggy, start menu taking forever, buttons switching places, apps wouldn't start but then randomly would, and of course ads. I know there are debloat scripts around but didn't have the patience, I felt if I'm going to try a new OS I might as well try Linux before buying a Windows license.

Now Linux has its issues, the occasional icon disappears, sometimes shutdown doesn't entirely shut down the machine and I have to power the machine down (electrically from my outlet), sometimes updates don't go through, and of course I miss excel and a couple other things (although I was far from a power user and OnlyOffice fits my needs). But it's still better and with KDE there is almost no config to get a similar "feel" as W10. Amusingly I actually use MORE apps now that I trust installing new stuff more.

That said I would probably pay a premium to dual boot occasionally on a supported Windows OS without bloat, probably it would be my default boot even.

Docker Desktop app for macOS might be a shitshow, but Colima -- or, apparently, Orbstack which I'm excited to try -- should make that moot.

You couldn’t quadruple my salary to get me to program on Windows.

It’s either Mac, Linux native, or I walk.

It's worse than a gaming OS. It's the free or cheap version of a Fire tablet.

> macOS is probably the best choice since it provides a native Unix environment

And the first thing I do is install the gnu coreutils because it still ships really old BSD utils, and everything expects linux-isms now.

In that regard, macOS is worse than Windows+WSL which at least is real Linux with a real package manager. macOS being better OOTB was true Pre-WSL/Windows 7 era where your choices were macOS for a UNIX with a really nice desktop environment and working sound, or taking a gamble with Linux on your hardware and praying everything worked. Windows was a non-starter for any development that wasn't win32, lest you were a masochist that wanted to deal with Cygwin and the like.

I say this as someone still all-in on the "Apple Ecosystem" across all devices, Apple fans that are also developers all seem to be blind to the ways Apple has been slowly boiling the frog and making macOS hostile to developers in all other aspects of the OS outside of it having a unix terminal. Apple is outright hostile to developers at times.