Nik ain't a kid no more, got S to do!

Hey, Chris and Michael.

First of all, I wanted to say, cheers Chris. I don't remember when exactly I started to listen to JB, but I was listening in 2012 for sure, so it has been 10 years. Thanks for all, dude.

Now, the main topic. I was doing some catching up on Coder radio recently and I stumbled on your discussion about MacOs(and Windows) stealing Linux Desktop users.

I am a recent(6 months or so) Windows convert after 10 years of exclusive Linux desktop use, so I wanted to chime in.

I guess I am older now and while in 2012 I was a student, nowadays I have a day job and "responsibilities", so I really like my machines to be like appliances, you turn it on, it runs, does what I want and that is.

And honestly, desktop Linux has become too much of a hassle for me. As stupid as this might sound to some, Windows is the ultimate LTS for me. If you apply some basic best practices like having a backup and not running exe-s from sites with pictures of naked ladies, it just runs. And everything works, because everything is written with Windows in mind.

Further, besides WSL, I think Redmond has got 2 more things right to snare Linux users.

One is the new Windows terminal, the thing is good. Also did you know ssh is installed and on by default now?
You fire it, ssh into something and there is Linux in all its glory.

The other thing, I hear nobody mentioning, is Hyper-V. Nowadays we have, most of us, very beefy machines, so why not running VMs daily? Hyper-V is no problem for anybody that ever ran virt-manager, but the ultimate killer feature for me is that dynamic memory management just works, meaning the VMs dos not use all the memory you allocate to them, but just what they need right now. I can run 2-3-4 Linux VMs daily and not worry about memory at all.

I know this is possible with virt-manager and KVM, but I never managed to make it work. Here it is just a checkbox.

Do I find all this problematic? No. Now that I don't run Linux, I run way more Linux. I have various Linux machines where I can thinker when time permits and use Linux VMs daily for critical things like backups.

And yeah, I am eyeing those damn MacBooks, it is matter of time I think.

Best regards to both of you,
Nik