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Is it time to move from Windows to Linux?
I’ve been developing Windows apps since Windows 3.1, back in the 90’s when the first program I wrote was an energy tracking screensaver along with a DOS TSR (Terminate Stay Resident) equivalent. In those days you booted into DOS first then started Windows with a command. This was before Visual Basic and Delphi existed, when you wrote Windows apps you had to explicitly code everything including font handling, display contexts and message loops. It was quite fiddly.
A friend had got into Linux, but as far as I can see he only ever used it to benchmark his hardware by measuring how long it took to build Linux from source. Then around 2011, after fifteen years of working on Windows, I found myself needing to test some C code. MS VC was fine but Microsoft was a bit behind the curve with C99 support and I learned enough Ubuntu to let me install and run gcc and clang C compilers. When I started doing web development, it was easier to setup a local test web server on Ubuntu.
I still program on Windows as well as on Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi OS (Debian). I learned Rust a couple of years back to rewrite a C++ poker hand evaluator and found a curious thing. I compiled and ran it on my four-year old Windows 11 PC, then on Ubuntu running under Hyper-V on that same PC. It took 175 ns to evaluate a hand on Windows and 125 ns on Ubuntu, i.e. it was 30% quicker. Perhaps Windows Defender was the reason for the slower time.