Random Chitchat 2012-2016

[xoft]

<rant>
I find Linux somewhat difficult to use, coming from a Windows background.
First, the console irritates me. Every other moment it picks a different behavior, I never know whether, for example, history browsing using up and down arrows will work or will display garbage characters instead. It just sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. What I miss the most in the console and more or less generally everywhere on Linux is the Ctrl+left / right arrow jumping over words. That's just such a natural way to navigate long commandlines, I can't fathom how Linux guys can live without this.

Then there's software, of course. There's nothing quite like the Visual Studio IDE and its integrated debugger, together with its ecosystem. You need symbols for the windows system DLLs? You get them, just check the "Enable MS debug symbols" and you get all the stacktraces you can ever want. The debugger is fast and easy to use. On Linux the debugger IDE integration has always been super-slow and awkward. In MSVC, I just hover the mouse over a few symbols and I know what I'm looking at, what the values are etc. On Linux, I'd die of exhaustion typing all those commands and watch expressions.

Then there's discoverability. In Windows I can click around in the GUIs and I find all the system settings I ever need. In Linux, I need to learn obscure commandlines to do basic operations, let alone some tinkering.
</rant>