Little T in the Cog windows

Why Windows?

2018-07-10

When I originally bought my Razer Blade Stealth laptop I actually went straight ahead and installed Linux on it (first Ubuntu, then later I settled on Fedora*). I didn't boot into Windows in 8 months, and had partitioned the SSD to give Linux more space.

But then I bought a Razer Core, and suddenly I was booting into Windows again to game. And then I got sick of booting between Windows and Linux when I just needed to quickly SSH into a server to make a quick tweak, so looked into the classic solutions to that (PuTTY, Cygwin etc) and discovered the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This was the missing piece of my Windows puzzle - with the subsystem installed I could then "install" Ubuntu from the Windows Store. Suddenly, I had a native Bash shell within Windows - and all the tools that came with that. I could apt-get install anything I needed, and set up my userland just as I liked it (ssh .config files, git etc etc). No more dual booting needed! Over time, instead of never booting into Windows I realised I was no longer booting into Linux, so I've ended up giving Windows the entire 512GB SSD (all those games do take up a lot of space!).

Having a native Bash shell really has made a world of difference to me and my workflow, to the point I actually really like using the Stealth with Windows to get work done. I've got all I need - my Linux userland, a good selection of both open source and commercial software and ~9 hours battery life in a compact system. And when I get home, I can plug it into my Razer Core (with an AMD Radeon RX 580 installed) and game away to my hearts content!

I can't believe I'm saying it... But here we are in 2018, and I <3 Windows!


*It was actually not a bad laptop to run Linux on - pretty much everything worked out of the box (suspend/resume, wireless etc). I don't know why I'm so surprised at this in 2018, but I still remember the days of compiling kernel modules to try and get things working properly...