Don’t Ignore Windows 10 as a Development Platform for FLOSS

Important Preface: This blog post was written originally on 2020-05-12, and scheduled for later publication, inspired by this short Twitter thread. As such it well predates Microsoft’s announcement of expanding support of WSL2 to graphical apps. I considered trashing, or seriously re-editing the blog post in the light of the announcement, but I honestly lack the energy to do that now. It left a bad taste in my mouth to know that it will likely get drowned out in the noise of the new WSL2 features announcement.

Given the topic of this post I guess I need to add a preface to point out my “FLOSS creds” — because I have seen already too many attacks to people who even use Windows at all. I have been an opensource developer for over fifteen years now, and part of the reason why I left my last bubble was because it made it difficult for me to contribute to various opensource projects. I say this because I’m clearly a supporter of Free Software and Open Source, wherever possible. I also think that’s different people have different needs, and that ignoring that is a failure of the FLOSS movement as a whole.

The “Year of Linux on the Desktop” is now a meme that has been running its course to the point of being annoying. Despite what FLOSS advocates keep saying, “Linux on the Desktop” is not really moving, and while I do have some strong opinions on this, that’s for another day. Most users, and in particular newcomers to FLOSS (both as users and developers) are probably using a more “user friendly” platform — if you leave a comment with the joke on UNIX being selective with its friends, you’ll end up on a plonkfile, be warned.

About ten years ago, it seemed like the trend was for FLOSS developers to use MacBooks as their daily laptops. I did that for a while myself — an UNIX-based platform with all the tools of the trade, which allowed quite a bit of work being done without having access to a Linux platform. SSH, Emacs, GCC, Ruby, and so on. And at the same time, you had the stability of Mac OS X, with the battery life and all the hardware worked great out of the box. But then more recently, Apple’s move towards “walled gardens” seemed to be taking away from this feasibility.

But back to the main topic. Over the past many years, I’ve been using a “mixed setup” — using a Linux laptop (or more recently desktop) for development, and a Windows (7, then 10) desktop for playing games, editing photos, designing PCBs, and for logic analysis. The latter is because Saleae Logic takes a significant amount of RAM when analysing high-frequency signals, and I have been giving my gamestations as much RAM as I can just for Lightroom, so it makes sense to run it on the machine with 128GB of RAM.

But more recently I have been exploring the ability of using Windows 10 as a development platform. In part because my wife has been learning Python, and since also learning a new operating system and paradigm at the same time would have been a bloody mess, she’s doing so on Windows 10 using Visual Studio Code and Python 3 as distributed through the Microsoft Store. While helping her, I had exposure to Windows as a Python development platform, so I gave it a try when working on my hack to rename PDF files, which turned out to be quite okay for a relatively simple workflow. And the work on the Python extension keeps making it more and more interesting — I’m not afraid to say that Visual Studio Code is better integrated with Python than Emacs, and I’m a long-time user of Emacs!

In the last week I have actually stepped up further how much development I’m doing on Windows 10 itself. I have been using HyperV virtual machines for Ghidra, to make use of the bigger screen (although admittedly I’m just using RDP to connect to the VM so it doesn’t really matter that much where it’s running), and in my last dive into the Libre 2 code I felt the need to have a fast and responsive editor to go through executing part of the disassembled code to figure out what it’s trying to do — so once again, Visual Studio Code to the rescue.

Indeed, Windows 10 now comes with an SSH client, and Visual Studio Code integrates very well with it, which meant I could just edit the files saved in the virtual machine and have the IDE also build them with GCC and executing them to get myself an answer.

Then while I was trying to use packetdiag to prepare some diagrams (for a future post on the Libre 2 again), I found myself wondering how to share files between computers (to use the bigger screen for drawing)… until I realised I could just install the Python module on Windows, and do all the work there. Except for needing sed to remove an incorrect field generated in the SVG. At which point I just opened my Debian shell running in WSL, and edited the files without having to share them with anything. Uh, score?

So I have been wondering, what’s really stopping me from giving up my Linux workstation for most of the time? Well, there’s hardware access — glucometerutils wouldn’t really work on WSL unless Microsoft is planning a significant amount of compatibility interfaces to be integrated. Similar for using hardware SSH tokens — despite PC/SC being a Windows technology to begin with. Screen and tabulated shells are definitely easier to run on Linux right now, but I’ve seen tweets about modern terminals being developed by Microsoft and even released FLOSS!

Ironically, I think it’s editing this blog that is the most miserable experience for me on Windows. And not just because of the different keyboard (as I share the gamestation with my wife, the keyboard is physically a UK keyboard — even though I type US International), but also because I miss my compose key. You may have noticed already that this post is full of em-dashes and en-dashes. Yes, I have been told about WinCompose, but last time I tried using it, it didn’t work and even screwed up my keyboard altogether. I’m now trying it again, at least on one of my computers, and if it doesn’t explode in my face again, I may just give it another try later.

And of course it’s probably still not as easy to set up a build environment for things like unpaper (although at that point, you can definitely run it in WSL!), or to have a development environment for actual Windows applications. But this is all a matter of different set of compromises.

Honestly speaking, it’s very possible that I could survive with a Windows 10 laptop for my on-the-go opensource work, rather than the Linux one I’ve been using. With the added benefit of being able to play Settlers 3 without having to jump through all the hoops from the last time I tried. Which is why I decided that the pandemic lockdown is the perfect time to try this out, as I barely use my Linux laptop anyway, since I have a working Linux workstation all the time. I have indeed reinstalled my Dell XPS 9360 with Windows 10 Pro, and installed both a whole set of development tools (Visual Studio Code, Mu Editor, Git, …) and a bunch of “simple” games (Settlers, Caesar 3, Pharaoh, Age of Empires II HD); Discord ended up in the middle of both, since it’s actually what I use to interact with the Adafruit folks.

This doesn’t mean I’ll give up on Linux as an operating system — but I’m a strong supporter of “software biodiversity”, so the same way I try to keep my software working on FreeBSD, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work on Windows. And in particular, I always found that providing FLOSS software on Windows a great way to introduce new users to the concept of FLOSS — focusing more on providing FLOSS development tools means giving an even bigger chance for people to build more FLOSS tools.

So is everything ready and working fine? Far from it. There’s a lot of rough edges that I found myself, which is why I’m experimenting with developing more on Windows 10, to see what can be improved. For instance, I know that the reuse-tool has some rough edges with encoding of input arguments, since PowerShell appears to still not default to UTF-8. And I failed to use pre-commit for one of my projects — although I have not taken notice yet much of what failed, to start fixing it.

Another rough edge is in documentation. Too much of it assumes only a UNIX environment, and a lot of it, if it has any support for Windows documentation at all, assumes “old school” batch files are in use (for instance for Python virtualenv support), rather than the more modern PowerShell. This is not new — a lot of times modern documentation is only valid on bash, and if you were to use an older operating system such as Solaris you would find yourself lost with the tcsh differences. You can probably see similar concerns back in the days when bash was not standard, and maybe we’ll have to go back to that kind of deal. Or maybe we’ll end up with some “standardization” of documentation that can be translated between different shells. Who knows.

But to wrap this up, I want to give a heads’ up to all my fellow FLOSS developers that Windows 10 shouldn’t be underestimated as a development platform. And that if they intend to be widely open to contributions, they should probably give a thought of how their code works on Windows. I know I’ll have to keep this in mind for my future.