Turning Windows into a Dev Machine

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

So, it’s been an interesting week and a half. I started screwing around with Python after spending time casually reading about it, and decided to learn it, hands-on, and I smashed up a slew of interesting things. Then, I started thinking about, despite my love for Linux, and especially Debian, there are some critical things I still don’t have access to while on Linux.

Such as things I use for my creations in Second Life, like Quixel, Marvelous Designer. And how I’m basically locked to only using Gimp. And, regrettably, there are a few games I want to play that I just can’t. With these things in mind, I decided to mess around and put Windows on my System76 machine. It wasn’t all that painful, because I have all of my important stuff backed up on the cloud, and I don’t mind redownloading games as I decide I’m interested in playing them.

But … And this could end up being the reason I decide to just put Linux back onto my PC: Turning Windows into a machine for a developer is a pain in the ass.

From configuring SSH, to realizing I didn’t have OpenSSH, to installing OpenSSH, to configuring PowerShell, to downloading the actual latest version, to screwing with SSH keys, to adding, deleting, adding, deleting, adding, deleting, and adding and deleting about 15 different keys, before I generated a new one, and then manually pasted the key into the authorizations on my Debian server.

Oh, but then there’s VS Code … An apparent Microsoft centric developer app, that crashes against a wall as soon as you try to push and sync? Because apparently, or at least in my case, it doesn’t know to use OpenSSH?!

Nevertheless, here I am, with access to all of my games, and every single program I used to use, and also my developer tools setup exactly the same way they were in Pop!_OS.

I do have to say that I really like Pop!_OS, but I’m not that excited about merging and migrating my entire system to the Rust based COSMIC. I don’t know. I … kind of like Ubuntu, you know?

All that aside, we’ll see how long this lasts. Despite the shortcomings, Linux is really a revolutionary OS, and I’ll probably put it all back sometime in the future. Probably when I get tired of the games I wanted to play, and decide to figure out the workarounds for the apps I want to use in Windows (I don’t like using Virtual Machines, I just want to interact with my actual PC).

But, until then, I’m going to see how far I can stretch Windows into giving me control of the system.