Shfiting to Linux from Windows

TLDR: Linux better for performance

I've recently switched from Windows to Linux. It's been 1 week (7 days) and I don't regret a thing. Well maybe, there are few things that I'd like, but honestly, I just wish that I switched much much earlier.

To tell you a few things about myself: I'm a developer, a smart contract & backend engineer. My main stack includes: Solidity, Golang, Typescript, Python. What does that mean for me? I DO a lot of shell commands. go run main.go (go), forge test, forge coverage (Foundry), python main.py, npm run build, etc. You know the rest. Most of these commands run well on Windows, especially node commands. But the thing is, some shell commands, such as Foundry and Go needs a little bit of tweaking. I needed to install WSL to run Foundry, and Golang properly.

Honestly, WSL is fine. If the question is “Is WSL enough for your shell commands?”. The straight answer “Yes it works”. BUT, it comes to a point where “it works” is not enough. Working as a developer, you need efficiency. It sometimes takes A BIT TOO long to compile Foundry projects. And when you're working with smart contracts, you need to test a lot, which means your project will compile A LOT. This extremely slows down my performance as a developer.

Switching from Windows -> Linux is one of the best things I did this year. It might seem small, but everything works better now!! If you're a developer and use a lot of shell commands, switching to Linux might be for you as well. Faster, and better performance.