The Standup with ThePrimeagen - Why Use Windows?! -

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

☕ ssh terminal.shop Timestamps: 0:00 intro / pre-meeting chaos 1:48 Welcome to The Standup 3:16 Prime explains his two-PC streaming config 5:02 Real story: Netflix internal meeting leak scare 7:00 Why do game devs still use Windows? 9:23 Misread tweet kicks off Linux vs Windows debate 10:48 Casey: No one “loves” Windows — they tolerate it 13:29 Why studios can’t easily switch from Windows 15:47 IT/security & enterprise restrictions on Linux 20:15 Why clean-slate devs still choose Windows 22:22 Debugger superiority on Windows explained 24:48 Steam Deck & RAD debugger could change the tide 32:34 Anti-cheat isn’t the main Linux roadblock 35:01 Why do *you* use Mac or Linux? 36:47 Prime’s Windows pain & Linux love 40:26 Linux window managers vs Exposé 46:29 The fragility of custom Linux setups 51:09 Web dev has even more breaking changes 57:27 AI doesn’t fix underlying dev tool problems 1:00:04 Trash’s hot take on over-optimizing workflows 1:02:35 Prime explains why he optimizes *everything* 1:07:30 Valve anecdote: why default setups can be smarter 1:14:15 Keyboard nerd segment 1:16:11 Joke outro + how to “save” Windows Why Do Game Developers STILL Use Windows?? | The Standup 🎮💻 In this episode of Standup, we dive deep into the eternal operating system war: Windows vs. macOS vs. Linux. Legendary game dev Casey Muratori (of Handmade Hero fame) joins Primeagen, Trash, and Tee to unpack why game developers still use Windows, even when most modern developers swear by Linux or Mac. 📌 Topics We Cover: • Why game devs prefer Windows (spoiler: it’s not because they like it) • MacOS vs. Linux vs. Windows for developers • Is GDB actually garbage? • Debugging tools: RAD Debugger, Visual Studio, and why Linux falls short • Why enterprise studios can’t just switch to Linux • Anti-cheat, Steam Deck, and the future of Linux gaming • The unbearable pain of Windows terminals • Why developers obsess over window managers and productivity setups • And of course… the real debate: should devs optimize everything or just get stuff done? 🔥 Whether you’re a web developer, game dev, Linux power user, or someone just trying to survive corporate IT policies — this one hits every nerve. 👇 DROP YOUR OS HOT TAKES IN THE COMMENTS 👇 #GameDev #WindowsVsLinux #DeveloperPodcast #StandupPodcast #CaseyMuratori #LinuxGaming #DevTools #Primeagen #TechPodcast #Debugging #VisualStudio #MacVsPC #WebDev #SoftwareEngineering #SteamDeck #OpenSource #RADDebugger

You're just baiting gifted subs. At the Primogen, please stop baiting gifted subs and start the meeting. Josh, you can leave that in. That can be the intro. Trash, correct me if I'm wrong, but you just held up a mason jar that was easily the size of your head. Of water. Wow. Casey, save that.

Save that reaction for live. That's okay. It's a recorded, right? All of this would be live if Prime could figure out how to push the start button. at 10 o'clock when the thing starts quote unquote. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, anyway, sorry. Hey.

Oh, nice of you to join us. Classic, I'm trying to give you the best version of the stand-up, and you're just acting like somehow that it's not good enough. Oh. Yeah, well, are we going to start the stand-up or what, Prime? Are we going to start the stand-up for what? I genuinely love you guys. You guys are just so cool, specifically T-J. I love that T-J goes to Miami once,

and he's yet to be able to button up his t-shirts. It's just like, whatever the weather was. There's no more buttons. What are you talking about? This is the only buttons that I have. Every button is buttoned on the shirt right now. Oh, okay. So he just buys Miami nice shirts now.

He's like, if there's a top button on the shirt, it's not for me. Is there like a throat to button distance that comes like on the description of I was kind of thinking the shirt would still go pretty hard like this way too though But it doesn't have a button here Yeah it's Miami nice classic TJ Impressing his wife impressing his wife impressing I'm not in a bathrobe today that's a step in the direction

All right welcome to the stand-up episode 8 This is an interesting question actually I'm just going to hijack the stand-up because it's going nowhere so far Good. I'm always interested because I use two computers for streaming so that the one that is being streamed doesn't have anything on it at all. Like it can't even log into my Gmail. So there's no possible way to leak anything because there's nothing there. I'm always interested when like real streamers, right? Because I don't even stream really anymore, hardly at all. They don't, how is it possible that you still haven't set up some isolation? Because I would be. I would be terrified all the time that like,

Casey, I'm going to flip a page and all of a sudden they're going to see that nasty email that I'm going to get screwed, right? Casey, Casey, let me, let me hit you with some facts, okay? Please, please do. Okay, facts number one, I do have two computers. Okay. But I have to be logged into Discord, because Discord I need to be able to bring people on in, like, in audio on the stream. So I just have it as that way. I don't have Discord ran through my computer.

I have it ran through my Windows computer so that I can have it run through a specific audio. line as opposed to things for my computer. So I can have two separate audio lines in. Pretty straightforward. So it has to be on there. Second, I have to be logged into Riverside on my streaming computer, which means I need to be logged into my email. I'm pretty sure of it.

It doesn't really matter. I have my studio stuff up because it's always a huge pain in the butt to edit stuff on YouTube. So I just have that open on my streaming computer. So if I need to make some quick edits, I can just do that. But Riverside is this really magical thing where they don't give you RtMP feeds. for OBS. So I bring in all of these things.

Okay, I bring in all of your things by capturing the screen. So when I change, if you looked right now on my screen, I'm now currently showing everybody my YouTube page. It's not you guys. It's now my YouTube page

because I'm literally just capturing areas. So basically like, it's kind of like contamination. It's like each little thing you need, it's like, oh, well, that's going to mean I'm going to have to be logged into this, which means now I've exposed that, which might actually show up on stream and so on.

Yeah, and I've just given up. They call me the leakage in. That's fair. That's all there is. I would say the main thing, probably like not getting mentioned in this conversation is like once it's been leaked once it's there forever. So at some point, there's nothing to be afraid of. It's all there. That's trashes password policy.

Right. Yeah. I think that's what he said. I leak every time I stream. So I stop streaming. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've done it. I've actually definitely joined a, um, I've joined to multiple. meetings now with my stream still running both at Netflix and at... I think I messaged you one time and it was like

you're gone right now. The Netflix one was almost really serious too. Yeah, it was about... Well, luckily, you know, it was about gaming and gaming's live now and all that. So anyways, that's awesome. I didn't know that. That's great. Anyways...

You almost had like a tech crunch article. Like, streamer leaks inside Netflix information about upcoming gaming products. Like it actually would have been like mainstream news. Dude, you would have got so many extra subs for that though. That would have been very good.

It would have jumped started my streaming career. Oh, is what you're trying to say. Okay, hey, welcome to episode nine of the stand-up today. Casey Moratory legendary game programmer has submitted a topic for us to be able to discuss, which none of us have experience on except for Casey

because he's always like, oh, web-diff stuff, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Along with Casey, we do have Teage and we also have trash. Did you just get restarted? What just happened? I wanted to keep talking about that. I'm super confused. Did I submit this topic? Because I thought someone, I thought trash did or T's. This one right here. Can I say one more thing about the streaming thing? This one. Oh, oh, right. It was somebody from the, it was somebody from your, it was from your feed. Somebody replied to you, Prime.

Oh. Remember you posted What are the things that you would want To talk about on the next stand-up I was back Oh, I didn't realize it was from that I thought you were just submitting something that you've received And you'd like to talk about it

I was going to just go through those one at a time Casey like I thought we were just going to go through As like Twitter's biggest questions For the stand-up Which here I'm going to do this again And that way everybody right now in the chat Can respond to that plus I need to update all the titles So can you give me a second

Then can we actually start the stand-up Or can we just like start over Can we just start over? Because I don't think any of this needs to be it. All right, everyone. Welcome to the stand-up episode nine. Welcome to the stand-up, episode nine. Welcome to the stand-up, episode nine.

Did we do this correct? Hey, who's on the stand-up? Anyways, who's on this call? I made it this time. Trash, can you not talk over, Casey, please? Yeah, trash, it's really rude to talk over your senior. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Can we just start over? Welcome to the stand-up. We're going to talk about why do game devs still use Windows? All right, boom. I brought it on the screen right now for us all to read, which goes, why game developers love the Windows developer experience while web devs love Mac OS slash Linux.

What does Windows do better than POSIX systems, if anything? And what is worse? So, oh, go ahead. Can I do two quick things on this? First off, it says Linus. So it's a little confusing. Oh, I read Linux. I didn't realize Linus.

with the operating system. Oh, my. So that's the first thing that I have to say. I mean, I do love Linus. He's great. Me too. And who calls it Mac OS? Is this 2007?

A boomer. A boomer. That tweet. Never mind. Sorry, Casey. Continue. I don't, I always call it MacOS. I call it MacOS X.

Can you, Lyme. Still, to this day, I'm like over on Macoss X. Because that's the first one I had. I had an old Mac, a black MacBook, the old clamshell kind. And you opened it up and it was like Macoss X beta, right? Yeah. That sounds just like a Mentos, right? Like Mentos, the Freshmaker.

When you call it Macoss, it's like a commercial all of a sudden. Wait, do you actually pronounce Mentos, Mentos? That's, I mean, when you listen to the commercial, it's Mentos, the Freshmaker. Really? No, it's not. I can't be real. It is not. Mentos.

for a ride. Mentos, the Freshmaker. Mentos sounds like something from Star Trek. That's the thing from Dune. The guys with the weird eyes. Hey, by the way, TJ, did you know have you listened to Fat Boy Slim Weapon of Choice? Christopher Walkins in the music video? No.

I don't know. Sorry. Where are we going with this? There's like a fun little side quest right here that in the video Christopher Walkin's doing this weird kind of walk and the lyrics just say, walk without rhythm, so you won't attract the worm. I didn't even realized that they were doing a Dune reference for like a decade.

That's nice. That's nice. All right. So welcome to episode nine of the stand. All right. Welcome to episode nine to stand up. Everyone today we're going to be talking about what Linus does better than Bill. And by that we mean why do game developers still prefer Windows to Macoss as it was referred to in the tweet?

Can I just start with something with someone that doesn't do game developers? development, but just an observation. Okay. So from, like, way back when I understood that people use Windows because a lot of them use C-sharp and then C-sharp Windows make sense, and then now everyone's just kind of used to it. I know that's not the case now with, like, dot netcore and all this stuff, too. So I don't know.

That's just like my initial thought, but I would love to be educated. Is that for game development is what you're saying? I think people write games in C-sharp. Yes. Oh, yes. It's the default scripting language in Unity, for example. you see sharp. True.

It's also X and A game studios back in the day. That's how I learned how to do some game development was X&A. Yep. Yeah,

it's important because like you want the picture to look really good, right? So everyone wants it to be to be able to see sharp, right? No one wants C blurry.

That failed as a product. That was a big failure. That's a stupid joke, T.J. Really tried on it. Dude, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Episode 9 of 6. Can you keep what I said in, okay? I'm not saying that again. We're keeping everything in. You have to say everything you want in again. It took everything within me not to like slur my words and talk properly. So I'll get us started here. Yeah.

And I'll simply say. You just give us a real take here. Let's just let's let's let's let's, let's, I'd like to mute the enthusiasm of the original tweet a little bit. Because while I'm sure there are. some game developers who quote unquote love Windows. I don't know that most of us who are

old school anyway would ever use the term love Windows. Like we use it and we have reasons why it's more efficient to develop games on Windows than on Linux. There are reasons why you would be using it. But that's very different than loving it.

Most of us complain about Windows constantly and wish Microsoft would do a lot more to make it a better user experience. So I wouldn't necessarily use the term love. And it's important to kind of get that clear. It's like game developers aren't going around going like, Windows is so awesome.

Like, why do you guys use Linux? Because Windows is amazing. Like, that's not really being said by a lot of people. I mean, I'm sure someone does, but it's not the common case. So I just like to get us into that band where it's like they use it, but it's not necessarily because they're having a fantastic time. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, no, I noticed that.

when I made fun, I recently made fun of Windows. And even Jay Blow was just like, it said, is either you or Jay Blow responded with, the year of the Linux desktop is going to be because Microsoft is so bad at continuing to make Windows better. That's me. Yeah, it was just like, yeah, we're just, Windows is only becoming a worst platform right now. And it's going to by accident to make Linux good. In the old days, I don't know if people still use this term. We used to use the term controlled flight into terrain, which is what, you know,

they used to label like aircraft when they would crash and there was turned out there was no problem with the plane it's just the pilot just flew it into a mountain or something and that is what that's what like Microsoft feels like with windows right it's just like they are just flying straight into a plane wreck and no matter how much user feedback they get no matter how many people are like please don't do this uh they they're just like nope it looks like a nice place to land, this giant La Rocky Cliff, right? And so, so I don't know. Like, we generally, I think as game developers, I would imagine the majority of game developers,

if pulled, would not be like, oh, yeah, Windows is fantastic, no complaints, use it by choice 100%, and not because of these other things that are kind of required, whereas Linux is terrible, right? Like, that's not really the sentiment at all, if that makes sense. I'd also mention, I think a fair number of game developers, maybe. on, I don't know. I wouldn't even say necessarily on the more indie side, but just in general, I'd say a lot of game developers do have Macoss.

Like, that's not that uncommon. I can't take you seriously when you say Macoss. I'm going to say it every time. Maybe I can do it better. Macoss. So a lot of them use Macoss. And there are very notable game developers, too. Like Ron Gilbert, for example,

MacBook, every time I've ever seen him working, right? and he i mean he's the person who made the scum system for lucas arts made monkey island all that stuff right so you know there's there's game developers you've heard of who are rocking macbooks so it's not that weird it's not it's also not like they're all using windows Linux is rarer but you know so anyway i'll just i'll start with that and we can talk about the reasons but that's enough talking for me why don't you just no no no keep talking why don't you tell us because none of us are i would put us in the game dev side okay i'm not sure if you could put debt uh trash in the dev side, but none of us are game devs.

And so can you please, like, tell us why would someone ever even stay on Windows? So there are a couple reasons. And we'll start with the, we'll start with reasons why you would be on it today. Okay. Because a lot of things, too, are like, once you build up a dev environment, like, if you're a studio and you're all running Windows and you've built up your dev, you know, sort of set up around Windows, then there's a cost. Like, if we're going to switch to live,

Linux, it's not free to just do that tomorrow. Like everyone has to be retrained. And you're talking tons of people, not just programmers, right? Like you're talking artists, you're talking sound designers. You're talking like people who are not necessarily that technical. They all have to switch as well, right? That, by the way, is another reason why I think Macauss, you will see that more likely than Linux because it's very easy to tell an artist, oh, use Macauss, because artists like

Macoss. It's very easy to tell a sound designer use Macauss, because sound design. designers would vastly prefer macaws. That's the default audio platform usually, right? So macOS makes sense, whereas Windows is, you know, sort of more of a default there. Linux, nobody, like no non-dev person thinks of Linux as a home operating system. Like your average sort of art person is not going to be like, oh, I always use Linux. So, hold on.

Okay, this doesn't make any sense to me because I have been reading a lot of articles recently, and they're all telling me that art and sound and all these things are done by AI anyway, so why does the operating system matter? Yeah, that's a very good point. AI is running Windows, dude. Like, it's owned by Microsoft. And also, like, Sasha Nadella was saying, like, 30 to 40% commit rate of AI or so. Like, didn't he say that in a thing with Mark Zuckerberg recently or whatever, right?

So, yeah, maybe the reason Windows is continuing its spiral is because the AI has accelerated it. I don't know. Um, you know, if you're heading into a mountain and, and AI massively boost your productivity, it means you'll hit the mountain much faster. So, yeah, but assuming you're talking about having actual humans, you know, assuming we're talking about an Amish community that wants to make games with actual human beings who, you know, care about the thing that they made or whatever, uh, and have some pride in it, they're going to be macOS or Windows usually. It's pretty unlikely. Because if you're not a super technical person, you know, and I'm not, these people are. aren't untechnical because nowadays art is fairly technical actually for making games. But if you're not a super technical person, you're going to use the operating system that's on the machine you bought at,

you know, Costco or Best Buy or wherever you bought your laptop, you ordered it online. And it came with Windows or it came with Macoss, right? Or Macoss. So in that case, that's what you learn and that's what you use. So you're not going to come in knowing Linux. So it would be a re-education process to teach all these people in your company what that is. and you don't like, you know, so.

So there's a hold over there that's like we could talk about the reasons people used to use Windows. And that's one thing. The reason people might still use it today. And I can speak from experience here because we're like... I throw one thing into for the category. I have a next question. All of it. All of you, please.

The other thing I think, too, is like, I've even experienced this at dev companies. It's just hard to do basically like all the normal like enterprisey, like, oh, we have to have all this software on. we need to make sure that you're not leaking this to our competitors. Or we need to be able to wipe your system if your laptop gets stolen. Like all of those like corporate ones that I imagine like everybody at Ubisoft has to have on their stuff. Like this just doesn't exist even on Linux to do, right? You know what I'm saying? Or if they do, they just work so badly that they accidentally wipe your computer or can't wipe your computer.

And you're like, well, I literally do need to be able to wipe this remotely. Like it's actually an important like business critical thing that they can't just get my computer. So I do think, like, that's probably another big reason. And, like, I've experienced that even at regular, like, dev companies, not game dev things. Like, oh, we just can't use Linux as the primary one because we have no way to, like, lock these down in this different way. Or they just don't know how, right? It's like, we have a software stack that we've established on Windows that's our crap stack that's like, you know, it's got CrowdStrike and all whatever the crap is on it. And, like, some of those have Linux versions.

and some of them don't. And so then that's another thing, right? That's like, okay, now our IT department has to spend time figuring out what the crap stack is that's going to ruin everyone's experience on Linux that was ruining everyone's experience on Windows previously, right? Right, like, how can we slow everyone's computer down by like 30 to 50%? And lock them out of their machine periodically and not let them access the network and all the other things that these tools allow you to do,

they wouldn't necessarily be able to do on Linux until they go figure out what that stack looks like. And so, again, just cost. Someone has to go do that work, figure out what that would look like. It's probably very possible on Linux, but you have to do it, right? You have to figure it because all of your expertise was on Windows. Trash, you had a very important thought. I knew.

I did, and it was slowly leaving me the more you all were talking, so I'm trying to reel it back in. Pull it. A really good point on, like, the security thing. I didn't even think about that. But let's assume, like, no enterprise developers or whatever. Like, to be honest, like, the conversation of just like, do I prefer Windows or Mac OS? I don't find it too particularly interesting because it's more like the conversation

of what's your favorite editor you can ultimately kind of arrive at the same destination I think but like is there an actual clear advantage of using one versus the other like is there like actually performance benefits is there software that's actually better in one or less versus the other

that's what like I'm particularly curious in. Yeah so that's kind of the more of the question is why would you start on Windows today if you were clean slate? So let's say that you're just like we're starting today. We can pick whatever we want. we have no sunk cost.

Like there's no like investment in one of these other OSs. And the reason that Windows is still very compelling for game developers, even to this day, I would say there's a couple of things. One is that it is still overwhelmingly what you will sell your game on. So this is actually fairly important because, I mean, you have to remember if you're doing server dev stuff, like if you're running, you know, if you're Netflix, I would imagine that your deployment platform,

off in Linux. It's like, well, our servers, they're not going to run Windows because why would we pay for those licenses in the cloud or something, right? I don't know, but that'd be my guess, right? So it's very easy to say, well, let's develop on Linux because all of our developers will be literally

working on the platform that they will deploy on, right? If you wanted to be a game studio who was going to develop on Linux or on Mac OS because you would unfortunately have to cross ship. Like what you're doing is you're building binaries that will be shipped on some machine you're not testing on, right? And especially when it comes to stuff like, you know,

cutting edge game development, so we're going to be pushing, you know, the latest GPUs and all this stuff. If the drivers are what they are, the subsystems are what they are on Windows, that is what the user will experience. It's always a little risky to say, well, we'll do it all on Linux and we'll just occasionally sort of test what it does on Windows and hope that that's fine, right? Increasingly, that is more possible. Linux used to be much worse at having graphics driver support, so this was kind of a non-issue before.

But like, it's a little, it's definitely better now and you could see going that route. But again, this has been very long time coming. So you would, even today, you'd still be like, oh, do we really want people all running on a platform that's not the platform we ship on, maybe, right? And then the other big reason is the debuggers on Linux suck. So this is going to be a point of contention with a ton of people, but every game developer I know says this, and every one of them is correct. The debuggers on Linux are atrocious, just full stop.

And yes, I've tried every last single one of them, actually, many times I have gone to Linux and gone through the suite of debuggers, and they're awful. And this makes a big difference for game developers because game developers are often running things that are very difficult to test or log. If you just have, I'm trying to figure out why some stuff is happening in the middle of this level somewhere

and I didn't like the way that particle effect looked or something and I want to just see what the state of the variables are in there. A debugger is so much faster to tackle complex code like that that most of us who do serious game development just always are running in the debugger. Always. That's just how we run. We don't run the program any other way. And sort of snide people I've seen on the internet

say things like, well, that doesn't work with multi-machine and multi-pens. It's like, yes, it does, actually. We do that all the time. Games have servers all the time. And we use debuggers all the time. It doesn't mean we don't use logging and we don't use all sorts of other techniques we do, but debugging saves a lot of time.

And the debuggers on Windows are light years ahead of the debuggers on Linux. Specifically, like, Visual Studio, actually for a long time was a much better debugger than you could get anywhere. Nowadays, RemedyBG and the Rad Debugger, the rad debugger is insane. That thing is just out of control good.

Ryan Fleury and the team at Epic have been just absolutely crushing it, and it's amazing, right? There's people that don't, I don't think post-public, like Nick Slivka and some of those guys, that are really good, and they've just been doing an amazing job.

And that supposedly is coming to Linux sometime soon. I know they've been working really hard on that. So that would be another sort of taking a brick out of the wall of windows for it to crumble. When these things hit a critical mass, I think then it would be a lot easier. Final piece of the puzzle is Steam Deck, having Proton and running as a gaming OS, suddenly has created the possibility of gaming set-top boxes, gaming handhelds, running something other than Windows, and that, again, is a huge deal for game developers.

Because all the things I just mentioned, you can see that they're sort of grinding against Microsoft slowly. People are slowly going to get there. So I would say at the end of all of that, hopefully that's given some perspective, at the end of all of that, I am still optimistic that the year of the Linux game developer is on the way.

I don't know if that's the year of the Linux desktop, per se, but all of the pillars are slowly weakening for Microsoft because they've done such a terrible job, right? And Linux slowly grinds forward, and that's where we are today. Does any of that make sense? I guess I have a follow-up, because kind of hidden in what you said,

at least I can see it from the chat. I saw some people really losing it in the chat. That what you secretly said was that GDP is garbage. Yes. And so I need you to explain that because we got a lot of GDP lovers out here. GDP lovers. So first of all...

They've already said skill issues that you just don't know how to use GDP. That's the reason why you hate it is because you don't know how to use it. Just like me and prompting. I'm a bad prompter. I can't get the AI to get good code for me. And so that's my problem. I just have skill issues. I do know how to use GDP, actually, which is amusing.

So the reason that... First, I'll say, I wouldn't criticize GDP's feature set. So I'm with the chat. The people in chat, I'm actually with you on the... does GDP have the features you might want in a debugger? And I would agree that it does. The problem is that the point of a debugger is to find the bug faster than I would find it if I did something else. That is the, like, a debugger is completely worthless if it doesn't reduce the total amount of time taken to find the bug.

Now, as game developers, it takes us a very short amount of time to do stuff like, display information on the screen, right? So in order for a debugger to actually save me time, it has to be very close to instant for me to be able to have a complete heads-up view of everything that's going on in my game as I step, as I run. It has to be like the visual display of the information is the most important part, and the speed at which I can update that visual information is critical, right? So you look at something like the RAD debugger, and literally in like a few keystrokes,

you can be displaying a 3D like model on the screen and spinning it around that's coming from your data, right? GDB is just nowhere close to being able to do those kinds of things quickly like we need them to do, right? Can you give us a little bit more, like, for us that don't debug a problem so complex that can only be displayed on a 3DB? plane. Like that's just like, that's just not web dev. Web dev is like, why come React re-render? Right? Like, there's not, there's not like a huge amount.

Casey, and you're going to be very happy when you discover that React has something called a compiler that takes your React and rewrites it into new React, which is then transpiled into JavaScript, which is then interpreted and jitted into the JavaScript runtimes or V8. So you'll be very happy to learn about a compiler. Trust me, it's coming. We'll talk about that another day. But for now, can you explain that like what is, what, why do you?

need, I literally cannot imagine what does it even mean to have my data displayed in 3D. Okay, so let's forget the 3D for a second, because I can do this with something simpler. Okay, 40? 2D. Oh, shit. So let's say that you're working on your

web code and you're trying to debug this thing where you wrote this processor that was supposed to like stamp meme stuff on an image and it's coming out garbage and you can't tell why, right? Like, what What is logging going to do for you?

Well, the only way I could really add value with a log is by dumping the image lots of times, right? So I just, I dump the image like through every loop through this pixel modification routine or something. Like, I'm dumping the image. I spam it all out to the hard drive. I can't see any of the variables that time, so maybe I dump text files that have what the variables. Like, that's just a ton of work, right? What's GDP going to do for you? Nothing.

Like, GDP can't even view an image, right? You would have to use a front end for it that could. I don't even think I've ever seen a GDP front end that can actually display image data in any format that you ask. If you're like, just show me like this pointer to memory, show me as if it was a this by this image with this pixel layout. I don't even think they have one. Maybe there is one somewhere, but I certainly haven't seen it.

But GDP vanilla definitely can't do it. It's like text mode, right? And like the graph user interface is like curses or something. Like it's like it's just terminal. And so if you live, look at something like that and you're like what's going on, well, in something like Raddebugger, it's so trivial. You just set a breakpoint

in the middle of that pixel processing routine. You just type into the watch window, you know, whatever the pointer is to the bitmap. You say it's this width by this height. You can even use variables for that. So they could be the variables that store the width and the height in their code so that you don't even have to reset it at different times.

And you can say it's an RGBA bitmap. It'll put up an image and you can step through and watch the pixels change. And when you see, like, a wrong pixel, you're in the debugger, so you can see all of the state, right? You can be like, what are all the variables? That's so fast. And what people don't understand when they say, like, GDP, it's fine, it's skill, no, it's not skill. Gdb is slow. That's the problem. It's not, it doesn't, not that it doesn't have the ability to access the data. It's that getting that data

onto the screen in a format that helps me debug quickly is too slow with GDB, right? stepping has to be instant the visual display has to be perfect and very capable lots of different ways of visual and the data all that stuff and we have all that on Windows right now we don't have that on Linux right

even Visual Studio has the ability to display bitmaps like this you just need to use like a little like plugin thing for it or whatever so it's really important to understand this difference it's not abstract features like yes I you know can you do time travel debugging or something like that it's like okay sure GDB has

features, some features that we don't even have in RAD debugger, for example, those aren't the important part. It's not why we're using the debugger. I love that scenario in this entire time. Trash, you looked so serious. You're like, yeah, hell, yeah. Yeah, pixel. I'm trying to legit follow this, but all I'm getting from everything you just said is that I don't

ever want to do game development ever in my life, because that sounded so annoying and so complex that you can have game development. I'll find my missing comma. I'll grep through some JSON because man, that sounds like hell on earth. Y'all, y'all bitches live like this? What's that? You're crazy.

All right. Well, this is why people use game engines, right? Because they're like, they don't want to do that. So there's plenty of game developers who don't need that stuff, right? Because they're like, look, as soon as it gets down to how the image is being built, I'm out. Right? It's like, that's fine, too. But for engine devs, right?

and it kind of snowballs, right? If you're a company that's developing engines like Ubisoft, like Rockstar, like Epic, well, if all your engine devs need this stuff,

then they're all on Windows, right? And then all the people who are going to then work with them are going to be on Windows and it cascades out. So all of a sudden your artists are using Windows.

Why? Because, you know. So I don't know. I mean, I'm just trying to give some perspective on what actually happened or what would happen today if you want to go to Linux

there's problems. But again, Linux people, Epic may save us here, right? They are working very hard on porting the rad debugger to Linux. And when it is there, I will absolutely try. I periodically try to move to Linux, and it's always the debugger that stops me. Pretty much always, because I can deal with all the rest of the stuff. It's jank, but so is Windows, right?

It's like, I just need to learn a different set of jank in Linux. And so when the rad debugger's over there, that's going to be a really huge deal because it will make switching plausible to me. I also see a lot of people mentioning that there's like anti-cheats and stuff that's built up to make it so that gaming on Windows is better. But I guess, you know, after seeing Call of Duty banning people because they just raw red memory and looked for Asky strings where you could just like message your friend and get his account band. I'm not like super impressed with their anti-cheat. And so is this always true? Is there actually real uses of anti-cheat?

Because as far as I can tell, whenever I talk to someone about this, it seems like there are people that are kind of pretty pro on that. and then there's people that are like super angry about anti-cheat. Casey, do you have like a place you land on it and why is it good or bad? I don't have an opinion on that because I've never really worked on a big multiplayer game like that that was competitive that would need. I just don't have any perspective. But what I would say is that isn't really a problem. That's a problem for the gameer.

It's not a problem for the game developer because in game development, you're usually not going to be running the anti-cheat most of the time. So you can still, you're still going to be running the anti-cheat most of the time. still you're still going to, like, you could run on Linux just fine without the anti-cheat during development and treat Windows as just a platform that you ship on that you know will work relatively well. You could do it that way and just have test machines. Like I said, it's maybe not ideal. But again, in this world where it looks like more and more people might be running on Linux, that could become more plausible. I mean, Steam Deck is, again, a great example. And so what I would

say is, I don't know. I don't think that's a huge barrier to Linux. adoption. I think that if the ball got rolling, which, you know, it seems like it's sort of starting, if it gets to rolling more. I think people would just have to deal with anti-cheat on Linux. They'd have to ship it on Linux and stuff like that. Because, again, like, say there's a steam set top box, which has been rumored, right? That's going to be like a steam deck, but you just buy it and put your living room. Well, people are going to want to play their games on that, right? And they're not going to want to hear, like, oh, you can't play into the big games because the anti-cheat doesn't run. So I feel like it's a chicken and egg problem, and, you know, if the chicken squats, the egg will come out. It's another ornithologist fact for you.

Okay, yeah. I get that. When you called it a macaws, I also thought we were, like, kind of dancing around the lines of ornithology there. I mean, let me turn this around since I've talked this entire time because I'm the, like, one rep from the game industry, I guess, here. let me turn this around and say like

so what's what's with Linux like why do you guys prefer Linux and you know I mean I have guesses obviously to be honest if I do server stuff I usually I have a Linux machine that I use for that so I think I could guess but rather than guessing how about you just tell me I feel like TJ needs to answer this one because TJ

you've just been quiet looking Miami nice out there and just you know just smiling just looking good Do you use Macoss? I'm a hardcore Macass user. Okay. He's a Macoss X-11, X-12, X-13. We don't know how many versions it's been.

He's a Sierra Mountain Man. I don't remember all. He's a Macass user. Yeah, exactly. I hadn't talked to a lot. I think at one point. My voice was falling apart. So tell me, like, why do you guys pick this?

Why do you pick Mac? Why did you guys pick Linux? Like, what's the deal? Can I go first? Please. I literally use whatever my company gives me. Okay. and I don't like spending money.

But your company gives you multiple options. I used to work at your company, so I know all about it. You can get a Linux machine. Well, you know what? They didn't tell me that. A Windows machine. I actually have a Windows machine next to me, and it is, I actually have to do some development on it, and it's literally the worst thing on the planet.

So I will never. No. Nope. I'm taking the M2, whatever chip we're on, and it's free. Okay. What was that experience like? So what did you hate? Like, I want to hear, like, what is, I mean, I can guess, right?

But again, I'd rather not guess. What's so bad? Like, being. in the terminal, like I got like a brand new computer. I was expecting it to be like blazing fast, open up terminal, type in a simple like command and it's like a one second latency for it to show up.

And then I, dude, it was so bad. And I was like asking my, I do like contract on the side. And I was like, is this normal for like you Windows users to have like latency? And they're like, well, try installing the terminal app from like some store and then run it in.

Okay, see familiar. Yeah. And then like run it in admin mode, but then also fix your, settings to where like you're doing full performance and I was just like are you kidding me and it took me like one week to get neovim to even work and then even then neovim was like performing so slow I can go on for a while but it was just the performance was so bad do you use weasel or is this like windows i don't think like the thing i'm working on we're not allowed to use the weasel thing

and they it's like i asked them if i asked them if i could use and they're like no and then i don't know man it's it is actual like unbearable to the point where like i can kind of like code stuff on my Mac and then I'll just like transfer it to myself. But it's not like real code. It's like like P-O-C code. All right. Piece of crap. Yeah,

I got to protect myself on this trail. I was like, oh, uh-huh. Anyways, it's bad. Okay. I've also developed on Windows professionally trash,

believe it or not in my first job. Did you like it? Like at that place, so that was when I was working at Epic. and they have like everything, not Epic games, sorry, Casey. Epic, the boring one that does medical records. I was about to be impressed, but never. No, no, no, no. Sorry, trash.

I mean, to be fair, like Epic, the other place, they also have a lot of users. So just like, probably, I don't know, when I left, like 70%, probably now like 80% of the U.S. and a bunch of other countries, too. But regardless, it was, we used Windows there, honestly, for that place, since everything was like custom because they do all their own stuff, it didn't make barely any difference. Like it was, it was fine.

You couldn't install stuff anyways. You know what I mean? It wasn't like I was installing other programs. I just had a work computer that I did the work stuff on. I mean, I think Windows has deteriorated a lot, though, and I would be like pretty tilted by like Bing showing up all over the place and like Cortana yelling at me and stuff now.

Co-pilot. Co-pilot just being like, yo, hey, you open a Microsoft Word document again. Do you want me to ask you the same seven questions? No, no, I don't. Please, stop. Like, don't do that to me. Where are my files?

How'd they suddenly end up in OneDrive? I didn't save them to One Drive. Yeah, yeah. So, like, now that's the big thing that's very annoying for me, like, opening up a Windows machine is, like, Microsoft's just, like, serious overreach into every aspect of, like, the user's life of, I don't want any of the things that they have. I just want to, like, use my computer and search the files on my computer. like why is it i don't understand how this doesn't work um the other thing like for me i like the like why like Linux more i like a lot of the window management like solutions better on Linux um which is nice and i do think actually there there are a few like package managers for

windows that are a little bit like underrated like scoop and some of these other ones which uh like i remember i was giving a bunch of arch users a hard time telling them that like scoop is way better than like Pac-Man and yay and they were like losing their minds and it was really good it was a great troll so if you're looking to make all the arch users really mad just tell them scoop on windows is a better experience and they'll lose their mind i have a serious question that's bothering me for decades okay decades decades wow what is up with Linux users and their window managers like you all like live and die by like i don't know i it's so simple i can easily not tiling it's got to be tiring. I will easily answer this question for you. It's so simple. I just want you to look down and look at your Mac, your Mac costs. I can configure how I want. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you'll notice that you have like 15 windows open from all these different programs running. Each one will be of various sizes. Some were just placed randomly on the desktop. And it's your job to play Find My Window, which is by far one of, like, if there's, when I, when my wife uses Mac OS and when I walk in and she's just like oh hey can you grab this and do this just finding chrome is me pressing command tab and looking to find chrome and then go dick dick dick dick dick dick dick like it's all

manual searching and it's insane like why would you why would there ever be something in your life that you use a thousand times a day that you cannot just have in front of you by pressing one button so i use raycast and raycast pretty much just like does everything you can hey trash did you know you You can order terminal coffee through Raycast. That's right. We don't have a website, but Raycast works. S-SH terminal.comal. You can order terminal coffee through Raycast.

Speaking of which, I just finished my last bag. Oh, better order something now. Are you not? I've never bought one because you guys always give them to me. Oh, you got to subscribe. You got to subscribe. Subscribe and live a real life. Okay.

So, strictly out of curiosity, though, my understanding was that Macauss users loved their expose. Like, expose, like, you. They love to push a button and all the windows go bloop into like that thing. Oh, no, that's a crime against humanity. They love that thing. No. They hate it when they don't have that on another platform. There are people who do love that thing.

You're not wrong, Casey. I know, I've seen them and it's insane. Yeah, yeah, and they're like, oh, there it is. It's over there. I see it. And they click on it. And they zoom back in and they're like, yes, I have the power of flight. I'm soaring above my windows and I can see it like an eagle, like a bald eagle.

about to go into a death spiral. There it is, and I'm going to go into that one, and they love it, right? And they love that. So I feel like, I don't know, I feel like your wife is probably into expose. Do you know? I think she might be. First off, this is not an expose on my wife, so we need to, hey, keep your wife. Okay, sir, I'm just saying you brought it up.

Keep my wife's name. But, no, no, I don't, honestly, when I watch her use a computer, it does give me a lot of anxiety. okay because like I live a very optimized life and like I love my wife not for her computer skills like there's a lot of reasons to love my wife and that's just not one of them and so we just like it's okay I don't need to you know I don't need to help her I don't need to coach her she can just live whatever life she wants to live and that's just okay up to her on that one okay and if she uses ex-pose I'll just walk out of the room like there's no need for me to you know okay okay all right Well, I mean, what's your question, though, trash?

It's just like, I forgot my question. Your question was, why did like window managers? I mean, like, you also install stuff on Mac to make it work the way that you want, right? So it's more like about the availability of a lot of the tools. I'd be like the Windows ecosystem for that is underdeveloped compared to like Mac and Linux for window management solutions. because the serious, like, gray beards of Linux, they have their own 35,000 lines of auto-hotkey scripts that do their own custom one-off window manager implemented, right?

So that only works on their machine. So it's like the people who care about doing all of that stuff on Windows land, they just write their own auto-hockey thing to do everything, right? But then everyone else is just happy with, like, alt-tapping and whatnot. So I think that's kind of the difference. There's more, though. there's a bit more like I would say that now that I've kind of gone a little bit deeper into it to be able to add in your own little widgets to be able to add in your own kind of interactivity

is fairly trivial whereas on Mac it's not nearly as trivial just to be like hey I want my server status just to show up in the top bar like that's just not an that's just not an option easily and so I think Hammer spoon you can do it but yeah yeah but he's still like it hammers spoon if we got I just got to go with the Mac guy just got to go of it Just not. Amherst. Are you just making it? Are you just making up?

You just literally said two random words and you put them together. That's like all you did. That is not real. That's Drill Fighter. Obviously, drill fighter version 3? Didn't you not upgrade to Drill Fighter version 3? Hammer? Okay, it's called a hammer spoon?

Hammer spoon's a real thing, trash. Hammer spoon's real. I don't know about, I don't know. Okay, to be fair, I haven't been on Macs since I've made the great change in 2016. So there's probably some things that I'm missing. and I'm totally willing to say that. But I mean, I truly only use Linux because of a guy on the team that I used to be on. He was just so fast.

He used EMAX and he was just so good at navigating. He was so fast and all the scripts and everything he had, his whole operating system was customized for him to use it. And I thought, man, like when I look at other Mac users and they're going in between desktops and they're like scrolling through stuff and I have my Macs, up that's like way better. I'm like laughing at them. I'm like, oh, these losers, they don't even know how to use their computer. And then I saw this guy and I like felt so self-conscious. I felt more self-conscious when I saw him than I did see PewDiePyU's arch better than I

used Ubuntu. Like it was that bad. And so I was just like, okay, I got a, I got to step up my game a bit. Let me ask a question for you Linux power users out there because, you know, like I've used Linux many times and have Linux systems now. So I'm like, I am a Linux user, but I'm definitely not a Linux power user. Like the last time I built a kernel was when I installed Slackware in 1993, I think it was, or four, something like that. So I really don't have any Linux hardcore cred. And what I always wonder is, I do like the, I like the idea of Linux where it's like, I'm to go create this like customized environment where everything is as I wish and I am the like master of this kingdom right and I find that I can do that if I want to on Linux but what I also

find is that it will be incredibly fragile and like as soon like within five years all of those things are completely broken or don't exist anymore or no one's maintaining it and you have to switch to some totally different thing and all that stuff is that just is that not a correct perspective or do you guys like what do you do you do to make sure that you don't waste all your time making some stuff and then they go like oh hammer spoon yeah no ham the guy flamed out and he doesn't do hammer spoon anymore and now it's part of the hammer spoon collective which is decided that it all has to be you know done this other way and then and it's they can't get version four out it doesn't work with that kernel and glib c broke and then you're just like oh got right so what do you do

about that you know what i'm talking about right yeah you install jack fork I think Jack Fork 7. I heard Jack Fork was the next thing. Right. Three Docker containers later, it's all solved. Yeah. My counterpoint would be like, do you expect anything that any Windows computer that you have running right now to still be running in five years?

Like, that would be my first one is like, because it's like it's about tradeoffs is one. Like, I don't have any Windows computers that last five years. They always do something stupid between then and now or Windows adds so many other crazy features that the computer that I think. thought would be powerful enough to power my life for the rest of my life suddenly slows down so much that it's dead. So like there's some like difficulty there. Like for me, I guess like I don't even really consider myself a Linux power user in the like like kernel way. It's difficult because there's like so many verticals on Linux, right? Like definitely some people would be like, oh,

TJ uses the terminal a bunch. He knows how to use a bunch of like Linuxy things. But like I don't know how to do I don't I don't compile my own kernel for me I just bought like system 76 bought a you run pop OS on it which is the OS like distribution that they like maintain and I bought a AMD like GPU and it's the computer that I've had the least problems with ever and I probably had it now for three or four years I would guess and like I've never had any issues with it right so it's it's kind of like that would be my comparison is like I'm doing that one right now I spend

no time doing my setup I mean I did like a few things just to do like my window manager but nothing else right I don't spend any other time on my system well I guess I'm not really talking about the computer running I'm talking about like your setup right so like the way we do things here right

is we if we set up a new Windows machine I copy the directories over and maybe you have to install like an Adobe product if you're doing art and then you're done. Because all like... I have binaries that were compiled like 15 years ago that run.

I see. Right? On Linux is kind of like sorry son. Like none of that. Like we change the location of those things and oh that's not how you set a command line. And oh by the way no one's used that. No one's even used that shell for a while now. We use this other shell and all your scripts don't

work anymore if you didn't like do them exactly the right way or like it seems like there's just a lot of this like we don't. We don't don't care about what you did last year. It's like, you know, I know what you did last summer? This is like, I don't care what you did last summer. It always feels like that.

And maybe that's just because, like, I haven't spent enough time with it now. Like, maybe it's all better now. But that's how it felt, like, over the years kind of, like, trying to do Linux stuff periodically. I always had that feeling. And I don't get that thing for Windows. I do get the feeling that the machines degrade over time. Totally true. And I also get the feeling that Windows gets worse every year.

It totally does. So with everyone on that, I'm just, the Linux, fragility thing is the thing that bugs me and maybe I'm just doing it wrong but that's how I feel about it a lot of the time. Yeah, I guess my only counterpoint is that a lot of the super backwards compatible stuff with Windows has also been some of its bane

for why I can't move forward on a whole bunch of stuff and so maybe there's also an equal cost on that. But I do agree. Things just break. You just no longer use certain items and they go out of style. I mean, it's the same thing with what's it called? it's the same thing with a lot of the package managers, plug-in managers of Vim. Like I started using VIM.

I was on Vundle and then Pathogen and then back to Vundle and then I went to Packer and now I'm on Lazy, all to download something from GitHub and to put it on my machine. And each one obviously gave some sort of better version of it and there's reasons why each one progressively got better. But nonetheless, like that was a transition. I think a lot of people went through and it is kind of, it is in some sense kind of annoying that there is this world

that every couple years, the things that you liked, people are like, dude, no one uses that anymore. The package maintainer, yeah, he's like in jail right now. Yeah. And it's just like, oh, okay. Yeah, but I do feel like most of them still like run. And if you were happy with what you were doing before, like, at least for the things that I've done, like, they still would run.

Or it's like you could, if you like actually built it from source your first time or whatever, you just like could build it from source again with one command like basically every project that I'm that I at least for me that I install I don't know but maybe it's different depending of what you're working on but like

I get way more problem from like everyone's just like this new JavaScript thing is the way that we do this now we can't so like but that's a if I was running on Mac Linux or Windows I have to find out that now this project only works with Bunn because it's using buns built in stuff that's a real project too.

Bun. Yeah. Yeah. You're probably more correct. The amount of breaking changes that exist in the web world, trash, you're going to need to answer for all this is so much higher than all these other things that we're talking about. Like, you know, you were saying to us like, bitch, how do you live like this? I would like to Uno reverse and be like, have you been in the web world?

Yes, you work in the web world. Like, bitch, how do you live like that? That's crazy out there. The amount of changes just react alone. Well, and I just He's currently muted, you're muted. I'm muted.

Classic stand-up muted. We finally have a question for you. I know. I was like, I was like, I'm going to answer the hell out of this question. And I was just muted. I ruined it. I ruined the surprise on nobody.

Anyways. Welcome to the stand-up episode nine, everyone. Today we're going to be hearing from trash. He's got our lead-off discussion point. Trash, take it away. No, that does. Trash, you're muted again. I think T.J. muted you.

Yeah, that was me. Did you freaking muted you, Trash? I don't have, I don't have the power in me to speak with this passion anymore. I like, I gave like, I bet it was so good. I bet it was so good. I had like a really good ton of voice and everything. All right, come on, guys.

Let's get this started. Welcome to stand up, everybody. Episode nine. Today we're talking about Windows and Linux kicking it off is going to be trash One password I can't believe you unfortunately I can't meet you unfortunately

I'll try I tried I have a power so I don't even want to answer No no I'm not It's not even going to be the same anymore I'm not even going to answer the same way You missed the magic tege

What I was The spirit was I deal with it Because I get paid to Good answer And it's literally my answer You think I do this shit for free? You think I sit on my computer all day because I want to?

Absolutely not. And that's the honest to God. All day. He's literally on a podcast right now. Hey, that's on the computer, man. That's on the computer. Good point, good point. I love to nuke node modules five times a day and restart my TypeScript server 20 times a day because it's fun.

Is that still real? Like, I haven't been in an enterprise. put the hashtags on that one. JavaScript project in a while. Is it true that you still are deleting node modules on a regular? No, not really, but times a week. This whole thing also is kind of why, like, it's sort of the mental divide of AI for me.

I'll just put a, like, I'll put a, like, layer of AI on top of this, which is just that a lot of times I'm like, I see the AI stuff and, like, what people are doing with it or don't, and I'm just like, I don't understand, like, this doesn't seem like, this would be useful to me at all. And then I realize I'm like, well, actually, the reason that I'm thinking that is because I've, like, optimized everything I do to not do all that stuff, right?

Like, if I had to go, like, oh, what happens if, like, chocolatey hasn't done the thing that it needs to, and then there's this error? And it's like, it's like, oh, yeah, like, A, that's completely unfun. B, it's not an educational experience because, like, that package manager won't even be the thing that you're using next week. So there's no reason for a human to ever learn it. It's completely worthless information, right? And so it's like, yeah, if your job actually involves 50% that or more, heaven forbid, which is actually kind of common, yeah, I mean, like, that's, the AI is excel at that. It's just like, hey, yeah, tell me what the heck happened to this

ridiculous thing. You're like, oh, yeah, well, in that version of this package manager, this package was broken, so try doing this line. It's just what I would have ended up finding on Stack Overflow, taking longer to find us like sort of a later, right? All that cruft, right? And so I think part of the problem, the holistic problem for me is why, how did we get here? Like, why aren't people trying to make it

so that actually you don't have to think about these things? Like why people act like you're supposed, like that development is supposed to be about even knowing that there is a package manager? Why is there a package manager? If this stuff was designed properly, you'd just copy it and it would work, right? But we've gotten ourselves into such a disastrous zone of how things are designed and shipped that literally a package manager is like the only alternative.

Like having a human being figure out what all the dependencies are for this is no longer possible. That's insane, right? And so the fact that our, and now our solution is like, oh, well, we'll just have AI automate it or we have package management it. It's like, this is not good, right? And so I think, like, that whole mentality that I think also you see a lot in Linux, which is like, well, you're supposed to learn how to 50 different ways of running shells and setting environment variables because that's just like part of the skill issues. Like, no, if you're spending your time doing that, you weren't spending your time making whatever it is you're supposed to be making. It's a zero-sum game. Like, you don't get better at making the game or whatever you're supposed to be working on by learning a new shell.

No. Maybe that new shell will add new features that allow you to be faster, but what should have happened is your old shell should have just gotten those features or something. And you should have been focusing on what you act supposed to work on. So every time that a developer is supposed to spend their time learning about a source code control utility, learning about how the shell works, learning about scripting, package managers, all this crap, it's just making their end product worse because they're having to spend that mental energy on it. feel like that's the thing, like that's the overall fragility thing that just, it really sucks. And AI doesn't solve it. It just papers over it so that people don't have to deal with it as much. But it's not a solution because the crap crap is all still there, if that makes sense. And causing problems.

Yeah, so Nick Sticks is this, Casey. I want to say something real quick. Soft work. Say something trash. I'm going to say more things. So. DJ, don't mute them. Don't view.

I need to start. staring. I need to start staring at the speaker. I'm actually like at PTSD now. Yeah. Okay. Casey said something and I already forgot because we just started, we started talking about muting me and now my brain's not thinking. Okay.

That's spiral. Focus. So everyone wants to like, so like Linux users, whatever you use, always try to optimize their workflow. So let's just take Prime for an example just because I can't think of anything better. And Prime is doing all these. He's navigating the Chrome in one click and he's going to them and he's harpooning everywhere or whatever.

But and he's optimized his life to like 10th degree or whatever. I don't even know what that means. I just said it just came out my mouth. But let's just say he sucks at coding and he codes terribly slow. What happens to all those optimizations are for like absolutely no reason. You just like look cool, but ultimately like you're coding 20 times slower than me or someone else. Right. So that's why I never really like focus on these like optimizations because eventually you hit some bottleneck.

Let's say like I optimize my whole desktop workflow. but then I go pee too slow. Like I walk to my bathroom too slow like five minutes later, right? I'm not, all that time is, all that time you're saving is lost. I don't know where I'm going with this analogy. But I've been thinking about it for like this whole podcast. And I'm just like, it's driving me crazy. Like I just don't like sit here and like try to automate everything because I just know at some point I'm going

outside of this realm that's probably not optimized. So what's the point of like sitting? I mean, I don't know where I'm going. I don't know where I'm going right now. First off, if you're paying too slow, see a doctor. Go see a doctor. Okay, that's a prostate problem. That's serious.

You know, you've got to get some fingers in places you don't want them to be and you'll figure it all out. But second off, as far as like why optimize, for me, the point isn't to optimize for speed. It's to remove search fatigue. I really dislike every time I need to go somewhere. I have to go and like spell out half the file's name or to put like part of the packs. I'm like, oh, it's in this one place. and this one, you know, da-da-da-da-da. When I want to go to all these places,

I don't, I want to have as little, like, mental search that I have to do to get to where I want to be. Like, that's kind of my whole, that's my whole, I guess, the philosophy of this is that anything that's important should be one-click away, you shouldn't have to think about it. Every time I want to go to my work, my work desktop, it's just a single click. I know where it's at.

It's never changing. It's always in the same workspace. It's always the same thing. It's one window. It's always there. when I want to go to my testing, it's always one place. When I want to go to Twitch chat, it's always one place. When I want to go to my browser, it's always one inside my browser.

When I want to go to Twitch, it's the first one. When I want to go to Discord, it's two. When I want to go to Twitter, it's three. When I want to go to Grok, it's four, right? Like, it's all like, everything is just kind of mapped out so I don't have to think about it. So when I want to go to Grok and ask a question, I just go, workspace one, position four. Boom, I'm already there. It's just there.

I don't think about it. It's just like, duh, right? It's just a quick little hand motion. I'm exactly where I want. and so yeah there's a memorization cost but after the memorization cost has been made it doesn't matter that I pee too slow or anything like that I never waste brain cycles

thinking about okay I need to go to grok now I have to go over crap I have like 700 tabs open maybe I need to close my tabs maybe oh dang it now I have this I have too many of these you know like you don't have to go through all of that like just crap in your way and so that's the that is my reason why I do all this end of rant I think like go ahead.

Yeah, I think the thing, like, there's, there are a bunch of people who I would say spend like an insane amount of time always focusing on this and like always chasing the latest trends and like, oh, I saw someone using a different thing, blah, blah, immediately I have to throw that all away. That's like I tell people not to do that all the time. That's like also just useless. I mean, like if it's fun for you, it's whatever. Like, I don't care. I don't tell people they can't play video games on the weekend. that also is whatever. You know, like, same thing if they want to go rice their arch set up on the weekend.

Who cares? I just, okay, awesome. But, like, the thing that I, along with what I'm saying is, I think a lot of it is, can I eliminate, like, getting distracted or, like, having to get some break in, like, what I'm doing for focusing? I think, like, the really simple example is, like, I don't think there's a meaningful difference between typing, like, 120 words for minute and 100 words per minute. You know what I'm saying?

Like, it's pretty much the same. But, like, I think it's important that you can type without having to think about typing. Even if that means you only type at 60 words per minute, right? Because, like, if you're spending part of your brain while you're supposed to be coding or doing other stuff, literally thinking about the act of typing or having to backspace so much that you're, like, failing to type or do it. You are, like, you are hurting your ability to do the rest of the stuff, right? And it gets you distracted. It gets you off focus. It doesn't let you get in the zone as much.

all this other stuff, right? So it's like, I don't think you need to type 160 words for minute to be effective. I think you should be able to type like effortlessly. So it's a bunch of the same stuff like Prime is saying. Like he wants to be able to navigate effortlessly. It's not really about having the most riced set up and looking the coolest or whatever, right? It's more about can I do the same thing without having to think? That's the big win for me for like a lot of what I shoot for those things. Yeah. Yeah. I think. So I agree with all of that. So I do the same thing.

Like I have hot keys to do things so I can search stuff fast. I think like I said before I even said, I used Prime as it was not the best example, but it was only thing I could think of because he's like in my face and I'm just looking at him. But I was thinking more of like situations where people just automate things that like ultimately like say like you automate like I don't know, setting up some program. I don't know what. But you do that you sub this program like once or twice a year. But you spent like a week automating it.

Right? Like it's kind of like dumb stuff like that is kind of like what I was getting at. Bad cost. Those are bad returns. It's cost benefit analysis is failing. Like you're spending more than the savings you're going to get, right? I would say though, one thing people don't like probably don't factor enough for that is sometimes it doesn't take that long. Trash, I know you, I know you're going to relate to this just knowing you. There's some stuff where you know you need to do it, but you just put it off because you don't feel like doing it.

And then even if it only takes 30 seconds, it took you like eight days to get up the motivation. to accomplish the dumb little task because you hate it, right? If you can automate those, it actually doesn't matter that you only save yourself 30 seconds. You, like, saved a bunch of mental, because you know thyself, trash, know thyself. And you, you know, like for me, some of it's like, I know that I just hate this thing.

I won't do it if it's not automated, right? So then I can automate it and like it's worth it for me because I know that I'll just be tilted for the rest of the day that I had to spend five minutes. minutes on this task that I'm like, so there is something, there's something like that about life, too, and it's okay. That's just okay. And sometimes you got it wrong.

Sometimes you got it right. That's all right. Dude, I can relate to that. Even with the way bar thing, because I just did my, like, racing. And I just have, like, someone's way bar and pick. Don't put it in quotes. It was. And even with that, I added my own custom widget to tell me if my TTS server is up.

Because every single stream, I see a cheer, and then no TTS. And I go, dang it. and why? Ah, the server wasn't started. I killed my T-Muck session and it was running my server or I forgot to actually open up the browser. That's why it's not running. So I can look up and I see, ah, it's up, there's an admin panel running and there's an OBS panel running. It should just work. And if it's not because I forgot autoplay and now I just need to get autoplay as a little icon up there.

And so then I'm no, oh, I'm auto playing and there's not, like, then I just don't have to think about it anymore. It's just like, here's a server. It's just this dumb thing that makes me super upset. And I spent two hours making it work, but I'm only saving it. like 10 seconds of actual checking, but it's those 10 seconds that just piss me off. And so it's like, here's how I'm saving myself emotional effort, and I just don't have to have it anymore,

even though it costs me way more. I'm okay with that. That's an okay in my book. Yeah, I think anything quality of life improvement is worth doing, for sure. Yeah. I might circle back to something trash said and just, I'd like to give a supporting anecdote that is not something I necessarily myself understand, but I'm just going to recount it.

because it happened. So at Valve, right, one of the things that they do is their kind of culture is sort of set up to be like a distributed work environment. Like, it's all in one building, but it's like,

you just, the desks have wheels on them and the computers are literally like strapped into the desk so you can just unplug from the wall and wheel your desk somewhere else if you want to work next to somebody for that time, right? They literally, I've literally seen this. This isn't like some fictional thing they're saying. you like go to us this is what you will see for reels.

I don't know. I haven't been there in a few years, so maybe they'd change. But that's literally what they were doing. And back in the day, I remember, I think it was Gary McTaggart, I want to say, who's one of their rendering guys. He uses Visual Studio as his editor. And I was like, I was interested. I was like, you still use Visual Studio as the editor because it's like, visual studios editor is kind of crappy, right? And he was like, yeah, I use it because I just want to be able to know that,

My normal, like, whatever my normal work pattern is that I do is just the default setup for this thing. So that if I ever need to, like, go, like, I'm just walking around or the person next to me, I want to just sit down at their computer and debug something that they just hit or edit some code just right on their thing, that I can just use it, right? And since we all have this visual studio assault, I just do it, right? And so for him, and he, like, you know, this is a very good programmer, right, who made a lot of stuff that a lot of people have played and loved, right? for him the tradeoff was literally like

I just I want my skill set to be practicable anywhere I go on just the default thing that people are running and to me like that's more worth it than customizing even like what the hotkey setup is so that I'll get like a little bit more out of this editor right because a lot of the other people at Valve like might use their own custom editor like you know that they bought or whatever right so so i do think that's kind of interesting like everyone has their own everyone has their own thing

they're optimizing for and like i don't who's to say which ones the right one i don't know uh but it is like sort i feel like that's kind of along the trash line of like look it's like this is not i don't want to focus on that like that's not the op that's not the thing that's going to pay off the most for me in the long run this other thing i think will right yeah and that's going to depend a lot on like where you work what you're doing what you're trying yeah you know like and those are like you said, they're all cost-benefit trade-offs that you've got to figure out for what you want your thing

to be. Like, for me, it sounds terrible to roll my desk around and touch someone else's computer. I'm like, I want to optimize so that I can't do that. I always thought it was weird because I was like, well, just roll your desk or their. Like, he didn't want to have to copy the state, I guess. I don't know. I know. I know. He said what he said

and I'm like, well, I believe you. You know, I mean, like, I don't think you're wrong about your own preference, right? Right. Yeah, I try to use Prime's computer, I can't even find the backspace key. No, that's because he has the stupid remap thing. Vim users are used to this. Like, most people can't even quit the editor. If you walked up

to their edit, you couldn't even get out of it, right? Yeah, he can't use my computer. Because he has a software remap on his keys online. And his keys have no words, letters on him. It was like an alien spaceship. I will say, I want to redo that in Learn Quare team. Like, I do, because I realize that even though it's really great for me, I made it

during a time when I thought buying an ergonomic keyboard was stupid and I could just use a laptop, optimized for the laptop life. And so I made a layout that was optimized for literally a Mac book air keyboard. And that's why everything's in the position it's in, is so that I could use that on the go anywhere I want to. And now that I've switched to like a super ergonomic keyboard,

I realized that, you know, it was actually thumb clusters were the real friends I made along the way. And that I just like this layout that I have, I could probably drop it myself. What the hell? Yeah. And so I could drop it and use some. different and it'd probably be really, really nice.

And so I've been strongly considering going back to quarity. Even though it's going to be like, it's like two days of just painful muscle memory. You can still type on QWERTY though. Like for you, it should not be that hard. Just do it for two days. You'll be fine. I know, but it's still those two days. You know what it feels like.

You know what it's like being a good type or T.J. Imagine going back and living like people who don't know how to trash. I get it. I don't even know, like, I honestly don't know how people program when they have to look at the keyboard. The amount of anxiety and like when I, I remember when I switched to Dvorak, I would get an email and I would break out sweating knowing that I have to respond to an email because I'm going to have to like, oh gosh, typing is so dang hard right now. And it was just like so hard to do. And I remember that just like that feeling. And I just cannot believe there's people that just live every single day not knowing how to use their computer.

a keyboard and they do it every day for eight hours. It's just like, why would you do this? This seems so painful. And so I never want to do that again, but I'm willing to do it again. I'm willing. I might do it. Hold on. I have to ask, Casey, do you use a regular keyboard?

It's not split, right? He uses a Microsoft six-hour keyboard, I bet. Oh, no. Is that Groovebox color scheme? His reaction to like seeing y'all's keyboards was so funny to me. He was just like, what the hell are? I can still type fast on a regular keyboard, though. So it's not like I can't.

You know, so it's more like my wrists were really hurting when I was in college while I was like, and I was like, that's way too early for my wrist to hurt. I'm a child, you know. I am. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. No, keep going. Yeah.

Yeah. So I switched to split keyboard and then eventually tried one with like concavity and all my wrist pain went away. So it was like it just kind of had to be done. But I can still type on a regular keyboard. Yeah. I never lost one for the other either. It's just I don't understand when people say that. Like, how do you go back to a regular keyboard?

I don't know. I put my hands on it and start typing. Like, I'm driving at the keys? Like, what are you guys talking about? Just, like, write the, smash the buttons for the letters you want. Like, it's okay. It's like, how is it possible? If you learn to write a motorcycle, how do you go back to driving a car?

They're completely different. It's like, yeah, my brain remembers that they're different and knows how to do it, right? So it's all right. I love keyboards. I should say that. I got into keyboards. And I, so, like, this is completely custom, this one. Nice.

And I'm never going back, baby. Like, I, to you, your guys' window manager is my keyboard. Like, I'm like, what are the switches and what are the key caps? And is there a foam plate? Is there pour on foam in it? If there isn't, I'm not using it. So, yeah, it's gotten, I've gone down that rabbit hole for sure. Oh, nice.

So now I know who to ask when I have keyboard questions about what one I'm going to do next. Sure. This is good to know, though, because, you know, like, I am not a keyboard guy. I go to Kinesis and say, I want to try this one with this switch. And then I try that one with the switch. So I have some browns. I have some blues, and I have some pinks right now, some thongy pinks. And, like, that's it.

And it's fun. I never think about that. But maybe there's, like, more to life that I just don't understand. I obsessed over it. Because I had, I wanted, so this baby right here, this is an old keyboard from an Amiga 2000. Some of you will recognize this if you're old like me from the 1980s. I grew up on that one. Yeah.

And I love the feel, the feel of the key. It's soft and it's almost like a... It's ASMR. Okay, Trash, stop doing that. I'm gonna, I am gonna mute you again, Trash. Like, shut up. And I wanted that feel back. I'm like, you know what?

I'm tired of this crap. I'm tired of all these PC keyboards. They don't feel like an Amiga. It's bad enough that the operating system sucks now. I can't have my Amiga OS back, right? I can't have workbench. Are you laughing because he said PC keyboards? Like, I want a base.

keyboard like that's politically correct crap. Yeah. It won't even let me type memory. Yeah. What does that even mean? Get them out. Changing all my words as I type them in the microcontroller, what's up with that? So I wanted a base keyboard. Prime, should I, when you said

earlier, GDP's lover. I have a one on one soon. I know, I know. This is the joke that I told Chad I wasn't going to say, but we're far enough in. This is what we're going out on. This is the ornithology moment. Let's go. I actually have two things. I'll close on both of these. They're both important. The first is when he said GDB lover, I was going to say, it's 2025, it's LGBTQIA plus lovers now.

I didn't want that in the first 15 minutes of the video, though. You are so canceled. I cannot wait for this. It was nice to do it. It was nice to do in a podcast with you, T.J. It's been fun. And we'll find something to take your place next time. I'm the one that's 2025.

You guys are behind the time, okay? The second one is I actually know how. Windows can be saved, how Microsoft can save Windows. And? All right, so here's the strategy. They're going to open source windows. They're going to allow people to make closed source forks of it, and then they'll be able to acquire it for $3 to $9 billion six years later.

Thank you. That's the end of the stand-up. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a pleasure. Welcome to the stand-up episode nine and goodbye. All right. Awesome. That was a long one. Lord.

All right, everybody. Thank you so much for joining. We are off. Bye-bye. Enjoy. Boot up the day. Fibre errors on my screen.

Terminal coffee. Well, I think your idea sucks. So that's how I feel right now, okay? All right.