I recently returned an HP Spectre x360 (slightly better spec than the XPS 13 from the article) and was terribly annoyed by the thermal throttling. My 2014 MBP easily outperformed it despite a much older processor.
PC land is a jungle, because you have this cartesian product of hardware vendors + configurations and Windows + OEM customization which leads to PCs with similar specs but with wildly different performances. 🤷♂️
WSL is slow and there'll always be file system permission issues for docker and vagrant mounts when Windows is the host OS; this often applies to git projects too.
You're probably the third person say WSL is slow on here, can you elaborate? What do you mean by slow?
The XPS has slightly better thermals than the early 2018 Spectre but still hits thermal limits quickly. Notice how the MBP uses a different processor to every Windows 13" and 14" ultrabook on the market, it's base speed is also higher. Despite this and the fact the MBP CPU draws more power, battery life in Mac OS is superb.
WSL's main performance issue is related to file io. Something like 'git status' is much slower than native performance. Expect 'npm install' to be much slower than if you were on Mac OS or native Linux. To make the performance issue worse, the terminal experience in Windows requires manual setup to get something that kind of works, i.e. interactive applications (I recommend running wsltty via conemu).
Further to this, WSL does not always work correctly, e.g. I've had problems with multiplexed SSH connections and agent forwarding. Expect to have to downgrade binaries manually.
WSL's main performance issue is related to file io. Something like 'git status' is much slower than native performance. Expect 'npm install' to be much slower than if you were on Mac OS or native Linux.
npm install is already slow per se :-(
Further to this, WSL does not always work correctly, e.g. I've had problems with multiplexed SSH connections and agent forwarding. Expect to have to downgrade binaries manually.
It's like ending up with a worse linux on top of Windows.
My brain is currently moonwalking out of that place :D
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Hey Andrew, thanks for your insight.
PC land is a jungle, because you have this cartesian product of hardware vendors + configurations and Windows + OEM customization which leads to PCs with similar specs but with wildly different performances. 🤷♂️
You're probably the third person say WSL is slow on here, can you elaborate? What do you mean by slow?
The XPS has slightly better thermals than the early 2018 Spectre but still hits thermal limits quickly. Notice how the MBP uses a different processor to every Windows 13" and 14" ultrabook on the market, it's base speed is also higher. Despite this and the fact the MBP CPU draws more power, battery life in Mac OS is superb.
WSL's main performance issue is related to file io. Something like 'git status' is much slower than native performance. Expect 'npm install' to be much slower than if you were on Mac OS or native Linux. To make the performance issue worse, the terminal experience in Windows requires manual setup to get something that kind of works, i.e. interactive applications (I recommend running wsltty via conemu).
Further to this, WSL does not always work correctly, e.g. I've had problems with multiplexed SSH connections and agent forwarding. Expect to have to downgrade binaries manually.
npm install is already slow per se :-(
It's like ending up with a worse linux on top of Windows.
My brain is currently moonwalking out of that place :D