Quite a lot has happened in a few months. Windows 10 became much much better and now includes Linux built in, so you have the full energy saving, sleep, hibernate stuff fully working for windows, all the other benefits, software, services, cheaper hardware and full Linux, if all they had given us was just BASH, things would still just be the same.
What this BASH shell is, it is a real linux system, with full access to the whole system, sudo access, you can edit your /etc/host file and it is system wide. But the real kicker is, it is a real linux computer, no emulation, not a virtual machine.
I installed redis and MongoDB with just 2 commands, and these systems are running on my windows machine, everything is available on localhost. You also have open ssh and all that comes with it. This means, you can run NodeJS and Python servers. Everything you could do in Linux (pretty much) is now available.
I have set myself goal of writing a fully blown NodeJS server, using only Windows 10 machine with BASH shell. This is a web server running with Redis and Mongo, NodeJS and a lot of packages, using a windows programming editor, and then deploy on a Linux server.
Is this just as easy as using macOS machine? Just as easy or even easier than using virtual linux host ? Well I am off to find out.
The Thinkpad machine that I have available is no macintosh, that is for sure. It is dual core i7 with 8GB memory, SSD disk and not very good monitor, the keyboard is excellent though.
So I will keep at this. I just think paying $3000 for a laptop is way over the point when you get a very good PC laptop for $600-800. i7 Quad core, gaming GPU, backlit keyboard and such, usually though the screen and the feel of the machine is quite bad. The second question usually is, is it that much worse ? You could aways loose one, drop one, spill water/coffee/cola over it. It could get stolen.
Like I said earlier, a machine that costs $3000, is about $100 per month over almost 3 years. That is a lot of money. 2 machines for $600 each, over 30 months, is just $40 a month, and if you are lucky and just have 1 machine, it is just $20. Then you can swap out the disk, add more memory, I saw an Asus with 4 banks of memory, which in my books means it is possible to expand it's memory to 32GB, now we are talking.
