So, since forever, I had been programming on Windows - since, well, I did everything on Windows. However, at university they used linux on their systems, which, fair enough, so I learned to use a linux command line. Windows of course doesn't use the linux command line, it has its own thing, and I didn't particularly like cmd, and that was that, until of course I heard of WSL.

WSL, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux, is basically a command line linux virtual machine that can run on Windows, interact with windows file systems and run .exe files. All while having all the linux stuff a command line linux has - pretty nice. So I installed WSL(2) and rolled with that for most of the year.

Eventually, though, I realised what sort of bodge job I had with the WSL system, which can be summed up by alias java="java.exe". Basically, because I didn't want to re-install all the things like Java, Python, Haskell, etc. onto WSL, since it seemed like just taking up extra space for nothing, I ended up using a system which was basically windows bash. This doesn't sound as bad as it was, since I just kept bodging things into the bashrc file, and basically ended up not liking it much. Then, as I programmed more in Windows, the more I hated it. Windows was in itself clunky and not suited to such things, and so I resolved that when I moved home to get a 500 GB SSD and install a linux distribution onto it.

And so, of course, I did just that. Luckily a family member had a spare SATA SSD he could give me (so no extra £40 spent there) and I decided on Linux Mint. It had a very windows-like desktop packaged with it, and seemed to have a good, painless, install process. I plugged in the SSD, and spent an hour or two getting it installed (and the rest of the day to configure it to my liking), and bam, I had Mint dual-bootable on my computer.

Now, I had two OSs running, and basically Mint was for work and programming, and Windows for everything else. I've kept windows as it is, but I don't use it for programming any more. I could now properly set up all the programming languages I needed, and have a terminal environment I was comfortable with.

There's only two things really that I have complaints with though. First, I do miss windows terminal. Xcfe terminal with a background image and cascadia code gets close, but there's nothing I found quite like that specific microsoft product. Second, C# is still a bit of a pain. Everything other language was quite easy but Microsoft Java had to cause me that little extra bit of annoyance. I don't even really use it anyway; I like LibGDX better than MonoGame so I'm sticking with Java for now.