> I’ve been using Emacs for 6 years now. But recently it became clear to me that it’s really optimised for Linux and doesn’t work as well on Mac and Windows[1].
The Emacs devs definitely are biased in favor of free platforms, that’s true. However something like 30% of users are on MacOS and I’ve personally never noted any deficiency there. The native Windows builds definitely don’t run as well though. A big part of that is because NTFS is poorly suited to Emacs IO patterns.
I use the same config for all three, but I did have to disable certain parts when running on Windows. One that immediately comes to mind is the vterm package.
> The Emacs devs definitely are biased in favor of free platforms
This strikes me as shortsighted. Most of us don't have much control over the platform we use.
I, for example, was a very happy (even mildly evangelistic) emacs user up until my last job change. The new company issued me a Windows laptop. After a couple days of fussing with trying to get it to work acceptably well on either native Windows or WSL, I finally gave up and switched to vscode.
This probably spells the doom of my use of emacs for hobby work, too. Virtually all of my programming time happens at work these days, so my emacs proficiency is rapidly declining. Soon not even nostalgia will be able to overcome the inconvenience of using an editor that's becoming decreasingly familiar by the day.
I suppose I am only one person and I don't speak for everyone, but being able to spare at least a little more love for Windows users might have prevented at least this one developer from attriting out of the community.
>This strikes me as shortsighted. Most of us don't have much control over the platform we use.
Well, that's the thing.
This is NOT my POV, but I have definitely heard true-believer libre/Free software people opine that making it too easy to use Free software on nonFree platforms isn't desirable.
I think this is a silly perspective, but it's definitely one that's out there.
What I worry about there is that letting it become too inconvenient to use Free development tools on non-Free platforms will eventually harm the Free Software community's ability to produce competitive Free software, by encouraging a brain drain in the communities that develop Free development tools.
It's not an "eventually" thing. It's happening now, and has been happening for a long time.
I don't use much libre software in my day to day (desktop) life because most of it is only good enough if you feel strongly that libre is a value unto itself, and worth hassle. I mostly don't. I mean, in some places, there's definite parity or even advantages on the libre side, but holy crap on the desktop it's bleak.
Biased is too weak a concept. It is a deliberate, principled choice of FSF/GNU/Emacs to advocate against Windows usage. They are, overall, in favor of some Windows support only in order to show Windows users the benefits and virtues of free software. The ultimate goal is that those users will move away from Windows, not that their Windows experience will be enriched. They knowingly favor these principles over greater success in the Windows world.
Whether this is a realistic, good, or successful point of view, will clearly be debated endlessly, but Emacs' intentions should be understood clearly.
IMO, there is a gray area between "such a bad experience that many Windows users will not see its value" and "so good that it's just another piece of good Windows software". Finding a practical balance, if it's even possible, would be another area for debate. There are surely mailing list archives that cover this, but I think the project would always strictly prioritize "avoid enriching the Windows experience" over "show Windows users how good Emacs is."
AFAIK the balance they try to keep is that users of non-free OSs should not have a better experience than those of free OSs. That doesn't mean they will cripple the experience on non-free OSs, but they won't implement features not implementable, say, on linux nor specifically optimize for non-free OSs.
The Emacs devs definitely are biased in favor of free platforms, that’s true. However something like 30% of users are on MacOS and I’ve personally never noted any deficiency there. The native Windows builds definitely don’t run as well though. A big part of that is because NTFS is poorly suited to Emacs IO patterns.
I use the same config for all three, but I did have to disable certain parts when running on Windows. One that immediately comes to mind is the vterm package.