I guess part of the confusion might be in the different use-cases. I guess the core teams focus is that elixir can run on, be used on and especially be compiled for windows. With releases in core this task probably even became a lot more work than before. This is a completely separate expectation to “providing (a great) developer experience”, which additionally includes installers, editor support and further tooling. The latter wouldn’t even be needed if the first part is not handled properly.
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I’ve never been able to get WSL to install tbh. Granted this is a reflection on Windows.
Why not start a thread for Windows Elixir Users and see if there’s anything you can work on together to help improve the Windows experience?
There are a few Windows users listed here:
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What type of issues did you have?
I’ve been running it as my full time dev environment since 17.09 (about 2’ish years now) and didn’t come across any issues in all of the releases from then until the latest stable release.
IIRC the windows store just broke. Wouldn’t download the Ubuntu. Very predictable situation tbh. Git Bash works ok though.
Are you running something like Shut Up 10 or another tool that might try to black hole certain Microsoft web addresses? You don’t need to confirm or deny that publicly, but you may or may not need to loosen the chains on such a tool to get the MS store working.
Proton isn’t a fork, it’s a prebuilt collection of wine, DXVK, and a lot of other little addons (which most wine front-ends also setup for you). You can still use the platform wine or any custom built thing as well, but Proton was built to ‘have everything’.
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Linux doesn’t typically have any relevance to a desktop end-user unless they are Microsoft-haters. Most desktop end-users just want to do their “computer stuff” (to which the desktop PC is becoming increasingly less relevant) and get on with their life.
Because watching the cursor flushing itself in its toilet hole gets old… When I get on a windows 10 machine its like going back to floppy disk days compared to linux…
It is a risky statement.
Why do Linux users hate Microsoft? I don’t hate or love Microsoft.
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There are non-developer/programmer/IT Linux users out there - I’m simply not aware of any particular Linux distro that caters to that particular group as much as Windows/MacOS does.
As I stated Android seems to be the biggest Windows competition - but that I wouldn’t classify that as a desktop OS.
Perhaps Microsoft-hater was a bit strong. I was referring to the fact that most desktop systems come or are even designed for Windows - and the mainstream consumer behaviour is to stick with that. You have to go out of your way to get Linux on a desktop system - which isn’t mainstream consumer behaviour.
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I think the popular one is Ubuntu. I freelance as a computer repair guy, and from time to time I see a Linux box and most of the time, it has Ubuntu (or one of its derivatives like UbuntuStudio, or Xubuntu). The only time I’ve been called to fix one of those was because of a hardware failure. The windows machines on the other hand, are spyware/malware based repairs.
The Windows 10 experience sucked, flaky os, malware preinstalled, background operations and internet communications that are hidden.
Windows 2016 Server with desktop experience installed is much better. Clean and not preloaded with junk I will never use.
Linux is for users that want to see what is under the hood and also is very customizable. You can even build your own linux from scratch.
Thanks to @OvermindDL1 in another topic we discussed a problem of mine. Regarding Linux performance, i ended up using a KDE based Ubuntu known as KUBUNTU , which uses very little memory and is user friendly.
Also if anyone has any questions regarding this you can pm me or we can create another topic to discuss this.
My wife, many friends in real life, all are heavy gamers. They like Linux because the games run faster and they just don’t have any issues, ever. I’m “on call” for them if they need help but so far they never have, and they’ve discovered a lot on their own that they like to show off to me. They don’t dev, don’t program, aren’t IT by any stretch. They all use Kubuntu.
Oh hey! Is that working well for you then? 
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Well it’s a lot to talk about if you like we can create another topic. Where i can describe the experience and also run some tests for comparison against my old Bodhi Linux.
Would you like that?
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At your encouragement and with your support no doubt.
Most people just stick to what the vendor hands them and/or what they can find support with from their peer group - which in most cases is Windows. Few people are fortunate enough to have somebody like you around to help them explore alternatives (apart from the it’s just too much like work aspect).
Apparently just installing a different browser on one’s OS qualifies as a remarkable action.
The Elixir experience on Windows is deteriorating
It could be due to an absence of documentation. In this thread, there is valuable content that could be added to the official documentation.
Nowadays, anyone can use Linux. Example: Dell XPS 13 (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS preloaded).
SUSE, Mandrake (Mandriva), Canonical, Red Hat … did a good job.
Started using a Windows machine for my elixir development a couple weeks ago and so far the experience has been surprisingly good.
My first test was just the elixir installer for Windows, made a small example project with Phoenix and had no mayor issues. My “biggest” issue at this stage was just the lack of mix auto completion at the command line.
I tried a connection to MS SQL with Ecto and was able to retrieve and insert data (with some caveats), definitely less troublesome than I expected it to be… but the problems here have more to do with available Ecto adapters.
Missing the terminal coloring I gave a shot to Windows Subsystem for Linux… one or two commands and I already had ubuntu on windows. After that installation with asdf was no issue.
Tried to install VS Code on WSL but I had trouble selecting the right display, this ubuntu distro is not graphical so I settled for vim for a while… until the instance of VS Code on my windows machine gave me a plugin hint. So, if you’re fine settling for VS Code as an elixir editor it has been doing wonders on my case.
Just to not discard the option I also gave a shot to Postgress on Windows, the available installers worked super smoothly and was able to get an instance running with 0 effort. On ubuntu I always struggle with the available packages or docker configurations (I have to go back on “how to setup”).
Creating a small Ecto app (on ubuntu) that connects to the windows Postgress instance was effortless, the connection string seems to be shared between Operating Systems.
All of this within a span of 3 days… neat! 
Haven’t tried releases but right now I’m super optimistic that deployment on an Windows Server will be successful. Also, I’m super happy with my current working environment 
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If you did want to install it natively on Ubuntu in WSL, you can set up an X-server. I’ve been doing this for years for other things and it works wonderfully, even with dual monitors.
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Thanks for the tip! Will definitely give it a shot in the upcoming days.
My main concern is that I’m using VS Code + ElixirLS which can be quite a burden for slower machines, thankfully I was lent a very beefy machine so no issues or perceived “lag” while editing code.
