My new laptop arrived 'early' (May 31 instead of Jun 21: good marketing by Dell). These are my experiences so far with my intention to work under Windows instead of Ubuntu.

• On the surface, Windows 11 isn't that much different from Windows 10. It may be very different under the hood, but I can't tell.
• The winget package manager works like a charm. I also installed apps through the store, just to experience the difference, but winget has a much wider choice. The weird thing is, that removing an app must still be done by selecting "Uninstall" in the start menu...
• Windows Terminal works fine and I may get used to PowerShell as well.
• I am having trouble using Hyper-V:
  • I can't share folders between the host and guest, like I am used to in e.g. VirtualBox. There is usbipd.win and you can of course use "Sharing" (i.e. Samba).
  • I can't set the display resolution in Debian other than through Grub.
• Migrating Emacs was fairly painless. I just needed to set $HOME, install MSys2 for Org-roam and adding MSys's /usr/bin to my path. MSys2 also removed my need for cygwin.
• I also created $HOME/bin and added it to $PATH (mainly for sqlite)
• It turns out Docker Desktop needs WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), so as I no longer need Cygwin, I decided to install Debian just for the fun of it (so far, I have no real need for it).

On top of my original plan, I installed some additional apps:

• Dev:
  • SQLite (in $HOME/bin)
  • nvm for Windows
  • WinMerge
  • DBeaver
  • Lazarus
• Utilities:
  • 7-zip
  • Notepad++ (associated with all text files instead of VSCode)
  • I tried Files as a tabbed file explorer, but found it too flaky, so now I am trying Double commander, even though I am not that fond of dual-pane managers
  • Dropbox to share my org files between machines (not really needed any more, now I am exclusively on Windows, but you never know...)
  • rclone (in $HOME/bin) for on-site and off-site backups
  • Putty
  • Rufus
  • TreeSize Free
  • PowerToys
  • sysinternals
• Productivity
  • LibreOffice although I use Google Docs when I can and Microsoft Office when I have to
  • TeamViewer
  • Zoom

My intention is to install server components like MSSQL through docker.

Apps I like but don't need (yet):

• Jenkins CI/CD
• FileZilla because most of my customers use WinSCP and using the same tool makes communication easier
• Audacity sound editor
• OpenShot video editor
• InkScape vector-based drawing