smackeyacky

Return of the Living Dead I don't want to be disparaging about this product, it was my favourite development environment for a long time. It could be astonishingly productive or completely, brutally time wasting depending on the programmer. After writing about it in the last post I figured I would see what it's like now and how it stacks up to modern environments like Android Studio or Visual Studio Code Now, you can't just go and grab a copy of VisualWorks (I think, for a brief period in the 2000s they offered the community download no questions asked, but they don't any more). You make a polite request on their website , part of which I think is some vetting required for US export customers, not so different to downloading some of the embedded tools from Texas Instruments but still, it's some friction. I was allowed access to the download links (which were emailed to me) after 24 hours. It...it hurts to be dead? The download isn't an installer exactly,...

Can I make this switch? Part of this post was motivated by frustration - I have an ancient (as of 2021) Sony Vaio E 11" notebook that became unusable with the later versions of Windows 10. This isn't surprising, it's specifications are a little short of modern expectations. Since I don't use it for development and I can access Microsoft Office 365 over the web I was free to throw Debian Buster on it. It's a fine little machine and Debian sparked it right back up to the performance it had when I bought it. Background Normally for development I have two machines - in my study is an Acer Nitro 5, with two SSDs, a big external monitor, 32gb of memory and an Intel Core i7 processor. It's easily the fastest thing I have ever owned. Running on here is Windows 10 Pro, Android Studio, Visual Studio (for .NET core development), Docker Desktop using WSL2, Texas Instruments Code composer studio for embedded development and Heidi SQL for database maintenance. Ups...