Up to this point I’ve been creating using the Windows variants of KiCad / FreeCad. At KiCon it seemed that the default for many people were the Linux variants, including tools to load up the really cool conference badge. I think there were some people that had successfully loaded the badge from a Windows tool chain (not sure who they were).
Instead of maintaining a Linux virtual machine for doing things like loading software into my development projects (and to continue to use my business OneDrive folders, etc) I’d like to be able to do cross-platform development (compile C and C++ in something like Visual Studio) for a target like the ARM Cortex-M4 (ATSAM4SD16B) that’s on the KiCon badge.
What are your thoughts/experiences/recommendations?
I was running linux for many years, until I went self employed and then I got a windows box again.
Most development tools are fine in linux: Eclipse, Kicad, LibreOffice.
Where it goes wrong is all the measurement tools. UltraSigma, Easyspectrum, Audio Precision only provide windows tools. If it weren’t for those I’d be on linux, and these tools don’t really like to run in a VM because of their direct hardware links.
for layerone badges, i just started making VMs and sharing those since it was easier and a lot of tools are just conflict hell. docker can also work. we’d give out usb sticks or make a shared NAS so people could copy the from that, rather than downloading since they’re usually large and it kills network performance.
oh for windows 10, WSL is crazy useful since you can run nearly all of the specific linux dev tools there, but not everyone has moved over yet.