Windows Dev Configs just made Windows easier to set up than Linux

Published Sep 2, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Korbin is a Linux system administrator who spends most of his time in a terminal figuring out how things actually work. Over the last decade he's written hundreds of articles about Linux configuration, troubleshooting weird problems, and using open-source tools in the real world. He also works a lot with Windows systems and networking, especially in mixed environments where things don't always behave the way the documentation says they should. Writing things down is how he makes sense of it all and hopefully saves someone else a few hours. I've set up enough development environments on both Windows and Linux to know that configuration takes about the same amount of time on both systems. After all, the configuration process that I'm accustomed to involves a slew of runtime dependencies, developer applications, and OS settings to make everything work the way I need it to. I can recite most of that configuration from memory, though it's easy to forget one or two things on every new installation. Microsoft has finally made it easier than ever to get a development environment up and running, and I no longer need to remember every last setting that needs to be toggled, since their config does it for me. With regard to setup, WinGet had already put Linux and Windows on a level playing field years ago, allowing both systems to install entire toolchains in a single command. Windows Dev Configs now makes Windows the easier OS to set up, because it keeps going after the initial installation and applies dozens of settings I'd normally hunt down myself. Setup now boils down to one command It turns the system into something I can use right away Dev Configs are nothing more than plaintext files that describe a desired configuration state for Windows. Essentially, it just lists all of the programs and runtimes that should be installed, and what settings should be enabled, disabled, or modified from the defaults. The configs are open source and they're stored on GitHub at microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig. As for running one of the configs, that happens with WinGet, as seen in the code snippet below. The first command enables WinGet configuration, and the second command installs the full workstation config: winget configure --enable winget configure -f .\windows-dev-config\dev-config.winget --accept-configuration-agreements --disable-interactivity The two flags at the end of the command will help get everything installed and configured without prompting you over and over. That particular command runs the most comprehensive config that Microsoft offers. It includes Git, GitHub CLI, VS Code, .NET SDK, Python, Node.js, PowerToys, and a bunch of the other typical stuff that most developers find themselves installing whenever they load into a new Windows installation. All of those programs aren't that hard to install manually with WinGet anyway, so the settings that the Dev Config changes are the real selling point. The config applies many settings that I'd otherwise click through by hand, as they're difficult to script out and the registry keys that control them change sometimes. It enables dark theme, Developer Mode, long path support, some File Explorer settings, and cleans up the start menu by ridding it of widgets and Bing, among a myriad of other things. Switching those settings used to account for a good chunk of setup time when I'd first boot into Windows, and now they all get configured alongside the software I need. Linux never really solved this Package managers only do half the work Linux package managers like apt and dnf work great for installing software, but none of them solve the problem that Microsoft has addressed with Dev Configs. On Linux, once the software lands on my system, it's still up to me to do the rest of the configuration myself. Installation is such a simple step on Linux that the rest of the assembly got glossed over. The best way I've found to quickly get a new Linux system provisioned to my tastes is with a Bash script and dotfiles repo. But both of those have received dozens of edits over the years to account for new or changing settings, often costing me more time than manually editing the settings on a fresh install would have. Desktop settings are now harder to automate on Linux than on Windows. My homegrown Bash script isn't vetted by anyone but me, and it can't reliably account for all the granular settings across every distro and desktop environment. Dev Configs also gets Ubuntu up and running without any input from the user, which is a more automated setup than what's offered by Canonical. Nix and Ansible have done this for years So isn't Microsoft the one catching up? The concept of reproducible environments certainly isn't new, with tools like Nix and Ansible providing a way to provision new systems with deep configuration options that cover every setting you can think of. WinGet config can't match that. Microsoft's configs are not one-size-fits-all, either; it's likely that you won't need all the packages that it downloads, or you'll undo some of the settings it tweaks. What Microsoft's bringing to the table is the curation. It's giving users a long list of software and settings that it recommends for a dev environment, without the user having to do much thinking about it. With tools like Nix, you're stuck learning how it works and writing your own files that specify the environment you want to use. Microsoft has already done that work for me. The worst case scenario is that I comment out the couple of lines I disagree with, being that Dev Configs are just plaintext anyway. This is how a fresh install should feel Windows has had the right developer tools and a package manager for years now, but it never had a quick way to make a machine ready for real work. It finally does, while Linux still leaves that step to you. When I want to go from a fresh installation to writing code, Windows now provides the shortest path. Windows 11 Pro