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I understand losing time to silly bugs and issues is frustrating. I'm a C# coder professionally but I've been using Linux for over a decade.

It's much, much better than it was 10 years ago. You can even use C# these days! [1] [2] [3]

[1]: http://www.raspberry-sharp.org/

[2]: https://dotnet.github.io/

[3]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotnet/corefxlab/master/de...

It sounds like in some ways you have no issue with Linux other than it's not Windows.

I think that's basically where we're at and will continue to be at with desktop Linux because essentially the 'internal' problems are all solved now. Ubuntu boots and installs from a CD/USB in about seven clicks (all of which are either typing a name, language, or clicking forward).

A Linux user has no need to play around with RDP just as a Windows user has no need to play around with X11. I think it's unfair to expect mutual compatibility there.

If you're waiting for that, it will never happen, because effectively you're asking for Windows userspace running on the Linux kernel. A bit like asking for windows games on Linux - WINE exists, but native will always be better.

Even on Linux, there's Mono (for running .net code).

FWIW, I think the Windows IOT that's made for RPi will be a big disappointment for most people - as the expectation would be "regular Windows, compatible with Anything and Everything, just running on RPi" versus the reality of "something that loosely resembles Windows, but severely limited". In this, I believe that it's better to dive into a Linux distro (the NOOBS one should make stuff easier) - there's a learning curve, but you're not getting sidetracked by the expectation of "runs on desktop Windows, why is it refusing to run here?"

Which is why I was referring to Windows RT rather than Windows 10 IoT. I think Windows IoT is meant to run on really tiny under-powered devices. The specs of the RaspberryPi 3 seem to look more like a modern smartphone and I would assume Windows RT would run OK on it.

Happy to help you - the default "NOOBS" installer for Pi should be GUI all the way through.

The UI for iptables/ipfw should be on Raspian and is called "Firewall Builder"

Cron is taken care of here: https://blog.bartbania.com/linux-2/cron-jobs-with-gui/

Right clicking a script file should give you Properties, where you can select Execute permission.

There's a critical need to attract more UX designers and testers to something like Raspbian, and I think the Raspberry Pi Foundation is in a good position to do that.

Actually the firewall thing was my experience with Ubuntu. I tried to setup linux in a VM to learn to use it, and failed on what I thought would be a simple first step: configure it so that I can connect to the VM using RDP. That involves tweaking the firewall and installing an RDP server. I finally discovered ufw but the original instructions involved creating a security group, etc. As for the RDP thing, I still have't found a stable solution (but have long deleted the VM since).

TeamViewer have a build that uses Wine which works well.

What VM host software are you using? If it's VirtualBox, just install the guest additions and use it through there.

RDP is really a Microsoft-only protocol. It's better on Windows than VNC because AFAIK it's just sending draw calls across the wire. I'm not sure what XRDP does.

You may actually have a better experience on a Pi 2 or 3, because of the way Raspbian is set up to run by default.

I was using hyper-v on windows 8.1 (now 10) machine that I use as a server. I didn't want to run a local VM as I was connecting from a laptop running windows 7.

I could also have used VNC but I much prefer the RDP experience, in particular being able to share the clipboard with the local machine and to copy text and files.

Ah right. I don't use Hyper-V because I want to be able to use USB devices under Linux. I've had a lot more problems under Hyper-V than I have with VirtualBox. Both can't be installed side by side, either, you'd have to remove the boot flag or uninstall Hyper-V before you can use VirtualBox.

VirtualBox also does clipboard and file sharing, but only with the Guest Additions (only tested under a recent Ubuntu).

>TeamViewer have a build that uses Wine which works well.

TeamViewer has a native linux build, which works well: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/linux/

Not sure why you'd want to use Wine.

For Ubuntu, I've used xfce4 desktop and X2Go quite successfully from Windows. I now pretty much always install xubuntu if I want to RDP into it.

I don't think Windows users appreciate the importance of a good command line accessible over SSH for managing headless systems.

I don't mean to be too snarky about it, but it's a different environment and you're complaining that it's not as easy as the one you're familiar with. "Intuitive" is difficult to quantify; the Windows interface has changed repeatedly in the 7 -> 8 -> 10 era while the basic command line interface hasn't, so once you learn it it's not likely to be obsoleted. There are Linux UIs with all of the stuff you mention - GNOME has always targeted that market.

.NET has its own versioning pain with the .NET frameworks across different versions of Windows. I think it will eventually become more popular on Linux, but only once trust of Microsoft has slowly been rebuilt. Having an open source System.Windows.Forms would help too.

(Professionally I'm a Windows CE developer at the moment, which is a little weird from a Linux background)

I think the ideal system has an intuitive and exhaustive GUI, but where everything can be scriptable.

And a more than ideal system would give you the way to go from GUI to scripting easily. I.e. in any control panel you would have a button at the top that if you click, will make some command windows appear below the current window, which would show you the command line equivalent of anything that you do using the GUI.

I am not arguing against having a scriptable OS. I am saying that a GUI makes things a lot easier to understand intuitively, being able to observe the state of the system visually and making it clear what are all the possible options from a given point.

That would be great; I get the impression that Microsoft are very very slowly moving towards that with Powershell and Powershell ISE.

> I don't think Windows users appreciate the importance of a good command line accessible over SSH for managing headless systems.

You should check out this link - production quality OpenSSH for Windows planned for H1 2016. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2015/10/19/opens...

CE? Really? Can you share anything else? I thought even the GPS manufacturers had moved on.

Such as? It's a point-of-sale system that runs on PC tills (Toshiba, IBM etc) and also our own less general-purpose hardware (iMX6). It was written in the 90s as an MFC application. The original system the company was founded on was written in the early 80s in Z80 assembler.

The dedicated hardware uses a mixture of Flash and battery-backed SRAM to provide a crash- and powerloss-resistant transaction system.

Right, I'd forgotten about POS. Interesting that CE is still in use - I thought everyone would have migrated to Windows Embedded by now.

We use WEC7 - Windows Embedded Compact is CE with two of the letters swapped in the acronym. We're not using 2013 because our BSP hasn't been ported.

I thought the whole point of those DIY projects was to learn something? If you just use what you already know (.NET) for everything, why even bother? Just buy a readymade IoT thermometer.

PS. and you can apparently use .NET on Linux anyway (Mono) - here's an example of interfacing with I2C sensors: http://blog.mshmelev.com/2013/06/connecting-raspberry-pi-and...

If I'm trying to do one thing, and a whole new tech tree, completely alien to me, spirals out of it, it's possible I'd be overwhelmed.

Your suggestion of Mono goes the right way, I think: using a familiar language in an unfamiliar environment could help with the initial confusion.

Hahaha, someone should definitely draw a Civilization style tech tree for a whole lots of things.

Yeah but if the environment setup takes 3x the time of the project it becomes less fun. I had this experience when trying to log temperatures to InfluxDB for use with Grafana.

I did learn something doing this DIY project. But at the end of the day there is also the question of whether I enjoyed using these new tool, and I am afraid that I have done all the CRON editing I could stand.

I also looked at commercial alternatives but I wanted it to call one of my web services and that's not what these IoT devices typically do.

My contact details are in my profile. I've got some holiday time now, I can help you directly if you want.

Thanks for offering, I appreciate it. But I did manage to get the temperature logging to work in the end, and will most likely stick to windows for the time being. I would love to learn linux but it seems to consume more time that I am ready to spend on it.

Understandable. The offer stands (and to anyone else in the same position). Although I guess if a lot of people took me up on the offer I don't scale too well.