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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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