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Comment by symlinkk | Hacker News Reader

You know what's funny is you can't even flash Raspbian on an SD Card on Windows without a third party application [1]. If Microsoft is going to be all gung-ho about open source and about the Pi, maybe they should ship "dd" with their command prompt...and bash / coreutils while they're at it. Until they do that, development on Windows is going to be a pain outside of the Visual Studio walled garden, and barely anyone is going to want to develop on Windows when 99% of the tutorials and documentation online is written for a bash prompt. And I'm not talking about just Pi development - developing anything on Windows is a huge pain without a Bash prompt and proper coreutils support.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/insta...

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> And I'm not talking about just Pi development - developing anything on Windows is a huge pain without a Bash prompt and proper coreutils support.

Now that's some grade A nonsense.

Aye, developing C# is a breeze and perhaps the best development experience I've ever had.

I think he meant to say "not talking about just Pi development -- developing anything for embedded systems on Windows is a huge pain"

"...developing anything cross-platform on Windows is a huge pain"

> And I'm not talking about just Pi development - developing anything on Windows is a huge pain without a Bash prompt and proper coreutils support.

You haven't used Windows in a very very long time I take it? Powershell is likely a better shell than Bash and Microsoft freely provides compilers for C/C++/.Net and you can trivially get compilers for most other major languages on the platform.

All I am reading from your complaints is that you're scared of learning something new.

PowerShell may be much better than the command prompt ever was, but it still doesn't contain a `dd' equivalent

I might add that the C# compiler seems to come pre-installed on windows, nowadays.

It is? I had to install Visual Studio manually the other day in order to compile C#. Or are you talking about `csc.exe'?

I did mean csc.exe. On my machine csc.exe came pre installed but was not on the path.

The (old) C# compiler, as the VB compiler, was actually part of the .NET framework starting with .NET 2. Since .NET comes pre-installed on Windows, you also have a compiler. However, the new C# 6 compiler is no longer included in the framework, I think. When you install .NET 4.6 it even adds a notice to the old compiler's greeting message:

This compiler is provided as part of the Microsoft (R) .NET Framework, but only supports language versions up to C# 5, which is no longer the latest version. For compilers that support newer versions of the C# programming language, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=533240.

Yes, that's right.

This is probably true, but then it involves learning powershell, which is only useful on Windows.

I highly doubt that powershell is better than bash, unless you're perhaps only counting bash and its builtins and disregarding the whole environment of binaries around it.

Have you spent any time with PowerShell? It's completely amazing. And I say this as a hard core Linux user since 1996.

What makes a shell amazing?

Better pipes

edit: and better tab completion.

I've spent quite a bit of time recently with PowerShell and I have to say that at best, I'm underwhelmed. I can see the potential with PS but there are too many things that are just left out by default.

The documentation seems incomplete and very clunky to actually use; it's hard to find what command you want and some docs are just plain wrong. Even using third party docs is frustrating. Honestly, it reminds me of the PHP docs, and not in a good way. Job control seems to be very clunky. I can't seem to push things into the background reliably in a PS1 script. Some things seem to work OK but others just background and disappear. Another problem I've had is appending to files; you can output log information to a file (ie. ls > ls.log) but you can't append to a log file (ie. ls >> ls.log). There may be a way to do it, but it probably involves writing a command and loading it somewhere.

That's the most annoying thing I find when living in the Windows world; there doesn't seem to be a good representation of $HOME. Where do I keep my SSH keys? When I create PS1 scriptlets how do I ensure they are loaded in a new PS1 shell? I'm sure there are answers to this but, as I said before, the docs are not the best. Maybe Microsoft should author a BASH --> PS1 translation guide. :)

I think you're suffering from PEBCAC ;)

You can append content to a file using >>:

PS C:\Users\rich> "Foo" > 1.txt

PS C:\Users\rich> cat .\1.txt

Foo

PS C:\Users\rich> "Bar" >> 1.txt

PS C:\Users\rich> cat .\1.txt

Foo

Bar

To your second point, @home is a default variable $home and can be de-reffed from '~':

PS C:\Users\rich> ls ~/.ssh

    Directory: C:\Users\rich\.ssh

Mode LastWriteTime Length Name

---- ------------- ------ ----

-a---- 1/14/2016 19:30 3247 id_rsa

-a---- 1/14/2016 19:30 744 id_rsa.pub

-a---- 1/14/2016 22:12 1595 known_hosts

Last time I tried to use Powershell I gave up pretty quickly.

Learning Powershell had higher costs than using something *nix based without any major advantage.

Well, you can't format a SD card with a unix file system on Windows..

Seems logical to me.

You can format the SD-card with a 3rd party app that's free. Okay, i'll download that..

Actually, i don't really understand the problem and i also don't agree with developing anything on windows is a huge pain...

I run a lot of github projects just fine on my Windows 10 without additional hassle if VC++ is correctly configured :)

that doesn't seem logical to me. I can format ntfs and hfs partitions (and many others) on linux.

For the ability to create ntfs drives on Ubuntu, you need to:

    sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

That's the same as installing a third party application i suppose ;) -- http://blog.onetechnical.com/2009/06/09/format-an-ntfs-drive...

I am perfectly fine downloading an external application to write an image the sd card just like I am perfectly fine in using "apt-get install" for any application that doesn't come bundled with Ubuntu/Raspbian. If 99.9% of your users aren't going to use a feature why bother bundling it? If there was no effective way of doing this on Windows then I can understand the reasoning behind your statement. However, that is not the case so am sorry but this comes off as pissy person trying hard to find a reason.

Here is dd for Windows. http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

You might find this helpful: https://github.com/t0x0/random

It seems to convert the ffu format to a dd-able img format. I haven't tried using it, however.

What do you mean you can't flash an SD card in Windows? Never heard of Win32DiskImager?

Excellent point

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