Microsoft Trying to Appeal to the Unix Crowd? | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Trying to Appeal to the Unix Crowd?

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9 pointsbrk10 comments

I'd be interested to see how this pans out. The GNU compatibilities in OS X were what originally drew me away from using Windows.

To a certain degree this is true for me as well. However, the (IMO) other horrible user experience in Windows was probably an equal or greater motivating factor.

It's not so much that I'm "anti-Windows" as I am pro nix. For me personally, I can get more of the things done that I want to do in a nix environment. And, for me, I can do them cheaper and more securely. I know plenty of people for which the opposite is true though.

What in a Unix environment makes you more productive? The GUI of OSX is quite different from Gnome or KDE. Is it the command line with tools like grep?

Command-line is a big part of it.

I grew up on DOS and edlin and pre-mouse days.

I do a lot of different things but a lot of my time is spent on/with mailservers, web servers, db servers, network sniffers, perl/shell scripts, etc. With the exception of the network sniffers almost all of that stuff is better/easier/faster in some sort of "hi res text" (ie: a terminal on a high-res 24" monitor). And of course I use a browser and an email client, but those things are pretty much OS agnostic these days.

Windows also just feels "heavy" to me, and it feels to me like the OS is "hiding" too many things from me. I know what I'm doing, I don't blame anyone for my own stupid actions, so please don't hide files and subdirs from me. Don't require upteen mouse clicks to edit a simple setting...

Perhaps you'd like Microsoft's PowerShell if you have to use Windows. Microsoft is slowly realizing that many people like to use command line tools, especially for managing servers.

I tend to do a lot of things from the terminal these days. Maybe I wouldn't if they'd FTFF.

I talked about this back in December of last year at a conference. They actually announced this at an EU conference back then. The original plan was for Windows 8 to allow a genuine Unix stack to co-exist along side the Windows kernel.

In a way, this would bring Microsoft full circle. Anyone remember Xenix?

Or, if they REALLY want to appeal to the unix crowd, they could stop charging $500 for their "Ultimate SuperDuper Awesome Smashing Ballmerastic Organicasmic Edition" of Windows... Perhaps making it free? Yes, I think that would fit the bill.

I like this comment from zerofactorial on /.:

"This is like Satan trying to appeal to Christians."

GNU compatible framework?, Nix environment? Embrace Extend Extinguish ?

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