I have to say this is the first time in years when there's a feeling that MS has outpaced Apple. The product looks amazing.
That is what I came here to say (as a mac user who uses only apple computers, currently[1]).
See this animated gif from the article:
https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kFQXkfWYVYCRnSfXpAhRBTVXH4M...
Now ... I don't know what that's about and I am pretty sure that's an action I will never use, but that's something new and interesting. That's innovation.
[1] 11" macbook air, mac mini HTPC and 2009 mac pro as primary desktop
Obviously video editors use them, but I know of professional photographers who find them really useful in moving through a catalogue while editing photos too.
It is no longer the platform of choice for creative content creation.
Plus most of the interface feels unnatural to use, at least for Apple Music and the Store.
Indeed. iTunes has become so bad I bit the bullet and signed up for Roon - despite its eye watering price. It's a vastly better (and of course in some other ways inferior) alternative.
One thing which I like about Roon and indeed a lot of 3rd party software from smaller companies is that I can talk to the devs and product managers on the community forums and find out where the product is headed or make suggestions and get feedback.
As far as iTunes goes, I have no idea where in the hell it's going. It went from a music manager to an eBooks platform, an App Store and now a Spotify clone.
Good time to be a software company specialising in catering to the disgruntled user who wants something a little more sophisticated than what Apple's currently selling.
Not sure if anyone listened to Satya's closing comments but they sounds eerily similar to something Jobs would say.
Either way, good for Microsoft on putting out a product for the high end creative segment.
1: https://affinity.serif.com/fr/windows/ 2: https://www.figma.com/downloads
XCode & iOS development is going to keep me on Apple for now, though, but the Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing. The BSD Unix environment is the whole reason I went with Apple in the first place. OS X is basically a Unix workstation & perfected anything the Linux desktop wanted to be.
Surprised MS went with nVidia 980s instead of 1080s, & Win 10 still a little clunky compared to OS X.
It's not even 980, its 980m which is significantly slower than 980, nevermind 1080. And the 980m only comes in the $4199 option, that's ridiculous...
iMacs and Macbook Pros (top of the line 15-inch with dGPU) have always used mobile GPUs. Also, illustrators/designers don't need dGPUs. That's why the designers/illustrators at hte tech companies that you work at can use macbook 13 inch laptops and 15-inch laptops without the dGPUs
In theory. To anyone who feels that way, please try it out for yourself before making a leap. I thought it would let me develop Ruby on Rails under Windows like I could do on Linux or macOS. I discovered a whole bunch of unimplemented features that prevented this. After a couple of months of commenting on bug reports and watching and trying, I gave up. I'll check back later. YMMV.
As for soft links, a lot of linux tools create soft links (ln -s from to) and generally that fails on NTFS (I tried installing a bunch of npm modules and all had this specific issue)[1].
[0] - https://mspoweruser.com/ntfs-260-character-windows-10/
[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8232778/nodejs-npm-insta...
With respect to symlinks - NTFS supports them, but there are subtle semantic differences with POSIX. WSL does actually support symlinks (i.e. you can do ln -s), it's various other behavior around them that breaks, like trying to untar a file that contains symlinks.
The team said that they're working on a custom implementation of symlinks that would provide proper behavior (but wouldn't be seen as a symlink from Win32).
Now, Microsoft should be in a position to put something better into their WSL, but that might entail the risk that someone else will hack that implementation and provide good drivers for everyone, something they clearly don't want (or they would have provided open specs for NTFS support by now).
So there's no ext4 driver, and no concept of loopback mounts.
I see that there's considerable demand for this exact thing in their bug tracker already. If they go for a low-hanging fruit here, it'd be FUSE support - and that should give us ext2, at least.
I'd be very interested in a blog post about your problems and I don't think I'm alone.
I couldn't cross compile simple toy kernel (xv6) in OS X (because I needed to have i386-elf-gcc, which need to compile whole binutils , which really cumbersome, and brew doesn't support it -as far as I looked into it ) but in BashOnWindows , it just works, it maybe a little slow (specially file system operations) but it works like charm. I actually tried to compile linux kernel and running it on qemu, It worked, but compilation (which is a lot of file system operation) was so slow it hadn't worth it.
Nadella (MS CEO) aimed perfectly, instead of introducing some limited amount of support for linux apps, his company tries to port whole ubuntu user space. After this project matures enough, rest assured, it will be equivalent of using linux workstation (which is dream of most developers).
> After this project matures enough, rest assured, it will be equivalent of using linux workstation
Didn't Microsoft say WSL wouldn't support graphical apps? That's a big portion of userspace; and without that, it simply can't be a linux workstation
When it works, it's great, but some things just don't work and you're stuck.
I've found the WSL devs to be fairly responsive, but not to everything.
However, I've found open source projects to be pretty responsive to bug reports of their projects running on WSL; it's far easier for them to support that than support a native windows build.
There are often workarounds for issues, but their coverage is certainly not where we would all like it to be yet.
I'm not very familiar with OSX, but I'd be surprised if there weren't differences between it and mainline Linux that needed special care and I see this as similar.
Despite being a software company (or because of it), I think innovating on the internals of Windows and its APIs and cleaning house on the software front will be the real challenge for them - making incredibly beautiful hardware might prove to be the easy part!
Exactly. How do they not know this ? Or, why do they not care ?
There is one big huge reason that "smart people" switched to OSX and the computers that ran it and that institutional knowledge appears to have evaporated at Apple.
When you know your core, core base is here for the UNIX, you don't take away the escape key ... or keep breaking and re-breaking crontab ... or introduce the weird-stuff-I-can't-do-even-as-root.
I thought nobody anymore believed in this after the first versions came out and people actually had a chance to try it in action. There are endless amounts of bugs, unimplemented features, complications between 2 filesystems, permissions, applications etc.
When MS announced this I was pretty hopeful. Not that I would change my dev-computer from way superior macOS to Windows, but that when I'm at home gaming on my Windows PC and I get some cool idea, I could do some small development or create simple prototypes without changing from my desktop to my laptop. After trying it out for real I don't belive anymore this "linux" subsystem thingy is ever going to be anything more than niche PoC.
Unless you need to pass a directory path.
Windows NT has done a good job supporting multiple APIs/subsystems in the past. Windows NT for example does a perfectly good job with the Win32 subsystem - software targeting Win32 for '95, '98, etc. still works on Windows 10, perfectly, despite being a totally different kernel.
Quick, someone page Apple because Mac sales are declining even faster than the market. Surely they have to do something, that's the only possible motivation /s
People don't buy Macs because they work well with an iPhone as far as I can tell. They buy Macs for all sorts of other reasons, but that doesn't seem to be one of them.
Every corporate office in the world is running Windows. I'm pretty sure people are going to continue buying whatever they use at work, so unfortunately for HN, Windows is here to stay...(sorry!)
While many companies do use Windows, many others do not, including some very large ones. You think they are using Windows at Apple? That's the world's most valuable company and they have 70000 employees. What about Google? It's another huge company with tens of thousands of employees and you have to beg for permission to run Windows there, and very few do so.
I think Windows has a lock on mid-sized businesses that are large enough to have serious information management challenges, but aren't big enough to solve them. Outside of that zone it is by no means universal.
I'd say that outside of your two examples, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have >90% of its corporate fleet (not servers) being Windows boxes.
See: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosyste...
Any additional computer purchase is some kind of conscious choice, and people will default to what they are familiar with. I.e. iOS and Android. This is a big hurdle for microsoft to overcome to convince anyone to buy a computer from them. That's my point, and I think it will be very difficult for them to accomplish at scale.
It protects from toolbars, addons and other bundlewares of free software.