Windows 10 S Will Not Support the Linux Subsystem
thurrott.com
thurrott.com
The stratification of users like this always irritates me. I don't think "developers" should be a special class of users; today's curious kids are tomorrow's developers! But if you lock them out of their own systems, they won't even have a chance to get started.
I find this quote by Russell Kirchner to be really good:
> They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things
From https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/
There is also interesting observation made by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work [1] that teaching kids how to use iPads is counterintuitive as they - consumer products - are designed to be super easy to use and one should rather learn how to master hard things (e.g. programming).
GUIs are nice in many ways, but in general they seem to encourage consumption much more than they do creation. I feel like there has to be some way to build a GUI with the same kind of expressiveness as those early PCs, but I don't know how.
And i can't help wonder if we ended up in this situation because the DOS CLI sucked, and the Mac didn't have a CLI at all.
Thus anyone exposed to home computing back in the day things CLI is something nasty and borderline useless, and this mentality has transfered over to desktop _nix, where the CLI is quite the potent interface.
Thus we have big name DE projects trying to insulate the users from the CLI, and coming up with ever more elaborate schemes of daemons and protocols to do what a few quick commands in a virtual terminal could solve.
Yet time and again we see that the power-users and similar reject these elaborate GUIs and their plumbing for simple tiling WMs on top of an X11 session started from a CLI login to run a pile of virtual terminals (and the odd web browser).
Hit F12 and you are inside a REPL (the console).
Hit "View Source" and you can learn how a website works.
The fact that developer tools ship with most browsers is really cool and encourages learning in my opinion.
Tells you jack all how a modern site do things, as so much is hidden away at the server end.
Yes you can, iTunes has quite a few development environments to play with.
Swift Playgrounds and Pythonista are much more powerful than what I could do on my Timex 2068.
It's artificially restricted to be barely usable. If kids aren't apathetic about the device but actually willing to use it, it's hard to imagine a chance they would cope with the limitations (they seem way too severe, compared with the usual locking) and won't research how to exploit it to get around them and get the device's capabilities to the fullest.
If kids grow up with machines that restrict their behavior, they'll come to accept those restrictions as the norm. Some will be curious enough to learn to install a new OS and such, but they'll be the exception and not the rule.
I thought Visual Basic was the way to program on Win 95-2001 until very late. It landed me a crappy career start, despite starting at 7yo. Getting Windows, even for free, is a straight loss in the long term.
I remember hacking simple VB apps as a self-taught teenager and I could probably get a job in it if there was an opportunity and if I didn't go to uni to learn other things instead.
Today I suppose VB is not much different from COBOL - just an old language used in few systems here and there maintained by dedicated specialists.
Or are there still new things built in VB?
The industry for these type of devices is mostly Windows based, with drivers implemented in COM or Win32 APIs.
So they get access to the SDKs and write small applications to process their data in ways that fit their workflows.
Windows today at least lets you compile a program and run it - Windows 10 S will block you from running a program you wrote yourself because it's not "trusted".
There will be programming apps in the store.
You would certainly find a hater in me if I was to go to school today.
Now, you still need virtualization for a ServerOS - WSL is all running under Bash.exe, so when that exits - everything is gone.
But, for client OS - It's the bomb.
And now that they are planning on supporting Fedora, Suse, and Ubuntu environments, I can yum install, or just drop in-place any of the Redhat binaries as well.
That's the big difference - I don't need cygwin compiled apps anymore - I just drop in the Linux variants and I am good to go.
I word: laptops.
I've used a laptop as my primary dev environment for years. During that time I ran Debian on ThinkPads. Compared to Windows you paid a price in terms of higher power consumption and randomly breaking sleep and hibernate, not to mention poorer plug-and-play multi monitor/dock support. Add in unpredictable driver support and my newest laptop just runs Windows 10. If I need to use Linux I'll do so via WSL or VMs.
On the other hand how often you do real work without AC ?
Aircraft and buses are common locations, but even when I'm coding on the couch I appreciate not being tethered to an outlet.
And the sleep/hibernate problems are equally if not more important. I need to be able to close my laptop and reopen it without it consistently crashing. Debian Sid had a good stretch for a while there but right around the move to systemd things destabilized again and I'm just done with it.
More generally, Linux just fails on a laptop. See the comments here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/48y2db/system76_lapt...
And that's for a laptop designed to work with Linux.
Again, I have deep familiarity with running Linux on a laptop, having done so for over 10 years. Debian running on my old Lenovo T410 worked okay. Most of the time. Well, for a while, anyway. Assuming I could live with 2-3 hours of battery life and apt-get update resulting in random hardware breakage.
Heard lot of good about using better laptop with this https://www.neverware.com/ - still it's unclear how reliable it's
Too much loves turned into rape.
And they want the developers, before all of them switch to Linux or Mac. They desperately want developers to stay. They need it.
There are many kinds of developers in the world, some of us dislike being mixed with UNIX developers all the time on HN.
Primary and Secondary schools may find this of limited value due to existing licensing agreements. I used to work in a province which licensed much of the educational software used by public schools and first nations schools (and the scope of licensing ranged from school computers only, to teacher computers, to student computers). While this would probably be addressable with time, the transition would be a rough one.
Post secondary education is also a mixed basket. The majority of students may get by with a restricted range of software, yet many departments depend upon specialized applications. This would create barriers for students regardless of whether the software is Windows native (but not approved in Microsoft's store) or Unix software that can run in WSL.
While this isn't a huge issue for students with their own computers, who can upgrade to for the nominal price, it is likely going to create many issues for institutions.
Fixed it for you.
Use Windows since Windows 3.0, never missed having a POSIX shell.
In fact, I am yet to install WSL on my Windows 10 machines.
PowerShell is a godsend, on the other hand. Even the better POSIX shells out there are woefully lacking in comparison to PowerShell. It's what the Unix shell should've been from the beginning, and I'd sooner use it over WSL any day (despite my home being a Windows-free environment of Linux and OpenBSD boxen).
On the third hand, I've recently taken up Tcl, and it's in turn a godsend. There are some things from PowerShell which I miss in Tcl, but they're minor in comparison to having Tk at my fingertips and a vast array of tribal knowledge encoded in the Tcl wiki. It also integrates reasonably well with both Windows and Unix.
For multiplatform scripts, Python, as F# isn't available in all systems.
Love Tcl, I used it on a startup as our application server main language, back in the first .com wave.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/05/18/will...
> Windows 10 S is not well-suited for many app developers/hackers, admins & IT pro’s!
> If you want to run all your dev tools, distros, shells, etc. on a machine running Windows 10 S – like the sweeet new Surface Laptop – then upgrade it to full Windows 10. You’ll then be able to run Linux distro’s, Cmd/PowerShell, install dev tools, debuggers, profilers, packet sniffers, etc.
That sums it up.
It's a shame the Surface RT didn't allow that.
Is Cygwin available in the Windows app store?
Still is. See LibreOffice's first attempt to build using WSL instead of Cygwin:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2017-Apri...
I'm still entirely unconvinced WSL replaces Cygwin for what Cygwin does and is useful for.
Office 365 is kind of the same, I know. We can think of these machines as Office 365 clients just as much as we can think of Chromebooks as Google clients.
But, at least for Chromebooks, you can seamlessly add a fully functional Linux environment.
"It's not secure."
At a glance, the results don't look immediately credible to me: I didn't see an explanation of how they chose the specific URLs, why there is a difference between the browsers, or the false-positive rate. But the study is, at least, actually comparing browser "security", and isn't comparing user behavior or anything like that.
Disclosure: I've never used Edge.
A 'superiour' user experience implies lots of options. I.e. luxury car with all the gadgets, etc.
A stripped down application, void of options, doesn't provide a 'superiour user experience's. If anything it provides cheap entry model.
Not really. Better UX comes from better options, not more, poorly thought out ones. The options available fit the purpose of the device. A luxury car has features tailored for comfort. A real luxury car focuses on the back seat. A sports car has featured tailored for "feeling" and controlling the car.
Having more options brings a superior experience only if your goal is to do multiple things, some never done before, sometimes in unexpected ways. Sometimes you use `sed`, others `awk` and there are days `cut` will cut it.
In the segment of operating systems, windows differentiated and promoted 'home' 'pro' 'ultimate' , etc. They already paved the terminology and more importantly trained the users to expect it. Many users after, got really annoyed with Windows 7 ultimate being upgraded to only win 10 pro.
So in the case of Microsoft Windows, superior means something different than Apples IOS where superior means less (removing of the physical escape key, audio ports etc).
Happens every time.
You remove (not just hide or disable, but remove) everything that's not absolutely necessary, and the ideal result is a system that cannot run anything but a very small list of whitelisted binaries.
Even Apple let you side load apps onto an iOS device if you're a developer... Microsoft is definitely setting it up for a stumble (again) similar to WinRT.
They're not intended to be developer machines - imagine the recent UK NHS WannaCry situation; it would be very, very nice if most of these NHS systems were running a locked down not-general purpose OS. If you're deploying a hundred "office PC appliances", then you'd prefer if they could not be simply sideloaded with stuff to make them developer machines, you'd want a clear separation between that - e.g. installing the normal Win 10 instead of Win 10S.
Solitary confinement has the side effect of being both very secure, while being a torture.
It also depends how you count. Numerically, the games produced for Android far outnumber the AAA titles.
About the UX, not sure if it's just me, but I want more character or object control when playing a game. I guess I have played on a keyboard+mouse for far too long. Phones/consoles just don't have the same level of satisfaction for me.
That's why I have a console.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4020089/windows-10-...
Every single time I fire up Pythonista on an iOS device I soon realise that any meaningful coding I do requires access to external data. And then I give up, until next time some years down the line.
Pythonista for iOS can be used for automation (Workflow for programmers).
they (at msft) love linux nowadays, but only if you get a premium windows version..
The next one will probably come with Windows 10 S and never actually boot into it (like the Windows 8 before it).
Was your first laptop a cheap 10S? or chrome? or did you install it yourself on a thinkpad?
It's all marketshare with them.