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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

> Too bad that Windows 10 barely usable on itself.

I am always surprised to hear these statements. Hundreds of millions of people use W10, so it must be usable to some extent. I think it's also quite rare that the system stops for 5 minutes -- actually I've never seen that happening.

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Well...I'm a Windows user since around 1992 and have done pretty much all my coding typing on a keyboard connected to a Windows machine. However, I have to say that in recent years I have experienced similar hassles to the parent -- general unreliability, sleep/resume problems, machine just won't resume from sleep, endless WiFi driver bugs, touch screens that randomly stop working, pens that randomly stop working, and on and on. Initially (3-4 years ago) I assumed this was all due to lazy hardware OEMs not fixing their driver bugs so I switched to Microsoft hardware (Surfacen) but to be honest the buggy unreliability didn't change much.

I don't use Macs so I can't say if the grass is greener there. I do have a feeling that if I were using Linux on the laptop it would be much worse than Windows, but that's just a hunch based on my historical experience with Linux and device drivers.

I use Linux servers extensively and all my code runs on Linux in production fwiw. Linux on the server is almost at Solaris-level reliability today. The comments above relate to desktop/laptop machines.

>I am always surprised to hear these statements.

No kidding. I use it every day nearly all day and I can count the number of times I've had the OS itself get in my way on 1 hand.

> I can count the number of times I've had the OS itself get in my way on 1 hand

I could overflow both hands just counting two Explorer things: (1) trying to figure out where MS put a setting/option if it's not on Ribbon & (2) trying to use any advanced search operators.

I usually grep (powershell Get-ChildItem | Select-String) if I'm trying to do anything crazy in searching files.

Then there's also Powershell (as much as it improves on cmd) reminding me of adventure games where I have to remember which of the five synonymous verbs is recognized and does the thing I want.

You don't have to remember anything in powershell as you get parameter completion and command completion by default. Powershell useability beats the standard UNIX shells (bash/zsh) in command discovery and assistance. You even use PSReadLine if you want VI keybindings at the command line.

Am I using it wrong? I realize a large majority of those aren't used frequently, but there are ~250 cmdlets, each of which attempts to have a unique-but-also-generic name.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff714569.aspx

Let's say I didn't know ForEach-Object existed (trivial example, but generalizes), how do I find out there is a cmdlet that does what I'm looking for?

`Get-Command` lists all the cmdlets in the current sesion. You can also alternatively hit `help -category cmdlet` which lists all cmdlets with their short alias and long name. You can do `man -category cmdlet` if you wish to page through. The first thing in powershell you should do is `help help` :).

Argumentum ad populum; people just don't know better. Also, I doubt it's really hundreds of millions (of people, as opposed to installs).

That was an anectodal evidence at first place.

What should they 'know'? If they can use it for their purposes then it is, per definition, usable. It's like saying that 'most cars are unusable for getting around'.

As somebody born in the USSR I can easily imagine how cars will be barely usable for getting around, and people who bother with cars will be called 'car enthusiasts' instead of 'people'.

We're there with Windows 10. We were better off with Windows XP and arguably we're much better with Android.

They should know that not all cars break down two times a month on average and that black smoke is definitively not a feature.

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