Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
Ditto for a lot of other software; enough with the churn, stability is more important.
Unfortunately, some areas like embedded development are stuck in the past with support for modern platforms. For example, it is somewhat ironic that I cannot use most tooling for baremetal ARM devices on an ARM platform (tablet, chromebook, raspberry pi) because Eclipse 4+ is a common dependency and is not built for ARM. And before you say it - go try to build Eclipse from source yourself in a reasonable amount of time. Nightmares.
With open toolchains available to serve most of my needs from coding to compilation to EDA to graphic design, it's becoming less of an issue. And on x86/64 platforms, more and more places are starting to provide multiplatform support. But it is so flippin' annoying to have to deal with all the cruft and crap of Win10 when all I want is a clean environment for creating things. Just make the OS easy to use and get it out of the way! It's a product, not a service!
My wife, for example, plays games on Facebook, uses Gmail, and surfs a few websites she likes. That's why Chromebooks are so popular.
Windows is competing perhaps more with the web (and soon, WASM) than say MacOS.
Microsoft seeing profitability and growth from its cloud business, and investing resources accordingly, doesn't mean its "putting Windows on the back burner".
In its cloud and enterprise offerings MS has been adding support Linux and open source in general. That mentality shift away from "MS products are for Windows OS" is more what's going on than "MS doesn't care about Windows anymore"
Also the whole office 365 plan gets F500 companies already tied into Azure. It's sort of like the drug dealer's "first one's free" tactic. They will, for example, spend money on direct connect network for O365, which makes Azure immediately more attractive. And their Active Directory info is necessarily already federated to Azure.
Look at what they've released in the past two years... their AI stuff is second rate compared to Google, and seems like its just there to check boxes. Their serverless stuff beyond Lambda is overpriced, like Aurora Serverless and Fargate. They're dragging their feet on EKS; it was announced 5 months ago, we still don't have a release date, and the latest webcast (last week) they showed made it seem either really bad or really unfinished, like you have to involve CloudFormation to provision instances, manually manage VPC subnets, etc.
Its a world where they have a core set of "legacy" building blocks that are really good and well-tested (EC2, RDS, S3, SNS, SQS, a few others) but if you go beyond those you enter uncharted territory that mostly exists to seem hip and check boxes.
GCP, on the other hand, has legitimately powerful products at higher abstraction levels like GKE, Firebase, DialogFlow, and their AI stuff. I know less about Azure, but they seem to be doing well checking boxes and pushing toward more higher abstraction levels with things like AKS, service fabric, etc. Where's the actionable innovation at AWS?
Though, I get some of the egress upcharge in GCP. Their global network is worth some premium. Just not the current predatory pricing.
That could disappear like a console generation. That's a little disconcerting.
Of course, then we'll have to deal with whatever the next platform is, but that's just the reality of the industry.
I fear we will lose the Microsoft as the silent steward of backwards compatibility, DirectX support, getting manufacturers to make great hardware drivers, the list goes on. It's this part of Microsoft that Windows will lose, because it isn't customer facing.
I think the fallout is exactly the opposite of what you want. A de-emphasized Windows means that the customer experience stuff is pushed forward while the above suffers. The only bulwark against that is how deeply invested most enterprise companies are in the Windows universe, driving many of those behind-the-scenes fixes and changes.
> Of course, then we'll have to deal with whatever the next platform is, but that's just the reality of the industry.
Gaming on the PC was, in many was, a repudiation of that idea. We could have one continuous open system that ran everything from old games to new games. That's part of the point the emulation crowd wants to make as well. We don't have to live with platform churn.
But I'll be the first to admit Stallman was right. We collectively ceded this power to a private corporation, and we could lose much of what we had because we weren't good stewards.
EDIT: Spelling and grammar because I lack coffee.
I use uTorrent on my mac.
The vast majority of gamers using Windows buy their games through Steam, Origin, or other stores that Microsoft has nothing to do with. Unless we see a massive market shift then I don't see this having any affect on the future of PC gaming.
As for the game mode stuff, it's easy to turn off if you don't want it so I don't see any issue with it.
I also think that most gamers (myself included) would be okay with PC gaming becoming more consolized.
Back in the 90's you had to mess with configuration files in both the OS and the game you were playing far more than you do today. In a sense, it's because PC games have become more consolized - they "just work" most of the time. People like that. I hope the future of all forms of computing "just work" better than they do now.
I will concede that if you want absolute freedom of customization, Linux is the best OS for you even if you don't plan on gaming at all. However, saying that Linux is the future of gaming is about as accurate as all of the claims that "20XX will be the year of the Linux desktop".
Gamers that I know disagree and very much dislike this trend.
Any platform (Windows or not) in recent memory that underwent fundamental UI changes would have been improved if we had separated the layers. Let us continue to benefit from intelligent foundation improvements without being forced to inherit other changes.
There are lots of ways to draw these lines but there needs to be at least one line, below which software updates should have an entirely different meaning.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
Microsoft's understanding of what an operating system is and how it facilitates a user's interaction with their computing hardware has been completely misguided over the last decade. So much so that I can't tell if this headline describes something good, in the sense of salutary neglect, or whether it's a euphemistic summation of what's been done since Windows 7 (taking a considered, and profoundly user-centric approach toward OS design has been eschewed and given short shrift in favor of animated sprites in the start menu, for example).
If Windows erodes share or loses it's edge with corporations I feel like Azure & the online services will slide with it. But I don't have access to the data Microsoft execs do and I could be completely wrong. Maybe Azure is mostly Linux servers and o365 isn't really that important to their overall strategy.
1) coreutils + some other nix commands
2) iTerm2 equivalent(ConEmu/Cmder do not compare)
1) show the Git branch in the prompt 2) display nice colours 3) open multiple tabs
Looking forward to being proved wrong :) Cmder works well for me but I'd rather have something core to Windows to use instead.
Colors can be customized, but changing them is a PITA so we made (ColorTool)[https://github.com/Microsoft/console/tree/master/tools/Color...] to make it a little easier
Auto updating the prompt isn't possible in CMD unfortunately. I do believe it's possible in powershell, but that's not my cup of tea. I do have a batch script that gets the branch and re-sets my prompt. You could create a git.bat that calls such a script on every git command, or like me, create `vf.bat` that I use to cd and update the prompt at once.
Also in this picture: cmd.exe running inside tmux in WSL. Coming soon to Insider's Builds near you
It's still ages behind *nix OSs.
And I don’t care about the *nix implementations because the first thing I do is start tmux and use that. Same as I only care for the Linux userland which is what WSL gives me.
Powershell is miles ahead in every way I can think of.
A second point, WSL programs don't rely on an active conhost shell to keep running. You can kick them off and run them in the background just fine. On one of my machines, I have a full i3 session running with no conhost window in sight. Everything works seamlessly, I can talk to my editor running as a Windows app, cut & paste back and forth, see file change notifications, hook up my docker command with my docker for windows VM, and so on. It's nice enough that I miss it when on my Mac and get annoyed with some of the fussy application alternatives on the typical Linux desktop.
DISPLAY=:0.0 xfce4-terminal &
After that, it about 90% of typical Unix setup with all the control key bindings for copy-paste, etc.
I wish WSL 's bash environment can run windows programs/utilities like Cygnus.
I tried insider for a few months and found the frequent updates too much, have some stability issues and stop it. Maybe it is a good reason to to start it again.
Let’s see.