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Comment by FiReaNG3L | Hacker News Reader

This is BIG for machine learning adoption! 2 years ago it was a nightmare to setup everything on a Windows box, and wasn't working in any VMs (WSL or VirtualBox). Very excited about this.

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Other than C# and other Microsoft specific stacks, I've found coding on Windows to be absolutely horrible compared to Linux.

If I can’t ask for the budget available for any Windows project _for tooling and libraries ^0 I never really know how much of a problem was it being a Windows project. Even then I used to like to ask about experiences with a handful of different parts of the windows systems which frequently suggested that either the programmer was pretty new to windows or that something was amiss, it was usually my experience to find more unix talent avoiding windows by default and at least with a BSD tcp stack and any communications project, windows jobs kept turning out to be for executive management demonstration purposes which was a very important opportunity for getting into more significant financial programming work.

Can you be more specific? What exactly is horrible on Windows when you've tried coding?

I tried Windows 10 Pro and Windows 2019 Server about 2 months ago on a self-built computer (my first in ~15 years). What I found was:

- driver support was atrocious for Windows server, and also for Windows 10. Almost every component from a fairly standard Ryzen build installed some form of custom skinned crapware to get basic functionality

- spyware and advertising was everywhere.

- the UI is a mess of old and new. It's unforgivable that this far from Windows 8 there is still such a mix of metro and older UIs.

- mixed DPI support is poor leading to screens where elements are quite different sizes

These are not specific to coding, but in particular the advertising and spyware removes Windows as a contender for _any_ use from me.

After a brief foray into desktop Linux, I returned all the parts to Microcenter and went back to OS X.

On the spyware part it can be all turned off. They give the Group Policy tools to do it to 'Enterprise Customers' but it is all there in the settings/registry and tools like this will flip it all off for you quickly and easily. https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Giving the ability to “opt-out” of spyware does not make it OK. I’m bored of hearing that tired excuse for poor behaviour.

SDI Tool Origin. Don't waste your time with everything else.

> These are not specific to coding

Ok, so it was not about coding after all.

I haven't seen any ads or spyware when I use Windows 10. Maybe I just don't install them.

Command line navigation and support was awkward and painful unless you go through a complicated rigmarole of figuring out which combination of package managers and power shell scripts lets you run something that sort of approximates Linux.

Python and virtual environment a were bizarrely difficult to get working across my + my teammates computers.

Many useful packages weren’t on Windows, or if they were were awkward to install or just weren’t as fast.

Sure I can install WSL and just use that for everything, but then you get to a point where everything is kind of duplicated, and I’m doing everything in Linux anyways, so why not just use that and be done with it?

Windows never felt as fast as Linux, and using it just perpetually annoyed me.

- Powershell sucks

- Graphical installers / no package manager

- No search results / docs for most languages

- Weird bugs due to being second class for most languages

- Have to use docker in VM

- Bad env for writing scripts

- We deploy on Linux

Some of these are fixed or there's progress being made:

- IMHO PowerShell is not that bad, but the newer PowerShell Core works better and with WSL you can use your favorite linux shell (and mix and match Windows and Linux binaries)

- WinGet is in preview

- No search results: my experience is 50/50 on that

- second class citizen: I wouldn't say most, definitely for Golang

- Docker now runs on WSL2 (which is still a sort of VM, but in my experience it's night and day with the old VM and especially compared to the default Docker experience on macOS)

- Why? You can use Python, and scripts are where Powershell really shines as a language

- That's the entire point of WSL I guess

PowerShell is horrible and confusing to use. Maybe I’m just dumb, but it was confusing to learn and super unintuitive.

If I’m running everything in WSL/2 why not just run Linux? I don’t remember the last time I had to use something windows specific - and word is available online for the sporadic times that needs to be used.

What I've found to be most alien to people used to bash is that Powershell is fundamentally different because of its object-passing style instead of dealing with text streams, usually once someone gets a grasp on this their experience using powershell improves significantly

About WSL, you're right: if you only use WSL it doesn't make sense to use Windows, but it's a good compromise for anyone who needs both at the same time (at least it's a better compromise than a VM)

Agreed. But with WSL you're no longer shoehorning Linux software into Windows, you're running Linux software on Linux within Windows.

This feels like it's gonna be terrible for people already doing ML.

Now, the following has more than a bit of elitism, I'm aware of that, so please don't comment to point that bit out...

I'm afraid that searching for answers to specific ML questions will start feeling like trying to google some Windows problems (every few years when I make the mistake of trying to help someone out) where it's all "download this, then click here..."

I hope I'm wrong and this will only be used by people willing to go the extra mile...

Don't be too elitist and scared, machine learning developers using Cuda and WSL are far from the windows non technical average user.

You can take a look at the Github issues for Microsoft's projects related to WSL if you don't believe me. They are normal developers like you and me.

What's scary about Googling for specific ML questions beginning to look like googling some Windows problems? This kind of dichotomy already exists between people who interact with ML only through keras and those who use a more flexible library. If you fall into the latter category it's still easy enough to find the answers to ML questions that mostly pertain to the deeper stuff. Don't even get me started on the difference between people who do and don't know statistics theory. But the point is that all of these groups do ML and they coexist just fine.

On another note. I don't think technical proficiency (or whatever your elitism-metric is) is very correlated with using Windows as the primary platform. You can Google stuff related to a Windows problem and through that learn how to work with the registry, and yes, some of the things you need to do require you to RTFM. So this elitism also suffers from being off the mark.

Doubt it. Even though you can run e.g. anaconda or pandas on Windows if I google an issue, I have no provlem getting linux-relevant results.

Hope we don't see things like: "Google announces today that to work around Windows' file path length limitations, Tensorflow's directory structure is being rewritten to use three characters or less per directory."

I recently helped a friend with their museum's collection management software. The server and client were Windows based, and even with the proper dependencies and provisioning, the installs kept failing.

Some of the paths were too long and the installer could only be executed after being unpacked to root.

It's been a while since I more than casually gutted and used Windows as an app container, but I hadn't realized how much has remained the same after more than two decades.

Windows itself can deal with long paths for a long time now. The problem is the apps - they need to use newer APIs that don't e.g. deal with structs with wchar_t[MAX_PATH] fields in them. For apps written in higher-level languages, it's usually the standard library that needs to be updated - e.g. Node.js and Python already have such support. But if it's C++, then it depends on how much the app developer cares.

What sold me on NT 3.1 was the in-the-box Microsoft Transaction Server.

MTS is the single largest reason why SQLServer_Linux was a shoehorn refit, not anything like the job that it could have been.

Out of the box CICS interop was bigger than my memory of the first browsers for W/NT. Want to trade with the world and speak EDIFACT, or do X.500 real money movement? You had codes running before you could put the screws on your local IBM account rep to get out of bed for you.

I last looked at HN just as Lockdown was announced in England. The last discussion I perused was showing a project that provided secure remote access to sensitive ports. Which I think is stable CICS fayre since about ‘85 on the cross platform side I would guess at least twenty years older for anything/360.

I mean there are services like Amazon AWS, Azure, Google Cloud that will set up everyting for you. The money you pay them to me is worth the time you otherwise would have spent to do the setup yourself.

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