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Also BOM marks, which Powershell loves to output. Took a while for me to figure out what was putting 2 extra bytes into files.

Edit: 3 bytes, not 2 (thanks!)

The useless utf-8 BOM is 3 bytes ... were you also getting utf-16 encoded text?

The UTF-8 BOM still has some uses, unfortunately. I had to convince Excel to parse a CSV file as UTF-8 and inserting a BOM at the beginning of the file was the easiest solution.

Powershell has stopped doing that in that newer version. I think since 6 or 7. On Windows 10 you do have to install it separately though.

If you think that's fun, just wait until you encounter the clowns who copy-paste random shit directly out of Word docs containing C1 control codes mascarading as "smart quotes" into your UTF-8 source.

I've done that before, but copying from web pages that have randomly used smart quotes (or whatever they are actually called) in command line samples.

Very annoying!

You needed a unix, so you tried WSL? You would have been much better served by Linux.

> a goofup with IT and instead of shipping a Mac this coworker ended up with a Windows machine

That kinda implies this isn't a small shop, so "breaking" a windows machine IT provisioned to put Linux onto it might be out of the question, both in terms of requisition, access to the UEFI, or even network configuration.

Or said coworker is more familiar with Mac/Windows than <Insert Linux Distro and particular window manager here>, so this is best of a bad situation.

You can secure boot Linux with UEFI. For a laugh I do it on my Arch lappie but my Home Assistant Debians do it out of the box and so do my Ubuntu LTS servers. I gather that SuSE does too and probably many others.

You can domain join via Winbind or SSSD. Exchange via Evolution or Kmail and other work arounds exist. TPM 2.0 has been supported for quite a while so all good for encryption and other attestation tasks. We have rather a lot of host based firewalls (sore point 8) but it looks like the latest effort might stick for a while longer than the past ones.

...

Oh, you use that ... vendor ... SSL VPN. OK, can't do that and that's generally where it falls apart. We do have several.

I can and do operate solely on Linux but I have the benefit of owning the company. Some of my customers insist on their gear/setup for their environment and that's fine: they get to buy it too.

I think they meant bios/uefi is locked out by IT. That is case for me. Also TPM is only available on some distros. You can use linux as long as it is Ubuntu or RedHat and maybe Arch if you are lucky.

You'll be stopped long before SSL VPN. Right about the "you're running an unsupported/unauthorized OS on your company-owned laptop, send it back so we can restore to Windows"

And then you send the laptop and your two week notice. People seem to forget or not take advantage of the employees' market that's been going on for several years in this field.

Use it to make the world a better place.

People seem to forget there is this thing called offshoring when employees get too picky, and that's been going on for several years in this field.

Most business IT over a few hundred employees looks nothing like this. They’re going to be managed laptops with locked UEFI and, if you got past that, you or your manager would get a call from IT asking you why it isn’t showing up in the management system anymore and to ship it back for a restore.

At a larger enterprise organization (that isn’t tech/FAANG) it could be considered a fireable offense.

It's extremely frustrating that IT policy in large corporations is the same for say clerical stuff and software engineering. Down to buying the same hardware for ease of management when it makes no sense because of the use cases being so different.

Most of the places I have been at least separated out the hardware for different use cases.

You entirely missed the point.

From the original comment, it's likely an IT department, meaning a large org, meaning slow changing policies in place about how the machines are setup, often in order to meet even slower changed compliance laws.

Your seven different "vendors" solution to bodge domains/outlook wouldn't be supported by IT, which is a problem when then machine breaks or an audit happens...

Sadly, corporate IT usually mandates Mac/Windows, so nuking it and installing Linux is probably a no-go.

yes, and it's imperative you have HP Wolf Security installed!

> - The new Windows Terminal is fantastic, hopefully its bundled with Win 11.

It is, and it's even the default prompt in the Win+X menu

> Issues with CR/LF.

Is this still really a thing? even notepad can handle LF. I guess the default could still be crlf for some apps.

I think one of the main problems is that when you install git for windows, the default setting is to convert LF to CRLF when checking out code. This can cause a bunch of issues if you later try to work with those files within WSL (especially when doing any git-related stuff). I don't really understand why that's the default, or even why it's presented as an option during installation, it's been ages since I actually had issues reading/editing Unix-style files in Windows.

It is insane to me that git doesn't checkout/in as-is by default on Windows.

The biggest gotcha on Mac is using git on the default case-insensitive volume. I always create a separate case-sensitive APFS volume for all my git repos to avoid subtle mismatches between the filename git knows about and the filename macOS knows.

because of crap like notepad

I always wondered. Source?

notepad is the default text editor in windows, it doesn't support Unix line endings until insider build whatever

Sure, but is that really the reason why autocrlf is the default in git?

it's the default in git-for-windows

I see no other reason that maximum platform compatibility

Would be weird if platfrom compatibility is measured by making sure once single program works, a program which most of the people using git probably don't even use

Notepad changed 3 years ago so now this isn't a problem. Git should default everything to LF. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/extended-eol-in-n...

that's a Windows 10 insider build, git for windows presumably wants to be more backwards compatible

just change it to input and be happy

The new notepad version was released to non-insiders in Windows 10 1809, so it's still been around for almost 3 years now. I do understand that git wants to maintain the best compatibility, but at this point I would argue that converting to CRLF on checkout is causing more issues than it solves.

It's usually the other way around these days - most Windows apps can handle LF just fine, but Unix apps often cannot handle CR LF. So if you use Windows to generate a text file, things break when you try to use it from WSL.

I would not work until you got me a Mac. This poor soul.