Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

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I know this is a troll statement, but I feel Windows does a lot of things well.

* For large organizations, domain controls make managing a large number of desktops much easier.

* I feel MS Office on windows is a better product than the mac version (if you do a lot of document work).

* Gaming. Windows is still dominant for desktop games.

* Windows isn't the walled garden that Mac is going towards.

* Backwards compatibility. Software written 10+ years ago for Windows still has a good chance of working on Windows 8.

* Familiar. People are used to it. I'm not going to force my parents to learn a Mac and all the weird behaviors that go with it.

* Isn't tied to hardware only made by Microsoft (which makes hardware a commodity).

I'm sure there are a number of other points I'm missing, but it's the ones that I like. But there are a number of things I really dislike about it:

* It's not unix based. So the filesystem layout differs, I can't share perl/bash scripts as easily across them. / vs \ for filesystem paths. EOL characters in ascii files.

* It took too long to get a good command line. Powershell is nice, but just too different than what I'm used to with Bash that I get on OSX and Linux.

* Many developer tools today are becoming OSX focused. Windows has a lot of great software still, but many of the smaller nitch tools that I discover are OSX or Linux focused.

> For large organizations, domain controls make managing a large number of desktops much easier.

The Unix way of putting the resources on the network, and synchronizing /etc works quite well. I've never seen anybody actually claim that AD is better than it. Most people complaining that the unixes don't have administration tools just want them to work like Windows.

Windows is a hell to administer, you can't just clone machines and you can't centralize your resources. You must do what AD allows you, and beg that this time something won't break, because you can't really test anything.

Would you mind explaining what domain controls offer? I've never worked with a large windows desktop install base, so I have no idea what domain controls do exactly.

A "Domain Controller" is basically a server that has authority for a domain. A domain in Active Directory is really the same thing as a "normal" internet domain (in fact is uses DNS) in that it can have sub domains where authority can be delegated to other DCs etc.

Each domain can have a collection of resources such as other servers and printers/storage etc. So once you authenticate against the domain controller (usually by logging into a computer using a pattern like \\Domain\Username rather than just username) you get a secure signed "token" back from the DC.

This token can be sent to other computers on the network that are members of the domain (or sent to web apps via a cookie) and it will identify the user as a member of that domain and also provide information as to what levels of access should be allowed without having to authenticate separately with each system.

That's kind of hand wavey though and Active Directory provides too many features to be enumerated here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Directory

I'm a nix guy, but I believe it's for dealing with setting/managing authentication, authorization, permissions, etc.

The big win is Group Policy. You can centrally control every single option, including many applications, for every single Windows system on the domain. It's like puppet on steroids and HGH.

> * I feel MS Office on windows is a better product than the mac version (if you do a lot of document work).

Absolutely. I wonder if the MS Office for OSX team ever tried using it, or exchanging documents between Windows and OSX. The different epoch startdate in Excel on both platforms... bleurgh.

The crappiness of Office for Mac is 50% of the reason I have a VMWare Windows box (the other 50%? Testing websites on IE9)

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