My colleagues at work, Programmers, aren't able to get out of Windows, even though they are just writing python. They would rather stick with the pain of having to use git in a crappy console, and suffer loads of pain when shell-ing into ec2 linux boxes, Than learn a new UI and file-system
The terminal _sucked_. It was the same crappy DOS box I'd seen since, well, DOS days and Win3.1.
That lead me on an exploration of MKS, UWIN, Cygwin, and finally, Red Hat, over the course of a few months. And I realized Linux Didn't Suck.
Another few months and I wiped NT off my hardrives and repartitioned with RH. Never looked back.
Powerful tool, but the "we'll go our own way despite commonly accepted UI standards" has always made me a little crazy.
* Most simple grep and sed commands are entirely do-able. Bit more verbose syntax, but that comes with a hell of a lot of easy-to-access power
* It's all about objects, rather than plain text. This can often be a pain, but Import-Csv and Export-Csv are utter LOVE. Adding additional new properties could be easier, but it is an option and can be used to great effect
* It's basically .Net for the command line, and you can get to all the power locked away in the .Net libraries
* No installation required on modern windows machines. Assuming your network admins are not overly restrictive, you get a proper shell without having to install cygwin
But Cygwin is also usefull ;)
The available console or ssh apps are horrible compared to the same apps or linux or mac; and the unix tools have sort-of-been-ported, and I can use them through, say, cygwin but they're not 'nicely working' as they should be. I mean, it's simpler to just ssh to an ubuntu instance than get&use the same tools directly on your machine.
I dunno, I must have a different usage pattern to a lot of people here, but I've used tools such as git/ruby/node/telnet/etc across Windows(conEmu + bash)/Linux/OSX and don't really have a strong preference for any OS in this regard. I get that there are differences, and maybe I'm just lucky and haven't seemed to hit these issues that make Windows so horrible for a lot of devs.
This might hold water were it not for the fact that pretty much all console unix tool users started off on Windows or Mac.
> GUIs are more natural, it's much better then learning each tools crappy mini console DSL.
Yes, GUIs are more natural. But for most of us, the time spent learning how to use common unix tools pays for itself very quickly by increasing productivity: it's an investment.
Conemu comes pretty close to solving the terminal software problem, and there are alternatie shells, e.g. Powershell or bash from cygwin.
And msysgit (https://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list?q=full+inst...) which includes the "git bash" shell. It's got almost all the basic unix tools installed by default.
Its a fork of console2.
+ Adds Splitting Tabs into views
Console2 development seems to have slowed down.
readline completion à la bash: http://code.google.com/p/clink/
nice console emulator with tabs: http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/
gnu tools on windows without cygwin: https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki
not perfect, but actually usable...
Our company has a lot of legacy VBA code that would need to be replaced. Don't get me wrong, I think it would be smart to replace this. I hated the way VBA changed on every release and broke my code base. The last straw was when I needed to access spreadsheets that used 3rd party VBA modules that were locked. I ported my whole back-end data analysis/report generation code base to Open Source R/Sweave/LaTeX. But I'm just one user and did it myself as a spare time activity.
I still think Visual Studio is a pretty nice development environment for C++. I'm trying to get up to speed with Eclipse. I do prefer Open Source. Now that our corporate budget is REALLY tight, that is a big help. Guess the IT folks think it would cost more to switch than pay the annual tribute to Redmond
She was against every subtle change, so putting another OS on her machine was hard. She even resisted to use a much faster Computer, because she likes when things "just work" and really doesn't care what the name of the system is or about the specs of the system, as long as things can be done the "usual way" and she doesn't need to wait 5min. for things to happen. Her old computer was a 1GHZ, this one has 3.2GHZ and for her it's the same. To be honest, things aren't really getting faster for an average PC user, except when you install an SSD.