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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

My real concern is that figuring out so many things without the GUI is currently a real PITA. Like trying to make IIS act as a reverse proxy. It's a huge pain, and most of the docs are telling you to click various things. Compared to setting up nginx, ouch. Compounding things is the fact that MS took a cover-our-ass policy to installing things, so even after installing IIS, you've gotta go explicitly install "dynamic" compression as an extra. Then to really make it work, there's a file buried in system32 you've gotta edit, because you can't configure those settings by default at a site level. Overall, it's just way more complicated.

I know they're working on it, and PS is a great shell overall, even if it is missing a lot of simple tools by default.

But MS is way late to the party. OpenVZ was in heavy use what, a decade ago? And MS did nothing to respond, really. But hey, maybe they'll pull it off. I don't have a fundamental objection to Windows.

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Windows has always been super-visual. For many tasks there isn't even a CLI way to do it short of editing the registry.

The registry is not very discoverable. However, once you discovered, a lot of customization can be had from running as little as a single registry script.

As a trivial example, remapping caps-lock to something sane was easier on the last few windows releases I tried (just run a registry script) than on any of the 'nixes I used in the same time period.

IIS management is done via WMI which will work for this version of Windows Server: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj635848.aspx

Right, it technically exists, and for some common scenarios, some people may get it to work. Step outside that, and it seems like a world of pain. Like, for instance, IIS's half-baked reverse proxy, ARR (Application Request Routing). Despite being aimed at a very narrow set of applications and overall being cumbersome and annoying, all of the docs I've found on it are screenshot-and-clickhere based.

MS has a ton of work to do if they wanna make a non-GUI Windows viable, and it seems like if they don't have a lot of that work done upfront, they're going to end up providing a very unappealing first taste to customers. I hope they succeed, just that it seems to be a much larger problem than just cutting out parts of Windows.

> I don't have a fundamental objection to Windows

I do. I have a fundamental objection to MicroSoft too. I do not know why people forget that MS actually tried very hard to make internet just a special button in MS Word. How they fought against anything looking like an open communication protocol. This is a sin, the kind of sin that shall not be forgiven. I respect Mr Gates being a generous guy in his old age, but he led a company that did and still do a lot of harm to almost all industries over the world.

Be reminded that Windows is still the dominant OS by very very far. Almost everyone on earth working on a desk uses MS Windows, Word, IE and Excel. This is not a sane distribution of powers.

What would we say if 98% of the oil and the gaz stations on earth were operated by the same company? We are living in this Orwellian world, where one company drives 98% of the computers and their major softwares in the world.

Why are we so fast to forget that?

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