Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

money.cnn.com

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#11

for me to dev solely on windows, it needs: 1) coreutils + some other nix commands 2) iTerm2 equivalent(ConEmu/Cmder do not compare)

How does ConEmu compare to iTerm2? Why do you think its not up to the mark? I have recently moved to a company using windows computers and ConEmu with WSL has been my lifeboat.

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#12
Little bit sensationalist.

Microsoft seeing profitability and growth from its cloud business, and investing resources accordingly, doesn't mean its "putting Windows on the back burner".

In its cloud and enterprise offerings MS has been adding support Linux and open source in general. That mentality shift away from "MS products are for Windows OS" is more what's going on than "MS doesn't care about Windows anymore"

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#13
post #6

To be honest it is not a bad thing. The new features in Windows have been rather user hostile and regressions in term of usability and capabilities. I’d be happy with them maintaining the security and adding features as required by advances in hardware, but not treating the OS as a playground for radical creativity and monetisation.

Agreed completely. There's still a large group of people for which 2000/XP was when the GUI was already nearly perfect, and everything after that was downhill. As an OS I think Windows doesn't need any "new features" in the way of radical GUI changes anymore, just continued bug fixes.

Ditto for a lot of other software; enough with the churn, stability is more important.

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#14

PC gaming just shook a little. I have decades old games that still work because Microsoft still supports Windows. uTorrent entirely exists because of Microsoft's commitment to break-your-back-backwards-compatability in Windows. DirectX is 25+ years of of PC gaming's history. That could disappear like a console generation. That's a little disconcerting.

On the contrary, I think perhaps the best thing for the preservation of the history of windows gaming is for windows to stop changing. A frozen or deprecated win32 API will give WINE (which is already quite good) breathing room to catch up and fill in the gaps, without having to continuously cope with the shifting sand of the latest experiments with windows. We'll be able to run old windows games forever, rather than just as long as Microsoft deigns to allow it. DOS games are fairly well preserved at this point for similar reasons.

Of course, then we'll have to deal with whatever the next platform is, but that's just the reality of the industry.

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#15

for me to dev solely on windows, it needs: 1) coreutils + some other nix commands 2) iTerm2 equivalent(ConEmu/Cmder do not compare)

Hey there, I'm actually on the windows console dev team. Any specific features you're looking for from iTerm2? There's already hundred of items on the backlog, but I'm always curious what things in particular people are looking for.

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#16

for me to dev solely on windows, it needs: 1) coreutils + some other nix commands 2) iTerm2 equivalent(ConEmu/Cmder do not compare)

They already have #1 in the form of WSL.

Yes but it runs inside CMD which is the WORST Windows terminal host.

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#17
post #9

Kind of frustrating to hear that the largest OS by marketshare for desktop PCs (82.68%) is going to be even less supported than it is currently. Doesn't seem like thats going to be good news for security on the windows platform. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Err, that's not true. In fact, the only reason they can charge for that OS is because they can keep it secure going forwards. It's not that Windows is being dropped, its more like MS realized that there is a lot more potential to grow in other areas, without being tied up to Windows.

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#18
post #15

for me to dev solely on windows, it needs: 1) coreutils + some other nix commands 2) iTerm2 equivalent(ConEmu/Cmder do not compare)

Hey there, I'm actually on the windows console dev team. Any specific features you're looking for from iTerm2? There's already hundred of items on the backlog, but I'm always curious what things in particular people are looking for.

If it's any consolation what you guys have done with windows 10 is amazing. Big thumbs up here.

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#19
post #5

PC gaming just shook a little. I have decades old games that still work because Microsoft still supports Windows. uTorrent entirely exists because of Microsoft's commitment to break-your-back-backwards-compatability in Windows. DirectX is 25+ years of of PC gaming's history. That could disappear like a console generation. That's a little disconcerting.

I'm not clear on why uTorrent depends on extreme backwards compatibility. Isn't that a currently updated product?

The reason uTorrent can stay small is because it exploits libraries that have existed in Windows since NT, mostly for GUI work. There was also development that incorporated the HTML Application library [1]. At least that was the case when I worked on it back in 2014.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner

#20
"Putting Windows on the back burner."

Microsoft's understanding of what an operating system is and how it facilitates a user's interaction with their computing hardware has been completely misguided over the last decade. So much so that I can't tell if this headline describes something good, in the sense of salutary neglect, or whether it's a euphemistic summation of what's been done since Windows 7 (taking a considered, and profoundly user-centric approach toward OS design has been eschewed and given short shrift in favor of animated sprites in the start menu, for example).

Post reply on HN