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Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

dev.windows.com

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Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#181

Post by nmeofthestate »

chernevik wrote: post #167
nmeofthestate wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves" "Windows is closed as ever" Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. Seems to me Windows is a perfectly open enough OS to act as a platform for…

Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook. She wants to learn to program, she says, so I said, great, let's get you a real programming environment. She was nervous about her computer and all the stuff flying by on the screen, so we talked about what her computer is -- a CPU, memory, storage -- it's all bits, nothing happening here can hurt it. We then got Python up and drew a turn wit…

To this I would say jeez: worrying about how your eleven year old daughter might be restricting herself to particular technology platforms is really somewhat premature.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#182

Post by gue5t »

rburhum wrote: post #178
ekr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, while legally, you are perfectly right, Windows is as close as ever, it's not actually that hard to look under the hood. I work as a Windows device driver developer, and sometimes I need to reverse engineer some of the internals, and the source code from WRK is easily available on the internet : ( http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_R... ). These are sources from 2005-2006 timeframe, but t…

So basically, you can set the example for kids to not give a crap about IP and that it is OK to study/do whatever they want with something they find online. Nevermind that because they have not signed the MS agreement it is basically stolen property. I see somebody mirrored it already.

That benefit doesn't seem like enough to offset the fact that they'll be running an OS which is very difficult or impossible to actually modify for use. Any changes made would amount to a fork with one of the worst possible merge workflows; for beginners an open-source environment is much easier to start modifying, and for the more experienced it's much more productive to modify an environment that has a responsive upstream.

Really, we shouldn't encourage kids to waste their time on operating systems whose developers are hacker-hostile.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#183

Post by pbhjpbhj »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #80
bohol wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I do think the trend of iOS, Android and similar Windows environments is troubling. But if they ship Windows 10 on the RPi with something like QBasic and Visual Studio it's…

I don't think Win 10 is about teaching kids to code. But then I don't think the Pi is really about teaching kids to code either. The Pi Foundation has done a good job of persuading everyone otherwise, but I'm left with a nagging suspicion that a computer designed for kids from the ground up would look very different. It's just too damn complicated for most kids. The nerds get it, but expecting the average ten year ol…

>The Pi Foundation has done a good job of persuading everyone [that "the Pi is really about teaching kids to code"], but I'm left with a nagging suspicion that a computer designed for kids from the ground up would look very different. //

http://www.raspberrypi.org/about/ says that they designed it to enable kids to access a cheap platform on which it would be easy to code and that they considered the multimedia capabilities a good hook.

Price was clearly a major factor in making the RPi accessible to all [UK] kids. Their inspiration was in part the BBC Micro series - which were certainly not inexpensive.

RPi is cheaper than a second-hand Nintendo DS.

In short, as I understood it, the RPi was about removing the cost barrier to kids having their own system on which to code and hack both hardware and software.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#184

Post by [deleted] »

jbandela1 wrote: post #99

I think this is awesome. For all the people that are complaining about not being open source and not friendly to hackers, the truth is probably most people that program Raspberry are not even using a native compiled language but are using Python. The people that want to hack on a kernel, can install Linux. I am really excited about the prospect of Microsoft enabling writing and debugging for the Pi using Visual Studi…

[deleted]

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#185

Post by zanny »

rbanffy wrote: post #161
watty wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree. I used Ubuntu for a year and I spent more time fixing things or trying to do things in the OS than I have in all other operating systems combined. My nephew tried to install Ubuntu on his new build and hit brick wall after brick wall trying to install the OS and Minecraft. It simply hasn't gotten easy enough and I'm afraid it's too late now. I don't see a comeback for linux. http://www.google.c…

My 79 year old mom uses Ubuntu and she loves it because it never breaks. I moved her to Linux because I was tired of fixing her Windows install (on the same machine). You and your nephew must be doing something very wrong.

I've moved my immediate family over to Suse and Ubuntu, but I've had about half of all my conversions "in the field" backfire - something little breaks, and then the echochamber of Windows mindshare around them make them demand I put them back on Windows because they "can't get this different thing".

Then I get a dozen calls in the next six months about how completely broken something in 7 or 8 is, but they never consider switching back.

I don't know how to fix that. They get it in their heads that Windows is right and everything else is wrong and the first sign of contention drives them to panic right back to the MS camp, where every day is contention with the viruses and spyware.

Just an example, I had setup a small store with Ubuntu terminals. Six months later they wanted me to switch it all to Windows 8. For those six months the only service calls I got were software updates and general inqueries like "how do I download X?" or "how do I get flash?". Linking a one click Ubuntu install for Flash is insanely easy.

But now its been over six months again since the Windows 8 switch back, and I'm in about once a month to remove systemic viruses and spyware from all the computers because they all get horribly infected and I make them change their passwords every time. They even had the store owners credit card info stolen once, but they would never fathom using anything else again.

And they switched back because Office 2013 in Wine (because they could not stand LibreOffice) didn't interopt between each part properly - IE, trying to open an Access database as a form fill in Word never worked, and they didn't want me to just give them network disabled XP VMs to run Office in using all their old license keys because when they tried that the employees kept trying to use IE6 in the VM and complained it had no Internet connectivity.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#186

Post by drv »

benn_88 wrote: post #79

Note: Windows 10 on Pi 2 will be an IoT platform, not a desktop OS. You'll develop your app in Visual Studio on a Windows PC and deploy it to the Pi. Raspbian will continue to be the main supported OS. - Ben from Raspberry Pi

Does that mean it will be Windows RT API-wise or something else?

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#187

Post by patja »

The devil is in the details of the licensing terms. Just like the "Windows 10 upgrades done in the first year will be free for the supported lifetime of your device" leaves a lot of wiggle room around who gets to decide what constitutes the lifetime of a device (you can be sure if you upgrade more than a few components you will get thrown out of the land of "free"), the terms of this program are not necessarily what you might expect from the PR: you get to install one single license and it is only good for 60 days!

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#188

Post by higherpurpose »

rburhum wrote: post #178
ekr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, while legally, you are perfectly right, Windows is as close as ever, it's not actually that hard to look under the hood. I work as a Windows device driver developer, and sometimes I need to reverse engineer some of the internals, and the source code from WRK is easily available on the internet : ( http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_R... ). These are sources from 2005-2006 timeframe, but t…

So basically, you can set the example for kids to not give a crap about IP and that it is OK to study/do whatever they want with something they find online. Nevermind that because they have not signed the MS agreement it is basically stolen property. I see somebody mirrored it already.

And only until Microsoft turns a blind eye. Anyone remember what happened to the WP7 "ROM unlocking" guys? Microsoft bullied them with legal action, and then they announced some kind of "partnership" where the project they were doing for free before now cost $10...and it quickly disappeared.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#190

Post by zanny »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #181
chernevik wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook. She wants to learn to program, she says, so I said, great, let's get you a real programming environment. She was nervous about her computer and all the stuff flying by on the screen, so we talked about what her computer is -- a CPU, memory, storage -- it's all bits, nothing happening here can hurt it. We then got Python up and drew a turn wit…

To this I would say jeez: worrying about how your eleven year old daughter might be restricting herself to particular technology platforms is really somewhat premature.

I'd argue it isn't. It is the kind of mindshare effect from early age that makes it incredibly hard to displace Windows throughout IT. There were three computer generations of note - the fourth is still growing up and is the smartphone one - but in general, the generations were:

1. The Unix era, back in the 70s, back when it was all university stuff. Free software was unheard of but the code was always widely distributed. 2. The Mac era, in the 80s, where there were a ton of different computers and they were all so primitive and simple you could easily hack on them yourself or with effort make your own kernels. DRM was too expensive to fathom so it was still modestly open. 3. The Windows era, starting with DOS but lasting through XP, where users grew up on a completely black box experience where you bought an emachine at Best Buy and browsed cat pictures online. No developer tools or command line presence at all after a while, so in my high school years (2005 - 2009) an extreme few of my peers even knew what programming was (I'm talking less than 5%).

The phone era is even worse than the Windows era because the form factor does not lend itself to productivity and the ecosystems are locked down (though I think a lot about Android and AOSP makes it much easier to break out of the theme park and see the wider world than in the Windows era).

I'm not saying making everyone use a command line OS or having to install Archlinux themselves would make them more enlightened, but I can convincingly say we probably lost a huge amount of potential developers in these last twenty years to the tivoization and tonka toy Windows experience where the barrier from going from software consumer to software creator was so insanely high.

On Windows, you have to first realize you can develop software. Huge barrier there. Once you know that, you are immediately in the giant cancerous mess of .net and Windows developer tools from MS, which is not something a, say, ten year old is going to be much interested in.

On Linux or any free software OS, you always have Python right on your system. You open up this terminal thing, type in python, read the website a bit, or maybe do Codecademy, and you can drop right out of the browser into the developer tool right at the ready. Maybe you want to get a bit more sophisticated and start using Gedit or Kate or Geary or Ninja as a Python IDE, in which case you just one click install this stuff to your desktop after reading about it on a Python forum.

My point is the process of "getting into" development or just giving a damn about computers is a hell of a lot more fun and reasonable on free software OSes or just one that distributes the developer tools out of the box, in the same way the 80s kids who now represent a huge chunk of the developer workforce came to be.

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