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Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

dev.windows.com

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Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#201

Post by superobserver »

microtonal wrote: post #37

I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes this announcement. I also don't hold a grudge against Windows, I think it is a fine system for most people. However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Althou…

> It's in Microsoft interest to keep kids in their ecosystem

Yep, which is also why they purchased Minecraft. It was more like purchasing the community of Minecraft users, which has a lot of children as well.

I really wished there were a Micronix or something - combining the best of both worlds (Microsoft's extensive resources and reach coupled with GNU/Linux freedom and open-source development) - and that probably is what Microsoft is slowly aiming towards. I guess we'll find out in a decade.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#202

Post by DSMan195276 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #197
microtonal wrote: post #37

I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes this announcement. I also don't hold a grudge against Windows, I think it is a fine system for most people. However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Althou…

Or it makes tinkering easier and simpler than ever. Linux is many things. User friendly is not one of them.

> User friendly is not one of them.

That highly depends on what you're doing though. The Raspberry Pi in general isn't a user-friendly piece of hardware, the OS is only a piece of that. The fact that at least past iterations of the Pi aren't extremely fast means that it also had to run fairly unfriendly stripped-down setups so you could squeeze power out of it (IE. Even if you could run Windows on the Raspberry Pi 1, it wouldn't have been very pretty. The advantage of Linux was that it could run with a lighter setup.). With the new processor in the Raspberry Pi 2 I'd expect you could run much a much nicer setup on the Pi, comparable to the Windows setup. I'm interested to see how well Windows 10 actually runs on it though, I'm not convinced it's really fast enough to handle a full Windows stack, so it's possible we might see some type of stripped-down Windows setup for it. In which case, it will probably be less user-friendly.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#203

Post by ap0 »

There's nothing wrong with learning to first code on Windows. If it is easy for a kid to get going and start making stuff, they have a much better chance of sticking with it long enough to actually be interested in it as a hobby or career. My first programming experience was VB6 on Windows 98. I went from there to C in Visual C++. Fast forward to today and I write Java on OSX that is deployed to Linux machines. Most of this stuff is pretty transferable. Starting on Windows by no means stops you from exploring Linux later.

CS fundamentals can be taught on any system. Most kids don't have really technical people in their lives to get them past some of the hurdles of even getting started. I think we sometimes forget that the whole world doesn't want to be Linux gurus -- they want to be able to watch their cat videos and check their Facebook accounts. Most people don't care about the technical parts. If we can try to make the more technical parts accessible to a wider audience, I think that's moving the needle in the right direction.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#204

Post by UK-AL »

zanny wrote: post #194
bryondowd wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to play devil's advocate here. Teachers will push Windows, because they know about it and they can teach it. If you throw a pile of linux machines at teachers, how many are going to have the time, ability, and will to actually learn it well enough to teach it? It's hard enough to get a school to teach kids anything beyond using Office. I'd be happy to make things as easy as possible on the teacher who are willi…

Except the teacher on Windows by design cannot teach a huge chunk of the stack that makes a computer a computer. They talk about hardware, maybe a bit about the ToS breaking NT source floating around this comment section, skip over everything else and land on this theme park island of C# standard library and Windows forms. It leaves a huge gap in the childs education on computing that is one the major reasons so many…

I think modern .net devs chose the platform out of its advantages, not because its what they only know.

I know fair few .net developers, and they've all had linux years, and tried various languages.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#206

Post by [deleted] »

superobserver wrote: post #201
microtonal wrote: post #37

I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes this announcement. I also don't hold a grudge against Windows, I think it is a fine system for most people. However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Althou…

> It's in Microsoft interest to keep kids in their ecosystem Yep, which is also why they purchased Minecraft. It was more like purchasing the community of Minecraft users, which has a lot of children as well. I really wished there were a Micronix or something - combining the best of both worlds (Microsoft's extensive resources and reach coupled with GNU/Linux freedom and open-source development) - and that probably i…

[deleted]

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#207

Post by nmeofthestate »

zanny wrote: post #192
spdustin wrote: post #170

I think there's too much arguing for things that kids don't give a shit about. The argument can't be, "think about the children!" The argument must be, "preserve the children's rights to think for themselves." It is on us as adults - parents, teachers, trusted elders, whatever - to instill in the kids the information needed to make decisions, and the fundamental skills to objectively utilize that information in a rat…

And nothing kills curiosity more than NT system calls that are undebuggable and the bureaucracy around setting up a .net development environment or even worse trying to use any other language on Windows than the .net stuff.

"What's wrong Timmy?"

"This computer sucks, Dad! I tried to debug into an NT system call and it didn't work."

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#208

Post by chez17 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #197
microtonal wrote: post #37

I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes this announcement. I also don't hold a grudge against Windows, I think it is a fine system for most people. However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Althou…

Or it makes tinkering easier and simpler than ever. Linux is many things. User friendly is not one of them.

Linux is beyond user friendly these days. It just depends on what you want. I gave my wife's parents, two old hippies who live in the middle of nowhere and have literally no computer skills, an old laptop with Ubuntu on it. It's been totally fine. If they can use it, anyone can. Long gone are the days of needing editing configuration files in a terminal editor. Of course power users still can, but for novice users it's just as friendly as Windows and more friendly than OSX I would argue.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#209

Post by zxcvcxz »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #197
microtonal wrote: post #37

I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes this announcement. I also don't hold a grudge against Windows, I think it is a fine system for most people. However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Althou…

Or it makes tinkering easier and simpler than ever. Linux is many things. User friendly is not one of them.

I don't understand what you're saying? What is something one might want to "tinker" with in windows that is more complicated than "tinkering" with it in Linux?

I assume you mean install drivers or possibly configure an internet connection?

This can be a head ache on windows just as much as Linux... and believe it or not there are ubuntu certified PCs that literally work out of the box.

I'd argue learning to "tinker" through a whole bunch of GUIs specific to one OS isn't a good starting point for anyone.

If you plan on using complicated UIs and powershell then the learning curve is already really steep, so Windows doesn't really offer any advantage here.

Knowing Windows != Knowing computer science

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#210

Post by melling »

microtonal wrote: post #37

I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes this announcement. I also don't hold a grudge against Windows, I think it is a fine system for most people. However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Althou…

Yes, Microsoft has been kicked pretty hard by free software and open hardware. Now they're adapting. However, I don't see a problem. Microsoft is making that hardware market even larger. If Linux is "cool" and interesting enough, kids will boot Linux and run it on one or more of their Raspberry Pi's.

Linux developers should also consider that the "hackable system" feature is only one of many features that people consider when choosing an OS. It might be good to add a few more carrots to Linux rather than beating people with sticks for not using free.

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