hah good old MS - no single link to Rasp project - still afraid of L word.
Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
281–290 of 390 posts
Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Premium not over-priced. I am still yet to find any laptop with the build or trackpad quality of any of the MacBooks.
Thinkpads have better build quality (but crappy trackpads). Macbook's cases feel nice but they're brittle.
Are you talking about the metal aluminum cases? Some of the most durable laptops i've had.
Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
#283I 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.
And how, exactly, will a child be faced with debugging NT internals while making a game in Scratch?
The educators that want to foster an interest in computing will do so in a way that's least burdensome to a child's limited attention span and desire for instant gratification. Those that want to foster an interest in writing software simply won't put Windows on the thing unless they're teaching it.
Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
#284Earlier 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…
>Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook Yet you decided to buy her a Chromebook, which is the most locked down laptop out there with heavy DRM with everything locked to Google's services and only Google code being allowed to run natively. Even Windows is much more open in comparison and doesn't wipe the hard disk when you try to install an alternate OS. Nor do you have to "root" it…
I unfortunately had to downvote your comment because this is not the conversation about DRM, Google Services, etc. I'm as passionate as anyone about fighting the walled gardens out there. But it's not germane to the current thread.
Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I wanted to use my Raspberry Pi to share an external NTFS formatted hard drive on the network. This required installing support for NTFS, making changes in fstab to mount it with read and write privileges, installing Samba, making changes in Samba's configuration file, making a new Samba user, restarting services, and probably more that I've since forgotten about. Every step needed to be researched through a mixture of blog posts, Wikis and other online resources.
I also wanted to run a Python 3 script I'd written on a different computer. Python 3 wouldn't install through apt-get, so I downloaded and installed it myself. Various dependencies wouldn't install using pip, instead giving error messages mixed in the regular output from the install process. I don't remember the actual errors now, I gave up and ran it on a Windows desktop instead.
Sometimes Linux gets in the way of what you want to do. Sure, keep at it and you've learned something, but sometimes you want to get stuff done and don't really care about how hard drive mounting works.
I'm still a big fan of Linux and open source, but I think Windows is a fine option for Raspberry Pi 2.
Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 con…
I sincerely hope you, at least, are paid by the hour and by incident.
It's depressing to read stories like these. I to do not know how to neutralize the peer pressure that seems to make people want to be constantly abused by their malware-infested Windows machines just because their friends are...
One thing may help: interesting metaphors.
When my mom once asked about viruses, I made her picture her computer as an SR-71 cruising at Mach 3.6, high above anti-aircraft fire directed towards Windows machines. Sticky images like this may help, but they may need occasional reinforcement.
Every once and then she also forwards me a chain letter warning about the dangers of such-and-such e-mail scam that tricks people into download malware. I tell her to relax because the malware most likely will not be able run on her computer, much less compromise it.
Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A lot of them choose .NET because their CTOs chose it because a Microsoft account representative told them it was enterprise-grade and had full Microsoft support while playing golf.
Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems to me Windows is a perfectly open enough OS to act as a platform for tinkering and learning about computers. Maybe, but Linux just seems more convenient. I mean, can you install gcc, golang, nodejs, python, ruby, ghc, lua (...) on windows with a single command? And all the other tools you might want to use, like editors, databases? And you will never know if they want to do kernel-level coding if they don't h…
can you install gcc, golang, nodejs, python, ruby, ghc, lua (...) on windows with a single command Yes! Just install chocolaty and type cinst git cinst mingw cinst vim (and so on) Prior to Windows 10 it is a third party tool and not officially supported by windows. However starting with Windows 10 windows will ship with a version of this command called OneGet and it will be be officially part of windows.
I don't think you can call chocolaty a package manager as it does not (and, by the nature of Windows, can not) offer dependency resolutions in the way apt works. It might be better to call it a package downloader or a package installer.
Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux also. From the consumer market, only OS X/iOS demands over-priced hardware to run.
Premium not over-priced. I am still yet to find any laptop with the build or trackpad quality of any of the MacBooks.
Sorry, but since the move to Intel it isn't "premium", it's just over-priced.
Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just off the top of my head: package management, live-cd functionality, architecture support, command-line interfaces, GUI variety, kernel customization, scaling to low-powered harware, licencing.
GUI "variety" ? Are you joking? The very reason there exists so much "variety" is that they all suck. Windows has one GUI system and it's worked darn well for quite a long time, and will continue to do so. Linux might be able to let you make your windows do somersaults so you can show off to your friends, but it still hasn't been able to get the basics right, like focus-stealing prevention. Windows is miles ahead of…
I don't know... Ubuntu's UI is pretty consistant and I think simpler to use than Windows. I wouldn't say it sucks... at all.