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What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

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Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#101

Post by genr8 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #51

What an incredibly petty set of complaints. - "It takes ~3 seconds for WSL2 to start up the first time" - "Windows Terminal [gasp] has animations " - "The new spotlight search isn't already flawless " - "File explorer right-click menus have... too many things in them" (Paraphrasing, of course) And I honestly wonder if the flickering thing is a problem with the author's GPU or something. Seems to happen everywhere and…

I agree, but its a personal blog that got self-posted to HN, its just his opinion man. You can disregard it if you want.

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#102

Post by genr8 »

snazz wrote: post #12
benbristow wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The config file still seems like a cop-out for "we couldn't be arsed to build a GUI settings editor". Excusable at alpha/beta, not a final release. Command prompt & Powershell both have GUI settings editors.

VS Code's configuration is a GUI skin over JSON, so that's probably what they should do with the terminal as well.

Yea. But that was added later, and theres still important JSON build-system files that you need to edit manually to this day. JSON isnt descriptive enough to auto-translate the raw files into a functional GUI. They seem to think its better off as text, but that goes against everything else on Windows mentality, and its not documented properly.

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#103

Post by schoolornot »

> Recently Windows team made a few stunning announcements

More and more telemetry in each subsequent OS release. The fact I had to flip 6 switches off during OOBE on a brand new MS Surface followed by a "hosed" Windows Update run tells me they still haven't figured out what their power users want.

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#104

Post by dleslie »

munchbunny wrote: post #91
dleslie wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity and its suite of tools. Anything that slows access to disk IO can add significant time to my large-project build turnaround.

In the case of Unity, why do you need Linux crossover? I can see also having a Unity development setup in bare-metal Linux if you plan to target Linux gaming, but WSL currently doesn't give you graphics. The game development scenario feels to me like a case where a Windows based toolchain is going to be more coherent. I might be missing something though.

No, I don't _really_ need Linux crossover. I greatly prefer a Linux CLI environment as that's been how I've been comfortable as a developer for nigh-on three decades now.

No, we don't/won't support a Linux port of our product at this time, and as a primary developer it's not worth my time to be hassled by it.

But WSL1 is _so nice_. I've fought with MSYS, MSYS2, Cygwin, various other bash environments and such, and I find none are quite as good as WSL1+X410.

And, let's be honest, if WSL2 is just another VM then it's a worse product than the other VMs that are available and far more mature. Hell, Canonical's Multipass is as good or better.

I really don't get why they went the VM route with WSL2. It seems to totally wipe out any advantage that WSL had over the other VM products.

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#106

Post by Zardoz84 »

piggycurse wrote: post #25

Why is this blog post so negative? Microsoft are trying and giving all of the developers the tools to help affect the project along the way. The Terminal project was only announced 1 year ago[0]. As I understand it, they had to more or less split how the whole conhost.exe work in order to allow Terminal to even exist. The settings UI is far from sexy, but they're working on it[1]. I think it's impressive to know that…

I don't know your experience, but on my experience W10 it's painfull slow compared to a native Linux install. I don't talking about WSL1 or WSL2 its slow compared to a native Linux. I say that the whole W10 is slow, to the point that barely is usable if you not have it installed on a SSD.

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#107

Post by llampx »

genr8 wrote: post #100
projektfu wrote: post #21

I think this site might want to reconsider using Medium. All of the animated screenshots were covered with ads in Safari on iOS, with no apparent way of getting past them. I had really no idea what they were talking about.

You might want to reconsider using Safari on iOS...

Why?

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#108

Post by pjmlp »

genr8 wrote: post #96
piggycurse wrote: post #25

Why is this blog post so negative? Microsoft are trying and giving all of the developers the tools to help affect the project along the way. The Terminal project was only announced 1 year ago[0]. As I understand it, they had to more or less split how the whole conhost.exe work in order to allow Terminal to even exist. The settings UI is far from sexy, but they're working on it[1]. I think it's impressive to know that…

M$ will only open source things that don't make them their money, while at the same time, tricking developers that they care by appropriating the communities work and extracting as much value out of Linux for free as possible, for their own benefit. Providing second rate hybrids masquerading as innovations, is all they can really do, to keep people locked into Windows. I stayed on Windows desktop for 20 years even wh…

Just like Apple and Google, the love childs from communities like HN.

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#109

Post by pjmlp »

juliand wrote: post #52
piggycurse wrote: post #25

Why is this blog post so negative? Microsoft are trying and giving all of the developers the tools to help affect the project along the way. The Terminal project was only announced 1 year ago[0]. As I understand it, they had to more or less split how the whole conhost.exe work in order to allow Terminal to even exist. The settings UI is far from sexy, but they're working on it[1]. I think it's impressive to know that…

I feel like the author is nitpicking over small issues just because it's Microsoft. They already admitted that they were wrong about Open Source and even though there is room for improvement, I'm happy that they are supporting power users more and more.

Yep, if it was Apple or Google it would have been written in another tone most likely.

Re: What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

#110

Post by pie_flavor »

abraxas wrote: post #92
zaphar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1995 this might have been a true statement. In 2020 Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall and realized that to stay at all relevant they need a seat at the table for cloud services. The only way to succeed at that is to win over the ultimate power user, developers. WSL{1,2}, Windows Terminal, SQL Server on Linux, too many intiatives to count all focused on catching up to the reality that webservices and infra…

Microsoft feels very schizophrenic at this point. On the one hand I think there exists a faction that wants to move more into the open ecosystem. On the other though there appears to be an entrenched faction that's hell bent on retaining as much proprietary status quo as they feel they can get away with. Thus the command line is still incompatible with any Unix shell, the SQL syntax subtly different to make it a pain…

You take for granted that it should be Windows conforming to Linux. Why shouldn't Linux implement Winsock and COM and have Linux-specific PowerShell cmdlets and so forth? Windows dominates the desktop market more than Linux dominates the server market, and one of those wants 'cross-platform software' more than the other.
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