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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

#111

Post by pie_flavor »

endogui wrote: post #60
Grumbledour wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic Features in separate packages means, many users will never use them, because they don't know they exist. Bulk renaming files for example is not something only power users do, it is something only power users can do because it just does not exist and/or is not discoverable for a normal user. And also as a power user, it is annoying to find a program for every basic thing the system should be able to do. On the o…

I can't be the only user who installs Cygwin just so that I can move files around, calculate hashes of files, and grep with regular expressions. Simple things Windows users don't get out of the box.

By what criteria? PS is installed on all Windows systems and does all of those things.

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

#112

Post by jpalomaki »

josteink wrote: post #71
fetbaffe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Windows Task Scheduler broken?

> How is Windows Task Scheduler broken? Fundamentally. Try to schedule a simple script to run once an hour, while the user is logged in. No other conditions. Nothing complex. Wait an hour and wait to see one window pop open running your script. Wait one work-day. Work on your machine. Observe 10+ executions of that script, in parallel, on the mark the script was scheduled to run once. Watch this get worse every day,…

Did you check "run task as soon as possible after scheduled start is missed"? And what about "If task is already running, then the following rule applies: Do not start a new instance".

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

#113

Post by jpalomaki »

kfk wrote: post #29

We are 30+ years and Windows Task Scheduler is still broken. Compare that to simple .txt files to schedule anything you need in Linux. Windows took the UI path for users and that's OK, but most of Power users are still much better off with text files and simple utilities (like crontab) that work. This type of ecosystem is completely broken on Windows, I don't think it can be fixed, it is too much of a paradigm shift.…

The Task Scheduler can export and import tasks from XML. There's also SchTasks.exe command to manage the tasks from the command line.

The UI can be a bit complicated, but on the other hand the Task Scheduler itself provides quite much functionality. You can for example trigger tasks based on events which are generated by Windows or applications (the same events that are visible in Event Viewer).

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

#114

Post by munchbunny »

dleslie wrote: post #104
munchbunny wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where has Cygwin or Git Bash been falling short? As far as I can tell, these days it's not particularly hard to assemble most of the Linux CLI environment in a Linux-like UX on Windows. And these days with process based isolation support on Windows you can even package the dev setup in a Docker container for easier setup.

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.

They're not deprecating WSL1 yet. You can still use it. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq#what-w...

But if you're looking for reasons, here are some officially stated ones. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-about

I/O performance and support for using Docker inside WSL seem like big ticket items. I'd agree with them that the trade-off of convenience sharing files between the two OSes for better support running Linux things in WSL is worth it.

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

#115

Post by munchbunny »

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…

I have trouble believing that Linux's demise is remotely possible at this point. Too many huge tech companies have made their beds with it for Microsoft to be able to change that.

Linux desktop has the opposite problem: it's always been niche for mainstream users because its app ecosystem has never been good enough and it's often finicky to set up, even if its support for developers has been great.

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

#116

Post by munchbunny »

Grumbledour wrote: post #16

I actually don't get Powertoys at all. They provide basic functionality I would not even class as for power users. Yeah, they are nice, they were nice in win95. Why do I need a separate Program 25 years later to rebind some keys or switch windows, yet every new win10 version tinkers with cortana? People say it would add "bloat", but somehow basic functionality beneficial to many users is bloat while candy crush and x…

Yup it seems pretty easy these days to just have PowerToys and the Sysinternals suite included by default. They're small footprint but they're all very useful tools for power users.

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

#117

Post by munchbunny »

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…

That really depends on what you consider "rest of the world".

A lot of companies, big ones, have their IT setups primarily on Windows. These are customers who make up a huge chunk of Microsoft's revenue. Linux is a small concern at best for them and is not the rest of the world.

What you call "schizophrenic" to me is the reality that Windows has massive user segments of consumers, developers, servers, and enterprise IT, and they all want different things, so Microsoft ends up making something for each group. Linux doesn't have that problem because, for better or worse, it doesn't have much of a footprint for consumers and enterprise IT.

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

#118

Post by jonnypotty »

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 can't belive that a shitty slow terminal impresses you as the work for 6 people for a year.

Go and look up how long it took one guy to create Unix.

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

#119

Post by zaphar »

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…

Expecting a company as large and with as deep a history as Microsoft to change without looking schizophrenic while doing so is unrealistic. Microsoft is a supertanker. When it tries to do a 180 it makes really big circle and takes a really long time to do it.

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

#120

Post by dleslie »

munchbunny wrote: post #114
dleslie wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where has Cygwin or Git Bash been falling short? As far as I can tell, these days it's not particularly hard to assemble most of the Linux CLI environment in a Linux-like UX on Windows. And these days with process based isolation support on Windows you can even package the dev setup in a Docker container for easier setup. I really don't get why they went the VM route with WSL2. It seems to totally wipe out any advant…

They're brittle as hell when installing additional packages. WSL1 is still brittle at the edges, particularly when attempting to use it instead of a VM to run services, but all of the compilation woes because Cygwin/MSYS/Mingw are special build targets _simply disappear_.

I got tired of having to find patches/hacks/bespoke branches of tools I find interesting just to have them work in half-baked POSIX environments.

If they think Docker is more important than seamless desktop integration then obviously developers like myself are not as important to them as sysadmins who want to run docker services, I suppose.

I really, really want a proper and seamlessly integrated Linux environment on my Windows machine.

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