Live data from Hacker News

Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

dev.windows.com

331–340 of 390 posts

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#331
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK so let's take your example from the perspective of a Linux user trying to use Windows 10...

So I want to share out my external ext4 filesystem from Windows 10. There are no options. I'm done.

Sure, an ext4 tool exists for Windows on x86 but it will not work on ARM. Probably won't work on Windows 10 in general anyway.

Even if I could get Windows to mount the drive I still have the hurdle of NFS (or sshfs or other options) to overcome. Windows Server 2012 ships with old school NFSv3 support but regular desktop Windows does not. That means finding and downloading a 3rd party tool.

In the past I've solved the problem by using openssh under cygwin but let me tell you: getting openssh server setup and configured in Windows, starting on boot is much harder and more complicated than getting Python 3 running on Raspbian (the latest version of which actually has Python 3 in the repos).

There's another thing I want to point out: The Python 3 problem you experienced has already been solved but I don't see the ext4 (or any other common Linux filesystem) being supported by Windows any tine soon. It won't be solved because Microsoft has no interest in interoperability and the closed nature of Windows means it is difficult for 3rd parties to solve for the rest of us.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#332
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

I find it strange that Microsoft is trying to pitch Windows as an OS for Internet of Things projects running on ARM processors. Microsoft's primary strategic asset, the Win32 API (and specifically the large number of x86 Windows apps), is useless for this use case. And it seems to me that Windows would be quite heavyweight compared to a stripped-down Linux-based system. I guess they're desperate.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#333
post #330

IoT devices running Windows 10. So I guess my coffee machine will also have the blue screen of death (BSOD) now. Jokes aside, strategic move by Microsoft. The new CEO has some interesting stuff in mind indeed. Can't wait for the build conference where they open the HoloLens dev tools.

That's not a joke: quite a few coffee machines around the Microsoft campus run embedded Windows, including one in the recruiting building's reception lounge.

Have these windows coffee machines ever produced the bad coffee of death though?

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#334
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

But it will run Windows 10 and Windows Universal Apps: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheNewRaspberryPi2WillRunWindo...

That guy just links to the MS blog as his source. The Windows IoT page mentions that they intend to support the Universal App model, but for now it's just C++/Arduino. There's also no UI. http://ms-iot.github.io/content/WelcomeAndFAQ.htm

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#335
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"miles ahead of Windows for research" For example, only 2 of the currently fastest 500 super computers run Windows and 1 of them is owned by Microsoft. All of the others run Linux or Unix. "Since when are 25-year-old command-line shells research products?" The shell is a researcher's best friend as they have always been (and will be for the foreseeable future) the direct interface between data and the user. I honestl…

REPL are way superior as shown in any Xerox PARC OS.

And shells are indeed REPLs (in the sense that they run a loop in which they read, evaluate, and print things).

Though to be fair, REPLs for languages like MATLAB or Julia are likely far more useful from a scientific standpoint than a typical shell (which is more useful for system administration).

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X is free now on the condition of using only Mac hardware. Windows is the only OS that isn't free and their market share has been gobbled up by Apple in the last decade or so. I think the only place where Windows is still pricey is the enterprise, but Apple has made it a point to give away their OS completely free to everyone. Apple got out of the server game mostly because Linux has and will take over in the long…

>OS X is free now on the condition of using only Mac hardware. By that metric, Windows is also free if you buy a Surface. >their market share has been gobbled up by Apple in the last decade or so Today I learned that going from 5% to 7% marketshare is gobbling up a rival that has 90%+ marketshare.

> By that metric, Windows is also free if you buy a Surface.

There's a difference between Microsoft's model (using a hardware product to better market a software product) and Apple's model (using a software product to better market a hardware product). Microsoft is a software company first and foremost, while Apple is a hardware company first and foremost.

That's the root cause of the reason why your particular comparison isn't exactly valid: that OS X is not at all designed to work on hardware that wasn't built by Apple (and, indeed, getting OS X to work on non-Apple hardware requires a modified OS X and installer on top of matching the hardware of a Mac almost perfectly).

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use linux for research for several reasons. The most important reason is that I own several high performance computing resources that need to run code with as little interference from the OS as possible. Furthermore I need these machines to share a file system and I need to be able to set it up myself with little IT experience. For my purposes Linux is dead simple to use, well documented (most of the time), and doe…

This. Basically, Windows for scientific software is as bad as Linux was for 3D FPS gaming fifteen years ago. Just ask anyone who has tried compiling anything scientific under Cygwin. And don't get me started on MS's own compilers. They STILL don't support C99, a sixteen year old standard for one of the most important programming languages!

I thought most of the scientific computation is written in Fortran. Anyways, I have used a big closed source scientific computation package several jobs ago to conduct experiments. The entire stack was running on windows at the time, but the operating system really did not (and does not) matter. I agree with you that MS compilers should support C99 but it has very little to do with how useful windows is for scientific computing. (Worst case scenario you can use an opensource compiler).

I think the reason why the top 500 HPC clusters are using linux is the price of the operating system and not the functionality.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#338
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I even mentioned libc. There is more to an operating system than a kernel. In fact, this was an important part of my early computer education: when I was 12 (1994) I bought a copy of Slackware Linux because it had a free compiler (even Turb…

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 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.

There was certainly a significant Windows (and DOS) demoscene, but to say it was exclusively built on Windows is about as far as the truth as one can get. Emphasis on Windows really only picked up in the late 90's; throughout the 70's, 80's, and early 90's, most of the demoscene, game development, etc. revolved around non-Windows platforms (particularly BASIC-running toasters in the 70's-80's, followed by Amigas and Macintoshes throughout the 80's and early 90's).

Windows 95 was the start of Windows becoming more popular for game development and multimedia production, but it took quite some time for Windows to displace the rest of the market (through Microsoft's monopolistic tactics, but that's another story). Until that point, there was DOS, but it was one of many contenders with relatively-equal footing only as far back as the late 80's at the earliest, before which DOS was more the purview of businesses buying IBM PCs alongside their IBM mainframes (in other words, about the most uncool computers one could possibly own). The reason DOS eventually caught on was very much because of how "open" (comparatively-speaking) it was compared to, say, Mac OS; the same subculture of BASIC programmers from the Commodore 64 days could make an easy transition to a similarly-minimalist environment requiring a lot of user intervention and therefore customization opportunity, much like how the world of GNU/Linux had been all the way up to the mainstream adoption of Android (and still is, though it's no longer an absolute necessity to be able to tinker with one's system like it was in the first half of the 2000's).

This isn't to mention that Windows didn't fully penetrate the educational market until well into the 2000's; most schools had a large quantity of Apple hardware still in use, thus influencing educational development. This was much stronger when the idea of a "demoscene" was still really relevant.

Now, the cracking world might have been different (I know DOS was a strong contender in the BBS subculture), but the latter two are very much not a product of Windows; far from it.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't we just establish that it's the system that kids already know more about?

Not kids. Teachers.

OK, but doesn't it follow that the kids would be more productive if the teachers know the OS and are able to help out?

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#340
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think you mean commodore, or atari. Windows gaming came a long long time afterwards. It is more advanced in some ways but it does not beget OS programmers, like an open source OS does. If OS programmers die out, we're in very deep trouble.

No, while nostalgic, the Commodore and Atari scene were tiny in comparison. Since the mid nineties people have learned graphics programming and reverse engineering primarily on Windows. It's not like OS programming is going away, but it has always been mostly a university thing. And you could say we already are in big trouble. Since the ecosystem for multimedia weren't (and isn't) very good on Linux a lot of qualifie…

> No, while nostalgic, the Commodore and Atari scene were tiny in comparison.

Uhh, no they weren't. They were the focus of home computing during that time period. IBM-compatibles running DOS (or, previously, CP/M) were still the purview of businesses needing personal computers.

The reason why BASIC-oriented systems like those of Commodore and Atari are "nostalgic" is because they were ubiquitous in households during their heyday, and contributed heavily to the same memes and tropes of video game design that are being recycled to this day in big-budget games running on Windows 10 64-bat Supreme Home Edition Republic-of-Gamers PC-Master-Race monstrosities with Core i9 processors and NVodia GeFarce 96000000GTXXX 16TB 525600-CLUTA-core EXTREME-GRASS-RENDERING GPUs and all the other baloney that's dominated the thoughts of gamers nowadays.

> Since the mid nineties people have learned graphics programming and reverse engineering primarily on Windows.

By your logic, the concept of the automobile was invented by Toyota when they came out with the Prius.

There's a lot more to the history of video game development, demoscene, etc. than just the 90's; you're leaving out literally half of those subcultures' very nuanced histories chronologically-speaking - and, in fact, opting to leave out probably the most important half.

Post reply on HN