Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux

Your IT/PC guys keep images with Visual Studio and SQL Server? Yes, please. It was a major hassle getting approved for the PARTIAL-admin account just to so I could install those things.

> Your IT/PC guys keep images with Visual Studio and SQL Server?

Well, I've known of shops where IT keeps complete role-specific (e.g., developer, etc.) or even individual-computer images rather than just generic base images. Or at least have IT track software installed per-user and handle rebuilds even if they use a generic base image. Where I work they don't, unfortunately, but I would never not call that out as a problem.

Common practices and good practices are often not the same thing.

Fair enough (and I say this as a Visual Studio user), but we should also note his aim was not to have an IDE. The IDE was not a goal, it was a means to a goal.

His goal, what he wanted to try out, was creating Windows Phone apps, and for this the big complex IDE is was a prerequisite, and this prerequisite caused him to fail reaching his goal.

Contrast this to other development tasks, like web-development, and the need for these complex tools went away and he could be instantly productive. Does that say anything about developing Windows Phone apps?

It's definitely not a direct apples to oranges comparison, but when making Windows Phone apps gets its complexity way beyond web-apps, that is entirely something within Microsoft's control.

I'm sorry, but comparing homebrew to apt or yum just incenses me.

Let's begin with the most glaring difference: source distribution vs binary distribution. Installing my GNU Octave takes under a minute with yum or apt but hours or days with homebrew or macports.

Let's also proceed with how none of homebrew, macports or fink is native to Mac OS X, but is some tacked-on thing that most Mac OS X users are unfamiliar with (yeah, most Mac OS X users don't even know that a terminal exists or what to do with it). It does not control the entire OS, but only some packages, which are going to be installed in /usr/local or /opt or /opt/local. And woe betide the users, the same Mac OS X users who just learned that their OS has a command line, if they decide to use more than one of these package managers. Conflicting packages strewn all over their filesystem! Great fun trying to figure out which Python distribution is getting run and which Python packages are getting imported.

While we're on the topic of Unix unfamiliarity, let's also talk about simplicity. The typical user sees the following when told to install Xcode and run this, run that, set these environment variables, modify their .bashrc:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/03/10/10598...

Now let's move on to "one day is a long time in brewland!" There is no promise of stability or attempt to make sure that all packages work together with each other. There is no stable distribution. If you're lucky, you might be able to check out specific git tags of each package, but this doesn't work for all packages, and you're expected to be updating your entire set of packages pretty much daily if you want to have "support". The instructions that worked yesterday for getting the software you want may not work today, because all of the packages moved under your feet overnight.

Let's finally also see what happens when they upgrade from one Mac OS X release to another: breakage everywhere. Some packages may need to be recompiled, some may no longer compile (hello there, LLVM bugs that prevent compilation of GNU Octave), or hours upon hours of copying or moving homebrew or macports trees around during an operating system upgrade.

Homebrew and macports are a parody of what Unix package management should look like, and fink doesn't have the maintainership that a GNU/Linux or BSD distro has.

I didn't say that and that wasn't what we were talking about.

The guy in the post said that he didn't want to install the crappy Lenovo software from the restore partition. If he had he could have saved the drivers and then re-installed.

If I wiped the machine and didn't have drivers on hand I would expect something not to work...with any OS.

You are clearly a Linux "advocate" and you don't really care about this except to the extent that you can denigrate Windows to make your "side" seem superior.

I don't use computers that way. I try to learn how things actually work. When they don't work like how I would assume they work, I make a note for next time, and move on. I don't see the failings of some nameless developer somewhere in the bowels of a company or an open source project as indicative of , or representative of, some larger plot or plan that impinges my freedoms, rights, or prerogative. It's just another thing in a sea of things to remember about working with imperfect man-made tools to perform other tasks that I'm actually interested in. The software that manages my disk access and video card doesn't convey a sense of righteousness to me and I don't identify myself by or through it.