“elevate the command-line user experience on Windows.”
If I were an engineer in Apple's OSX group I would see this as the horde amassing an army on the border. Bit by bit, Microsoft is going down the checklist of why someone would use a Macbook pro rather than a Windows laptop for their daily driver and erasing the advantage (or at least mitigating it to the best of their ability).
This will never convert the die hard OSX fans to use Windows laptops, like the OSX features could never convince die hard Windows users to use Macbook Pros, but the real prize here is the large bulk of users who aren't die hard Apple or Windows fans and just want to get their job done on one laptop reliably.
Apple's latest earnings report re-iterates that they aren't investing in the Macbook Pro or OSX in any meaningful way. Microsoft's success with the Surface Pro series against the Macbook Pro has shown that good electrical engineering can be bought and if the software is good enough, it can remove the last objections to the Windows laptops.
I see Linux as a big loser here too as the opportunity for a Linux desktop, for the bulk of the users, recedes further into the distance with two capable, and supported, offerings from larger players to choose from.
I've got one of everything it seems, and I had a Macbook Pro as my daily driver starting at Google in 2006 through my exit from IBM at 2015. I bought a SurfaceBook when they announced them for the drawing experience and laptop that had more capability than my Macbook Pro. I then tag teamed between them until I got the Surface Pro 4 with the same drawing experience, but lighter than a Macbook Air and with WSL and a third party X server a decent Linux/UNIX like development environment.
I still haven't replaced my Macbook from 2015 with the various things that Apple has thrown out there, the keyboard issue, the track bar issue, the lack of drawing, the lack of any compelling reason to upgrade. I still use it for Xcode for the iPad app I am doing in my spare time but use it less and less.
The new terminal will make it easier to not use the Macbook. If Microsoft starts bundling an Xserver for the occasional windows app it would make it even easier to stay on their platform.
I can't tell if Apple sees this as a threat to their business, or just doesn't care anymore about that part of the business and so they are willing to cede it to Windows as the "portable" development environment supported by an enterprise vendor.
I've been using WSL for a while now (with Docker running through Docker for Windows but accessible through WSL). My whole dev environment is based on running tmux / Vim in it.
I don't want to start any flame wars but I happen to do a lot of pair programming sessions with people (I'm a freelance dev) and a number of people have said they were jealous of my set up and are thinking about a Windows laptop for their next upgrade. Not because my set up is special or super cool, it's just their Mac set up is all sorts of broken and buggy. I can hear legit sadness in their voice.
You don't need MS to bundle an Xserver by the way. Just download VcXsrv for free https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/ and be up and running in a few minutes. I use it mainly for flawless zero configuration clipboard sharing between Linux apps running in WSL to work with my Windows clipboard, but graphical apps run ok too (I even tried running i3 through it which was usable but too limiting with multiple monitors).
I guess I just wanted to really say that Linux based / Docker development on Windows is very much possible even today on the stable version of Windows 10, and WSL v2 is just going to make it a lot better than it already is.
I haven't been this excited over a new OS / OS feature since Windows 7 was first released.
Only problem is the June release is for insiders, not stable, and insiders requires sharing A LOT of private info with Microsoft (unacceptable IMO). It might not be until October 2019 or even April 2020 before this hits the stable channel of Windows 10. Doh.
> their Mac set up is all sorts of broken and buggy. I can hear legit sadness in their voice.
I'm normally very happy with the dev experience on my 2016 MacBook Pro. I run iTerm2 (multiple split panes in a window), zsh/ohmyzsh, homebrew, and VSCode. The new APFS filesystem is insanely fast, especially when combined with VSCode's ripgrep-based text search. I watch my Windows-based colleagues start a VSCode text search in our repo and it takes 10-15 seconds to complete. Me - it's usually less than 5 seconds and often instant. Also, moving/copying/deleting large directories (i.e. 25k+ files) is unbelievably fast.
So macOS is great, in my opinion. But I'm often frustrated with this machine: (a) the keyboard is unreliable - certain keys develop habits of not responding (the `fn` key is currently driving me round the bend), (b) it crashes every time the battery runs low, and (c) my corporate policy installs Sophos which sometimes slows it to an absolute crawl.
From many developers' perspective, Windows' greatest downfall is that it's, well, still Windows. There is so much legacy to maintain, and so many ways that it differs from macOS and Linux at low levels. WSL and the new terminal/PTY are making inroads, but if Microsoft would only fork Debian and build their own supported distro, I can guess that's where we'd all be going very soon. What if they forked Wine as well and built a supported Windows compatibility layer on top?
> The new APFS filesystem is insanely fast, especially when combined with VSCode's ripgrep-based text search.
I think this must be due to the NVMe drives they use in MacBook Pros. APFS has some performance overhead that makes it slightly slower than HFS+ (but I do think you get other improvements, when copying files etc.).
I own a 2014 MBP I use as my main work laptop. I also own a desktop running Windows 10. I currently maintain a VSCode dev environment for my coworkers who all use Windows.
We switched from XAMPP and Eclipse for PHP development to WSL with VSCode and so far the transition has been really good. The only problem is that OS X still has a way better free MySQL client in the form of Sequel Pro compared to Windows which only has MySQL Workbench and HeidiSQL for the free options. I wish there was a better SQL client we could use.
Hey Nick. I'm the PM for Windows Terminal, and formerly, WSL:
Thanks for your thoughts on WSL & the new Terminal.
Re. release mechanisms, etc: Terminal will be delivered via the Store so we can ship out-of-band.
We're aiming to deliver new Terminal preview builds every 2 weeks or so which, since we're delivering via the Store, will auto-upgrade everyone soon after each release.
Re. Insiders: We do NOT gather any personally identifiable information. We only collect anonymized statistics about some of the features you use and/or issues you experience. Why? To ensure that we can find and fix issues as effectively as possible.
For example, with WSL, we collect the number of times an un-implemented syscall is called, or # of times a syscall returns an unexpected error. We couldn't care less WHO experiences these issues, only how OFTEN they occur. This info (esp. combined with bug reports in our repo, etc.) has been essential in helping us prioritize which syscalls are being called, which we've implemented, which are failing, and thus, which we need to pay attention to. Without this info, we wouldn't have been able to make WSL as good as it is.
We understand the community's concern about data collection - heck, EVERYONE should be - but in the general scheme of things, I think it fair to say that Microsoft's telemetry data collection is pretty well contained and is not egregious.
The last time I tried to install insiders it mandated that I sign into Windows with a real Microsoft Live account, which requires an email address sign up.
Where as the stable version of Windows allows you to create an offline account.
If I sign in with a Microsoft Live account, now you can associate my email address to my OS usage stats. Isn't that the definition of personally identifiable data?
It mentions "User ID -- a unique identifier associated with the user's Microsoft Account (if one is used)". It also mentions collecting a bunch of low level network data that look questionable, such as IP addresses flowing through network devices. Isn't that saying "logs every website you visit"?
Then it mentions it logs every app I open and how long it was opened for, and even what I search for in those apps. I didn't go through the whole list in detail but that was what I saw in a 60 second scan of the page.
But on the topic of WSL, are you saying if we run Windows stable we'll be able to get and continuously update WSL v2 from the store? That would be neat.
I'm on OSX and I have to have a docker container up and running in order to do development. GNU v. BSD tooling just isn't cutting it, and that's actually (IMHO) what's stealing market share from OSX.
They got windows+linux users in the first place by pre-installing curl+ssh, now their version of ls, find, and bash are all holding back those same windows+linux users.
I use homebrew to install updated versions of gnu utilities. Sometimes it doesn't symlink them into /usr/local/bin because of potential conflicts with preinstalled versions, but you can override that by adding them to $PATH in your .bashrc or .zshrc - it provides the command to do so in the console.
Yeah it's kind of funny that Windows now does a better job at "being" Linux-like than MacOS.
Another example is Ansible. Since my entire dev environment is in WSL and WSL is running Ubuntu 18.04, I can reuse all of my exact Ansible roles that I use on a production Ubuntu 18.04 server. They work just the same in WSL, so setting up my dev environment involves nothing more than reusing roles I've created for production.
I find Microsoft also deprioritizing Windows, as mentioned many times here on HN its a mess with settings everywhere and a total mix of different paradigms. Ads? I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows. I actually use linux as my daily desktop environment for the first time in my life because Windows just feels so split to me. Using ubuntu feels like Windows used to feel, and the native package managers are just amazing compared to something like homebrew. That is my experience now, ymmv and all that
> I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows.
Each of the last few major updates have added more and more control over this. The latest release is allowing even more user control.
Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless.
At some point MS, as the maker of the largest consumer OS, has a responsibility to patch critical vulnerabilities. Balancing the need to keep users secure with the inconvenience of a reboot, and the feelings of lack of control that come with it, is not an easy task.
On the opposite side, I've been frequently annoyed when Windows, unable to install an update, turns my computer on in the middle of the night, fails to install, and keeps the machine on. Lovely way to waste electricity, error messages are silent, and I had to run a command line power management tool to determine why my machine was waking up every night at 1am.
> Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless.
Except for all the work it destroys in the process. Many productive workflows can't just be closed and restarted at random - pretty much anything in a terminal, for example. This new one seems great, but it can't be any different in that regard, as it has to run the same command line tools.
Reboots are a reality and they are never going to go away on this architecture.
Effort should be spent on resuming where you were after a reboot.
Some things cannot simply be resumed, I know. However, some things can.
There is an attitude at my workplace which I can only summarize as "I automate anything that helps my customers, and I will not automate anything that helps me."
We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots?
Too few people have heard of the "screen" command maybe. I was using it 20 years ago to reconnect to terminal sessions. I'm told that tmux does similar things, but I don't know if that's true.
Apple has no problem with the rate of people updating their phones and laptops, but still respects user choice. It's a simple thing to do, MSFT just chooses not to do it in a paternalistic manner. Not to mention how MSFT doesn't respect user privacy to the same degree as apple does.
The iPhone does get annoying about updates, but it always is still up to you when it happens.
So your contention is that Microsoft decided to deliberately annoy its customers, and presumably many of its own employees, by forcing updates for no good reason?
Sorry, but I don't buy that. If Microsoft did this, I think it was for a reason. It's very easy to sit on HN and opine about how Apple can persuade iPhone users to upgrade. But we're not the ones at Microsoft with the job of dealing with the reality of millions upon millions of desktop computers that simply aren't ever being patched, no matter how hard we prod our users, with the result that they are being exploited en masse, used for criminal purposes, and as a result our reputation is getting trashed and governments and other powerful actors are demanding we do something to fix this problem.
Microsoft has caused me more damage with their paternalistic attitude than any malicious software ever did.
They may have all the reasons in the world, but Windows is objectively worse for me (and I believe other power users) in this regard than other OSes.
I'm not sure why you think it's a good idea to defend a company that takes away _your_ control of your computer, and how the other computers having been exploited makes you feel better about losing _your_ work (when you are presumably qualified to avoid and/or detect being exploited on your own). Perhaps you're lucky to not have had trouble with this yet?
> The iPhone does get annoying about updates, but it always is still up to you when it happens.
Hah, say that to my iPhone - every time there is a new update it automatically downloads it (further crippling my already low storage) and keeps asking me for my passcode every few hours. One wrong tap and there goes my phone for the next 10-15 minutes.
A) When it thinks it is not in use, not so easy to predict.
> To be fair, how could you have known that? It only says so when asking for your passcode, after all.
Yes, but it actually presents the prompt twice, and one wrong tap reboots the device with no way of aborting the process which on a good day takes 10 minutes on my phone.
No, on my iPhone, it will insist on downloading the update, and the ONLY way to stop it (as confirmed by the "geniuses" at the Austin Domain Apple Store) is to immediately go into storage management and delete the update. This will only stop it until the next time (usually no more than a week or two) that iOS decides to download it again and ram the update down your throat. I'm getting really tired of doing this, especially since Apple's updates have a solid history of slowing performance, so I really just don't want them, in most cases. (I don't have a newer model iPhone, so most of the fixes, which address newer hardware, are meaningless to me...)
> We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots?
Because if I leave something running over night, and Windows reboots without asking me because it thinks it can resume the task, and Windows is wrong, then I have to wait until the next evening.
I would have no problem with any of this stuff if Microsoft gave the user control. They don't, and the steps they've taken so far don't go nearly far enough.
In macOS, apps tell the OS whether they're capable of perfectly restoring their state after a reboot.
If you, or the system, initiates a reboot/shutdown, and all apps that you have running are such apps, the reboot will just happen, with no further confirmation.
If, however, any app that you have running does not assert that it can be perfectly restored after reboot, then the OS will pause the reboot process and prompt the user to confirm that they want to shut down said app. If the user says no, the reboot is aborted. If the user does nothing (or isn't there to respond), the computer just stays stuck on that prompt forever.
I don't see anything wrong with such a "conservative" auto-detection system, personally.
Windows implements it in exactly this same way though. If all apps report that they can handle it gracefully, it reboots, otherwise you get a similar prompt.
But Windows will reboot for an update even if an app isn’t “reboot aware”. So I can be encoding videos or downloading a large game and it will just reboot, and I’ll wake up to the task not done.
The latest features I see in Windows Update seem to give the user total control. Am I mistaken? Maybe it's because I'm running a more expensive SKU? I can defer updates for 7 days, get extra notifications for reboots further in advance, and put myself in a channel that sees very few updates.
For a while now, users have been forewarned about a reboot being needed because of an update for at least a day, in my experience. Most of the time it is multiple days.
It's not like it hits you without warning. You also have the ability to manually reboot whenever you like(!) and prevent surprises that way.
It doesn't give you a warning if your computer has been turned off for an extended period beforehand (for instance, if you're dual booting and Windows isn't your main OS.)
It does for me. Updates are no surprise for me, and I honestly don't understand what the big deal is. They're literally never a surprise to me and I am given many days notice.
Screen and Tmux can help a little, but not much (if my work involved stable configurations of tabs, I could save maybe 2 minutes of setup per reboot). Unless you're proposing running all command line tools only on remote servers, which won't work with local files.
I think the problem already has a solution: no automatic reboots. Tell me it's needed and I'll sigh, do what I need to to save my state, then do it myself.
Just this morning I got a pop up on my windows computer with a 30 minute countdown to update time.
Which I know will fail - my laptop has been failing to update for the past year or so, but windows still insists on restarting my computer so it can fail the update again.
_Sometimes_ using the "defer updates for a month" will work. Other times, windows will completely ignore it and restart in the middle of my work day.
What you seem to ignore each time when doggedly defending MS is that this is not some checklist of grievances towards them, that once "fixed" will make everything be just fine again. No, Microsoft have proven that they couldn't care less about the privacy or concerns of large parts of their customer base.
Windows 10 telemetry is not an oopsie or one time thing. It's an entire saga that got wide press coverage every time Microsoft was playing dumb, diverting attention or making up excuses and generally being asses.
Windows 10 updates completely ignoring the wishes of the owner of the PC is not a one time thing either.
Microsoft has simply lost respect for its customers, it thinks it can throw some open source bones over the fence to keep the nerds happy and switch to SaaS, this time copying Google instead of Apple. They deserve zero respect for that, no matter how many terminals they include in their OS.
The negativity on this site towards people who express any opinion beyond the herd is making this site a groupthink echo chamber. This karma system has failed.
It isn't accurate to describe HN as pro- or anti-Microsoft (or any $bigco or $bigtopic). It has a wide range of users who feel different things. The comment above isn't representative. Its indignation-to-information ratio was too high to be a good HN comment, though.
Totally agree. I've largely quit commenting here at all because of it. I always thought gross polarization of topics would never come to HN, but here we are.
And the result is that the comments are really of very little use anymore. Time was they used to be enlightening.
Too bad Paul Graham doesn't give a rat's ass. He has the opportunity to create something beneficial to world society here but doesn't care to put in the money and thought to figure out how to make it work.
W10 has seriously fucked up updates. Nowdays its more like - will I be able to use computer AT ALL after the update then anything else. Not to mention problems to disable it, unlimited restarts etc.
Seriously, YOU DUDE, who lead this at MS - just go, get fired, whatever !!!
Yeah, the recent # of updates with critical failures has resulted in a huge loss of trust. I wouldn't touch an insiders build, I rely too much on my machine being stable. It is rather sad, a decade ago everything coming out of Microsoft was super stable, but of course it came out much more slowly.
The entire industry has moved to a "less testing, more releases" mentality. Not so bad for websites, where the damage is sandboxed by the browser, but IMHO it is unfortunate this mentality has pervaded everything.
I totally get rapid release cycles, I've lead teams that releases C++ code every 3 weeks! But we had a A+ solid test team backing up every one of our releases, and each of those releases got 2 weeks of testing done to them before they went to beta.
Best team I ever worked on automated every single bug that they have ever seen into a regression test. That mentality requires having a test team that is equal in size (and technical capability!) to the development team, and the current trend of "developer tests" tends preclude such thorough testing practices.
We live in a world where car entertainment systems can lock-up and reboot themselves and where headphones need firmware updates.
On the flip side, you have people now adays that are chomping at the bit to test out Ubuntu 19.04 and Fedora 30 in order to get all the awesome stability and performance improvements from the new version of Gnome. These days, it really seems to me that the only people taking the desktop really seriously are the major Linux distributions. People keep saying desktop linux seems to be waning, but I'll believe it when I see it. Every week it seems like theres a new forbes article or Linus Tech Tips video on desktop linux. Not that this will be the "Year of the Linux Desktop" or anything like that, but it really does feel as if some of the strongest advancements to desktop OS is happening in linux (Minus the hardware support for new monitors/graphics/peripherals)
> On the flip side, you have people now adays that are chomping at the bit to test out Ubuntu 19.04 and Fedora 30 in order to get all the awesome stability and performance improvements from the new version of Gnome.
And there are other people running Debian Stable.
I don't think there's anything wrong with Microsoft's fast release cycle, but I think there's lots wrong with forcing everyone on that cycle. Microsoft already makes LTSB/LTSC—why is it limited to enterprise customers? Microsoft seems to be afraid of people actually buying LTSC and preferring it...
I am really glad to hear that if true, altho I was never a desktop lover (using i3 mostly but just as a modern semi-tmux replacement, not using it on Windows at all except for wallpaper). One day I might be able to totally ditch Windows (hopefully, I do like it a lot, but Linux culture is something else).
Yes, almost every single bug (not cosmetics IMO) should have proof in the form of test. Not doing it ? Instant turn down for me.
But its not only about bugs, MS should not mandate new features on me, only security fixes. In one of my previous updates my camera stopped working so I couldn't use any IM any more. Tried to fix it for days in vain. Then latest update returned it so I realized that first time they simply turned it off by default (for paranoid people I guess that cover their camera with a tape; I found a setting after reading a changelog). Why ? WHy? WHY ? Why turning off camera FFS ? Or any other stupid decision like keeping windows.old for months with all those GBs of unused space ...
You are totally right about it - web apps need this, browser is their OS. Normal OS doesn't. Even phone doesn't. At least leave me an option.
> But its not only about bugs, MS should not mandate new features on me, only security fixes.
Eh, it depends.
Microsoft got seriously dinged in the press, and by customers, for their long release cycles. MacOS and all the mobile OSes, offered seriously cool new features on a regular basis! Windows looked stale by comparison.
And some of the new features are sweet, such as the new terminal! Heck having native OpenSSH support built into the OS is wonderful! Being able to iterate on search so it now actually works! The improvements to OneDrive and the underlying file system. These are all great features that have rolled out with Windows.
(Media controls from the lock screen, improvements to Windows Snap, better BT pairing.)
Meanwhile Android is set to kill file managers, and Google Music can't differentiate between differently named files that have blank ID3 tags, necessitating my using a file manager to play my MP3s. (That one seriously throws me for a loop, just show me the file name as a fallback!)
(I should just get around to manually adding ID3 tags, but how is a regular end user supposed to figure out what is happening?)
Honestly most of the time rolling Windows updates mean my OS just gradually gets better. I don't notice it unless things go wrong, but isn't that how it always is with software?
Make features. Make them optional, non-imposing and non-surprising on existing systems. Maybe do reverse on new installation. You can be nice and respect existing people choices.
> Meanwhile Android is set to kill file managers
Well, there is always Total Commander which has a decent music player too. But yeah, its like Exploder era again.
> And some of the new features are sweet, such as the new terminal! Heck having native OpenSSH support built into the OS is wonderful!
Argh... sweet new terminal 20 years behind everybody else. What else ? Notepad update ? Paint ? Some other completely granny stuff ?
Why is this integrated into OS update is beyond me honestly. Adopt decent package manager and update tools on its own (Chocolatey as an example). I don't need OpenSSH most of the time. When I need it, its `cinst openssh` away. Why is that a problem ?
Actually, I always cringe when OS updates brings awesome new "features". OS update should be all about kernel, file systems , drivers and other low level shit. Package manager can cover everything else.
> I don't notice it unless things go wrong, but isn't that how it always is with software?
It shouldn't be like that with OS. OS is not a typical software. Murphy always worked like a clock for me, so now, I only update OS (Linux too) when I am on vacation :) and have time to lose. Or I can revert ASAP (VM, BTRFS...)
One of the big things Microsoft has been working towards with Windows Core OS is an improved Windows Update system that installs updates in the background and requires less than a minute to restart once those updates are ready to do so.
How it works is very similar to how Android and Chrome OS do updates today. On those platforms, the OS runs in two separate mirrored partitions, and when an update is ready to install, the update is downloaded and installed to the offline partition that you're currently not using. When that's done, the OS will ask you to restart, and while it may look like you're just rebooting, what's actually happening is you're booting into the partition that just spent 25 minutes installing an update in the background.
Windows Core OS keeps system updates to under a minute.
It boots right up, as if there was never an update waiting to be installed, and that's because all the installing has already been done while you were busy using the other online partition. Now, you've booted into the partition where the update is installed, and the partition you were just in becomes the offline partition for newer updates to be installed to down the line.
This should solve one of the big issues Windows has when it comes to updates. Updates can usually take anywhere between 5 to 30 minutes to install, and even longer on older devices. Windows Core OS solves this problem by making it so the user isn't unable to use their PC for no longer than a minute. It simply restarts like normal, and you're back up and running again.
Windows Core OS is different from Windows Server Core.
Santorini is the codename for Microsoft's forthcoming 'Windows Lite' OS designed for laptops and 2-in-1s.
Microsoft is building out Santorini as the version of Windows Core OS that runs on consumer and education foldable PCs, laptops, and 2-in-1 tablets. It may even eventually show up on Microsoft's mythical Andromeda device. It's a new take on what Windows can be, introducing a brand new user experience that's a little more like Chrome OS and less like old-school Windows. It has deep ties with web experiences and puts universal Windows apps front and center, with the ultimate goal of having everything in the Microsoft Store runnable on Santorini.
Santorini features a centered taskbar experience, similar to that on the Surface Hub 2X. There's a simple app launcher that doesn't feature live tiles, which lists your installed apps from the Microsoft Store or pinned websites. I'm also told that Windows Sets has a pivotal role in the overall Santorini experience, with apps and websites running under tabbed windows that also get grouped as such in the taskbar.
> Windows Sets has a pivotal role in the overall Santorini experience
Didn't they say recently that Sets is not being developed, partly because it was too closely tied to non-Chromium Edge? Which makes me wonder how much else of that is still being developed.
Windows [...] turns my computer on in the middle of the night
This should be actually fucking illegal. Yet another nail in the Windows 10 coffin, then. It will never be on any of my machines. Never. The level of shit they think we will put up with is utterly outrageous.
I have cron jobs on my VM that auto restart services, and for managed VMs, providers reboot and install security updates w/o giving me any say beyond a certain point. Although warnings are given.
Windows has a slew of options. A giant dialog popped up asking me if I wanted to enable installing updates during quiet hours. I selected yes. I was given choices for when quiet hours are. The OS also has options to auto-detect quiet hours.
The idea is good, I just wish the implementation was foolproof. Then again the desktop it doesn't work on is ancient and has been updated from Windows Vista to 7 to 10, so it is a bit finicky. The various update mechanisms work fine on my other machine.
The "quiet hours" auto update is also the default way it always worked in Windows 7 home versions as well. I tend to delay Windows updates, but for patch Tuesday, Windows will override that and restart at 3am.
> I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows.
I've been using exclusively Windows 10, for 2 years at work and more at home, not once had I an uncontrolled reboot. Perhaps rebooting at least once a week help.
Apple has been making huge mistakes in their Mac strategy. From the outside it seems they got drunk on the iPhone success.
With the exception of the iMac 5K and maybe the Mac Mini, I'd say the complete Mac line of products is now in worse shape than ever. It started decaying around 2013 with the trashcan Mac Pro and the gradual death of the Apple pro apps (Motion, Aperture, Final Cut, Logic, etc).
Regardless of the mediocre state of Mac hardware I love macOS. Although I agree that Windows is in great shape now and is only getting better.
I hope Apple is changing course and it's only taking so long because it is difficult to steer a huge ship into a new direction.
Also, there is very little innovation in the OS space. While 10 years ago it fealt as if Apple was seriously pushing OS X, it seems to be more in a maintenance mode now. The only larger innovation was APFS, a welcome addition, but primarily developed for iOS.
The end of OSX was signaled by the iPad. When the iPad ended up just a large phone and not running a real OS for getting shit done, it was clear where Apple wanted to head.
The MacBook keyboard alone is causing me to rethink 20 years of Mac preference. Fucking sick and tired of spending $4,400 for a computer with a shitty keyboard and dealing with snotty “Genius Bar” people who act like it’s my fault that the keyboard is a fucking disaster.
I recommended the MacBook Pro for development and school purposes to family members and friends but am now in serious regret after keyboard issues developed in short time.
I like the older macbook pro keyboard, just before the keys became completely flat.
The keys were a concave curved shape so they were comfortable to your finger pads and tactile so that you could center your finger on they key by touch.
Instead of an X-server, it would be cool if Microsoft implemented a Wayland compositor that is fully integrated in the Windows UI. It would mean perfect hardware accelleration for Linux apps and probably a much better integration into the Windows desktop.
>If I were an engineer in Apple's OSX group I would see this as the horde amassing an army on the border. Bit by bit, Microsoft is going down the checklist of why someone would use a Macbook pro rather than a Windows laptop for their daily driver and erasing the advantage (or at least mitigating it to the best of their ability).
WSL and Hyper V(really docker for windows on top of hyper v) has gone a long way to stop me from switching to linux for development.
I still don't see any reason to not switch to Linux from MacOS. I love iTerm and Alfred and especially the unified keyboard shortcuts. I also thoroughly enjoy the MacOS window manager although not as much as I used to (I can envision a replacement). But there's just nothing Windows can offer me that Linux can't.
If you're OK with limiting your computer interactions to the 20th century, then yes, there's no reason not to run Linux directly. The most awesome thing about the WSL/Win10/Surface combo, though is that I get all the best features of Windows, including support for touch & pen, and all the best features of a real Linux box (which does make it way easier to keep your dev env like your deploy env.) I will never go back to a "caveman computer" that I can't write on to sketch and take notes in OneNote or similar apps. No Mac can offer that capability at any price.
Modern day computers are not where a large company like Apple should be investing its resources.
You forget that the battleground in their business is the smartphone, capitalizing on the gains in smartphones and accessories is what will make the most profit. Additionally Apple is well fomented against the PC market taking over, all over Silicon Valley, Macs (Unix) are a clear preference for getting work done.
Apple is so off the charts popular, that their events even take the world's attention. The glitz, the buzz, the beast marketing machine can't be defeated.
> If I were an engineer in Apple's OSX group I would see this as the horde amassing an army on the border. Bit by bit, Microsoft is going down the checklist of why someone would use a Macbook pro rather than a Windows laptop for their daily driver and erasing the advantage (or at least mitigating it to the best of their ability).
Does it matter? According to market share numbers osx/macos' is ca. 14%. Developers/others who care about terminal environment must constitute a tiny share.
Third-party, and not free, but if you want an almost single-click X experience with WSL today, this is as close as it gets. Basically just need to do DISPLAY=:0 in /etc/environment, and that's it.
Exactly. Microsofts obvious, deliberate and well executed attempts to strangle Apple by cutting off the developer pool they need to sell their live-style gizmos coupled with Apple management's apparent obliviousness that this is any threat at all (otherwise they would not impose additional unforced deterioration on their own developer system on top of whatever Microsoft is chipping away) makes one kinda wonder what's wrong with shareholder capitalism.
Aside from a bit of apex, I only use Ubuntu and chrome on my cpu 99% of the time. The fact that I can boot into windows and then press three keys (win u enter) means there's effectively no overhead (if we pretend windows doesn't just upgrade against your will). But I can still play apex. Afaik I can't do that on Linux and thus windows is justified.
I don't see this as a loss for Linux. I see it as Microsoft bridging a gap (albeit a gap they deliberately created) that Linux hasn't yet. If I could do it the other way around (Linux running windows) then maybe I would but when I created this setup some years ago I couldn't so... Yeah idk this way Linux at least gets to be a part of my life.
I don't see this as a threat to any Unix like operating system. In my 20+ years in IT, Microsoft has had many years to perfect their command line experience, but never did. They have a long way to go in terms of Unix like features that are part of the command line ecosystem of Unix land.
When I can do this in windows (unix command line): cat somefile.txt | sort | uniq > output.txt, then it'll become a threat. Otherwise, Microsoft should fork a version of GNU/Linux and port all of their apps and GUI. They need to stop trying, they had their chance but may never achieve equality when it comes to the Windows Vs. Unix/GNU-Linux command line.
Powershell is obscenely powerful, it is equal to anything Bash can do plus:
1. It sends objects instead of streams, so instead of relying on fixed width output and string splitting, you can specify which column(s) of output you want from a tool directly
2. It can pull data from all sources of sources, including databases, WMI, COM sources and more.
3. Fully plugged into automation for servers, rich auto-complete, and a native ecosystem that is designed to all work together.
4. It can call into .NET libraries
But even cmd.exe can handle outputting text and sorting it!
>Powershell is obscenely powerful, it is equal to anything Bash can do plus:
Yeah, modern shells should stop pretending that everything is text. That's ridiculous. Powershell is doing a good job here.
As for power, powershell is to weak compared to Python or Ruby, too few libraries and fancy stuff, at least on unices. Maybe it could compete with Racket, but Racket is a much nicer language IMHO.
Agreed - Since MS has open-sourced PowerShell, it really should get picked up and used by more folks in the Linux community - it seems like its mostly decades of bad blood preventing that, even though it's a clearly superior 21st century approach. My allegiance is to great tools, and I'm learning PowerShell b/c of this...
If you use aliases then its not nightmare. Use aliases, they are the same as on linux and even better (you can deduce them from the full name by standard).
my problem with powershell is that cmd.exe based workflows are not compatable, and it's workflows are sufficiently different from bash/cmd to make me avoid learning it. Why spend a few days learning pwsh if I can just use cmd now and move on to my next task.
Because even though you can do most things in cmd, it's just never been a very good tool? CMD is a bad tool that we learned to use b/c we had no choice (w/o loading an add-on scripting env of some kind). PowerShell has a learning curve, and I've delayed learning it for many years, but now is the time to do it, esp now that it's open-sourced and available on more and more Linux distros...
> When I can do this in windows (unix command line): cat somefile.txt | sort | uniq > output.txt
There are a lot of responses of the form "you can do this similar command in WSL/PowerShell/etc.," where that similar command will not run on a standard Unix-based system. I think that misses half of the point. One of the reasons a lot of programmers use OS X is specifically because you don't need separate sets of commands for the desktop and Linux cloud server (obviously, Linux gets even closer).
It's been possible to do a lot of stuff from the Windows command line for a long time. The problem has been that to do so effectively, many teams have to maintain a .bat alongside the .sh that will be used in production.
WSL runs Linux binaries on the NT kernel. That command executes in bash on Windows with no modification.
The opposite also works. Powershell has had a Linux port for a bit now. There's no reason you couldn't use use Powershell scripts to deploy to Linux servers if you wanted to.
In fact, you don't even need to be in bash - WSL also installs a Win32 binary bash.exe, that redirects to Bash inside your default Linux install (there can be several). Which means that you can do this in cmd:
Since bash handles pipes and redirection in this case, it preserves Unix semantics exactly. And since WSL can see all your filesystems (they're mounted under /mnt/c, /mnt/d etc), and bash.exe maps current working directory, this works in any directory.
This is much more tedious when you have to specify paths, because they have to be mapped explicitly, much like cygpath in Cygwin:
I would suggest you check out WSL (if you're running Win10, just install your favorite distro from the store).
Not only can you do operate your typical one-liners but if the package is basically command line driven you can just apt-get install it and go.
There is a remaining wart that I hit from time to time, if I have a git repo that I want to talk to both from the WSL window and from a Git Shell (Cygwin app), the line endings get tweaked. It can be managed but it is still annoying.
That is some serious BS - PowerShell is better then any other shell now. Its literally designed by UNIX people. Even your example is now shorter in PS then in bash.
If I were an engineer in Apple's OSX group I would see this as the horde amassing an army on the border. Bit by bit, Microsoft is going down the checklist of why someone would use a Macbook pro rather than a Windows laptop for their daily driver and erasing the advantage (or at least mitigating it to the best of their ability).
This will never convert the die hard OSX fans to use Windows laptops, like the OSX features could never convince die hard Windows users to use Macbook Pros, but the real prize here is the large bulk of users who aren't die hard Apple or Windows fans and just want to get their job done on one laptop reliably.
Apple's latest earnings report re-iterates that they aren't investing in the Macbook Pro or OSX in any meaningful way. Microsoft's success with the Surface Pro series against the Macbook Pro has shown that good electrical engineering can be bought and if the software is good enough, it can remove the last objections to the Windows laptops.
I see Linux as a big loser here too as the opportunity for a Linux desktop, for the bulk of the users, recedes further into the distance with two capable, and supported, offerings from larger players to choose from.
I've got one of everything it seems, and I had a Macbook Pro as my daily driver starting at Google in 2006 through my exit from IBM at 2015. I bought a SurfaceBook when they announced them for the drawing experience and laptop that had more capability than my Macbook Pro. I then tag teamed between them until I got the Surface Pro 4 with the same drawing experience, but lighter than a Macbook Air and with WSL and a third party X server a decent Linux/UNIX like development environment.
I still haven't replaced my Macbook from 2015 with the various things that Apple has thrown out there, the keyboard issue, the track bar issue, the lack of drawing, the lack of any compelling reason to upgrade. I still use it for Xcode for the iPad app I am doing in my spare time but use it less and less.
The new terminal will make it easier to not use the Macbook. If Microsoft starts bundling an Xserver for the occasional windows app it would make it even easier to stay on their platform.
I can't tell if Apple sees this as a threat to their business, or just doesn't care anymore about that part of the business and so they are willing to cede it to Windows as the "portable" development environment supported by an enterprise vendor.