In my experience Cygwin works better for the "compile software targeted mostly at Linux users" use case, but Microsoft definitely pursued the "make Windows a Unix" approach. Sadly Interix saw limited adoption (probably due to pricing) and has been discontinued, so we're left with the user-space emulation approaches (like Cygwin).
They should really just buy cygwin and make it the default shell keeping powershell as optional. It's time for MS to acknowledge they need to catch up and be a little bit more interoperable with power users from other oses.
cygiwn is one of the first thing i install when I bring up a new windows box.
Powershell ties in much, much better to the Windows infrastructure than any POSIX-like shell does. Managing Windows revolves around managing long-running services, and sending off requests to them which return rich data objects. This is an entirely different problem set from managing processes and files.
Modifying Windows to be administrable through a POSIX shell would change what Windows fundamentally is. I'm not sure that's a great idea.
Personally, I enjoy working with Powershell much more than I enjoy working with Linux in the traditional way (through a shell), and I currently don't personally own a Windows machine.
I don't think a shell is a very good interface for direct use; it's entirely non-discoverable past man pages. It's a great interface for developing reusable tools, though. I strongly dislike having to use it directly, preferring to develop scripts that I can access from my text editor.
As a developer, I think what you want from a shell is different from what a Windows admin wants from their shell. The Windows admin wants to manage the services they have installed; the developer wants to manage whatever files they have in their source tree. I don't think it's particularly terrible that Windows should be bundled with a tool for administrating Windows, rather than a tool for developing new software.
1) I can install an unpopular Linux distro onto it (NO VM!).
2) I won't get serious issues on Linux, due to no drivers being found compatible, overheating, hybrid-gpu switching problems, touchscreen issues, jumping stylus, battery dead in <3h
3) UEFI isn't causing as much trouble, as I've heard.
4) The keyboard is much better than the crappy colored plastic it looks like. I want a high quality keyboard with backlight. I would pay $200 extra for that.
5) It has HDMI, USB3 and a way to increase the internal storage and ram.
@smrtinsert
Should, would, could. But they didn't, for about two centuries, sorry シ
There is so much hope in your writing, hope that Microsoft recognizes where it erred and where it did it right. Alas, there might be no such plan, because they haven't found a way to directly capitalize on that yet, or political/strategical/management reasons.
I don't have any prejudices against Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD and alternative OS users, but I like all of them. What makes me and probably others turn off the ears are hardcore evangelists of any kind just as well as fanboys/fangirls. This is not directed to you, you're ok check ✊ . I just want to say that, there are such people whom you can innocently ask, why they've installed Windows onto their Mac (for example) and all you get is arrogance and hatred plus a bunch of prejudices on how one can question the superiority of windows. On another case I talked with a Windows Phone developer and she was such a hard knock evangelist, I was kinda feeling attacked, just because I asked how she plans on integrating with the back-end software we've developed to deploy the final app to various app stores.
Re: 1, 2, 3: Those are Linux problems, not Surface ones. There are types of hardware that Linux is just poor at supporting. It's up to Linux devs and the component manufacturers to fix that problem, not Microsoft.
I found it pretty easy to put Linux on my Surface Pro 2. The problem is that once it's on there, it kind of sucks. Poor hardware support, extremely poor touchscreen UI.
> Piping programs into each other is okay, but once you start bundling it's all up in the air.
How does bundling mean combining it into an _executable_ file? Sure, this could be the case for an installer, but that one could also just download/copy the files.
In common usage (I've never heard it any other way in 24 years of software dev) "included in the same executable" means either combining the source files, or linking object files, or similar. "Bundling" means shipping together, packaging together and never, ever has meant "in the same executable". You do know that .zips .gz and other packages aren't "executable" in the sense used by the GPL, right?
The example of an installer can't be more unambiguous. I quote "No. The installer and the files it installs are separate works. As a result, the terms of the GPL do not apply to the installation software." No. Full-stop. GPL does not apply.
If an installer of GPL software doesn't have to be GPL then certainly unrelated software which happens to come in same disk/download doesn't have to be.
Yeah, njharman describes bundling as I understand it as a programmer. What did you mean by "bundling"? If it was "Packaging two programs in the same archive." or "Using Cygwin Bash to kick off our proprietary program.", then those activities are unambiguously permitted.
In my experience Cygwin works better for the "compile software targeted mostly at Linux users" use case, but Microsoft definitely pursued the "make Windows a Unix" approach. Sadly Interix saw limited adoption (probably due to pricing) and has been discontinued, so we're left with the user-space emulation approaches (like Cygwin).