4 ms·

>But the Windows Subsystem for Linux is very specifically targeted at developers, who should be using Windows 10 Pro. And because of the way it’s implemented, i

>But the Windows Subsystem for Linux is very specifically targeted at developers, who should be using Windows 10 Pro. And because of the way it’s implemented, it’s almost certainly not in keeping with the reliability, performance, and battery life advantages of Windows 10 S. The stratification of users like this always irritates me. I don't think "developers" should be a special class of users; today's curious kids are tomorrow's developers! But if you lock them out of their own systems, they won't even have a chance to get started.

jackmott 9y ago
kids who get these in schools will never get to tinker. this whole trend is a tragedy
- hdhzy 9y ago
  I agree. Most consumer electronics (phone and tablets) are non developer friendly - you cannot develop anything on them. I find this quote by Russell Kirchner to be really good: > They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things From https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/ https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/ There is also interesting observation made by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work [1] that teaching kids how to use iPads is counterintuitive as they - consumer products - are designed to be super easy to use and one should rather learn how to master hard things (e.g. programming). [1]: http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    Contrast that with an Apple II or a Commodore 64. You turn it on and you are inside a REPL in less than a second.
    - ryukafalz 9y ago
      As someone who didn't grow up with systems like that, I really wish I had. I was never really introduced to programming until high school, but I feel like I would've loved it at a younger age. GUIs are nice in many ways, but in general they seem to encourage consumption much more than they do creation. I feel like there has to be some way to build a GUI with the same kind of expressiveness as those early PCs, but I don't know how.
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        I recall seeing some big name in the computing world calling GUIs point-and-drool interfaces. And i can't help wonder if we ended up in this situation because the DOS CLI sucked, and the Mac didn't have a CLI at all. Thus anyone exposed to home computing back in the day things CLI is something nasty and borderline useless, and this mentality has transfered over to desktop _nix, where the CLI is quite the potent interface. Thus we have big name DE projects trying to insulate the users from the CLI, and coming up with ever more elaborate schemes of daemons and protocols to do what a few quick commands in a virtual terminal could solve. Yet time and again we see that the power-users and similar reject these elaborate GUIs and their plumbing for simple tiling WMs on top of an X11 session started from a CLI login to run a pile of virtual terminals (and the odd web browser).
        ams6110 9y ago
        The DOS CLI didn't really suck any worse than the CLI of contemporary machines such as Apple ][ or Commodore or TRS-80.
    - styfle 9y ago
      Today, that's the browser. Hit F12 and you are inside a REPL (the console). Hit "View Source" and you can learn how a website works. The fact that developer tools ship with most browsers is really cool and encourages learning in my opinion.
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        May have been the case back when sites were static HTML. Tells you jack all how a modern site do things, as so much is hidden away at the server end.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    > you cannot develop anything on them. Yes you can, iTunes has quite a few development environments to play with. Swift Playgrounds and Pythonista are much more powerful than what I could do on my Timex 2068.
- drdaeman 9y ago
  I'm not sure. It's artificially restricted to be barely usable. If kids aren't apathetic about the device but actually willing to use it, it's hard to imagine a chance they would cope with the limitations (they seem way too severe, compared with the usual locking) and won't research how to exploit it to get around them and get the device's capabilities to the fullest.
  - piaste 9y ago
    Also, piracy and kids go together like bacon and eggs.
- taneq 9y ago
  You can also get an Arduino or Raspberry Pi at a far more accessible price these days. It's not that kids are losing access to 'tinkerable' devices, it's just that not all of the many computing devices we use these days are freely reprogrammable.
  - misingnoglic 9y ago
    The question is - will parents buy their kids these things, and will they actively use them? I think the much more frequent case is that kids playing computer games stumble upon this command line thing and are really curious what's going on.
rbanffy 9y ago
Hopefully, they can just download a Linux distro and reinstall their laptop.
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  Sure, they can "just" do that - if they know how or are interested enough in the machine to learn, which is kind of my point. If kids grow up with machines that restrict their behavior, they'll come to accept those restrictions as the norm. Some will be curious enough to learn to install a new OS and such, but they'll be the exception and not the rule.
- EvanAnderson 9y ago
  I wouldn't expect so. Surely Secure Boot will be enabled with no option, at least on ARM platforms, for users to disable it. (This would be keeping with Microsoft's requirements for prior versions of Windows on ARM.)
tajen 9y ago
MS' goal is for kids not to learn the Linux subsystem, and focus on Visual Studio instead. I thought Visual Basic was the way to program on Win 95-2001 until very late. It landed me a crappy career start, despite starting at 7yo. Getting Windows, even for free, is a straight loss in the long term.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The guys getting paid to develop VB.NET at some of our customer sites are quite happy with their salaries.
  - qb45 9y ago
    Could it be that there used to be an oversupply of low skilled VB programmers and that nowadays JS is the new VB? I remember hacking simple VB apps as a self-taught teenager and I could probably get a job in it if there was an opportunity and if I didn't go to uni to learn other things instead. Today I suppose VB is not much different from COBOL - just an old language used in few systems here and there maintained by dedicated specialists. Or are there still new things built in VB?
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      On Lifesciences there are lots of researchers using VB.NET to write small applications to process data coming out from microplate readers. The industry for these type of devices is mostly Windows based, with drivers implemented in COM or Win32 APIs. So they get access to the SDKs and write small applications to process their data in ways that fit their workflows.
misingnoglic 9y ago
Honestly, I don't think windows is that bad of a system to hack on. Especially for kids, they're not going to be recompiling Linux, they're just going to download python and do "from turtle import *"
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  This is about Windows 10 S, though. Windows today is an okay system to hack on - and I say that as a Linux user who prefers to have even more control over my computer than Windows allows. Windows today at least lets you compile a program and run it - Windows 10 S will block you from running a program you wrote yourself because it's not "trusted".
  - bobsam 9y ago
    10s is aimed for education. There will be programming apps in the store.
    - qb45 9y ago
      Yes, some silly turtle, scratch and stuff like that. I can tell you that as a 10 yo I wanted to build "real" software with real tools (even if it turned out shit by actual real software standards), not toys. You would certainly find a hater in me if I was to go to school today.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jackmott 9y ago

kids who get these in schools will never get to tinker. this whole trend is a tragedy

hdhzy 9y ago
I agree. Most consumer electronics (phone and tablets) are non developer friendly - you cannot develop anything on them. I find this quote by Russell Kirchner to be really good: > They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things From https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/ https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/ There is also interesting observation made by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work [1] that teaching kids how to use iPads is counterintuitive as they - consumer products - are designed to be super easy to use and one should rather learn how to master hard things (e.g. programming). [1]: http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/
- rbanffy 9y ago
  Contrast that with an Apple II or a Commodore 64. You turn it on and you are inside a REPL in less than a second.
  - ryukafalz 9y ago
    As someone who didn't grow up with systems like that, I really wish I had. I was never really introduced to programming until high school, but I feel like I would've loved it at a younger age. GUIs are nice in many ways, but in general they seem to encourage consumption much more than they do creation. I feel like there has to be some way to build a GUI with the same kind of expressiveness as those early PCs, but I don't know how.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      I recall seeing some big name in the computing world calling GUIs point-and-drool interfaces. And i can't help wonder if we ended up in this situation because the DOS CLI sucked, and the Mac didn't have a CLI at all. Thus anyone exposed to home computing back in the day things CLI is something nasty and borderline useless, and this mentality has transfered over to desktop _nix, where the CLI is quite the potent interface. Thus we have big name DE projects trying to insulate the users from the CLI, and coming up with ever more elaborate schemes of daemons and protocols to do what a few quick commands in a virtual terminal could solve. Yet time and again we see that the power-users and similar reject these elaborate GUIs and their plumbing for simple tiling WMs on top of an X11 session started from a CLI login to run a pile of virtual terminals (and the odd web browser).
      - ams6110 9y ago
        The DOS CLI didn't really suck any worse than the CLI of contemporary machines such as Apple ][ or Commodore or TRS-80.
  - styfle 9y ago
    Today, that's the browser. Hit F12 and you are inside a REPL (the console). Hit "View Source" and you can learn how a website works. The fact that developer tools ship with most browsers is really cool and encourages learning in my opinion.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      May have been the case back when sites were static HTML. Tells you jack all how a modern site do things, as so much is hidden away at the server end.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  > you cannot develop anything on them. Yes you can, iTunes has quite a few development environments to play with. Swift Playgrounds and Pythonista are much more powerful than what I could do on my Timex 2068.
drdaeman 9y ago
I'm not sure. It's artificially restricted to be barely usable. If kids aren't apathetic about the device but actually willing to use it, it's hard to imagine a chance they would cope with the limitations (they seem way too severe, compared with the usual locking) and won't research how to exploit it to get around them and get the device's capabilities to the fullest.
- piaste 9y ago
  Also, piracy and kids go together like bacon and eggs.
taneq 9y ago
You can also get an Arduino or Raspberry Pi at a far more accessible price these days. It's not that kids are losing access to 'tinkerable' devices, it's just that not all of the many computing devices we use these days are freely reprogrammable.
- misingnoglic 9y ago
  The question is - will parents buy their kids these things, and will they actively use them? I think the much more frequent case is that kids playing computer games stumble upon this command line thing and are really curious what's going on.

rbanffy 9y ago

Hopefully, they can just download a Linux distro and reinstall their laptop.

ryukafalz 9y ago
Sure, they can "just" do that - if they know how or are interested enough in the machine to learn, which is kind of my point. If kids grow up with machines that restrict their behavior, they'll come to accept those restrictions as the norm. Some will be curious enough to learn to install a new OS and such, but they'll be the exception and not the rule.
EvanAnderson 9y ago
I wouldn't expect so. Surely Secure Boot will be enabled with no option, at least on ARM platforms, for users to disable it. (This would be keeping with Microsoft's requirements for prior versions of Windows on ARM.)

tajen 9y ago

MS' goal is for kids not to learn the Linux subsystem, and focus on Visual Studio instead. I thought Visual Basic was the way to program on Win 95-2001 until very late. It landed me a crappy career start, despite starting at 7yo. Getting Windows, even for free, is a straight loss in the long term.

pjmlp 9y ago
The guys getting paid to develop VB.NET at some of our customer sites are quite happy with their salaries.
- qb45 9y ago
  Could it be that there used to be an oversupply of low skilled VB programmers and that nowadays JS is the new VB? I remember hacking simple VB apps as a self-taught teenager and I could probably get a job in it if there was an opportunity and if I didn't go to uni to learn other things instead. Today I suppose VB is not much different from COBOL - just an old language used in few systems here and there maintained by dedicated specialists. Or are there still new things built in VB?
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    On Lifesciences there are lots of researchers using VB.NET to write small applications to process data coming out from microplate readers. The industry for these type of devices is mostly Windows based, with drivers implemented in COM or Win32 APIs. So they get access to the SDKs and write small applications to process their data in ways that fit their workflows.

misingnoglic 9y ago

Honestly, I don't think windows is that bad of a system to hack on. Especially for kids, they're not going to be recompiling Linux, they're just going to download python and do "from turtle import *"

ryukafalz 9y ago
This is about Windows 10 S, though. Windows today is an okay system to hack on - and I say that as a Linux user who prefers to have even more control over my computer than Windows allows. Windows today at least lets you compile a program and run it - Windows 10 S will block you from running a program you wrote yourself because it's not "trusted".
- bobsam 9y ago
  10s is aimed for education. There will be programming apps in the store.
  - qb45 9y ago
    Yes, some silly turtle, scratch and stuff like that. I can tell you that as a 10 yo I wanted to build "real" software with real tools (even if it turned out shit by actual real software standards), not toys. You would certainly find a hater in me if I was to go to school today.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]