3 ms·

> I’m not saying it’s not good enough for some, a lot of things in it still suck. The onus is on you to prove that this is true and endemic to the platform and

> I’m not saying it’s not good enough for some, a lot of things in it still suck. The onus is on you to prove that this is true and endemic to the platform and not your unfamiliarity with the workflows on Windows.

pfranz 7y ago
I'm not trying to start a flame war, here. I was seriously surprised. I get that some people love using Windows. I had a similar transition. I used DOS through XP/2000 heavily growing up. I worked jobs that used Linux and had a Mac at home until I had a recent job as Win10 was being adopted. I tried to give it my best effort. I got a book on Powershell and read it and researched. I was aghast that the same frustrations I had with XP and earlier hadn't been touched. I wish I had kept a log as I re-discovered them. * Nobody used PowerShell. I tried to push it, but then I realized I needed a BAT file wrapper to run PS1 files, anyway. I was hoping PowerShell would be a next-gen BASH, but having verbose flags is great in scripts, but horrible interactively. The system I was on was air-gapped and the documentation required an extra download on each system. * Man, Windows still updates a lot. Often requiring reboots. MacOS asks to reboot like twice a year (and doesn't force it). With Linux it's very, very rarely necessary to reboot. * I found window management awkward. I was coming from Linux where META+LMB moved Windows, META+MMB resized them. I tried the hot-corners shortcuts and other built-in things, I tried installing a few things. * When the UI is busy I still can't resize or minimize it? * Control Panel and other configurations were a huge mishmash of tacked on menus with a mix of old UIs and icons. * I really missed ssh-ing in to query and poke at stuff. RDP felt so heavy for small stuff that should be quick or automated. After a few months I toyed with WSL, but spent most of my time sshed into a Linux box using vim or bash when managing files or source code. Most of the small services I set up running in Linux. After a year and a half I left for a variety of reasons.
- banachtarski 7y ago
  Have you tried the new tiling window management support software offered by microsoft? (FancyZones) Nothing stops you from installing an SSH server also. Also, you can change the update policy (although that might be due to your IT).
  - pfranz 7y ago
    I haven't tried FancyZones. I left that job a couple years ago and haven't yet dug into tiling window managers. > Nothing stops you from installing an SSH server also. I didn't want to get too much into this in my previous comment because it has more to do with how the place was managed, then Windows itself. But it does speak to Windows out of the box. This was an air-gapped setup and they were fairly open to me making changes, but I was very careful about jumping in suggesting big changes since I had 0 practical experience managing Windows. They mostly started with Windows as it was installed when it was delivered. Windows 10 was fairly new and they were comfortable with 7. Things were managed with PDQ. Most things were done in an "artisanal" fashion (individually done in a simple or straightforward way). I was used to installing a bunch of software on a network drive and running it directly off NFS. I've been told at multiple places that's unfeasible with SMB because of performance. (I'm definitely not speaking to NFS or SMB as a whole here--just with this specific use-case) This also meant our rack of headless machines, when the power went out, had to be brought up individually since the disk checker was waiting for input before booting. I had on my todo list to change this, but it's difficult to test and roll out and doesn't come up often. Back to that question; it would have meant finding a third-party ssh and rolling it out just to appease me. I likely would have done it if I stuck around, though. Maybe in tandem with a full update to Win10. On that topic, though. Currently, I support Windows users who work from home. It's a bit odd you need admin privileges to create a symlink (I admit, that need mostly comes from trying to get feature parity with Linux/macOS), but detecting and running Admin rights is incredibly awkward [1]. We also need these non-technical people do to some port forwarding or to ssh into our Linux servers. PuTTy's configuration interface is horrid to describe to random people. Since you can't import/export configs we've looked at creating a Registry file with the right configuration, but it's not a trivial thing. For a few people we've had them install WSL, but it's a bit overkill to install however many Gigs along with Linux just to get an ssh client (and it's not an option for non Windows 10 users). [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4051883/batch-script-how-to-check-for-admin-rights https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4051883/batch-script-how...
    - banachtarski 7y ago
      I actually bounce between linux and windows very frequently so I may have just grown accustomed to how each OS wants to do things. For backend work, I definitely prefer linux, but working frontend (I'm a graphics engineer), linux still poses a lot of problems. For example, as much as I hate windows apis, the linux X11 system is insane (and no, wayland isn't ready yet). Also, the state of device and driver support is still much more streamlined on windows. If someone complains that something isn't working to me on linux, it can be much more difficult to understand why as a result.

pfranz 7y ago

I'm not trying to start a flame war, here. I was seriously surprised. I get that some people love using Windows. I had a similar transition. I used DOS through XP/2000 heavily growing up. I worked jobs that used Linux and had a Mac at home until I had a recent job as Win10 was being adopted. I tried to give it my best effort. I got a book on Powershell and read it and researched. I was aghast that the same frustrations I had with XP and earlier hadn't been touched. I wish I had kept a log as I re-discovered them. * Nobody used PowerShell. I tried to push it, but then I realized I needed a BAT file wrapper to run PS1 files, anyway. I was hoping PowerShell would be a next-gen BASH, but having verbose flags is great in scripts, but horrible interactively. The system I was on was air-gapped and the documentation required an extra download on each system. * Man, Windows still updates a lot. Often requiring reboots. MacOS asks to reboot like twice a year (and doesn't force it). With Linux it's very, very rarely necessary to reboot. * I found window management awkward. I was coming from Linux where META+LMB moved Windows, META+MMB resized them. I tried the hot-corners shortcuts and other built-in things, I tried installing a few things. * When the UI is busy I still can't resize or minimize it? * Control Panel and other configurations were a huge mishmash of tacked on menus with a mix of old UIs and icons. * I really missed ssh-ing in to query and poke at stuff. RDP felt so heavy for small stuff that should be quick or automated. After a few months I toyed with WSL, but spent most of my time sshed into a Linux box using vim or bash when managing files or source code. Most of the small services I set up running in Linux. After a year and a half I left for a variety of reasons.

banachtarski 7y ago
Have you tried the new tiling window management support software offered by microsoft? (FancyZones) Nothing stops you from installing an SSH server also. Also, you can change the update policy (although that might be due to your IT).
- pfranz 7y ago
  I haven't tried FancyZones. I left that job a couple years ago and haven't yet dug into tiling window managers. > Nothing stops you from installing an SSH server also. I didn't want to get too much into this in my previous comment because it has more to do with how the place was managed, then Windows itself. But it does speak to Windows out of the box. This was an air-gapped setup and they were fairly open to me making changes, but I was very careful about jumping in suggesting big changes since I had 0 practical experience managing Windows. They mostly started with Windows as it was installed when it was delivered. Windows 10 was fairly new and they were comfortable with 7. Things were managed with PDQ. Most things were done in an "artisanal" fashion (individually done in a simple or straightforward way). I was used to installing a bunch of software on a network drive and running it directly off NFS. I've been told at multiple places that's unfeasible with SMB because of performance. (I'm definitely not speaking to NFS or SMB as a whole here--just with this specific use-case) This also meant our rack of headless machines, when the power went out, had to be brought up individually since the disk checker was waiting for input before booting. I had on my todo list to change this, but it's difficult to test and roll out and doesn't come up often. Back to that question; it would have meant finding a third-party ssh and rolling it out just to appease me. I likely would have done it if I stuck around, though. Maybe in tandem with a full update to Win10. On that topic, though. Currently, I support Windows users who work from home. It's a bit odd you need admin privileges to create a symlink (I admit, that need mostly comes from trying to get feature parity with Linux/macOS), but detecting and running Admin rights is incredibly awkward [1]. We also need these non-technical people do to some port forwarding or to ssh into our Linux servers. PuTTy's configuration interface is horrid to describe to random people. Since you can't import/export configs we've looked at creating a Registry file with the right configuration, but it's not a trivial thing. For a few people we've had them install WSL, but it's a bit overkill to install however many Gigs along with Linux just to get an ssh client (and it's not an option for non Windows 10 users). [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4051883/batch-script-how-to-check-for-admin-rights https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4051883/batch-script-how...
  - banachtarski 7y ago
    I actually bounce between linux and windows very frequently so I may have just grown accustomed to how each OS wants to do things. For backend work, I definitely prefer linux, but working frontend (I'm a graphics engineer), linux still poses a lot of problems. For example, as much as I hate windows apis, the linux X11 system is insane (and no, wayland isn't ready yet). Also, the state of device and driver support is still much more streamlined on windows. If someone complains that something isn't working to me on linux, it can be much more difficult to understand why as a result.