10 ms·
Yes, one has been able to graft nix to Windows since NT; however, it's still like a third arm dangling off of C:\whatever. If Microsoft can make a POSIX layer
by tres 12y ago
Yes, one has been able to graft nix to Windows since NT; however, it's still like a third arm dangling off of C:\whatever.
If Microsoft can make a POSIX layer like OS X did -- one that ships with the OS and feels like it is part of the OS -- I'd be very, very interested.
I've been on OS X since Apple was nearly dead (still have my 10.0.6 CD somewhere around here). Before jumping on, I bounced from the promise of Linux distro to FreeBSD, to OpenBSD -- trying to find something that worked as a desktop environment. Once OS X was released, I knew I found what I had been looking for. It definitely wasn't because it was from Apple (back then, using Apple was being counterculture, if not somewhat risky as the business wasn't doing so well); it was because there was finally a desktop OS that had a POSIX layer and a GUI that didn't feel like a third arm grafted on to /usr/local/whatever.
I'm hoping that MS catches the drift that DOS is dead & can kill that sacred cow; I'd love to get a Surface tablet & develop for Windows Phone, but having to deal with DOS is like moving out of a house and trying to live in a tent. My experiences with Powershell haven't been all that much better. It's definitely not got the same problems as DOS, but in my experience it didn't implement the paradigm of a pipeable set of simple tools to accomplish singular tasks.
I'd love to see a POSIX compliant Microsoft OS. And to me, these recent changes bode well -- it seems that Microsoft realizes it must be a part of a larger ecosystem. The is the kind of OS I want to work with has this kind of thinking at its core.
- discordance 12y agoWhen you talk of DOS, are you referring to Powershell? There's an enormous difference there.