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I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes

I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes this announcement. I also don't hold a grudge against Windows, I think it is a fine system for most people. However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Although .NET is slowly opening up, Windows is closed as ever. So, it does not actually let you check out how stuff works: looking up that function in the Python standard library, seeing how it calls libc, and then diving into libc to see how it is actually implemented. It's in Microsoft interest to keep kids in their ecosystem, which has been pretty much unproblematic in the nineties and before the smart phone revolution. As the RPi becomes more popular in education, it would be bad for them when kids see that there is something else that not only works well, but also allows them to do more. My fear is that teachers will now choose for Windows on the RPi, since that is what they know. And we are back to where we started: a fundamentally unhackable system. Now, if Microsoft would open up the core of Windows. I would be impressed. Now? Not so.

nmeofthestate 12y ago
"Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves" "Windows is closed as ever" Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. Seems to me Windows is a perfectly open enough OS to act as a platform for tinkering and learning about computers.
- beagle3 12y ago
  There have been quite a few projects that did hack the kernel and drivers directly. The majority of users are actually running XBMC on the Pi, and they don't care if it's linux or windows. But the early adopters do care, and they are all Linux people.
  - nmeofthestate 12y ago
    "There have been quite a few projects that did hack the kernel and drivers directly." Of course there are, but I was taking issue with Windows being unsuitable for a classroom - is it realistic to claim that teachers are getting children to modify and compile the Linux kernel in the classroom? No, that's silly.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I even mentioned libc. There is more to an operating system than a kernel. In fact, this was an important part of my early computer education: when I was 12 (1994) I bought a copy of Slackware Linux because it had a free compiler (even Turbo Pascal was expensive for a 12 year-old). At the beginning I just typed some small C snippets that I could find in books in the library. Then I started reading shell scripts and found out that a lot of the system is controlled through shell scripts and started writing my own. Then I started reading through the source code of libraries to find out how things were implemented. At some point I got a Minix book (I was probably 16) at a discount at a book store. I started comparing the theory I read there and tried to find out how e.g. the Linux VMM differed from Minix. Don't underestimate how important it is for a kid to have access to such information. Only a small subset dive deeply into the system, but they will be the hackers of the future. But you have to awaken the interest by making easy to dive in. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I think you underestimate how important access to the OS (in the widest sense) has been to the success of everyone from Google, Dropbox, and Facebook to the newest of startups.
  - bohol 12y ago
    I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I do think the trend of iOS, Android and similar Windows environments is troubling. But if they ship Windows 10 on the RPi with something like QBasic and Visual Studio it's probably just as good a learning tool as Linux. Or even a better one considering the rest of the application ecosystem.
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      > The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I think you mean commodore, or atari. Windows gaming came a long long time afterwards. It is more advanced in some ways but it does not beget OS programmers, like an open source OS does. If OS programmers die out, we're in very deep trouble.
- quonn 12y ago
  Plus, it's just another _option_. How can this possibly be a bad thing? You can of course still run Linux.
  - anilgulecha 12y ago
    I think this was answered. It's bad because teachers would push for a platform they presumably know more about -- Windows.
    - watty 12y ago
      And there's nothing wrong with that. Kids will be more productive on Windows and more likely be able to take those skills with them. How many kids need to know linux in the future? Here's what the Linux trend looks like: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux
      - aruggirello 12y ago
        'linux' is a single keyword, while GNU/Linux OS might show up as a wide set of different keywords, like ubuntu, debian, mint, arch, centos, rhel, fedora, gentoo, opensuse. Note that this is not the case with Windows, iOS, OSX. So, it would be interesting to see the combined interest of all those added to that of 'linux' for a more correct perspective - not considering Android of course, since it's not a GNU/Linux system. BTW it seems interest in Windows is also halving every ~10 years (though not as fast as 'linux'): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=windows http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=windows
        aruggirello 12y ago
        Edit: I was partly wrong; the matter is much more complex than that: interest in iOS and OSX might show up as interest in iPhone/iPad, and Mac/Mac OS; interest in Windows, besides any interest in 'surface', might also show up as a generic interest in 'PC' or similar terms: you can make such assumption, since anyway those interested in 'linux' or 'OSX' would probably avoid using terms generally associated with Windows.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  > Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Why not? Do you hod the opinion that kernel code is something impossible to mess with? If so, why?
  - nmeofthestate 12y ago
    When introducing kids to programming in a classroom environment, hacking the Linux kernel is a completely OTT scenario. And Linux will still be available and probably the most popular OS to be installed on RPis, for those kids who are the next Linus Torvalds.
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      naturally everyone wants to avoid a situation where people are afraid to try out different operating systems. instilling open mindedness and eagerness to learn new things, to kids, the idea that the OS isn't important it's what you can make it do... will stand them in better stead than leaving them with the idea that Windows or Apple or whatever, is the only way it's done.
- nkuttler 12y ago
  > Seems to me Windows is a perfectly open enough OS to act as a platform for tinkering and learning about computers. Maybe, but Linux just seems more convenient. I mean, can you install gcc, golang, nodejs, python, ruby, ghc, lua (...) on windows with a single command? And all the other tools you might want to use, like editors, databases? And you will never know if they want to do kernel-level coding if they don't have access to the kernel.
  - watty 12y ago
    I completely disagree. I used Ubuntu for a year and I spent more time fixing things or trying to do things in the OS than I have in all other operating systems combined. My nephew tried to install Ubuntu on his new build and hit brick wall after brick wall trying to install the OS and Minecraft. It simply hasn't gotten easy enough and I'm afraid it's too late now. I don't see a comeback for linux. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      I do: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=android http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=android
    - nkuttler 12y ago
      It's unfortunate that you apparently had bad experiences with Ubuntu, but this thread is about development tools, not installing third party games from external sources. Yes, if you want to game, windows seems like a more convenient choice, nobody disputes that.
      - watty 12y ago
        Well I have a B+ and installed Raspbian for a little home energy project that reads from my smart meter over serial and pushes the data to the cloud. The programming was easy, I spent 5x as much time trying to get things installed. Finally got Cloud9 working, never was able to get InfluxDB installed, kind of got OrientDB installed (it crashes). I consider myself a technical person and while I think it's fun to use Linux, it's certainly not productive.
- bananaoomarang 12y ago
  I am in computing now because someone put Linux on my laptop when I was 11, I don't think I would have ever really thought about it otherwise. It's not necessarily that I could look at the source of the kernel (I didn't), it's far more the philosophy of the OS as a whole meaning that I could tinker with whatever I wanted, pull apart components and see how it broke, dive as deep as I wanted into any area of the system. A Linux system is far more openly composed even when you're not at the source level, Windows is comparatively a black box. A value of Linux is teaching people how computer systems are put together and function, it is unequivocally better at this than Windows. I don't hate Windows either, but I do think that Linux aligns itself far better with the RPi's mission statement.
  - guardian5x 12y ago
    It's not like Linux is going away. I think more possibilities in regard of OS is a good thing, and also in align with the RPi's mission statement.
- Zardoz84 12y ago
  I would prefer giving to a children an ZX Spectrum and explain how use it to make programs on BASIC, that putting in front of a Windows. At least, they would understand what is doing the computer, instead of seeing the computer doing "magic"
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    I misread you then and read ZX81 instead of Spectrum and my mind went back to typing in pages of code and being unable to save due to only have the 8k version. That nearly put me off writing code! Thanks to the BBC B and floppy disks!
- chernevik 12y ago
  Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook. She wants to learn to program, she says, so I said, great, let's get you a real programming environment. She was nervous about her computer and all the stuff flying by on the screen, so we talked about what her computer is -- a CPU, memory, storage -- it's all bits, nothing happening here can hurt it. We then got Python up and drew a turn with Turtle, which she then extended to a rectangle. We'll see what she learns and what I can teach her. But whatever she learns will be directly applicable to many other available environments. My Mac and her Mom's will have a terminal. At some point she can take this up to a Linode and play on the net. If her computer club uses Raspberry Pi, Linux will be there. Maybe she could learn a lot with Windows 10 on a Pi. And much of it would be principled, and some of the basic emotional and mental disciplines needed to work with computers. But a great deal of it would be a particular interface, and one that is generally available only with costs or arrangements that exceed those of getting to a *nix interface. Now why is it a good idea for her to invest in a sunk cost like that when she can invest in one with much greater and freer applicability?
  - nmeofthestate 12y ago
    To this I would say jeez: worrying about how your eleven year old daughter might be restricting herself to particular technology platforms is really somewhat premature.
    - zanny 12y ago
      I'd argue it isn't. It is the kind of mindshare effect from early age that makes it incredibly hard to displace Windows throughout IT. There were three computer generations of note - the fourth is still growing up and is the smartphone one - but in general, the generations were: 1. The Unix era, back in the 70s, back when it was all university stuff. Free software was unheard of but the code was always widely distributed. 2. The Mac era, in the 80s, where there were a ton of different computers and they were all so primitive and simple you could easily hack on them yourself or with effort make your own kernels. DRM was too expensive to fathom so it was still modestly open. 3. The Windows era, starting with DOS but lasting through XP, where users grew up on a completely black box experience where you bought an emachine at Best Buy and browsed cat pictures online. No developer tools or command line presence at all after a while, so in my high school years (2005 - 2009) an extreme few of my peers even knew what programming was (I'm talking less than 5%). The phone era is even worse than the Windows era because the form factor does not lend itself to productivity and the ecosystems are locked down (though I think a lot about Android and AOSP makes it much easier to break out of the theme park and see the wider world than in the Windows era). I'm not saying making everyone use a command line OS or having to install Archlinux themselves would make them more enlightened, but I can convincingly say we probably lost a huge amount of potential developers in these last twenty years to the tivoization and tonka toy Windows experience where the barrier from going from software consumer to software creator was so insanely high. On Windows, you have to first realize you can develop software. Huge barrier there. Once you know that, you are immediately in the giant cancerous mess of .net and Windows developer tools from MS, which is not something a, say, ten year old is going to be much interested in. On Linux or any free software OS, you always have Python right on your system. You open up this terminal thing, type in python, read the website a bit, or maybe do Codecademy, and you can drop right out of the browser into the developer tool right at the ready. Maybe you want to get a bit more sophisticated and start using Gedit or Kate or Geary or Ninja as a Python IDE, in which case you just one click install this stuff to your desktop after reading about it on a Python forum. My point is the process of "getting into" development or just giving a damn about computers is a hell of a lot more fun and reasonable on free software OSes or just one that distributes the developer tools out of the box, in the same way the 80s kids who now represent a huge chunk of the developer workforce came to be.
- eloisant 12y ago
  Linux being open is not just about the kernel source code. It's the fact that it's modular, that you can decide what brick you need, add or remove them, and end up with the perfect right configuration. It's especially interesting when you're building an embedded system (typically with a RPi). Start with the minimal Arch Linux install, think about what you need and add just that. There is a lot to learn about how operating system work when you configure Linux without having to recompile your kernel (something that nobody do any longer anyway).
  - mwcampbell 12y ago
    Or you can go even further, use something like buildroot (http://buildroot.net/ http://buildroot.net/) to build your kernel and rootfs, and even tweak the kernel configuration if you like. I recently did an RPi project where the kernel and rootfs together were about 5 MB compressed.
- Niten 12y ago
  > Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. Not most of them and not to begin with, but "educating themselves" means having a platform where their curiosity can run amok, and some kids with RPis absolutely will find the Eudyptula Challenge or some other source of inspiration and make it to tinkering with the kernel. RPi is absolutely the perfect platform for this. Break your OS? Just throw in another SD card. Somehow damage the hardware? Whatever, it's only $35. I'm not the only person on here who taught himself Z80 assembly language in school because it let me dig deeper into our TI calculators; if we'd been using RPis for programming assignments I would have been all over that. I think it's a little surprising that it even needs to be said on a site called "Hacker News", but let's not underestimate what curious kids with a bunch of free time will accomplish.
  - gknoy 12y ago
    Thank you for mentioning the Eudyptula Challenge [1]. It's not my cup of tea right now, but it sounds Really Cool for anyone interested in kernel programming. 1: http://eudyptula-challenge.org/ http://eudyptula-challenge.org/
20kleagues 12y ago
They will surely open up their core as well when they see how much good open source is doing to dot net. Satya is a smart man.
Tarang 12y ago
From the perspective of many, including myself, it is easier to develop apps for Windows than for Linux. While having software that's open source on the Pi would be awesome, what would be even more awesome is tonnes of apps on Github that are easier to write for the Raspberry pi to allow it to do more than it can currently such as Media Streamers & Servers of all sorts with tonnes of forks. For what its worth, this is giant leaps forward for Microsoft and vastly uncharacteristic of what they're used to. It shows that they're hell bent on driving their platform through developers. The typical R-pi purchaser is a dev after all.
ekr 12y ago
Now, while legally, you are perfectly right, Windows is as close as ever, it's not actually that hard to look under the hood. I work as a Windows device driver developer, and sometimes I need to reverse engineer some of the internals, and the source code from WRK is easily available on the internet : (http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_Resource_Kit-ACADEMIC/WindowsResearchKernel-WRK/WRK-v1.2/base/ntos/ http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_R...). These are sources from 2005-2006 timeframe, but they are tremendously helpful when debugging. If you compare the disassembled version of an exported function from the Win 8.1 ntoskrnl, in most cases it's almost identical to the sources in those links. Of course, there are a few parts of the system which suffered changes, but nonetheless, it can still be very useful. I would also recommend it for studying operating systems, but obviously, along side something else. Let's say after starting with XV6, or Pintos, Minix, then moving on to NetBSD, Linux, only after that having a look under the hood of Windows, to see a slightly different approach. There is also the 'Windows Internals' book, but I never found it too useful. Describing concepts without any source code, and without a view to the implementation is not very helpful for me. But I completely agree with you, personally, I would never use Windows if I wanted to play with it, I only use linux and bsd at home.
- trentnelson 12y ago
  > http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_Resource_Kit-ACADEMIC/WindowsResearchKernel-WRK/WRK-v1.2/base/ntos/ http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_R... Oh my. Aaaaand, mirrored. There's also this, which seems about the same level of should-this-actually-be-publicly-available: https://github.com/njdragonfly/WinNT4 https://github.com/njdragonfly/WinNT4
  - slipstream- 12y ago
    Wait, someone put the (partially-)leaked NT4 src on github of all places? DMCA takedown from MS in 3...2..1...
    - rey12rey 12y ago
      It's been there since 2011
sireat 12y ago
Raspberry Pi 2 actually seems suited great for Windows 10 as Raspberry Pi is not a true open source device(Broadcom proprietary blobs abound). Most importantly Raspberry Pi is a friendly device which managed to really manage the market(press/public) perception just right despite the delays and early failures. Same goes for Windows 10, definitely not open but friendly and the price is right in this case.
ygra 12y ago
libc is a particularly bad example, actually, because the sources for it are even included with VS. Whether you actually want to look at the horrors of printf is another question, though.
rquirk 12y ago
I agree. This is pretty sad news. The Pi 2 page promotes Windows more than the alternatives, which seems to indicate the foundation has been completely "embraced" in the usual 3-stage process. It is another reason to not promote the RPi, and recommend other single board computers instead like those found here - https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers Sigh. I think I preferred it when Ballmer was in charge and Microsoft seemed clueless :-/
- anom9999 12y ago
  > Sigh. I think I preferred it when Ballmer was in charge and Microsoft seemed clueless :-/ It's funny you say that because I used to joke that Ballmer did more to aid the adoption of Linux than Shuttleworth had.
forrestthewoods 12y ago
Or it makes tinkering easier and simpler than ever. Linux is many things. User friendly is not one of them.
- DSMan195276 12y ago
  > User friendly is not one of them. That highly depends on what you're doing though. The Raspberry Pi in general isn't a user-friendly piece of hardware, the OS is only a piece of that. The fact that at least past iterations of the Pi aren't extremely fast means that it also had to run fairly unfriendly stripped-down setups so you could squeeze power out of it (IE. Even if you could run Windows on the Raspberry Pi 1, it wouldn't have been very pretty. The advantage of Linux was that it could run with a lighter setup.). With the new processor in the Raspberry Pi 2 I'd expect you could run much a much nicer setup on the Pi, comparable to the Windows setup. I'm interested to see how well Windows 10 actually runs on it though, I'm not convinced it's really fast enough to handle a full Windows stack, so it's possible we might see some type of stripped-down Windows setup for it. In which case, it will probably be less user-friendly.
- chez17 12y ago
  Linux is beyond user friendly these days. It just depends on what you want. I gave my wife's parents, two old hippies who live in the middle of nowhere and have literally no computer skills, an old laptop with Ubuntu on it. It's been totally fine. If they can use it, anyone can. Long gone are the days of needing editing configuration files in a terminal editor. Of course power users still can, but for novice users it's just as friendly as Windows and more friendly than OSX I would argue.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Good point. I forget that Linux on this new Pi will be more like Ubuntu on a laptop than a CLI with a stuttery slow X interface or Wayland with much tinkering. I wouldn't trust my parents to configure any of my machines securely (Windows, OSX or Linux). In fact, I advised my mum to use an iPad as it stops her fretting all the time. Sadly, she still struggles with using iOS since they removed all text and replaced it with obscure 1px line hieroglyphs that are apparently meant to communicate an idea (obviously, a box with a tiny arrow coming out of it means share, right??) Let's hope that they make the SD card reader on this new Pi respect the RW/RO switch on SD cards!
superobserver 12y ago
> It's in Microsoft interest to keep kids in their ecosystem Yep, which is also why they purchased Minecraft. It was more like purchasing the community of Minecraft users, which has a lot of children as well. I really wished there were a Micronix or something - combining the best of both worlds (Microsoft's extensive resources and reach coupled with GNU/Linux freedom and open-source development) - and that probably is what Microsoft is slowly aiming towards. I guess we'll find out in a decade.
- deleted 12y ago
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- zxcvcxz 12y ago
  Bill Gates can't continue espousing the ideas that everyone should have access to healthcare/technology/internet and be on the board of a company that charges way too much for an OS that --let's be honest-- isn't really miles ahead of any other OS... I did like the fact that he posted a picture of kids using Ubuntu on his FB page though.
  - sebastianavina 12y ago
    Depending on the type of user you are, but Linux is miles ahead of Windows for research.
    - sremani 12y ago
      Which way is Linux miles ahead ? This is not a rhetorical question, I really want to understand. What features and functionality of Linux are missing in Windows that sets them miles apart ?
      - 4ad 12y ago
        Being Unix-like.
      - okasaki 12y ago
        Just off the top of my head: package management, live-cd functionality, architecture support, command-line interfaces, GUI variety, kernel customization, scaling to low-powered harware, licencing.
melling 12y ago
Yes, Microsoft has been kicked pretty hard by free software and open hardware. Now they're adapting. However, I don't see a problem. Microsoft is making that hardware market even larger. If Linux is "cool" and interesting enough, kids will boot Linux and run it on one or more of their Raspberry Pi's. Linux developers should also consider that the "hackable system" feature is only one of many features that people consider when choosing an OS. It might be good to add a few more carrots to Linux rather than beating people with sticks for not using free.
- zxcvcxz 12y ago
  What carrots does Windows have that Linux doesn't besides a larger variety of software? Linux is used in far more circumstances than Windows and is just as capable as windows when it comes to 99% of tasks. Buy Linux on an Ubuntu certified pc and you will have zero issues. In reality most consumers don't use more than a web browser.
  - eloisant 12y ago
    Mostly the fact that people already know it and are too lazy to learn anything else. To take an example: building a Mame box. On Windows it's a major PITA because replacing the windows shell to start directly Mame is a big hack, because you need to configure Mame in command line / editing text file which is a pain on Windows, because you can't just ssh to edit config files from a regular laptop, etc. On Linux it's much easier, and you end up with a clean configuration that does just what you need. But you know what? People still use Windows on their Mame cabs because it's their confort zone.
    - zxcvcxz 12y ago
      >Mostly the fact that people already know it and are too lazy to learn anything else. But that's hardly a carrot when it comes to learning CS/Programming. Whether you were to learn on Windows or *NIX it takes a lot of non-intuitive steps too get going. When I started to learn python I used notepad on Windows and ran it on the command line, I soon switched to Linux and wrote my scripts in gedit and ran the programs on the command line. The learning curve was about the same. It seems to me that a lot of the skills you learn on Linux when it comes to programming can be applied to windows (you just have to learn their GUI), but methods learned in windows generally can't be applied to other OSs.
rebootthesystem 12y ago
I think you are operating with a very narrow view. Only a ver, very small percentage of people, adults included, will dive into OS and kernel source code. A lot of computing can and does happen without having to operate at that level. In 35 years as a software/hardware engineer I have never had to go into OS source code for either embedded or worstation applications. I have written real-time operating systems from sctatch for embedded applications running inside customized processors I built inside FPGA's but that's about it. Yes, I am suggesting that the lack of access to source does not limit growth or learning in any way. They can always run Linux on any platform and go as deep as they with. That's the other point. When the platform costs $35 you can certainly have more than one and play with different OS's and applications.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  This is a great point, well said and does not deserve a single downvote. The problem is that you disagreed with the primary constituency of nix lovers around here. It should not be done on a highly visible thread if you value your karma. Offering free software is only a crime when Microsoft does it. I find it laughable that these people typically support new tech, they back all sorts of non-open source projects and questionable schemes like growth-hacking when it suits them, but when it comes to Microsoft they just love to hate. (EDIT: I personally don't give a hoot, so downvote away Micro$oft haters ;)
balls187 12y ago
> However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Think of it differently--some kids may wish to learn about other things, or just build something. Not all kids will want to dive deep into the OS.
deleted 12y ago
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sigzero 12y ago
> My fear is that teachers will now choose for Windows on the RPi, since that is what they know. And we are back to where we started: a fundamentally unhackable system. I think that is extremely unlikely to happen.
nwp90 12y ago
"My fear is that teachers will now choose for Windows on the RPi, since that is what they know." Well, no. Almost none will have used Windows without the GUI.
dragontamer 12y ago
It always was fundamentally unhackable. It was built on top of Broadcom, which has completely closed documentation. Frankly, Arduino / Atmel is the only open platform from bottom to top. Oh, and PCs (Intel / AMD). I don't think Windows is going to close any real bits of the Raspberry Pi 2, at least any more than it already is. I'm actually more excited about "open" hardware like AMD AM1 or Intel NUCs for this reason.

nmeofthestate 12y ago

"Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves" "Windows is closed as ever" Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. Seems to me Windows is a perfectly open enough OS to act as a platform for tinkering and learning about computers.

beagle3 12y ago
There have been quite a few projects that did hack the kernel and drivers directly. The majority of users are actually running XBMC on the Pi, and they don't care if it's linux or windows. But the early adopters do care, and they are all Linux people.
- nmeofthestate 12y ago
  "There have been quite a few projects that did hack the kernel and drivers directly." Of course there are, but I was taking issue with Windows being unsuitable for a classroom - is it realistic to claim that teachers are getting children to modify and compile the Linux kernel in the classroom? No, that's silly.
danieldk 12y ago
Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I even mentioned libc. There is more to an operating system than a kernel. In fact, this was an important part of my early computer education: when I was 12 (1994) I bought a copy of Slackware Linux because it had a free compiler (even Turbo Pascal was expensive for a 12 year-old). At the beginning I just typed some small C snippets that I could find in books in the library. Then I started reading shell scripts and found out that a lot of the system is controlled through shell scripts and started writing my own. Then I started reading through the source code of libraries to find out how things were implemented. At some point I got a Minix book (I was probably 16) at a discount at a book store. I started comparing the theory I read there and tried to find out how e.g. the Linux VMM differed from Minix. Don't underestimate how important it is for a kid to have access to such information. Only a small subset dive deeply into the system, but they will be the hackers of the future. But you have to awaken the interest by making easy to dive in. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I think you underestimate how important access to the OS (in the widest sense) has been to the success of everyone from Google, Dropbox, and Facebook to the newest of startups.
- bohol 12y ago
  I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I do think the trend of iOS, Android and similar Windows environments is troubling. But if they ship Windows 10 on the RPi with something like QBasic and Visual Studio it's probably just as good a learning tool as Linux. Or even a better one considering the rest of the application ecosystem.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    > The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I think you mean commodore, or atari. Windows gaming came a long long time afterwards. It is more advanced in some ways but it does not beget OS programmers, like an open source OS does. If OS programmers die out, we're in very deep trouble.
quonn 12y ago
Plus, it's just another _option_. How can this possibly be a bad thing? You can of course still run Linux.
- anilgulecha 12y ago
  I think this was answered. It's bad because teachers would push for a platform they presumably know more about -- Windows.
  - watty 12y ago
    And there's nothing wrong with that. Kids will be more productive on Windows and more likely be able to take those skills with them. How many kids need to know linux in the future? Here's what the Linux trend looks like: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux
    - aruggirello 12y ago
      'linux' is a single keyword, while GNU/Linux OS might show up as a wide set of different keywords, like ubuntu, debian, mint, arch, centos, rhel, fedora, gentoo, opensuse. Note that this is not the case with Windows, iOS, OSX. So, it would be interesting to see the combined interest of all those added to that of 'linux' for a more correct perspective - not considering Android of course, since it's not a GNU/Linux system. BTW it seems interest in Windows is also halving every ~10 years (though not as fast as 'linux'): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=windows http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=windows
      - aruggirello 12y ago
        Edit: I was partly wrong; the matter is much more complex than that: interest in iOS and OSX might show up as interest in iPhone/iPad, and Mac/Mac OS; interest in Windows, besides any interest in 'surface', might also show up as a generic interest in 'PC' or similar terms: you can make such assumption, since anyway those interested in 'linux' or 'OSX' would probably avoid using terms generally associated with Windows.
marcosdumay 12y ago
> Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Why not? Do you hod the opinion that kernel code is something impossible to mess with? If so, why?
- nmeofthestate 12y ago
  When introducing kids to programming in a classroom environment, hacking the Linux kernel is a completely OTT scenario. And Linux will still be available and probably the most popular OS to be installed on RPis, for those kids who are the next Linus Torvalds.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    naturally everyone wants to avoid a situation where people are afraid to try out different operating systems. instilling open mindedness and eagerness to learn new things, to kids, the idea that the OS isn't important it's what you can make it do... will stand them in better stead than leaving them with the idea that Windows or Apple or whatever, is the only way it's done.
nkuttler 12y ago
> Seems to me Windows is a perfectly open enough OS to act as a platform for tinkering and learning about computers. Maybe, but Linux just seems more convenient. I mean, can you install gcc, golang, nodejs, python, ruby, ghc, lua (...) on windows with a single command? And all the other tools you might want to use, like editors, databases? And you will never know if they want to do kernel-level coding if they don't have access to the kernel.
- watty 12y ago
  I completely disagree. I used Ubuntu for a year and I spent more time fixing things or trying to do things in the OS than I have in all other operating systems combined. My nephew tried to install Ubuntu on his new build and hit brick wall after brick wall trying to install the OS and Minecraft. It simply hasn't gotten easy enough and I'm afraid it's too late now. I don't see a comeback for linux. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    I do: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=android http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=android
  - nkuttler 12y ago
    It's unfortunate that you apparently had bad experiences with Ubuntu, but this thread is about development tools, not installing third party games from external sources. Yes, if you want to game, windows seems like a more convenient choice, nobody disputes that.
    - watty 12y ago
      Well I have a B+ and installed Raspbian for a little home energy project that reads from my smart meter over serial and pushes the data to the cloud. The programming was easy, I spent 5x as much time trying to get things installed. Finally got Cloud9 working, never was able to get InfluxDB installed, kind of got OrientDB installed (it crashes). I consider myself a technical person and while I think it's fun to use Linux, it's certainly not productive.
bananaoomarang 12y ago
I am in computing now because someone put Linux on my laptop when I was 11, I don't think I would have ever really thought about it otherwise. It's not necessarily that I could look at the source of the kernel (I didn't), it's far more the philosophy of the OS as a whole meaning that I could tinker with whatever I wanted, pull apart components and see how it broke, dive as deep as I wanted into any area of the system. A Linux system is far more openly composed even when you're not at the source level, Windows is comparatively a black box. A value of Linux is teaching people how computer systems are put together and function, it is unequivocally better at this than Windows. I don't hate Windows either, but I do think that Linux aligns itself far better with the RPi's mission statement.
- guardian5x 12y ago
  It's not like Linux is going away. I think more possibilities in regard of OS is a good thing, and also in align with the RPi's mission statement.
Zardoz84 12y ago
I would prefer giving to a children an ZX Spectrum and explain how use it to make programs on BASIC, that putting in front of a Windows. At least, they would understand what is doing the computer, instead of seeing the computer doing "magic"
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  I misread you then and read ZX81 instead of Spectrum and my mind went back to typing in pages of code and being unable to save due to only have the 8k version. That nearly put me off writing code! Thanks to the BBC B and floppy disks!
chernevik 12y ago
Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook. She wants to learn to program, she says, so I said, great, let's get you a real programming environment. She was nervous about her computer and all the stuff flying by on the screen, so we talked about what her computer is -- a CPU, memory, storage -- it's all bits, nothing happening here can hurt it. We then got Python up and drew a turn with Turtle, which she then extended to a rectangle. We'll see what she learns and what I can teach her. But whatever she learns will be directly applicable to many other available environments. My Mac and her Mom's will have a terminal. At some point she can take this up to a Linode and play on the net. If her computer club uses Raspberry Pi, Linux will be there. Maybe she could learn a lot with Windows 10 on a Pi. And much of it would be principled, and some of the basic emotional and mental disciplines needed to work with computers. But a great deal of it would be a particular interface, and one that is generally available only with costs or arrangements that exceed those of getting to a *nix interface. Now why is it a good idea for her to invest in a sunk cost like that when she can invest in one with much greater and freer applicability?
- nmeofthestate 12y ago
  To this I would say jeez: worrying about how your eleven year old daughter might be restricting herself to particular technology platforms is really somewhat premature.
  - zanny 12y ago
    I'd argue it isn't. It is the kind of mindshare effect from early age that makes it incredibly hard to displace Windows throughout IT. There were three computer generations of note - the fourth is still growing up and is the smartphone one - but in general, the generations were: 1. The Unix era, back in the 70s, back when it was all university stuff. Free software was unheard of but the code was always widely distributed. 2. The Mac era, in the 80s, where there were a ton of different computers and they were all so primitive and simple you could easily hack on them yourself or with effort make your own kernels. DRM was too expensive to fathom so it was still modestly open. 3. The Windows era, starting with DOS but lasting through XP, where users grew up on a completely black box experience where you bought an emachine at Best Buy and browsed cat pictures online. No developer tools or command line presence at all after a while, so in my high school years (2005 - 2009) an extreme few of my peers even knew what programming was (I'm talking less than 5%). The phone era is even worse than the Windows era because the form factor does not lend itself to productivity and the ecosystems are locked down (though I think a lot about Android and AOSP makes it much easier to break out of the theme park and see the wider world than in the Windows era). I'm not saying making everyone use a command line OS or having to install Archlinux themselves would make them more enlightened, but I can convincingly say we probably lost a huge amount of potential developers in these last twenty years to the tivoization and tonka toy Windows experience where the barrier from going from software consumer to software creator was so insanely high. On Windows, you have to first realize you can develop software. Huge barrier there. Once you know that, you are immediately in the giant cancerous mess of .net and Windows developer tools from MS, which is not something a, say, ten year old is going to be much interested in. On Linux or any free software OS, you always have Python right on your system. You open up this terminal thing, type in python, read the website a bit, or maybe do Codecademy, and you can drop right out of the browser into the developer tool right at the ready. Maybe you want to get a bit more sophisticated and start using Gedit or Kate or Geary or Ninja as a Python IDE, in which case you just one click install this stuff to your desktop after reading about it on a Python forum. My point is the process of "getting into" development or just giving a damn about computers is a hell of a lot more fun and reasonable on free software OSes or just one that distributes the developer tools out of the box, in the same way the 80s kids who now represent a huge chunk of the developer workforce came to be.
eloisant 12y ago
Linux being open is not just about the kernel source code. It's the fact that it's modular, that you can decide what brick you need, add or remove them, and end up with the perfect right configuration. It's especially interesting when you're building an embedded system (typically with a RPi). Start with the minimal Arch Linux install, think about what you need and add just that. There is a lot to learn about how operating system work when you configure Linux without having to recompile your kernel (something that nobody do any longer anyway).
- mwcampbell 12y ago
  Or you can go even further, use something like buildroot (http://buildroot.net/ http://buildroot.net/) to build your kernel and rootfs, and even tweak the kernel configuration if you like. I recently did an RPi project where the kernel and rootfs together were about 5 MB compressed.
Niten 12y ago
> Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. Not most of them and not to begin with, but "educating themselves" means having a platform where their curiosity can run amok, and some kids with RPis absolutely will find the Eudyptula Challenge or some other source of inspiration and make it to tinkering with the kernel. RPi is absolutely the perfect platform for this. Break your OS? Just throw in another SD card. Somehow damage the hardware? Whatever, it's only $35. I'm not the only person on here who taught himself Z80 assembly language in school because it let me dig deeper into our TI calculators; if we'd been using RPis for programming assignments I would have been all over that. I think it's a little surprising that it even needs to be said on a site called "Hacker News", but let's not underestimate what curious kids with a bunch of free time will accomplish.
- gknoy 12y ago
  Thank you for mentioning the Eudyptula Challenge [1]. It's not my cup of tea right now, but it sounds Really Cool for anyone interested in kernel programming. 1: http://eudyptula-challenge.org/ http://eudyptula-challenge.org/

20kleagues 12y ago

They will surely open up their core as well when they see how much good open source is doing to dot net. Satya is a smart man.

Tarang 12y ago

From the perspective of many, including myself, it is easier to develop apps for Windows than for Linux. While having software that's open source on the Pi would be awesome, what would be even more awesome is tonnes of apps on Github that are easier to write for the Raspberry pi to allow it to do more than it can currently such as Media Streamers & Servers of all sorts with tonnes of forks. For what its worth, this is giant leaps forward for Microsoft and vastly uncharacteristic of what they're used to. It shows that they're hell bent on driving their platform through developers. The typical R-pi purchaser is a dev after all.

ekr 12y ago

Now, while legally, you are perfectly right, Windows is as close as ever, it's not actually that hard to look under the hood. I work as a Windows device driver developer, and sometimes I need to reverse engineer some of the internals, and the source code from WRK is easily available on the internet : (http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_Resource_Kit-ACADEMIC/WindowsResearchKernel-WRK/WRK-v1.2/base/ntos/ http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_R...). These are sources from 2005-2006 timeframe, but they are tremendously helpful when debugging. If you compare the disassembled version of an exported function from the Win 8.1 ntoskrnl, in most cases it's almost identical to the sources in those links. Of course, there are a few parts of the system which suffered changes, but nonetheless, it can still be very useful. I would also recommend it for studying operating systems, but obviously, along side something else. Let's say after starting with XV6, or Pintos, Minix, then moving on to NetBSD, Linux, only after that having a look under the hood of Windows, to see a slightly different approach. There is also the 'Windows Internals' book, but I never found it too useful. Describing concepts without any source code, and without a view to the implementation is not very helpful for me. But I completely agree with you, personally, I would never use Windows if I wanted to play with it, I only use linux and bsd at home.

trentnelson 12y ago
> http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_Resource_Kit-ACADEMIC/WindowsResearchKernel-WRK/WRK-v1.2/base/ntos/ http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_R... Oh my. Aaaaand, mirrored. There's also this, which seems about the same level of should-this-actually-be-publicly-available: https://github.com/njdragonfly/WinNT4 https://github.com/njdragonfly/WinNT4
- slipstream- 12y ago
  Wait, someone put the (partially-)leaked NT4 src on github of all places? DMCA takedown from MS in 3...2..1...
  - rey12rey 12y ago
    It's been there since 2011

sireat 12y ago

Raspberry Pi 2 actually seems suited great for Windows 10 as Raspberry Pi is not a true open source device(Broadcom proprietary blobs abound). Most importantly Raspberry Pi is a friendly device which managed to really manage the market(press/public) perception just right despite the delays and early failures. Same goes for Windows 10, definitely not open but friendly and the price is right in this case.

ygra 12y ago

libc is a particularly bad example, actually, because the sources for it are even included with VS. Whether you actually want to look at the horrors of printf is another question, though.

rquirk 12y ago

I agree. This is pretty sad news. The Pi 2 page promotes Windows more than the alternatives, which seems to indicate the foundation has been completely "embraced" in the usual 3-stage process. It is another reason to not promote the RPi, and recommend other single board computers instead like those found here - https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers Sigh. I think I preferred it when Ballmer was in charge and Microsoft seemed clueless :-/

anom9999 12y ago
> Sigh. I think I preferred it when Ballmer was in charge and Microsoft seemed clueless :-/ It's funny you say that because I used to joke that Ballmer did more to aid the adoption of Linux than Shuttleworth had.

forrestthewoods 12y ago

Or it makes tinkering easier and simpler than ever. Linux is many things. User friendly is not one of them.

DSMan195276 12y ago
> User friendly is not one of them. That highly depends on what you're doing though. The Raspberry Pi in general isn't a user-friendly piece of hardware, the OS is only a piece of that. The fact that at least past iterations of the Pi aren't extremely fast means that it also had to run fairly unfriendly stripped-down setups so you could squeeze power out of it (IE. Even if you could run Windows on the Raspberry Pi 1, it wouldn't have been very pretty. The advantage of Linux was that it could run with a lighter setup.). With the new processor in the Raspberry Pi 2 I'd expect you could run much a much nicer setup on the Pi, comparable to the Windows setup. I'm interested to see how well Windows 10 actually runs on it though, I'm not convinced it's really fast enough to handle a full Windows stack, so it's possible we might see some type of stripped-down Windows setup for it. In which case, it will probably be less user-friendly.
chez17 12y ago
Linux is beyond user friendly these days. It just depends on what you want. I gave my wife's parents, two old hippies who live in the middle of nowhere and have literally no computer skills, an old laptop with Ubuntu on it. It's been totally fine. If they can use it, anyone can. Long gone are the days of needing editing configuration files in a terminal editor. Of course power users still can, but for novice users it's just as friendly as Windows and more friendly than OSX I would argue.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Good point. I forget that Linux on this new Pi will be more like Ubuntu on a laptop than a CLI with a stuttery slow X interface or Wayland with much tinkering. I wouldn't trust my parents to configure any of my machines securely (Windows, OSX or Linux). In fact, I advised my mum to use an iPad as it stops her fretting all the time. Sadly, she still struggles with using iOS since they removed all text and replaced it with obscure 1px line hieroglyphs that are apparently meant to communicate an idea (obviously, a box with a tiny arrow coming out of it means share, right??) Let's hope that they make the SD card reader on this new Pi respect the RW/RO switch on SD cards!

superobserver 12y ago

> It's in Microsoft interest to keep kids in their ecosystem Yep, which is also why they purchased Minecraft. It was more like purchasing the community of Minecraft users, which has a lot of children as well. I really wished there were a Micronix or something - combining the best of both worlds (Microsoft's extensive resources and reach coupled with GNU/Linux freedom and open-source development) - and that probably is what Microsoft is slowly aiming towards. I guess we'll find out in a decade.

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zxcvcxz 12y ago
Bill Gates can't continue espousing the ideas that everyone should have access to healthcare/technology/internet and be on the board of a company that charges way too much for an OS that --let's be honest-- isn't really miles ahead of any other OS... I did like the fact that he posted a picture of kids using Ubuntu on his FB page though.
- sebastianavina 12y ago
  Depending on the type of user you are, but Linux is miles ahead of Windows for research.
  - sremani 12y ago
    Which way is Linux miles ahead ? This is not a rhetorical question, I really want to understand. What features and functionality of Linux are missing in Windows that sets them miles apart ?
    - 4ad 12y ago
      Being Unix-like.
    - okasaki 12y ago
      Just off the top of my head: package management, live-cd functionality, architecture support, command-line interfaces, GUI variety, kernel customization, scaling to low-powered harware, licencing.

melling 12y ago

Yes, Microsoft has been kicked pretty hard by free software and open hardware. Now they're adapting. However, I don't see a problem. Microsoft is making that hardware market even larger. If Linux is "cool" and interesting enough, kids will boot Linux and run it on one or more of their Raspberry Pi's. Linux developers should also consider that the "hackable system" feature is only one of many features that people consider when choosing an OS. It might be good to add a few more carrots to Linux rather than beating people with sticks for not using free.

zxcvcxz 12y ago
What carrots does Windows have that Linux doesn't besides a larger variety of software? Linux is used in far more circumstances than Windows and is just as capable as windows when it comes to 99% of tasks. Buy Linux on an Ubuntu certified pc and you will have zero issues. In reality most consumers don't use more than a web browser.
- eloisant 12y ago
  Mostly the fact that people already know it and are too lazy to learn anything else. To take an example: building a Mame box. On Windows it's a major PITA because replacing the windows shell to start directly Mame is a big hack, because you need to configure Mame in command line / editing text file which is a pain on Windows, because you can't just ssh to edit config files from a regular laptop, etc. On Linux it's much easier, and you end up with a clean configuration that does just what you need. But you know what? People still use Windows on their Mame cabs because it's their confort zone.
  - zxcvcxz 12y ago
    >Mostly the fact that people already know it and are too lazy to learn anything else. But that's hardly a carrot when it comes to learning CS/Programming. Whether you were to learn on Windows or *NIX it takes a lot of non-intuitive steps too get going. When I started to learn python I used notepad on Windows and ran it on the command line, I soon switched to Linux and wrote my scripts in gedit and ran the programs on the command line. The learning curve was about the same. It seems to me that a lot of the skills you learn on Linux when it comes to programming can be applied to windows (you just have to learn their GUI), but methods learned in windows generally can't be applied to other OSs.

rebootthesystem 12y ago

I think you are operating with a very narrow view. Only a ver, very small percentage of people, adults included, will dive into OS and kernel source code. A lot of computing can and does happen without having to operate at that level. In 35 years as a software/hardware engineer I have never had to go into OS source code for either embedded or worstation applications. I have written real-time operating systems from sctatch for embedded applications running inside customized processors I built inside FPGA's but that's about it. Yes, I am suggesting that the lack of access to source does not limit growth or learning in any way. They can always run Linux on any platform and go as deep as they with. That's the other point. When the platform costs $35 you can certainly have more than one and play with different OS's and applications.

WorldWideWayne 12y ago
This is a great point, well said and does not deserve a single downvote. The problem is that you disagreed with the primary constituency of nix lovers around here. It should not be done on a highly visible thread if you value your karma. Offering free software is only a crime when Microsoft does it. I find it laughable that these people typically support new tech, they back all sorts of non-open source projects and questionable schemes like growth-hacking when it suits them, but when it comes to Microsoft they just love to hate. (EDIT: I personally don't give a hoot, so downvote away Micro$oft haters ;)

balls187 12y ago

> However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Think of it differently--some kids may wish to learn about other things, or just build something. Not all kids will want to dive deep into the OS.

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sigzero 12y ago

> My fear is that teachers will now choose for Windows on the RPi, since that is what they know. And we are back to where we started: a fundamentally unhackable system. I think that is extremely unlikely to happen.

nwp90 12y ago

"My fear is that teachers will now choose for Windows on the RPi, since that is what they know." Well, no. Almost none will have used Windows without the GUI.

dragontamer 12y ago

It always was fundamentally unhackable. It was built on top of Broadcom, which has completely closed documentation. Frankly, Arduino / Atmel is the only open platform from bottom to top. Oh, and PCs (Intel / AMD). I don't think Windows is going to close any real bits of the Raspberry Pi 2, at least any more than it already is. I'm actually more excited about "open" hardware like AMD AM1 or Intel NUCs for this reason.