Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cryptonector 2867 days ago
It's the reality of the market, which is why Windows is adding Linux compatibility (as is every *BSD, Illumos, ...).

But also it's the fact that three decades of not even life support has left the Windows console in pretty sad shape -- the folks tasked with getting it into better shape were bound to see the value of ptys.

Lastly, don't forget that Windows NT was meant to be a console OS, like VMS. There must still be people, even if very few, at MSFT who appreciate text-oriented apps.

For me, the tty/pty, shells, screen/tmux/..., ssh, and so on, are the things that make Unix so powerful. The fact is that Win32 is far superior in a number of areas (SIDs >> UIDs/GIDs, security descriptors >> {owner, group, mode, [ACL]}, access tokens >> struct cred), but far inferior in the things that really matter to a power user trying to get things done.

2 comments

> Lastly, don't forget that Windows NT was meant to be a console OS, like VMS. There must still be people, even if very few, at MSFT who appreciate text-oriented apps.

I expect that, like Linux compatibility, most of it is not about "apps" but about being better at running in the cloud, where a (virtual) machine or container needs to be as light as possible, and to be configured and a service launched in it as unattended/automated manner as possible. Stripping out the GUI and making command lines work better works towards these goals.

That's a really good point.
As power user that gets things done on Windows, it never bothered me that it hasn't an UNIX like console.

If fact it bothered me more that I couldn't get a Borland like devenv on Linux and had to keep myself happy with XEmacs.