[TheAmazingIdiot]

Many a times, Microsoft will retire the older methods for something blazing new, and ruin what application knowledge you had in the process.

These jumps in "technology" are perhaps forward, but also very much backward. I've seen it time and time again with clients who have bought a new computer and had to deal with growing pains (and hatred) of the blue globe, ribbons, and other 'we changed the gui to make it hard to do what you previously did easily'.

At least in the Linux world, your knowledge isn't decimated on an update. There may be depreciations, but those are rarer than MS "we update the world'.

[forgotusername]

My experience of Microsoft was that they're the most backward compatible source of technology around. Perhaps you could provide specific examples of breakage?

It's funny that this should come up in a thread about PowerShell, a replacement shell Microsoft released 6 years ago which still hasn't supplanted cmd.exe (which itself is based on syntax from the late 70s).

[coroxout]

In 1990 I used the MS-DOS 5 Edit tool and QBasic and picked up the shortcuts Ctrl-insert and Shift-insert for copy and paste.

I'm still using them 22 years later. They still work in most Windows applications and all MS applications even though they're not listed. They could easily have taken them out since Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V have been standard in Windows for so long, but they didn't.

I also got quite comfortable with using F2 and F4 to edit my previous DOS command, which still work in Command Prompt. And since Command Prompt now has tab completion and copy and paste, I don't really feel the need to add a bash-style command history. In fact I can never remember the bash equivalent of some of the cmd history shortcuts I use.

I have, however, installed the GOW package (see bmatzelle on github) for grep, less, wc etc at the command prompt. grep is so much faster than the MS equivalent "find" it's not funny, e.g. I just searched for a 9-digit number across 13 files containing 4 million lines (158MB) and grep took 1 second; find took 57.

[JamesLeonis]

It couldn't replace the command prompt because of security issues. Basically it made it very easy for virus writers to run powerful commands that the OS would blindly run. In response, Microsoft not only made scripts not executable by default, there is also a "signing" thingamajig where a script won't be executable unless it is specifically signed off to run[1], including those written by you.

[1]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SigningPowerShellScripts.aspx

It also isn't a drop in replacement for the command prompt. They exist as two separate programs, instead of the Unix general Terminal and shells run inside.

In my experience, Powershell has a lot of potential but is hampered by clunky interfaces and the lack of a true robust security system across the OS. Add on top of that the large malware industry around Windows, Powershell is basically a non-starter as a replacement for the vanilla command prompt.

[Permit]

If we're speaking strictly in regards to UI, then this is not a problem unique to Windows. I mean, would you not agree that Ubuntu's implementation of Unity changed the GUI a considerable amount compared to previous versions?

[slowpoke]

The difference is that in the world of GNU/Linux, a different desktop environment or window manager is usually just a single package manager command away. You're being free to choose. Microsoft will force their UIs on you, and there's nothing you can do about it (except not updating, which is a workaround, not a solution).

[roel_v]

LOL. You show me a Linux machine that runs 15-year old binaries without problems, or source code that old that compiles against a modern machine, or even just source code 2 years old, for that matter. I'm not a big Microsoft fan but saying that they're less backwards compatible than the alternatives is talk from the looney bin.

"At least in the Linux world, your knowledge isn't decimated on an update."

Of course, so that's why the time I put into learning how LILO worked is now paying off so greatly! Oh no wait it doesn't, because LILO went the way of the dodo (as far as I can tell, I don't use Linux all that often any more). Wait, all that time I used to spend on manually insmod'ing kernel modules to get my audio to work with the various audio systems, that has paid off! Hmm no, that too is a crapshoot that changes every year or so. Config file format? Different between all programs. Desktop integration? Different desktop systems, who each change how they work every 2 or 3 years. Gfx card drivers? Depends on the brand, make and (if you're lucky) distro. Networking setup? Lol, don't get me started.

[dr42]

You're only talking about all the trivial stuff, the IT setup, getting drivers to work with different hardware. This is the just the same on windows, except it has a much broader support for more hardware.

Of course things like config files change, but unix remains one of the most backwards compatible platforms to build anything on.

[roel_v]

Did you only read a few words of my post? How about binary (or even source code) compatibility with everything that is not POSIX (which is most of what a modern application needs), desktop environments, the very ways that applications interact with the user? (where files and data are stored etc.) What else is there? Sure, man 3 printf may have had the same interface for 30 years, but it's disingenuous to use that to claim that it's "the most backwards compatible platforms to build anything on".

What's even more funny is that you use "Unix" instead of "Linux", implying that software written for one Unix would magically work with others (I mean, that would be case if all was backwards compatible, right?). Have you ever written software for more than one Unix, even disregarding historical versions? The most painful concoctions needed to develop for several Unixy OS's (like, say, autotools) exist for the exact reason that they're not compatible at all. While at the same time, I've written code for Win98 almost 15 years ago whose binaries still run, without as much as changing a software setting, on Windows 7 (and probably 8 although I haven't tried) today. (again, there are plenty of things to critisize Windows for, but backward compatibility is not one of them).

"Of course things like config files change"

Yeah, that's like saying "of course a 2012 BMW is different in a few minor ways from a Model T, but essentially they're just machines with engines and wheels." Eh, yeah, sure.