My guess would be there are some people at MS who, somehow, still can do something fun. Because they are not assigned on the another project on how to make OOBE even more miserable.
/rant Today I spent 3 (three) hours trying to setup a new MSI AIO with Windows Pro. Because even though it's would be joined to the local ADDS and managed from there - I need to join some Internet connected network, setup a 3 stupid recovery questions which would make NIST blush and wait another 30 minutes for a forced update download which I cannot skip. Oh, something went wrong - let's repeat the process 3 times.
Yeah ... I don't think there's any overlap between "users largely unfamiliar with terminals" who want something easy to use, and 'Linux users who are sufficiently technical that they would even hear about this repo'.
Here's a scenario. You're running a cluster, and your users are biologists producing large datasets. They need to run some very specific command line software to assemble genomes. They need to edit SLURM scripts over SSH. This is all far outside their comfort zone. You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?
I've met biologists who enjoy the challenge of vim, but they are rare. nano does the job, but it's fugly. micro is a bit better, and my current recommendation. They are not perfect experiences out of the box. If Microsoft can make that out of the box experience better, something they are very good at, then more power to them. If you don't like Microsoft, make something similar.
> You're running a cluster, and your users are biologists producing large datasets. They need to run some very specific command line software to assemble genomes. They need to edit SLURM scripts over SSH. This is all far outside their comfort zone. You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?
Wrongly phrased scenario. If you are running this cluster for the biologists, you should build a front end for them to "edit SLURM scripts", or you may find yourself looking for a new job.
> A Bioinformatics Engineer develops software, algorithms, and databases to analyze biological data.
You're an engineer, so why don't you engineer a solution?
The title is a bit confusing depending how you read it. Edit isn't "for" Linux any more than PowerShell was made for Linux to displace bash, zsh, fish, and so on. Both are just also available with binaries "for" Linux.
The previous HN posts which linked to the blog post explaining the tool's background and reason for existing on Windows cover it all a lot better than a random title pointing to the repo.
I dunno, I spent a lot of years (in high school at least) using Linux but being pretty overwhelmed by using something like vim (and having nobody around to point me to nano).
EDIT.COM, on the other hand... nice and straightforward in my book
There's no shortage of less technical people using nano for editing on Linux servers. Something even more approachable than that would have a user base.
Especially noting it's a single binary that's just 222kb on x86_64— that's an excellent candidate to become an "installed by default" thing on base systems. Vim and emacs are both far too large for that, and even vim-tiny is 1.3MB, while being considerably more hostile to a non-technical user than even vim is.
I can definitely see msedit having a useful place.