Subj : Re: Windows vs Linux
To   : boraxman
From : tenser
Date : Mon Apr 25 2022 01:05:14

On 23 Apr 2022 at 12:32p, boraxman pondered and said...
 
 bo>  te> And how is that relevant to the ability to customize your .zshrc
 bo>  te> file or whatever?  Do you really think you couldn't do the same
 bo>  te> thing with powershell or wsl or whatever?  The ability to customize
 bo>  te> your shell experience is only tangentially related to the ability
 bo>  te> to script a shell to do something useful with the Unix filter model.
 bo>  te> Indeed, if you want to write scripts to do useful things, in many
 bo>  te> ways it's best NOT to rely on customizations, so that those scripts
 bo>  te> are portable -- not just to other machines and environments, but
 bo>  te> even to other users.
 bo> 
 bo> WSL is a relatively new addition, and it is Linux under Windows. 
 bo> Powershell seems powerful, designed more around system administration. 

Nope.

 bo> Could I transfer my workflow to windows?  Perhaps a notable portion, but
 bo> Windows wasn't designed with the same philosophy.  It was designed as a
 bo> "consumer OS", a platform for applications, and it is only relatively
 bo> recently that Microsoft are accommodating this other usage.

This was not the "design philosophy" behind Windows,
which was designed to be a multi-tenant microkernel with
different "personalities" tailored to individual jobs.
Recall that Cutler had done RSX-11m at DuPont and then
VMS at DEC and was working on MICA for PRISM before the
Alpha.

 bo> Windows is changing, but Powershell and WSL are recognitions of the
 bo> advantages that we already enjoy.

Windows had POSIX compatibility bolted on more or less
from the beginning to meet FIPS requirements.  It used
the aforementioned personality support to provide a
more or less Unix-like experience to those who wished to
pay for the experience.  Things like UWIN and Cygwin
made this largely transparent (e.g., for those of us stuck
on Windows machines on US Government networks for a time).

WSL is new and is different.  WSL1 is an ELF loader and
system-call adapter that presents the Linux system interface
to applications; WSL2 boots a Linux kernel under Hyper-V.

However, this is all moving the goalposts: you started this
discussion talking about the ability to "customize" Linux,
but beyond selecting a window manager, I have yet to see
what you are referring to that you can't do on any number of
other systems.

As I said before, computers are tools; MSFT is invested in
you being able to use their OS as a tool, just as the Linux
and BSD and even Mac people are.

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