onlyonemac wrote:
And this is exactly the reason why WSL shouldn't exist.
WSL shouldn't exist because it runs everything Linux can and more?
oneonlymac wrote:
You lose:
- The security that comes with an open-source base system
- The flexibility customisation that comes with a modular base system
- The freedom that comes with an open (not the same as open-source, but rather meaning that it is open for modification and experimentation rather than containing undocumented proprietary components right down to the bootloader) base system
Maybe those aren't things that matter to you, but they're also things that you don't necessarily appreciate until you've used Linux.
Open source isn't inherently secure (unless you've personally vetted every single line of code in every single module of every single program your system runs). Windows is plenty customizable (there's a greater variety of PC hardware with working drivers, there are utilities for reskinning your window manager, and there is an incredible amount of software available). And the so-called "freedom" granted to you by being able to see the source code does... what for you exactly that Windows' proprietary kernel can't? The Windows driver development kit and references are free, the compiler and toolkit are free, and even the operating system is free now.
The "freedom" of the operating system means nothing to me because I expect it to just work and let me do what I want, which Windows did 99% of the time and now 100% of the time since I no longer have to run gcc in a virtual machine. The difference is gratis versus libre. And even then, Microsoft has been open-sourcing quite a few pieces of their software.
oneonlymac wrote:
Windows 9x has nothing to do with this; NT has plenty of problems of its own, and to cite one example I'm going to mention that every Windows system that I have that's older than about 6 months has svchost.exe using up an entire CPU core (and they're different Windows versions from different vendors running different applications), and when they're not doing that I'm fighting with the inflexible interface and restrictive filesystem (seriously, no quote marks in a file name???).
This is not a Windows problem. svchost is a host process that hosts services (which are not wholly standalone programs but rather modules that run under the generic sandboxing host process). Third-party drivers and software can include services that are run by the generic host process, and if we're going to be blaming services for making an entire OS crap, then Linux is worthless because the touchpad user-space daemon likes to busy hang on my single-core laptop when I put resume it from sleep in a virtual terminal and it makes the entire computer unusable.
I don't know what you're getting your information from, but NTFS supports every Unicode character in filenames except NUL and forward-slash. Win32 has a few other restricted characters because the API handles globbing and argument sets for all Win32 programs to give a consistent interface across the system.
oneonlymac wrote:
I personally hope that Linux users don't fall into this trap and give away the freedom and control over their computers (and the capability that this brings with them - I still remember how much faster my floppy drive used to work under Linux simply because the floppy disk driver bothered to calibrate the head step rate properly) that they have gained through using Linux.
I hope you and other people learn to enjoy an operating system that just works, and doesn't completely break on relatively common hardware setups like multi-GPU desktops even with manufacturer-created open source drivers that are supposed to be compatible with the hardware inside the "free" ecosystem, a system I have that has eight Marvell Fast Ethernet NICs in it, my netbook's LTE modem, and every surround sound system I've ever encountered.
NT is much more elegant than you think. And the operating system it's built on just works. There's no lack of working drivers due to the project lead telling manufacturers to f*ck off. There's no "give me freedom or give me death" ideology in the developer and user communities. There's no spontaneous system collapses because you decided to recompile the kernel to support ZFS boot images. The API isn't an attempt to half-arse a modern design and shove it into a design from the 1970s. And it certainly doesn't do only a quarter of what the average person needs it to out of the box and still pretend to be a desktop operating system.
There's a reason Windows ships on everything that's not targeting Linux and Free Software hackers, and it's not Darth Ballmer and the Microsoft Illuminati Cabal.