bohol

I don't disagree over all, but I'm not sure it works that way anymore. Systems have become super complex and the measurement for what is impressive have gone up. I think the power of a lot of those early system was that they were "boxes", but still impressive enough to keep playing in that box. I think Linux is very much the opposite. You can do pretty much anything you want, but it can be very hard to get good results. If I wanted someone o have the same experience these days I'd probably put them in front of something like processing.

In my experience a lot of this isn't becuase it can't work on windows, but because the developer didn't take the time to make it work on Windows. I also had my fair share on build and dependency problems on Linux when wanting something custom.

I think this is much more a ecosystem thing than a systems thing. Which do count of course.

Makes sense. My concern really is if Linux gets any better for these use cases. I think a lot of Linux development is to much software and to little real world "science". You hear a lot how powerful Linux is, but in a lot of cases powerful things are run by XP as you say.

I kind of gave on Linux a couple of years ago when at the same time when Apple had totally neglected the Mac Pro all you could find from the Linux community was how cool the latest 3D effects on the desktop where and chromium was much better than Firefox. Trying instead finding something like say a 2D library more modern than Cairo and there's a deafening silence.

Yes, I'm exaggerating a bit and there is some good developments. Like CERN making waves in electronics by hacking on KiCad. Though I'm sure they would be happier if they could replace Wx with something more modern, which I'm not sure the current alternatives are.

What do you mean by scientific? There's a lot of Windows only software for research. Mostly for applied things. But also things like data collection. There's even more if you look at development in things like engineering. Even industrial is surisingly much Windows only.

You can of course also make quite convincing BIOS password prompts with QBasic.

But a dissembler doesn't produce the same information that a datasheets provides? Unless he means to physically disassemble, but that isn't very easy.

Considering that what you consider 'IoT' and what Microsoft considers 'IoT' isn't the same thing it might be your comment that is irrelevant.

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/iot-whatisit-140607104402-php...

I know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the PC scene from early nineties to today that made up many of the founders and employees at today's games companies. You're have some high horse argument that the scene and games industry started before that, even though the connection at that point is much more unclear. There were of course some overlap, especially people starting out late with commodore, but less than you would think. If it makes you feel better you can insert "modern" or "for the last 25 years" in my previous statement.

And yes I've also been on HN for a while, longer than you if that is your first username.

Sure. I don't refute that Microsoft is, simplified, evil. That doesn't change the fact that people with positions in the Linux community don't really care about those things. I don't really see any move of note toward that either.

Even when Apple practically gave the Linux distributions an opportunity with the neglect of the Mac Pro. Here you had people who didn't like Windows, disgruntled with Apple, liked unix, wanted a powerful operating system and was overpaying for hardware.

OpenGL isn't that much harder on Linux than on Windows, so where the push for great OpenGL developer tools on Linux? Google and Mozilla gets a lot of credit for supporting open source, so why are there no decent bindings from their respective new languages to their respective 2d libraries (Go/Skia, Rust/Mozilla2d)?

There's kind of a macho attitude in open source that things should be hard. If you can't or don't want to fix it yourself it your own fault. It's great for the people that are happy with that and are invested in it, not so much for the rest of us.

I'm not talking about pre-90s and I've been to many demoparties. Do you want to refute that the PC demoscene have had a huge impact on the modern games industry? Because if you read my original comment, that is my point.

Oh, and maybe you should read the site guidelines, second paragraph under "In Comments".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The state of Linux is far more a hindrances for it's success as a learning tool than Windows ever was. I've been using Linux since '98, it's great for learning systems administration or networking. It's however lacking in most of the other areas of computing, those which yourself like many other apparently are quite ignorant of. I learned far more from windows than I ever did Linux, including advanced OS concepts.

That Microsoft is coercing people to use Windows is the favorite conspiracy among Linux evangelists. The reality is that Linux isn't and never was very approachable. You might not be able to dive into the source code of Windows, but at least your not stuck trying to understand yet another build system. At least there are decent learning material so you don't need read the source code or scavenge through mailings list trying to find something other than "why do you want to do that". Or a countless other examples like it.

I like Linux, I do. But you can't have your cake and it too. It's not as good as Windows if you want to have access to all areas of computing. Which is what you want when you teach computers to a wide verity of people.

Maybe you should be more concerned that most ARM devices doesn't have working graphics acceleration for Linux desktop systems.

No, while nostalgic, the Commodore and Atari scene were tiny in comparison. Since the mid nineties people have learned graphics programming and reverse engineering primarily on Windows.

It's not like OS programming is going away, but it has always been mostly a university thing.

And you could say we already are in big trouble. Since the ecosystem for multimedia weren't (and isn't) very good on Linux a lot of qualified user software exist on other platforms. Industrial, scientific, medical, music, film etc.

I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does.

I do think the trend of iOS, Android and similar Windows environments is troubling. But if they ship Windows 10 on the RPi with something like QBasic and Visual Studio it's probably just as good a learning tool as Linux. Or even a better one considering the rest of the application ecosystem.

Somewhat surprised that there are around 20 comments and all of the seem to be from more or less a consumer perspective. The Raspberry Pi is one of the few embedded devices with aspires to be used as a desktop computer and on top of that as a way to learn computers. Embedded systems is also one of the few threats to Windows, but this hasn't really materialized yet since most devices only comes with android drivers. All in all it's a great strategic move for Microsoft and confirms my suspicion that Linux is losing the second round of the desktop wars.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what a disassembler has to do with datasheets?

This is more cheap dismissal than a "superficial investigation". The author writes "Google News Archives are dead, killed off in 2011, now directing searchers to just use Google." and you have discovered that this is true?

The bigger problem is being infected by a trojan. You have all the time in the world to get infected, but would only take a single time when your files are unencrypted to expose them.

The whole thing seem really strange to me, almost like a parody. In the technology center of the world secular community movements, which SF used to be famous for, are being replaced by churches and networking events. Why not get together and start a study circle instead, it seems a lot more apt for the place.

I get that people are excited, but it seems like time and time again these abstractions fail to solve the underlying problems.

It's like how we never got a fix for making cross platform applications. And regardless how much people wants the new way of doing things to work, the results speak for themselves. Atom, the editor, can't even handle window re-sizing smoothly.