Microsoft and Pi

Hi Mark,

I only registered for the Program a few days ago, and received a similar (but shorter!) email yesterday!

Hello David Rolfe,

Thank you for signing up for the Windows Developer Program for IoT!

We are excited to bring Windows to the Raspberry Pi 2 and continue to support Windows on the Intel Galileo. By joining this program you will be amongst the first to receive new information about our Windows Developer Program for IoT, including product information, beta programs and launch specifics.

Thank you,

The Microsoft IoT Team

It will be interesting to see how long we will have to wait before we receive any useful information!

Mark, you said,

"I do not like the idea personally, we shall see how the treat the project. Am I alone in this?"

I'm not quite sure what you don't like.

I like the idea of Windows on RPi - and as I explained in another thread what would make it perfect would be a port of VB6 (or even QuickBasic) to Windows running on the Pi.

That would make programming truly accessible to the zillions of people who can afford a Pi (it isn't just the money that holds people back).

MK

Michael

What I do not like is the thought of MS possibly using this as leverage to get Linux off of the Pi and running windows exclusively. One of the benefits of the Pi is that it has not been, until now, in the MS camp and so offers a view of something different, letting people know that MS is not the only company making operating systems. There are enough machines running windows out there, some places should be left alone in my opinion. I suppose what I am saying is that I feel that this may be the thing end of the wedge.

I hope it is the thin end of the wedge:

The Linux phenomenon has reached the point where it need a damn good kicking - I can run a 15 year old .exe file on windows 8 but I can't do the same with Linux - it comes in so many different and incompatible flavours that it's only useable by geeks.

The great thing about early computers (Beebs, Spectrums, PCs) was that they were easy to get into and program. Windows made them easy to use but harder to program. Linux is hard to use and hard to program.

For evidence of this look at the complexity of what you need to do use  a new peripheral (like the Wolfson/Cirrus) chip) with the Pi - can you just add a drive, no, you need to rebuild the kernel.

Choice is good -  no one will be obliged to run Windows (I hope )

MK

There are lots of old programs that I can run well on Linux (any distribution including Raspbian). There is lots of old hardware that I own that only runs on Linux since support has long since gone from Windows 7 and earlier. The support for the Wolfson/Cirrus card is still being developed. They will be able to use the new developments in Raspbian driver support to add the Cirrus driver to the main distribution. The Raspbian operating system is a special ARM development for the Pi. Nevertheless, I am running two of the older Wolfson cards and have written a mixer program for it using the tools already installed in the Raspi. While I wait for Cirrus, I just use the perfectly fine pre-compiled Raspbian distribution that they have provided.

I have plugged and played DVD burners, USB serial ports, Flash drives, external hard drives, USB parallel ports and much more with Raspbian. Some of these are devices which no longer work in Windows because one cannot get up-to-date drivers. The Windows 10 OS for the Raspi will be the only one in use now that the Nokia Windows RT device and the Microsoft Surface RT have been binned. I doubt very much that there will be a huge army of companies and other developers building drivers and programs for the Raspi. Windows 10 is really a touchscreen based OS. We can only hope that they include generic drivers that support existing HDMI touchscreen monitors. However, as I see it, the point of a touchscreen on the Raspi is for something the size of a tablet. There are already such touchscreens with built-in support in Raspian. Microsoft will have to do the same at the same cost to make Windows 10 viable on the Raspi.

Although Microsoft have released the free Visual Studio Lite for (Intel) desktops and laptops, I don't expect them to port any development tools to ARM for either the desktop environment or for apps on the tiled environment. Even if they did, it would be hard to get even a cut-down Windows 10 to run it with Raspi resources. Raspbian runs in 1.8GB. The Microsoft OS for the Intel equivalent board requires much more. From Microsoft's previous support for folk like us, I doubt we will ever get sufficient documentation and support to use it the way we use Raspbian. That's the issue with closed, proprietary operating systems.

Based on what has already been said, I think it is fair to say that it will indeed be a long time (if ever!) before we see Windows 10 included as an optional OS on NOOBS!

Mind you, by then we will probably be looking at the Raspberry Pi 3, complete with on-board wi-fi and Bluetooth support!

I am sorry but I don't see how Linux, with a desktop as raspian has, is any harder to use than a windows desktop. In fact, with windows 8 the "desktop" became a lot harder to use than any linux distro, even ubuntu! I will agree that if you want to work behind the scenes using cli to do stuff then it can be hard to get your head around but how many people want do that with windows anyway? (And I don't mean using cmd to run a command like nslookup or ipconfig). Windows reliance on using drivers to make so many things work is a pain. For example I have had to download drivers for the TI launchpad  am using when I want to run it on windows. Nothing required to run on Linux. My Beaglebone needed drivers so I could talk to it over usb with windows. Nothing required for Linux. I have used usb drives, wifi adapters and usb - serial adapters on my Pi with nothing needing to be installed before they work.

To get a few facts straight: To talk to your hardware a driver is always required. The thing is that microsoft has made some "weird" decisions. So when a device claims to be a standards-compliant storage device, it instantly becomes driven by the standards-compliant driver that microsoft provides. When a device claims to be a standards-compliant serial device, somehow microsoft does not want to mate it with the driver they provide for such a device.

These happen to be the examples I know about. I haven't run windows in quite a while. (If you don't count the quick "can you help me out with this?", I haven't used Microsoft OSes since about 1990.)

I think they might be meaning that the iot version of Windows - that just has access to the WinRT sdk (not the Win32 sdk) will be coming to the Pi.   This is similar to the one found on Windows 8.1 mobile, etc...

My Windows 8.1 Phone with Internet Explorer is, so far, the best device I have used to view my RPi-Cam Control v4.2.3 (GASP! from the crowd...). I have never had to load a hardware driver specifically to run any hardware I have on my RPi, including 7 year old Biometric fingerprint readers.  My Windows 7 lab, Windows 8 lab, and Windows 10 Preview lab all require specific drivers. None of these will run most of my 7 year old legacy hardware.

When I purchased my first Timex Sinclair ZX81, before there were IBM/Microsoft Personal Computers (PC), everyone realized there was no compatibility between 'home' computer manufacturers and 'porting from one platform to another was difficult. Compatibility between home computers was non-existent. Before IBM made Bill Gates the Software King, you could run his Microsoft Excel program only on the Apple I.

In an odd sort of way IBM and Microsoft, two of the largest proprietary companies, have provided a path to more compatibility than we ever believed possible in the early 1980's.  The comments and opinions in this thread are a good indication of the fact there is still plenty of road left on the journey to computer compatibility.  We are still in the earliest stages of developing hardware.  And we would all be well served to remember:

"Whatever hardware manufacturers give us (in performance as example), software manufacturers take away!

As long as there are new advances in hardware capabilities, there will always be different software approaches on how to utilize them.  This is good, but does not lend itself to compatibility.  My approach is use them all and understand the developers approach, hardware and software. Warning... this action takes time, patience, and understanding.

Now you have been warned!