Microsoft and Pi

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.

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 have 5 - 6 years old webcam, cant run it on my windows 8.1. but on linux it works fine. With PS3 webcam it is the same. cant run it on windows any version without paying for drivers, on linux, just plug it in an use it On windows 8. cave you tried using older printer + scanner, scanner or even good plotter? Devices are good but you cant run then on new PC. there is drivers for older versions of windows, but not foe new ones. So why I have to buy a new one If I have realy good hardvare that is working just fine, even better then new ones? It's like, pay, pay, pay just because your one device failed (pc or even OS like XP). Why I cant download .net Framework from MS site without MS telling me to buy new windows? I payed for PC with them or even for OS it sell. So it has to work as long as the hardware works. Ok MS,make an upgrade windows on my OLD laptop. but it has to work like xp. But then they will say, oh, your ram memory is too small, CPU is to slow or someting like that. It you cant make it work without terabytes of ram, the do not nag as until you optimize your code to work just fin on normal PCs not only ones NASA is using.

Sorry, for my bad English

By the way: I'm working wit robots (not new ones) so i get with problems were you cant easily use new versions of windows on them.

Do not get me wrong, I do not hate windows, but I'm only using it, because I have no choice. Not because I like it so much.

To all of you who have sprung to the defense of Linux,

Mainly you have completely missed my point, I said nothing about the availability of drivers for different versions and it may well be that Linux is better supported than Windows in respect of driver availability for old versions of hardware.

My point was about BINARY compatibility - I can run the same binary file, compiled from VB6, on Windows 2000 or  Windows 8.1 (and Windows 10 promised). Obviously this only applies if the processor is the same or compatible.

In addition I was not saying that Windows is better than Linux (or vice versa) but that Linux could benefit from looking at the competition - and that does, of course, apply to Microsoft as well.

MK

@Michael Kellett,

You pointed to the lack of drivers for the new Wolfson/Cirrus cards as an example of Linux being deficient. In Wolfson's defence, just a few months after releasing the card, they were bought-out by Cirrus and it's not surprising that this niche market for their products (they are really into smartphone and tablet chips) took a short hit in support.

As far as Linux binaries are concerned, some of the command line programs are decades old and still run well. I suspect that the situation is just the same for Windows. I'm sure quite a few old MSDOS programs still run in Windows 8.1 command prompt windows (or, whatever they are called, now). However, I would bet on xwindow gui programs working rather than Windows GUI programs. IIRC, the Visual Basic/Studio programs must have the relevant .NET environment installed in order to work. Even commercial programs have failed, in my experience, because of incompatibilities between components of different versions of .NET being called in error. I have a CNC machine controlled by a Visual Studio program and the XP version will not even install in Windows 7 and the latest version will not install in XP.

I doubt whether even one release of .NET would fit on a Raspberry Pi 4GB card and still leave room for Raspbian. Discussion of whether old versions of programs written in this resource hungry development environment would continue to run if the appropriate old version of .NET is installed is not really helpful for any Linux distribution.

Of course, that does not apply to programs written for gtk and in Cygwin!

I do note that my favourite programming editor does use mono. I see a major rewrite in its future bearing in mind the end of mono development.

You missed the subtlety (if that's the right word) of my VB point. I'm talking about VB6 and QuickBasic which preceded the .NET initiative. The main point here is that these were nice simple programming languages which made real programming accessible to lot of people. As far as I'm concerned VB.net is pointless - you might as well use C#. VB6 and QuickBasic both need a runtime library but this is a reasonable size.

I never commented on a lack of drivers for the Wolfson card, I commented on the need to re compile the kernel to make them work - not as a criticism of Wolfson but of Linux.

Microsoft are talking  a lot about a write once run everywhere (where there is a Windows 10 version)  aspiration for Windows10 and the associated Visual Studio, which would be very nice if achieved. My main point is that the lack of a nice simple programming language will hold it back - hence the thought that VB6 on Windows 10 would allow Joe Public to code nice graphical things on a whole load of platforms including the PI.

MK

I agree Michael.

VB6 was by far the best programming language ever developed for non-computer scientists. When talking about the internet of things or the internet of everything it is clear there are not enough computer scientists in the world to hope to scratch the surface of all the applications that will be developed. It would be a significant accelerant to IoT if VB6 were available on ARM platforms. The combination of low cost hardware and powerful "anybody-can-do-it" programming language would make the current popularity of RPi pale by comparison. I don't care if it runs under Windows, Linux or its android spinoffs, it would be great to see another explosion of popular interest in DIY programming like the one that made VB6 the most popular programming language in the world.

For what it is worth, I asked Microsoft to include VB6 with Win 10 for RPi2 - maybe if enough people make the same request, it will have an impact.

Doug