Poll: virtual desktops on W10

[pkosewski]

Windows 95/ME were built on DOS but Windows NT, the progenitor of modern Windows systems, was a fresh start that had a lot more in common with Digital Equipment's VMS operating system than DOS.

I should have been more precise here. Yes, modern Windows runs on NT kernel, which is actually very good: stable and relatively light.

But NT took over most general ideas from DOS.
The way programs are installed and run, the idiotic directory tree, backslash in paths, stupid file encoding, different newline - we could go on and on. Windows is - in many ways - different from every other mainstream OS. And it means it's also super irritating for developers. Or even for casual coders (like financial analysts).

And while in the early 90s MS may have still hoped that DOS will rule the planet, shift to NT kernel happened when it was obvious that servers and mobile devices will run on Unix-like (POSIX-compliant) systems. But they were afraid to make the transition. And here we are, 20 years later. NT-kernel is at the edge of becoming just a fancy hypervisor.

I mean: being a cloud dev working on a Windows laptop, the only 3 tools I use for work that run natively are: VS Code, Chrome and Conda. Everything else is either remote, WSL or Docker.

 

[Sean Nelson]

And while in the early 90s MS may have still hoped that DOS will rule the planet, shift to NT kernel happened when it was obvious that servers and mobile devices will run on Unix-like (POSIX-compliant) systems.

Hindsight is 20/20. I lived through that era working in the IT industry and the dominance of Unix was nowhere near assured by the early 1990's when NT was developed. The traditional hardware companies like IBM and Digital Equipment were still very much at the top of the market.

Not to mention the fact that the only "mobile devices" in the 1990's were laptops running Windows and the Mac OS. And Windows-based computers far outsold everything else.

In fact the decline of the old guard companies started not as much from Unix (which had traditionally been a minicomputer OS) as from NT itself, which had already worked its way onto corporate desktops and proved itself solid enough to start replacing traditional mainframe and minicomputer servers at the low end.

At the time UNIX was plagued by the schisms between variants like BSD, Xenix, Fedora, etc. Conservative IT departments were reluctant to cast their lot in with a flavour that might fall out of favour.

 

[Austinian]

Windows 95/ME were built on DOS but Windows NT, the progenitor of modern Windows systems, was a fresh start that had a lot more in common with Digital Equipment's VMS operating system than DOS.

I should have been more precise here. Yes, modern Windows runs on NT kernel, which is actually very good: stable and relatively light.

But NT took over most general ideas from DOS.
The way programs are installed and run, the idiotic directory tree, backslash in paths, stupid file encoding, different newline - we could go on and on. Windows is - in many ways - different from every other mainstream OS.

As you said previously, "backward compatibility". That matters a lot.

And it means it's also super irritating for developers. Or even for casual coders (like financial analysts).

Some casual coders like myself have adapted to multiple platform changes over the years with no particular fuss.

And while in the early 90s MS may have still hoped that DOS will rule the planet, shift to NT kernel happened when it was obvious that servers and mobile devices will run on Unix-like (POSIX-compliant) systems. But they were afraid to make the transition.

For me, they've made whatever transitions they needed to just fine.

And here we are, 20 years later. NT-kernel is at the edge of becoming just a fancy hypervisor.

I mean: being a cloud dev working on a Windows laptop, the only 3 tools I use for work that run natively are: VS Code, Chrome and Conda. Everything else is either remote, WSL or Docker.

TBH, as long as my existing Windows applications run well, I don't greatly care how the OS is implemented. Everyone else is on their own. :-D

 

[CAcreeks]

NT took over most general ideas from DOS.
The way programs are installed and run, the idiotic directory tree, backslash in paths, stupid file encoding, different newline - we could go on and on. Windows is - in many ways - different from every other mainstream OS. And it means it's also super irritating for developers. Or even for casual coders (like financial analysts).

Not to mention the Registry. I suppose the central repository could have worked better if there had been a "restart Registry service" API, to avoid reboot after every software install.

I mean: being a cloud dev working on a Windows laptop, the only 3 tools I use for work that run natively are: VS Code, Chrome and Conda. Everything else is either remote, WSL or Docker.

Interesting! Visual Studio (Code) is free now. I used a paid copy before my employer eliminated "the Windows disease" as our CEO expressed it. Thanks for the ref to Conda, new to me.

 

[afterburn]

And let’s not forget that five and a half years after Windows 10’s release we still have settings scattered in two distinctly different locations.

Well, Control Panel is going away soon (maybe this year). But MS has vary bad experience with applying any modifications to the interface - there's a massive user base that is afraid of any change, although eventually gets used to the new things. And there's a fairly large group that would just prefer to use WinXP, because the only thing they want to do is double click the game launcher.

In the meantime, MS is struggling because of the wrong decision made 30 years ago, when they decided to keep the DOS kernel instead of using something Unix-like. And since gaming is so important for Windows, it became impossible to correct this later.

There is absolutely nothing related to DOS in any version of Windows for consumers since XP. Today's windows is based on the NT kernel and DOS does not exist in NT. It can only emulate it.

There is absolutely NOTHING in Unix that would make the current Windows better. And I'm a Unix guy. Anyone that thinks using Unix will make all software issues go away is, well, clueless.

BS statements like this do not help.

Oh, and to crap some minds: certain versions of msdos were actually a single user variant of Xenix, yes, the Microsoft Unix os.

 

[PhotoFactor]

Windows 95/ME were built on DOS but Windows NT, the progenitor of modern Windows systems, was a fresh start that had a lot more in common with Digital Equipment's VMS operating system than DOS.

I should have been more precise here. Yes, modern Windows runs on NT kernel, which is actually very good: stable and relatively light.

But NT took over most general ideas from DOS.
The way programs are installed and run, the idiotic directory tree, backslash in paths, stupid file encoding, different newline - we could go on and on. Windows is - in many ways - different from every other mainstream OS. And it means it's also super irritating for developers. Or even for casual coders (like financial analysts).

And while in the early 90s MS may have still hoped that DOS will rule the planet, shift to NT kernel happened when it was obvious that servers and mobile devices will run on Unix-like (POSIX-compliant) systems. But they were afraid to make the transition. And here we are, 20 years later. NT-kernel is at the edge of becoming just a fancy hypervisor.

I mean: being a cloud dev working on a Windows laptop, the only 3 tools I use for work that run natively are: VS Code, Chrome and Conda. Everything else is either remote, WSL or Docker.

The lettered drives are the worst of all. You have letters embedded in scripts. No generality.

My Apple II using Prodos from Apple got rid of that problem 35 years ago. Unix never had that problem. VMS always had a way to deal with that problem.

 

[gscotten]

Oh, and to crap some minds: certain versions of msdos were actually a single user variant of Xenix, yes, the Microsoft Unix os.

If that turns out to be true, my mind truly would be crapped, for sure. I know Microsoft sold a package of both MS-DOS and Xenix. If you needed a single user OS, you installed MS-DOS; Xenix was for multi-user systems. The two were not a bit alike. I supported both in those days, writing Assembler, mostly.

If you can give me a reference showing versions of both with any sort of similarity, I would love to be re-educated, even at my age.

 

[Sean Nelson]

The lettered drives are the worst of all. You have letters embedded in scripts. No generality.

My Apple II using Prodos from Apple got rid of that problem 35 years ago. Unix never had that problem. VMS always had a way to deal with that problem.

Yeah, the whole drive letter thing was a real fail, especially since NT was developed by VMS folks. VMS had physical drive names like "DRA1:", but it also had the concept of "Logical Names" which were terrific. You could code all your scripts and programs to use a logical name like "PAYROLL_DB", and then on the various development, test and production computer systems you'd set up the logical names differently for to point to the appropriate physical drives. You could develop code, do unit and integration testing on it, and move it to production without any changes at all because the logical names insulated it all from where the stuff actually was.

On Windows I've written a ton of PowerShell scripts to do various tasks, and in quite a lot of them I enumerate the drives to find the one with a particular volume label to decide where to process files. This is especially important with removable media like USB flash drives, because there's no guarantee they're going to get the same drive letter from one day to the next.

 

[CAcreeks]

Yeah, the whole drive letter thing was a real fail, especially since NT was developed by VMS folks. VMS had physical drive names like "DRA1:", but it also had the concept of "Logical Names" which were terrific. You could code all your scripts and programs to use a logical name like "PAYROLL_DB", and then on the various development, test and production computer systems you'd set up the logical names differently for to point to the appropriate physical drives. You could develop code, do unit and integration testing on it, and move it to production without any changes at all because the logical names insulated it all from where the stuff actually was.

On Windows I've written a ton of PowerShell scripts to do various tasks, and in quite a lot of them I enumerate the drives to find the one with a particular volume label to decide where to process files. This is especially important with removable media like USB flash drives, because there's no guarantee they're going to get the same drive letter from one day to the next.

Thanks Sean, great post as usual.

Doesn't Windows have a way to mount, umm... map (!) a drive? Can map be used with local drives to replace letters?

http://systemmanager.ru/svcsunix.en/extfile/clinfs/clientnfs_p_map_net_drive_nt4.htm

Either kudos or condolences for learning and using PowerShell. It is the weirdest thing I've encountered since Al Yankovic.

 

[PhotoFactor]

The lettered drives are the worst of all. You have letters embedded in scripts. No generality.

My Apple II using Prodos from Apple got rid of that problem 35 years ago. Unix never had that problem. VMS always had a way to deal with that problem.

Yeah, the whole drive letter thing was a real fail, especially since NT was developed by VMS folks. VMS had physical drive names like "DRA1:", but it also had the concept of "Logical Names" which were terrific. You could code all your scripts and programs to use a logical name like "PAYROLL_DB", and then on the various development, test and production computer systems you'd set up the logical names differently for to point to the appropriate physical drives. You could develop code, do unit and integration testing on it, and move it to production without any changes at all because the logical names insulated it all from where the stuff actually was.

On Windows I've written a ton of PowerShell scripts to do various tasks, and in quite a lot of them I enumerate the drives to find the one with a particular volume label to decide where to process files. This is especially important with removable media like USB flash drives, because there's no guarantee they're going to get the same drive letter from one day to the next.

Yes, I was a VMS Sys Admin for many years. A great OS. Too bad about DEC.

 

[Sean Nelson]

VMS had physical drive names like "DRA1:", but it also had the concept of "Logical Names" which were terrific...

Doesn't Windows have a way to mount, umm... map (!) a drive? Can map be used with local drives to replace letters?

You can map a drive letter to server share, (i.e., when you try to access drive "P:" you are taken to a share called (\\SC923\Payroll\") but in a large organization it's really, really hard to come up with a consistent drive letter mapping for all clients when so many people have so many different needs to connect to so many different file shares. There are only so many letters in the alphabet. And it's not really useful when accessing local files, because it sends everything through the network protocol stack. I think. It's been a while.

In theory, you can just code everything to use "UNC" names (i.e., "\\servername\sharename") instead of drive letters, but again it's not a great solution for local files and when we investigated it there were some issues, the details of which are lost to my memory (this was over 20 years ago), that kept us from adopting it as a standard.

Either kudos or condolences for learning and using PowerShell. It is the weirdest thing I've encountered since Al Yankovic.

PowerShell is a fantastic tool, well worth the learning curve if you do any scripting on Windows. The fact that it's all object based is what sets it apart from all the other scripting languages that I've used.

 

[gscotten]

For quick and dirty stuff, we just used SUBST, often in a batch file that started up the application. Anything serious we mapped in our software setup. Did not seem like that much of a problem....

--
George

 

[CAcreeks]

NT took over most general ideas from DOS.
The way programs are installed and run, the idiotic directory tree, backslash in paths, stupid file encoding, different newline - we could go on and on.

Actually \r\n is ANSI standard, unlike Unix with only\n or MacOS with only \r, the worst.

I mean: being a cloud dev working on a Windows laptop, the only 3 tools I use for work that run natively are: VS Code, Chrome and Conda. Everything else is either remote, WSL or Docker.

Do you like WSL?

I had Cygwin since the 1980s, so didn't install WSL when it first came around. And with all my W10 stuff going thru MacRDP and VPN, I'm not gonna try it now. A co-worker said she installed WSL, but when I later asked how she liked it, she denied having installed it.

So I'd like to know what you think.

 

[Sean Nelson]

Actually \r\n is ANSI standard, unlike Unix with only\n or MacOS with only \r, the worst.

Talk about legacy tech! That harks from the Baudot code used by the old Telex network, when you had to send the "carriage return" character first because that way the print head could commence it's long journey back to the left side of the carriage while the "line feed" character advanced the paper by one line... So its roots go back 150-years!

 

[Sean Nelson]

Hmmm - that's interesting. I'm still on Office 2007 so this may have changed - but one of the things that annoys me is that I've never been able to find a way to have two separate Excel windows open at the same time.

Are you sure? I have an older version (Excel 2003). If I double-click my Excel desktop icon three times, I get three windows.

HA! You are right! Terrific tip, thanks so much!

Is there any chance that there's a secret command line option so that I can create a shortcut to an Excel spreadsheet that opens in its own window instead of in an existing one?

Edit: I think I found it. I have to manually create a shortcut with a command line that runs the Excel program and specifies the file name, rather than just right-clicking the ".xls" file and choosing "Create Shortcut".

Just to follow up on this hack to get multiple Excel windows open - one of the very cool things about it is that you get separate icons on the taskbar for each Excel window. And what's more the taskbar icon is the one that you assigned to the shortcut.

This means that when you have two or three spreadsheets open it's really easy to see on the taskbar which one is which and click on it to go directly to the right spreadsheet.

 

[CAcreeks]

Are you sure? I have an older version (Excel 2003). If I double-click my Excel desktop icon three times, I get three windows.

HA! You are right! Terrific tip, thanks so much!

Just to follow up on this hack to get multiple Excel windows open - one of the very cool things about it is that you get separate icons on the taskbar for each Excel window. And what's more the taskbar icon is the one that you assigned to the shortcut.

Isn't that true only when you have Combine taskbar buttons = Never set?

This means that when you have two or three spreadsheets open it's really easy to see on the taskbar which one is which and click on it to go directly to the right spreadsheet.

I have mine set to When taskbar is full.

One thing I like about Windows and Linux Cinnamon is that clicking an icon opens its application, and clicking again closes it. In MacOS it's a weird right-click menu to hide or quit.

 

[Sean Nelson]

Are you sure? I have an older version (Excel 2003). If I double-click my Excel desktop icon three times, I get three windows.

HA! You are right! Terrific tip, thanks so much!

Just to follow up on this hack to get multiple Excel windows open - one of the very cool things about it is that you get separate icons on the taskbar for each Excel window. And what's more the taskbar icon is the one that you assigned to the shortcut.

Isn't that true only when you have Combine taskbar buttons = Never set?

Actually, my taskbar is set to "Combine = Always, Hide labels".

With shortcuts that refer just to the ".xlsx" file what I get on the taskbar is one Excel icon on the taskbar, drawn in the style which shows that it represents multiple open documents.

With shortcuts that give a command that runs Excel with the filename as a parameter I get separate taskbar icons for each spreadsheet that launched from such a shortcut, and the icons match those that I set for the shortcuts.

 

[John Sheehy]

I went through the comments and it seems that most unsatisfied people may simply be using virtual desktop in the worst scenario possible - splitting windows that belong to a single workflow/project.
Of course it makes way more sense to get a second monitor!

Virtual desktops excel at managing separate workflows - uncluttering windows and making the "alt-tab" switching much more efficient.

You can have 1 desktop for photo editing, 1 for news, 1 for monitoring etc.

I guess I just don't need this much efficiency in my life. I just minimize/restore windows as needed

Virtual desktops can save a lot of clicks and keep a lot of confusing clutter off the screen with minimal effort. If you look at one window at a time, your method is not too bad (especially if it is maximized), but if you have more than one set of setups with multiple windows needing to be visible at the same time for each, that's a lot of clicks and too much time figuring out which ones you've already toggled and which remain to be toggled.

 

[Sean Nelson]

...but if you have more than one set of setups with multiple windows needing to be visible at the same time for each, that's a lot of clicks and too much time figuring out which ones you've already toggled and which remain to be toggled.

I have three physical monitors and I still sometimes run out of screen real estate! ;-)

Economics applies to screens, too: demand expands to match or exceed supply.