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Ditch Linux For Windows 10 On Your Raspberry Pi With Microsoft's IoT Kit
An anonymous reader writes: Partnering with Adafruit, Microsoft has announced the Windows IoT Core Starter Kit. The $75 kit comes comes with an SD card preloaded with Windows 10 IoT. According to the Raspberry Pi blog: "The pack is available with a Pi 2 for people who are are new to Raspberry Pi or who'd like a dedicated device for their projects, or without one for those who'll be using a Pi they already own. The box contains an SD card with Windows 10 Core and a case, power supply, wifi module and Ethernet cable for your Pi; a breadboard, jumper wires and components including LEDs, potentiometers and switches; and sensors for light, colour, temperature and pressure. There's everything you need to start building."
why the hell would I want to do that?
You jest, but Windows is far and above king of backward compatibility as far as APIs are concerned.
Right. Like the amazing job they did with winsock?
The "change" in Linux is mostly invisible, and backwards compatible. For one thing, the POSIX API is there and remains unchanged, and is identical across all Linux variants, not to mention all the BSDs variants. POSIX is the #1 reason to stick with Linux or an open source variant. All this systemd non-sense? As an embedded and appliance developer, I couldn't care less. Systemd, BSD RC, it doesn't make any difference to me because I don't make any assumptions one way or another--you have to _actively_ work to become dependent on something like systemd. If daemonizing or logging is a chore, you're doing it wrong; and you can never go wrong by supporting a mode where you don't fork and simply print logs to stderr, which makes you compatible with every service framework ever invented.
The APIs for the desktop and GUI crowd are more volatile, but the beautiful thing about open source is that 1) nobody can ever force to move away from a framework and 2) it's much easier to move to a newer framework because you have access to the code, allowing you to hack together intermediate solutions until you're upgraded.
Windows offers none of those things.
Of course, lots of developers on Linux rely too much on non-standard GNU extensions, niche Linux kernel APIs, and make a host of other bad decisions which will come back to haunt them in the future. Indeed, many of those developers come from the Windows world where using and abusing hidden APIs is something of right of passage. But that was their decision to make. The rest of us who take a long (decades long) view know how to steer clear of dangerous dependencies, or how to isolate dependencies on such APIs so they don't poison the entire codebase.