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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."
Dumping a system that works and does what I want for a system that spies on me and will change at the whim of its maker with but a "swallow bitch" if I complain.
You jest, but Windows is far and above king of backward compatibility as far as APIs are concerned.
One does wonder how efficient it is compared to Linux, though.
It also isn't much different from the price of other kits already on Amazon.
There were a ton of misconceptions and two tons of lies/crap (can't tell which) going on over at the Ars Technica comments thread about this earlier today.
1) Windows 10 IoT is free. There is no paid-for version of WinIoT. (And you thought "WinCE" was a bad nickname...) .Net Micro Framework (NetMF), which is a stripped-down version of the standard .Net Framework (NetFX). It shares virtually nothing in common with the old .Net Compact Framework (NetCF), and is, in fact, less stripped-down than that. .Net and the rest of Windows. Nobody (reasonable) gets belligerent and calls you an asshole because you use Linux, so have the same consideration for those that work with, or even *gasp* like, WinIoT.
2) WinIoT is NOT based on the main WinNT kernel. It's based on good-old Windows Embedded Handheld, not Windows Embedded Compact. WinEC is based on WinXP, and is thus part of mainline NT, but WinEH is based on WinCE.
3) It uses
4) If you like Linux, then use it. The reason to use WinIoT is if you already have a ton of experience working with
5) WinIoT doesn't spy. It's too stripped-down to do most of that telemetry crap, and people (even "true believers") would piss/bitch/moan/threaten-mob-action if they were to waste precious processor cycles on an embedded platform for that crap anyway.
6) WinIoT doesn't auto-update. Again, people would be pissed off if their "things" suddenly stopped working because an update broke compatibility. Not gonna happen. (Also, it's WinCE, so it never had an update cycle to begin with.)
Now that that's all out of the way, there can be a civil discussion (read: no discussion, because this is the internet, and everyone hates everyone else).
Windows as an embedded platform is really attractive to companies. They can reuse a lot of their existing software with minimal changes, and reuse their existing developers. Real embedded and Linux experts are much less common and much more expensive than .NET monkeys. If you do have problems, MS has support (even if it sucks).
It's the same reason that, despite being absolutely awful, WinCE is widely used. The same reason that ATMs run Windows XP.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC