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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."

11 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Uh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's perfect. Now my Pi can have Telemetry!
    DirectX ought to come in handy, too.

  2. pft... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    why the hell would I want to do that?

    1. Re:pft... by edxwelch · · Score: 5, Funny

      masochism?

  3. You really make it hard by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    Decisions, decisions...

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    1. Re:You really make it hard by nyet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

  4. The Year on Linux on the desktop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    is the year that Windows will replace Linux on the IoT.

  5. The question is 'why' by Junta · · Score: 5, Informative

    'why' for developers and 'why' for microsoft as well.

    For developers, MS is so mismatched to the sensibilities of the embedded space, business and technology wise. Picking up the ball and going home from one linux to another or even to something like a BSD is easy enough if you have to. If you commit to MS ecosystem, there's no where to go if things pan out poorly (e.g, Windows mobile, windows ce, windows phone (at least 7 was a dead end), Windows RT). MS has a terrible track record in this space, even when their wheelhouse of desktop application ecosystem has some relevance, where the Pi has pretty much no relevance (it may have video out, but there are better choices for even ARM based graphical systems than Pi). MS ecosystem is in general so *alien* compared to the rest of the industry, you *really* have to believe in it to commit. It's silly to bet your project on MS's technology and ongoing commitment to the platform in this market.

    For MS, what do they hope to get out of this? They are coming into this from behind, against a competitor that gives away for free and where the entire ecosystem is tilted against them. They are going in to explore with no royalties, and no path to profit, or even revenue. Incidentally this has some resemblance to when they tried to break into 'supercomputing' nearly a decade ago, only to give up and let the resources mostly scatter to the winds when they figured out that there was no money to be made in the market, despite the prestige.

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    1. Re:The question is 'why' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  6. Re:Avoid the Microsoft tax! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I did a while ago. But you still need win 10 as a development station for Windows 10 IoT Core. kinda lame.

    http://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/win10/SetupPCRPI.htm
    "
    To setup your Windows 10 IoT Core development PC, you first need to install the following:

    Make sure you are running the public release of Windows 10 (version 10240) or better. You can upgrade from here. If you are already running Windows 10, you can find your current build number by clicking the start button and typing “winver” and hitting enter.

    Install Visual Studio 2015
    We recommend Community Edition.
    If you already have or choose to install Visual Studio Professional 2015 or Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 (available here), make sure to do a Custom install and select the checkbox Universal Windows App Development Tools -> Tools and Windows SDK.
    Install Windows IoT Core Project Templates from here. Alternatively, the templates can be found by searching for Windows IoT Core Project Templates in the Visual Studio Gallery or directly from Visual Studio in the Extension and Updates dialog (Tools > Extensions and Updates > Online).

    Make sure you’ve enabled developer mode by following these instructions."

  7. Technical stuff. Read if you want real info. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...)
    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 .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.
    4) If you like Linux, then use it. The reason to use WinIoT is if you already have a ton of experience working with .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.
    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).

  8. Re:Uh? by Eythian · · Score: 5, Funny

    It doesn't come with a GUI, so if you want a working display, you need Linux.

    I don't think anyone has ever said those words before.