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New Windows 10 Preview For PCs With Bash, Cross-Device Cortana Released
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has released a new Windows 10 preview for PCs. The preview, dubbed build 14316, comes with a range of features including support for Bash, which Microsoft had announced at its developer conference Build last week. Users interested in it can enable the feature by turning on Developer Mode (detailed instructions here), searching for "Windows Features," choosing "Turn Windows features on or off," and enable Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta). To get Bash installed, open Command Prompt and type in "bash" (without the quotes.) Other features included in the new build include low battery notification, find my phone (ring my phone), and the ability to share map directions across devices. Additionally, the company has also released a new universal Skype app.
Got there first? Huh? Bash is the latest iteration of the Bourne Shell, which has been around since the 1970s, and has had a number of offshoots. I mainly cut my teeth on ksh, but because the *nix world goes by the credo "if it ain't broke", it meant that a lot of the old /bin/sh scripts still run pretty much unmodified, and moving to Bash just meant learning a superset of that which I had been using for years.
And then came along PowerShell, which is just enough like the Bourne ecosystem to remind you of how Microsoft comes so close sometimes, but the inherent anti-*nix attitudes of its developers means it never quite gets there.
The fact is that if Microsoft really wants to make inroads into the realms dominated by Unix flavors, then it isn't going to do it with a scripted layer over .NET. There are decades worth of Bourne-variant scripts and libraries out there, and maybe, just for once, Microsoft might land on the right side of the question.
Unless of course, this Bash shell is nothing more than the latest iteration of the broken Posix subsystem, in which case, it's pretty much worthless.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What I don't understand is why they didn't provide an updated console mode/app/window with PowerShell and why they just threw it into the same dumb console that they had been throwing cmd.exe into.
I'm also curious why they didn't borrow more heavily from Unix. There are some things in PowerShell that are really awkward to do that are trivial in a Unix shell.
I'm sure there's some valid reasons but a lot of it simply seems like not invented here syndrome. I'm really annoyed with the default console window being so brain damaged, now I have to put ConEmu on everything if I want reasonable interaction with the console window.
Why can't we have nice things?