for-win VS Windows Terminal

Fifth thing: Bricker of Windows

https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1549

Still pissed my HP Windows laptop was bricked from it a few months ago. I’ll never use it for anything.

I use containers on Mac and Windows for development (and we deploy on linux). Docker for Mac is _unusably_ slow in my experience. The VM that it runs is a giant resource hog and a battery hog, and doesn't support ipv6 [0] Docker Desktop itself is (another) resource hog, wildly buggy, and painfully slow. It's the epitome of "shitty electron app".

On windows, docker desktop has all of the same issues as it does on mac. Docker's concept of volumes and file permissions on windows are nonsense. Windows updates and Docker Desktop regularly decide to disagree, [1] It's networking support interferes with other applications (like OpenVPN and the Xbox Game Center) [2].

[0] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1432

[1] https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/599

[2] https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1976

I have a GitHub post here I made that goes into more detail: https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/13320

possibly related to https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/13324 ?

> FWIW, when denying the request to wootric, the docker daemon crashes.

A yes, this about fits the standard of engineering I've come to expect from Docker.

Anyway, I couldn't find any references too "woocentric" anywhere in the code; looks like this part isn't open source? I did find this other issue: https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/12718 with a comment from May 2022:

"At some point we found out that bugsnag was actually sending a «session creation» request of some sort when initialized, even if no crash was actually being reported. We believed we had fixed that, but I just checked with a MITM proxy and it appears to have regressed… There may be some other services doing something similar without us realizing (wootric, …).

We have created a ticket in our internal backlog to review all this."

Docker Github issue

I ran into this error ( no matching manifest for linux/amd64 in the manifest list entries ), so I tried again on my Windows machine. But then I realized that Docker on Windows actually just runs on WSL2, and it's technically Linux as well! Supposedly, I can switch to Windows containers by clicking on "Switch to Linux container...", but I guess apparently not on Windows 10 Home?? https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/9701

A Microsoft employee recently (~6 months) opened a Github issue to discuss a command line editor for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440

> convince management of the value

This presupposes that such convincing is even possible. Many, many companies have leadership that are simply terrible at identifying value. If you've never been part of a majority of developers advocating for, if not outright begging for, some huge ROI initiative to get the green light, you are very fortunate.

There are great counterexamples, like Valve, which is known for giving developers an extreme degree of autonomy, and they benefit greatly from that approach. For each Valve, though, there are dozens of companies that manage to succeed despite themselves.

Take Microsoft, for example. One tiny, yet representative, example: the way the Windows Terminal team handled a suggestion from Casey Muratori to take their software from abysmally slow to lightning fast:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

A quote from one of the Terminal developers, dismissing the suggestion:

> I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively…

Just how difficult was such an endeavor in actuality? Well, given that Casey implemented his own terminal emulator from scratch and incorporated the functionality he was proposing in a mere weekend... not a whole lot. Relatively minor effort for a huge return on investment. It took Casey explaining the concepts, then providing a working proof of concept, and finally a bunch of backlash online towards the Terminal team to get them to do the right thing for themselves and their users.

At this point ConHost.exe is open source [0] so it is maybe not a stretch to expect Microsoft to open source CMD.EXE at some point.

Though with PowerShell being cross-platform and already open source, I personally don't think there's enough to gain in some sort of better open source CMD.EXE fork. I'd be interested in being proved wrong on that, but I'm also happy enough with PowerShell these days I'm not in a hurry to return to CMD.EXE.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/host

"Users of Linux and macOS may well be familiar with the sudo command, used regularly in the terminal, and it looks like Windows may finally be getting its own version."

More Linux tools are coming to Windows, especially Windows Server because the tools are good and they make it easier to administer a Windows Server.

They are looking at adding a default TUI text editor (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440) and now they are adding sudo.

I would not be surprised if systemd or something like it gets ported or reinvented for Windows simply because it makes managing services so nice.

GitHub

>We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it.

People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content.

An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...

Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued.

If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright.

If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development.

An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary.

Windows Terminal is pretty good and a new terminal emulator written in the last few years. No smooth scrolling, here's the GitHub issue requesting it: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1400

Assume its related to this:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

It's nothing serious just microsoft engineers writing slow as shit code and reacting poorly to someone trying to help.

"There are plenty of offline scenarios where this would be incredibly useful. For disconnected environments, etc. There are some environments that will never connect to winget."

Source: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440#disc...