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inetknght a day ago

> Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based

I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices.

> Heaps of games are developed on Windows

Inertia.

> Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows.

Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine.

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delta_p_delta_x a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine

The overwhelming majority of software written against MinGW (or worse, Cygwin) are bad/lazy ports of Linux-first software. Case in point: Git and Perl, both of which drag along an entire coreutils ecosystem (each, so you have two copies of `ls`) along with the main binaries.

First-class Windows programs that are used every day like Office, Chromium and its forks, the Adobe suite, and tons and tons of internal administrative programs for HR, inventory, and more are written on Windows, for Windows, using C# or C++ and 'boring', so-called enterprisey frameworks like WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI 2.

Anyone remotely serious about taking advantage of the large (albeit shrinking) market share of Windows users should at the very least fire up a VM to test their release binaries, rather than just 'use Wine'.

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WD-42 a day ago | parent [-]

Ironically it was the act of doing that: spinning up a VM to test a release on Windows, which really turned me against it forever. During installation, I counted 4 un-skippable EULAS about "sharing data" and then asked me what my ad preferences were. To add insult to injury once I finally did get it installed, the start menu was full of Xbox apps and the taskbar had some news headline about the Kardashians on it.

I don't know how people put up with it. It feels disrespectful.

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delta_p_delta_x 20 hours ago | parent [-]

> I don't know how people put up with it. It feels disrespectful.

I install the Enterprise/Education versions.

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WD-42 16 hours ago | parent [-]

No. I’ll install Linux which doesn’t make me the product.

	▲	delta_p_delta_x 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Good for you.

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steve_adams_86 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices.

I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial.

> Inertia.

I think that's a tough case to make. Windows offers legitimate technical advantages for gaming and game development. Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge. There are real workflow benefits.

> Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows.

You know more about this than I do. That sounds kind of wild to me, like it could be a pretty awful work flow at times for no good reason. It looks like you don't have access to native debugging tools and Wine itself introduces potential compatibility risks. I would rather just develop on target, personally

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broodbucket a day ago | parent | next [-]

>Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge.

This is a product of inertia. If Windows didn't have inertia it wouldn't have ecosystem advantages, it's not inherent to Windows itself

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rstuart4133 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial.

Maybe he's thinking of more modern devices. There was a time when Microsoft flogged WinCE as an embedded solution, and yes a lot of people producing embedded stuff drank the kool aid.

I watched one instance of this happen first hand. They asked me what OS should they base their shiny new product (that I would be the first customer of), I said I would use some 'nix, but they should chose what they were comfortable with.

It turned out to be bad advice. They were comfortable with Windows desktop of course, so they chose WinCE. WinCE is not the stable WinNT they were familiar with, despite what Microsoft's marketing said. I've used a number of WinCE based devices in the past, they were all about as reliable as Windows 95/ME, which is to say most wouldn't last the day without rebooting.

In the end they could only get it working by shipping the product to a team in Germany that had access to the WinCE source. It cost them a small fortune, and lost them over a year. The delay lost me as a customer.

Most (I hope all, but it's never all) of todays experienced software engineers wouldn't make that mistake, but these people where (pretty good) hardware engineers, with a vision for a product they built the hardware for. Developing software was something you hired people to so for you, like plumbing and legal work. And they wanted those people to provide them with a familiar environment.

WinCE has long since been retired, or course. May it soul burn in hell. Yes, those same hardware engineers who insist on sticking to what they are familiar with might turn to Windows 11 instead. But that comes with costs - no ARM or other CPU's, huge resource requirements, insistence on TPM's, so little lack of control of the platform that you lose control of the USS Yorktown [0]. Those costs are large. In fact so large they would have overwhelmed the budget of my engineering friends years ago, and they would have just gone with Linux. I haven't seen a new embedded Windows design in quite a while, so I suspect that's true for most embedded projects now.

[0] https://archive.is/aKrml

	▲	steve_adams_86 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry, it is my mistake. I was more so talking about software for working on industrial embedded devices (machinery, robots, or similar), which often use bespoke software for editing ladder logic or similar things for devices like PLCs. I've never encountered a robot that didn't require windows to program. I know they're out there, but they don't seem common in my experience. Building them yourself is possible, but you regularly encounter cases where common, well-supported components require Windows to program. It's a drag. I'd love to see it — Windows is far from my preferred OS. But my original point was essentially that there are tons of reasons like this which makes Windows a very productive and useful platform for many developers. I totally agree that there are cases where Linux or macOS are better (I prefer them both when possible) and yeah, WinCE was a total mess even by consumer standards. I had a pocket pc (ha, I was so excited about it) and it was a tremendous letdown largely because of the OS. Side note, thanks for reminding me of that era. As bad as the software was, those devices were so god damn exciting. A pocket computer! I still remember how incredibly futuristic it felt.