Being a windows user these days, I am getting kinda frustrated with how anemic everyone is at even trying to google for 20s to find the windows solution.
7zip is the program you want to handle most everything, with both gui and command line options: http://www.7-zip.org/
Given how radically MS is trying to reform itself to be an open-source friendly company and how ineffectually inoffensive they've been the last 5 years, can we at least try and throw them a bone or two?
The article is not talking about Windows, so folks here aren't either. Why are you surprised that folks are uninterested in Windows?
I've preferred Mac systems for longer than most of the HN crowd has been alive, so I understand what it's like to feel ignored and in the minority. For years, Mac users were treated as pariahs. The tables have turned, and as someone who has been in your situation, I should have great empathy for your predicament.
And I do, but your tone in general -- and your last sentence in particular -- makes it very hard to empathize. Microsoft used its near-monopoly status to stifle innovation for years, and many of us have figurative scars that will never heal. You seem to think that they are making great strides (while I see them as half-hearted overtures), but either way I'm not about to "throw them a bone." Their decades of misdeeds, in my eyes, will not be expiated so easily.
Perhaps Microsoft will someday be worthy of forgiveness, either from the perspective of morality (e.g., Mozilla) or product excellence (e.g., Apple). Until that day, Microsoft will continue to reap what they have sown, given no more attention than they have earned.
> And I do, but your tone in general -- and your last sentence in particular -- makes it very hard to empathize. Microsoft used its near-monopoly status to stifle innovation for years, and many of us have figurative scars that will never heal. You seem to think that they are making great strides (while I see them as half-hearted overtures), but either way I'm not about to "throw them a bone." Their decades of misdeeds, in my eyes, will not be expiated so easily.
I feel like Apple's has forgotten what was important, created then ruined a market, and lost everything that made it interesting (long before Steve Jobs passed away, by the way). Which cuts all the more deeply because back in the early 2ks they were walking the walk and taking a lot from NeXT's culture of developer friendliness. I grew up deeply invested in Macs and NeXT, which makes the realization painful, but... Apple wants to annihilate maker culture as it monetizes its platform. It's also stopped caring about design on a grand scale, instead appealing to very shallow notions of "visual simplicity".
That's all gone now, and they're consequently useless to me. I'd rather patronize a company currently doing the right thing after a troubled past than pretend a previously aligned company was still there.
It should be very telling that Apple AND Google's flagship hardware announcement of 2015 was something that Microsoft has been doing for years.
And if Microsoft suddenly goes evil again? Fuck them, I'll drop them and move somewhere else. Not Linux, unless the distros pull their act together, but I'm sure a competitor will emerge. Or I'll make one.
I know your feeling too, thanks for accepting I feel differently. And sometimes I ask myself "What the hell am I doing with this Surface book?" I won't pretend I don't have doubts.
It's sort of a rough time for devs right now even as we enjoy unprecedented prosperity and recognition. Big businesses are attempting to monetize and control every aspect of developers.
"...decades of misdeeds..."
Which they benefited handsomely from and were never sufficiently punished.
I'm with you, my trust of MS is still pretty close to nil.
GP seems to be talking about this line in the article:
> Windows: ? (No idea, I haven't touched the platform in a while... should WORK!)
I do think the author missed the ball in not doing basic research for the Windows platform. His point is that people should switch from one compression tool to another. If people on Windows were unable to compress or decompress such files, that would be a huge problem for his argument.
It can invoke arbitrary executables as well, which makes it exactly as interoperable as Bash.
Powershell can run on Linux, too. I've even met a few people who quietly prefer it.
So what, exactly, were you referring to? Shell choices are like editor choices: arbitrary and largely equivalent and without any real meaning or impact on a developer's productivity.
The context was: someone had difficulties to find "tar -xf" equivalent for Windows. I pointed out that it would be nice if Microsoft included tar etc. basic utilities in their OS releases. With out-of-the-box Windows machine, you cannot ssh, you cannot untar, etc. Windows-way of doing things is totally different than *nix culture (OS X, Linux, etc). In that context powershell is not "interoperable" (maybe bad wording from me).
> The context was: someone had difficulties to find "tar -xf" equivalent for Windows.
Right and putting that in google, "tar equivalent for windows", immediately nets 5 useful results. You can use tar, or a windows command line variant of 7z or tar, or a gui.
> With out-of-the-box Windows machine, you cannot ssh, you cannot untar, etc.
On an out-of-the-box Linux machine, you generally can't do a lot of things either. It seems particularly ironic that in a discussion about how we shouldn't be using old UNIX tools just because they're entrenched, you then call for compatibility.
> Windows-way of doing things is totally different than *nix culture (OS X, Linux, etc).
Stupid legacy path limits not included, Powershell is in my experience just a superior way to do things. I should maybe restart my blog to talk about that.
But even if we ignore Powershell and windows, your statement is divisive within the Linux community. MANY people prefer shells on Linux that don't adhere to the bash legacy. TCSH and CSH are very popular, to this day. Are they 'not interoperable'?
Everyone's got a big chip on their shoulder about how development tooling "should be." One of the things I've come to realize is how arbitrary, unnecessary, and useless these mores are. They just hold us back.
No. I'm not. But minimal distros are the primary surface area linux exposes for many people these days. The desktop userbase is (justifably) almost non-existent, and most core cloud distros don't even come loaded with curl by default. It's even more extreme as you work with docker.
I really don't see what that has to do with Microsoft. 7-zip is GPL and cross platform. In fact - I just checked - a command line 7-zip is available by default on my Linux Mint install.
Right, but an xz-supporting compression tool is shipped with many Linux distros, whereas you do need to grab a tool to support xz on any version of Windows.
But you're right, 7z is an under-appreciated format.
I have had awful experiences with 7-zip. Recently I was unable to decompress a multi-file rar, it kept saying it was corrupted. I downloaded it several times until I realised it was actually fine, because winrar could decompress it.
I sorta view RAR files as the problem. Only WinRAR ever gets them really right. I dunno why that is, but I also dunno why anyone keeps using RAR. It's something of a joke in the windows dev community.
7zip is the program you want to handle most everything, with both gui and command line options: http://www.7-zip.org/
Given how radically MS is trying to reform itself to be an open-source friendly company and how ineffectually inoffensive they've been the last 5 years, can we at least try and throw them a bone or two?