OK then let's compare VS to XCode, which doesn't even have half the features of VS and crashes twice as much. If not, which comparable product would you pick?
Bullshit. Allow an actual user of Windows 10 to correct your statement, since I bet you haven't used it at all: Some things are unfinished. Mostly the consumer facing stuff (think Metro apps).
Other than that, Windows 10 has been rock solid for the past 8 months or so that I've been using it on my main workstation and my main tablet.
/r/sysadmin is full of Win10 horror stories for multi-user deployments in business environments. Your one anecdote just doesn't compare. I think Win10 is very undercooked, even by MS's standards. There are simply too many use cases where its a step down from Win7.
MS has more of less conceded that Win10 isn't business ready, so they have a special distribution called LTSB (Long Term Servicing Branch) of its Enterprise version. It doesn't auto-update, no feature updates, no cortana or edge, no support for app/modern apps, etc. Can you imagine windows 7 shipping with a lot of things stripped from it to make it more like XP? That would be crazy, but that's exactly what's going on here.
I think by 2017-2018 it'll be fine, but two or three years from release date to get something as stable as the previous versions seems really rough.
Right and last year it was full of Windows 8 horror stories and the years before that it was full of Windows 7 horror stories. In other news - StackOverflow.com is full of programming problems so programming must suck. Point being - /r/sysadmin is where people go to complain and ask questions.
Also, it's empirically verifiable, not an anecdote - that Windows 10 runs all the same apps that I've been able to run for decades on previous versions of Windows without issue. That's what I call rock solid.
As a steady reader or that sub, I can say Enterprise never got on the Win8 bandwagon and the reception to Win7 was a lot more positive. We barely had any issues with our migration to 7 and we did it same year release.
> /r/sysadmin is where people go to complain and ask questions.
That's /r/techsupport. This sub is supposed to be only IT pros. A lot of the issues I see are outside of the "I just need a facebook machine" use cases, so a home user like you may not ever have these issues, but trust me, your IT department sure as hell is having issues.
Sorry to disappoint you but I am my IT department and I'm not having any issues...and neither are the IT departments from several companies that I work with.
And as a steady reader of that sub and of the Microsoft multi-sub, I heartily disagree with your observation. Both Win7 and Win8 had loads of "horror stories", just like WinXP before it. People are pretty much going to complain about any new Windows version.
Internal testing with Win8, which is still in the casual testing stage of "lets see what breaks" has like 3+ showstoppers for us and a dozen bad but not showstopper issues. XP to 7 had zero.
That's ignoring the metro apps/store nonsense, which I imagine I would just disable outright when we launch with it.
I guess one could argue that 7 wasn't a "real OS" and just Vista SP3. Still, I think 10 took a lot of gambles and wasn't the refined and less tablety Win8 everyone thought it would be. It clearly was rushed to save MS's image.
> I think these words are actually on the cover of the 2004 edition of...
So what? The words that you're saying are on the tips of every Microsoft-hating Linux fanboy's tongue.
> ...the Windows problems are harder because...
Oh please. The Linux problems are harder because most of the time the solution doesn't exist at all ~ (e.g. Does a driver even exist for a particular device? Does it actually work though? Can I get a particular piece of industry-standard software? Probably not (but oh - here's an actually hideous emulation (WINE) of a much better GUI system (Windows) that you can TRY and run it on... ).
> ...if you type the things into the terminal, it actually fixes the problem.
Good one - please tell me what to type to be able to run Linux on a touch screen tablet, so I can run Linux in the same places I can run Windows. Also, what do I type to get a decent desktop GUI experience?
Yes people can absolutely disagree about what is good and what is innocent. For instance - are American tax payers innocent? Some people see them as empowering the world's largest imperial death/chaos/war machine.
And if I use react native, I'll still be tied to Javascript, which is one of the web technologies that people try to get away from when trying to get away from the web.
If I pick anything I'll be tied to something. If I (attempt to) write POSIX only code in straight C - I'll basically be tied to doing only things that can work in that kind of environment.
VS2015 starts up in ~1 second for me even with all the options installed. If I open a solution with 10 C# projects in it, it takes about 3 seconds.
So is your complaint basically that it's just taking up too much hard drive space? I can't see how the other stuff (TFS Explorer Winforms/WPF designers) could possibly be getting in your way, especially since you don't ever have to open them.
I've tried all of JetBrains tools over and over throughout the years since I keep hearing about how much some people like their stuff - but every single time I am disappointed at how over-engineered everything they do seems to be. Furthermore, their cross platform tools like IntelliJ IDEA always wreak of badly emulated native components that don't look or behave the way that they should on any OS.
So for me - Visual Studio 2015 is the best tool I've ever used for HTML/CSS/JS (and Node.js and C#). It simply outshines everything else I've tried. I guess if I was forced to use an OS X or Linux desktop, I'd resign myself to using JetBrains tools because they probably are the best thing you can find outside of Windows...but as someone who prefers Windows and who wants native Windows apps that behave idiomatically instead of just fulfilling the lowest common denominator - VS can't be beat IMO.
I've had literally the opposite experience. Everything I seemed to need, IntelliJ IDEA magically had. I just ended up uninstalling things like pgAdmin, for example, since IntelliJ IDEA is just far superior at doing the same thing, and it's just right there where you code. Convenient. Usually it started out as, "I wonder if it can..." and then quickly find the feature that just does what I want.
Even as a Windows user myself, I can't quite articulate what has always bothered me about Visual Studio in general over the years. It seems to have it's own language, terminology, and way of doing things that you have to buy into. And I really don't like that. Let me pick a folder, have that be my project, and edit text really clever like. That's what I want.
Take a look at Visual Studio Code. I too have this (probably unfounded) resistance to using full blown Visual Studio for projects outside of work, but have found Code pretty good for developing Javascript and HTML etc. Nice and light, pick a directory as a project, good GIT integration, reasonable text editor, built in debugger etc.
For me it's a good balance between a straight up text editor and full IDE.
like pgAdmin, for example, since IntelliJ IDEA is just far superior at doing the same thing, and it's just right there where you code.
You don't mention the two things together, but VS has the server explorer which you can use to hook in to a database and do administrative tasks (both design and data viewing)
Also pgAdmin is about as feature-ful as Notepad is so it's not hard to do something a little better.
Besides server explorer, VS also has SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools) obviously only for SQL Server, but I've never seen anything even in the same league as SSDT for any open source database.
What you call over engineered I call common sense capabilities that get out of my way. There isn't any thing (non platform specific) that I can do in VS that I can't do better and faster in the IDEA platform. And with the tooling consistency, in can jump between stacks and Stillman maintain the same functionality.
this is a very interesting debate
is there a list of features side by side? or a comparative study that lists pros and cons?
I do not think over-engineering is a subjective term, also common sense :) yes, between them there's lots of levels but one is at one extreme and one is at the other.
so I guess, a good analysis of these two IDEs could be make with a good level of objectivity from the author.
And I wish there was a proper desktop for Linux and OS X - but there's not. I'm guessing this is the right place for that complaint?
Speaking of RDP though, I have yet to find a remote screen sharing tool that is as polished and that works as well on Unix as RDP does on Windows. I'd really like to be able to use something other than VNC to remote into my Mac from Windows.
NoMachine's solution comes close, but is still not as robust over flakey connections as RDP. I've yet to experience the kind of tolerance to slow/poor connections I get with RDP over NoMachine when run over either a very spotty cellular Internet connection (3G-grade will really point this out) and over an airliner's satellite Internet connection. As odd as it may seem, when I want a solid X11 experience over a flaky Internet connection, I spin up an X11 window server on a Windows desktop, and RDP into that desktop session. RDP degrades much more gracefully than the Unix-based options, and isn't as aggressive with timing out and breaking the connection.
I also looked at the SPICE protocol and its implementations [1], but again the user experience is poor over slow/flaky connections compared to RDP. The compact RDP data stream also makes it a good starting point for developing various RDP-based recorders.
In my opinion, RDP is a much-overlooked feature of Windows, and its superior implementation to any Unix alternatives I'm aware of is one of the reasons I still run some Windows instances in my environment.
NoMachine offers two methods when delivering a remote Linux/Unix desktop: 1) NX in 'lightweight mode', mainly using advanced compression and caching of the X11 protocol and 2) NX using hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding.
The first method is the preferred option when connecting to legacy X11 applications, i.e. applications making mostly use of traditional X11 Render operations and X11 vector graphics. In this 'lightweight mode' NX reduces both the bandwidth usage and the HW requirements on the client and the server to the very minimum, by employing the expensive video encoding operations only when detecting that the server-side application is producing video data on the screen.
Unfortunately this 'lightweight mode' can't deliver games, a Mac or Windows desktop, as well as most contemporary Unix/Linux desktop environments. The reason, in the latter case, is the inefficient way these applications use the X11 protocol, as well as the inability of the X11 protocol to deal with modern graphics. In these cases, the use of video encoding is unavoidable. NX employs a number of different techniques to reduce the CPU consumption and the bandwidth needed, so much to often make video encoding advantageous even compared to the legacy X11 protocol compression. But, of course, the final results always depend on the screen content being deployed.
Thank you for the clarification, that helps explain a lot. Next time I fly and/or hit a 3G area I'll try running the older X Window manager fvwm v2.x under NoMachine and compare to the RDP-based results. I'd really prefer to work with NoMachine because it preserves my Linux- and BSD-based stack, so if it works as well as RDP I'll try to remember to post back here my results.
Windows RDP has been amazing for modern desktops. Prior to having over 8GB RAM and an SSD drive, I would often access Windows from by Mac via RDP. Since I am mostly Mac OS X, Linux or Windows visualized on my Mac these days, I seldom use it RDP, but I am always amazed at how responsive it is compared to VNC.
The best remote desktop I have used was Timbuktu for Mac back in the early 90's. At that time, Timbuktu was able to utilize the Mac's great support for 1-bit (black/white) and other low-bit graphics modes, and you could have a very good remote experience even at high display resolutions via a 14.4kbps modem. Putting Mac OS X into gray scale mode helps, a little but VNC performance still sucks.
I also remember seeing an amazing demo of a NeXT system that was able to push its Display Postscript based terminals to remote systems. Alas, Apple lost that when Display Postscript was replaced by PDF.
