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Comment by youdontknowtho | Hacker News Reader

Nano Server gets it right finally for Windows Server. It's tiny and headless...no graphical stack at all. Just watch, most internal Microsoft teams will transition to it over time. First they will start releasing software as a container that runs on Nano, probably in the form of Server Core. Then built native for Nano Server.

I've said this before...If you still think that Microsoft has been sitting still for the last 10 years because they lost out on the mobile shift, you are mistaken. Server and tools have done a fantastic job and the rest of the company is starting to unf*ck themselves too. Azure isn't as popular with the HN crowd as Amazon, but if you work in large enterprises...they have a much better story to tell. It's really hard to compare.

Hate on, haters.

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No hate at all here, but my last contract I had to deal with Windows deployments and it's still a clusterfuck.

Without a Enterprise agreement you can't automatically install a new Windows 10 machine, period. Bear in mind this counts for the same machine being reinstalled constantly (whilst working out the exact incantations). The Linux hosts these machines ran on installed fine from Kickstarts / preseed files.

Powershell was nice, you can't compare it to bash (they're just too different) but it lives in a world that is .net and the vast majority of the Windows world isn't .net. We needed Windows VMs for some specific apps that couldn't even install without a gui. Could I automate their install? Not a chance.

Basically all these changes are 10 years too late. Powershell is nice, if you live in a .net world. I can't PXE boot a Windows VM without gui intervention without a Enterprise agreement. Why the hell would I go with a Windows Nano solution, which doesn't support the entire Windows ecosystem, when I can write a greenfield app in Linux, even using Mono, and call it a day?

I'm not sure what to tell you there. I actually don't think that's the case about some of that stuff... but I get it. I think Microsoft didn't really get how hard it was to run a large network of windows machines until they had to do it themselves.

Nano does support the entire windows ecosystem through containers running server core. There really aren't major apps that won't run on server core. Even if they need the GUI to install you can remove it afterwards and most apps will run just fine.

>is starting to unf*ck themselves too.

Too late. Developers have left the building.

.NET only exists any more because of legacy interests, there's little compelling developer story otherwise.

> Developers have left the building.

Eh, developers (collectively -- individually, less so, but the set of individuals that make up the collective are in constant flux) are fickle. If there's something good on offer, they'll come back. There's some psuchological resistance that might make rebranding helpful to this, but Microsoft's big enough that, they can probably afford keep things going long enough that people will get over psychological resistance even without that, if they are dedicated.

This developer is going to leave the building when someone else can provide documentation on the MSDN level

I cringe every time I have to read the MSDN documentation. When you really need it, it barely goes into detail to explain what a class/method/parameter does, how to use it, or give any useful code examples.

Its just a false sense of security, in my opinion. Python and Django has great documentation that most of all is relevant with good examples. For the things that you cant figure out, you can always read the source and you will find the answer.

We have a few companies on our portfolio which are both part of Fortune 500 index and whose IT is around 80% Windows.

The last four years I only developed UNIX applications outside work.

Our cloud platform (Azure) here in Cloud and Enterprise team (where I work) does not only embrace .NET and Windows Server. We've got a lot of people working every day to make sure Linux is a first class citizen and we're ensuring that developers working with Python, Node.js, Ruby, etc, get a first class experience as much as we can make it happen.

If you want one huge example where we are embracing Linux as an OS, just see how our SQL Server team is bringing SQL Server to Linux. (its not in public preview yet but we're working on that). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/sql-server-on...

But don't get me wrong, we really love and believe in .NET and our own server technology, we're always looking to find ways to innovate and grow it. Just as one example, look at all the work we've done with .NET Core and bringing that to run on Linux, Mac and Windows equally. https://www.microsoft.com/net/core

This isn't the old Microsoft and I love working here more and more every day now that for the last few years we've really embraced the developer community to enable them choice in however they want to build their next app.

You confuse developers like you or like the ones you know with all developers.

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