SUA Deprecated In Windows 8? 226
An anonymous reader writes "I just tried to install Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) on Windows 8 Preview and found that it's marked as DEPRECATED: 'Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is a source-compatibility subsystem for compiling and running custom UNIX-based applications and scripts on a computer running Windows operating system. WARNING: SUA is deprecated starting with this release and will be completely removed in the next release. You should begin planning now to employ alternate methods for any applications, code, or usage that depend on this feature.'"
Windows itself seems close to being deprecated (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this a shock to anyone after The Week of Windows 8 Hype? If there was a theme running through all of the stories it was this: Windows as you have known it is deprecated, a traditional Windows desktop will be available (certainly on x86, perhaps on arm) for those who are determined enough to figure out how to reenable it but don't expect it to last much longer. If Windows and native Win32 executables themselves are on the chopping block why would they have any interest in maintaining a UNIX command line layer?
Win32 (and UNIX more so) isn't going to lend itself to the sort of app store lockdown Microsoft is moving to. If you have a choice of buy Win32 apps/games at Walmart/Gamestop and Microsoft gets no taste of the action or buy everything at the App Store and give Microsoft 30%, which do you think they are going to 'nudge' you toward? And by 'nudge' I mean turn your PC into an iPhone with hard crypto locks and remove all options that do not let them rake off their 30 points.
Re:Cygwin (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not Cygwin. It's an implementation of the POSIX APIs that goes directly to the NT APIs instead of through Win32.
I can't comment much on the tradeoffs except to say that I think it solves the problem of Cygwin's fork() being terrible. (SUA also provides a route to get multiple files with the same case-folded name but different case-sensitive names, which I don't think you can do with Cygwin since it goes through the Win32 API.)
Re:Windows itself seems close to being deprecated (Score:3, Interesting)
> Windows as you have known it is deprecated, a traditional Windows desktop will be available (certainly on x86, perhaps on arm) for those who are determined enough to figure out how to reenable it but don't expect it to last much longer. If Windows and native Win32 executables themselves are on the chopping block
I think that's going to last about 6 months after Win8 release, and then they're going to realize that early adopters are putting keyboards and mice on their tablets and struggling to re-enable the traditional desktop because that interface reused from Windows Phone 7 isn't doing it for them, and the rest of us are waiting to see what Windows 9 looks like.
Then Win8 service pack 1 will add back in a bunch of stuff they had taken out, and make the traditional desktop the default.
Just sayin'
Re:Cygwin? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cygwin? (Score:4, Interesting)
100% agreed. The commercial alternative - MKS Toolkit [mkssoftware.com] - integrates seamlessly with Windows, and is both more complete and faster than Cygin. Yes, it costs money, and no, it is not open source - but if you need to do Unix-like stuff on Windows, it actually makes life tolerable.
But Unix-like stuff itself is not tolerable, which is why it has to be reimplemented with GNU, Linux, Cygwin and other free software.
For instance, how does the vi editor in MKS stack up to Vim? If the following link gives a more or less complete manual, it's freaking pitiful:
http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/vi.1.asp [mkssoftware.com]
Why would I pay money for that stuff if I would end up compiling GNU coreutils, bash, and other packages?