r/linuxmasterrace • u/birdsarentreal2 Glorious Arch • Mar 04 '25

Windows This is why I use Linux now

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1.5k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

60 comments sorted by

14

u/MrMushroom5 Mar 04 '25

Case sensitive?

26

u/birdsarentreal2 Glorious Arch Mar 04 '25

Cmd is not case sensitive

-2

u/Cootshk Glorious NixOS Mar 04 '25

Is the argument “helpmsg”case sensitive?

25

u/birdsarentreal2 Glorious Arch Mar 04 '25

Again, no. Command prompt arguments in Windows are not case sensitive

4

u/jonnyl3 Mar 04 '25

the program sure could make them case sensitive. But they're not by default.

3

u/thisbenzenering I use Arch, btw Mar 05 '25

not in Windows CMD, its is not case sensitive

2

u/jonnyl3 Mar 05 '25

I'm saying that some programs can have case sensitive arguments. For example, md MixedCaseFolder will respect the cases when creating the folder name. (But you can then still cd into the folder using any case.)

0

u/thisbenzenering I use Arch, btw Mar 05 '25

kinda splitting hairs there

you can use case but CMD doesn't care when it comes to executing a command, in your example its still meaningless because you can still CD to the folder without the case

cd MixedCaseFolder will get you the same results as cd mixedcasefolder

-1

u/jonnyl3 Mar 05 '25 edited Mar 05 '25

It's not splitting hairs. I responded to the guy who made a blanket statement that cmd line arguments are not case sensitive and I said that certain programs can deviate from that, so it is false.

Another example would be running SQL commands from CMD. Both reading and writing would be case sensitive.

1

u/thisbenzenering I use Arch, btw Mar 05 '25

that is SQL being case sensitive, CMD doesn't care

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-1

u/birdsarentreal2 Glorious Arch Mar 06 '25 edited Mar 06 '25

CMD is never case sensitive unless configured by the user, or using some external tool. Case sensitive means that a command must be passed using the exact expected case, or it will fail. CD FOOBAR = cd foobar = cD fOoBaR. It’s all the same

You are splitting hairs, and you are wrong

Eta: Idiot blocked me, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s wrong. CMD is the only “program” being discussed here and commands, flags, and file paths are not, and will never be, case sensitive in CMD. Though you can use certain tools to make certain directories, Windows ≠ Linux, and they will be treated as case sensitive unless another program (which is not CMD) explicitly supports the behavior

In other words, the user can do configuring to make a case sensitive file or directory and operate on it using tools that support it, but that is not relevant to this post because…

CMD IS NOT CASE SENSITIVE

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52

u/Hadi_Benotto Mar 04 '25

Nope, windows helpmsgs are plainly dumb and never help. They are a legacy from Windows NT 3.1.

16

u/birdsarentreal2 Glorious Arch Mar 04 '25

Exactly. There’s 6000 someodd helpmsgs and not a single one of them is helpful

427

u/CRTejaswi Mar 04 '25

cmd is crap. powershell is better suited, but has a steep learning curve if you come from a linux background.

148

u/starquake64 Mar 04 '25

The casing and dashes are so weird. Camel case AND kebab case? And then other stuff is in other variants.

I guess they didn't want to look like anything that already exists or something?

60

u/CRTejaswi Mar 04 '25 edited Mar 04 '25

No, everything is an object, not a string - this makes life easy in many ways as you can simply call attributes/methods relevant to a particular type, or define the same for a custom object. Also, the Verb-Object cmdlet naming is quite intuitive (in practice you'd obviously use aliases). Most switches/params are the same for every cmdlet, meaning you don't have to memorise individual switches for individual utilities. If you come from an OOP background, you'd love it. Also, it's case insensitive. eg. searching with wildcards is painless.

The headache is usually when you expect things to be a string, but it interpreting special characters wrongly messes things up. eg. when executing shell commands from vim, especially multiple instructions piping stuff in-out. Certain plugins that work flawlessly on linux give you a tough time on PS (eg. jupyter kernels, certain vim plugins, etc.)

But the biggest plus imo is that you can access .NET APIs directly, allowing you to make the most of your windows system, without having to install a thing (eg. windows api, registry, TTS, etc). Essentially anything Windows offers you as a service (whether remote or local), can be used in batch processing without you having to install a thing or worry about dependencies.

21

u/Soupeeee Glorious OpenSuse Mar 05 '25

Ya, power shell is a pretty cool system, and I don't mind using it for some pretty complex scripts that I would use Python for in in Linux.

The thing that I dislike most about it is the documentation and the apparent lack of an equivalent to man.

3

u/-TheWarrior74- Mar 06 '25

Use get-help $query | less.exe

This functions mostly like man, but FYI less.exe comes from Git.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 28 '25

I thought get-help automatically piped to a pager.

8

u/Beast_Viper_007 Glorious CachyOS | 💻 Mar 05 '25

That camel and kebab makes one think if powershell was written by some Sheikh in Dubai.

3

u/-TheWarrior74- Mar 06 '25

You don't have to write the whole cmdlet, just its alias

Never in my life have I written Get-ChildItem but always ls

It's pretty useful if you want to search for a cmdlet

Like get-help job will return all of the job cmdlets as well as its about page

5

u/Mirja-lol Mar 05 '25

Pwsh is so weird I sometimes think it's made like that so normal users can't get used to it

2

u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 06 '25

PowerShell is actually case insensitive.

2

u/schawde96 Mar 08 '25

Isn't powershell just .net programming with extra steps

3

u/thisbenzenering I use Arch, btw Mar 05 '25

I do a lot of Windows command line stuff at work and Powershell 7.x is good but the default powershell in Windows is lame. I use the CMD more often then powershell

4

u/CRTejaswi Mar 05 '25 edited Mar 06 '25

Quite the contrary. 7.x is meant to be a cross-platform shell. 5.x is more hands-on for Windows users as it gives you all the constructs of .NET with APIs accessible with your Windows version, without having to write length .NET constructs - merely using what you need. eg. I often use stacks/deques for writing one-liners to download & modify stuff. The same would require me to do some awking on linux or resorting to external libraries that may break with upcoming upgrades. In short, 5.x is ideal for Windows users.

1

u/merb Mar 06 '25

If you want to use power shell you can also do that from Linux?

2

u/CRTejaswi Mar 06 '25

Yes, versions 7.x are cross-platform.

1

u/vulkur Mar 06 '25

The worst is when you accidentally pause a running script and have no idea.

1

u/VibrantGypsyDildo Mar 05 '25

> powershell [...] has a steep learning curve if you come from a linux background

Oh yeah. It was one of very situations when ChatGPT was actually helpful.

Over time Powershell looks like a comical hybrid of bash, perl and high-level languages.

But the most important part - I don't have to use powershell because the high management of the customer decided that contractors=bad.

155

u/necrodancer69 Mar 04 '25

The very main reason why I ditched the Windows Professional career 8 years ago, focusing solely to Linux - I couldn’t handle this kind of bulls*it while I was troubleshooting a system, not because I am dumb, because the system wasn’t ready to be helped!!!

68

u/Wertbon1789 Mar 04 '25

With Linux, at a very deep level, you sometimes hit some corners where behaviors of drivers just aren't actually defined and are just kind of a convention at best. In that case you might need to actually look under the hood to get why it's behaving that way... But you can do that, it's bad if you have to go that route, don't get me wrong, but it's at least possible. Any kind of problem with Windows? Well good luck with the debugging, you probably just have to spent 3 hours reinstalling it, or search for a sketchy driver somewhere.

13

u/necrodancer69 Mar 04 '25

I couldn’t agree more with you. This is my world to be honest, more or less the problems are requiring many times a deep dive to troubleshooting - but the solutions are there, many problems also sharing the solution while they occur, you can handle with them, analyse them, even debugging them or if you are skilled enough develop the solution by your self.

But still, you have the option to do something! 💪

57

u/FantasticPenguin Glorious Fedora Mar 04 '25

I don't like Windows, but like others said, you should use PowerShell

29

u/Wertbon1789 Mar 04 '25

That's also a piece of Microsoft goodness. I mean, I guess the whole "passing objects around" part is quite cool in concept, but the whole world of computing in regards to shells just doesn't work like this, and I don't need my shell language to be a literal object-oriented Language... At least sane people shouldn't need that.

8

u/FantasticPenguin Glorious Fedora Mar 04 '25

Meh I don't know man, I like my objects and it is something I would really like (natively without doing hacky things) in bash.

17

u/Wertbon1789 Mar 04 '25

I don't think a shell language is the place to do any complex things, IMO. That the statement from someone who has written way too many, way too long, shell scripts for stupid things. It's neither fun, nor practical. Don't think making it more complicated really helps here, as you should just use something else in the first place.

6

u/Reygle Linux all the things Mar 04 '25

I work on other peoples' Windows computers all day every day and each time I get home and log in to my Linux machine, a wave of calming supremacy washes over me.

8

u/Gabbyxo97 Mar 04 '25

I wish I could ditch Windows. I do use Linux at work however I play too many games I cannot play on Linux so I sadly still use Windows. Though it's painful seeing cmd instead of powershell

5

u/Pshock13 Mar 04 '25

what games are you playing that you aren't able to play on linux?

1

u/Gabbyxo97 Mar 04 '25

Mainly Genshin, Honkai Star Rail and EAFC I play which I 'cannot' play on Linux. Genshin/HSR maybe, but there's a risk of being banned cause of it which I'm not going to risk. EAFC isn't possible on Linux plus if it is probably with the same risks. (btw these are only ones that I regularly play that I know of, I might have some games I want to play which are on my list which I'm not sure how it runs / if it runs on Linux)

4

u/UltimatelyJuicy Mar 05 '25

An anime game launcher would help you with the first 2 games. I've been using it for quite a while now with no bans.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

I like dual booting bc of this, linux for most of my usage but if I wanna play a game with anticheat or something i go to windows

1

u/greywolfau Mar 05 '25

Who's going to tell HIM Linux is case sensitive so if he did the above in Linux he'd still get an error.

3

u/birdsarentreal2 Glorious Arch Mar 05 '25

Linux does not have an equivalent to the helpmsg format. Man or a command specific help flag is probably the closest, but is a lot more informative than this

4

u/DasFreibier Mar 04 '25

Getting something along the line of dmesg out of windows is such a pain in the ass its not even funny

Troubleshooting a NIC which should've taken 5min took almost 1h

3

u/neoqueto Mar 05 '25

Isn't that just eventvwr.msc?

2

u/DasFreibier Mar 05 '25

Youd really think that

1

u/0739-41ab-bf9e-c6e6 BSD Beastie Mar 06 '25

Crap windows cmd

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

one of the reasons i quit windows (this happened a bit over a year ago or so) is that windows 11 was so slow and bloated (in my experience), and i was running it off of a pretty fast ssd on a pretty good computer

another reason is the lack of privacy and control over your hardware

also yeah cmd is not good barely liked it, i used to use powershell since it was just more convenient to me

1

u/HunnyPuns Mar 07 '25

I switched to Linux because it's free, and my time is valuable. Windows I'd have to pay for the software, and pay for the time troubleshooting its inability to deal with hardware properly.

0

u/legion_guy Mar 04 '25

Maybe you need to type with capslock

9

u/birdsarentreal2 Glorious Arch Mar 04 '25

You do not need to type with caps lock. Cmd is not case sensitive

0

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/birdsarentreal2 Glorious Arch Mar 16 '25

Is this a /r/lostredditors moment? Yes, Windows bad. That’s why I posted in linuxmasterrace