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Sudo for Windows

50 pointsby luispayesterday at 11:59 PM24 commentsview on HN

Comments

petterroeatoday at 4:53 AM

sudo makes sense as a name, but it is worth noting that it hurts the original projects.

Famously, the curl project receives tonnes of issues and support requests from people who run `curl` in PowerShell, not knowing it is an alias meant for convenience instead of the actual curl command[1].

Sudo for windows is already relatively old and doesn't seem to have been adopted much, but my prediction is that adoption would mean people would complain on forums that commands they found on the internet don't work. "Why wouldnt it? I have sudo?". Then people will have to explain to them that "No you do not have sudo, you have the windows version of sudo, which is not real sudo" and it will confuse.

When it comes to tools, I strongly believe naming things similarly to concepts the user already knows is a disservice to the user. This isn't UX for your mom and pop, it is a tool to perform a job, and learners get confused when suddenly the same thing isn't actually the same thing at all. It is mislearning, and I would argue almost anyone who does mentoring has seen this in action.

[1]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/08/19/removing-the-powershe...

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9devtoday at 5:24 AM

Funny that this pops up when Linux at the same time is moving on to something better than sudo.

RajT88today at 4:36 AM

Do you want to allow the following program from an unknown publisher to make changes to this computer?

Program Name: Sudo.exe

Publisher: Unknown

File Origin: Downloaded from the Internet

userbinatortoday at 4:43 AM

I'm surprised they didn't call it Run-AsAdministrator or some other awkward Microsoft-ism.

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overflowytoday at 2:19 AM

We had https://github.com/gerardog/gsudo long before this came out.

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G_o_Dtoday at 4:40 AM

https://m.majorgeeks.com/files/details/nsudo.html Been using it to run my cleanup or uninstaller utilities as SYSTEM/TRUSTED INSTALLER, so stubborn in use files that are not easily deletable not even with lockhunter or unlock file utilities that ultimately fallback to delete on next reboot.

With nsudo its fizz

onemoresooptoday at 4:58 AM

Lipstick on a pig, Windows is turning into a botched version of linux.

gnabgibtoday at 12:01 AM

(2024) At the time (587 points, 423 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39305452

archargelodtoday at 4:12 AM

> Everything about permissions and the command line experience is different between Windows and Linux. ... certain elements of the traditional sudo experience are not present in Sudo for Windows, and vice versa. Scripts and documentation that are written for sudo may not be able to be used directly with Sudo for Windows without some modification.

Then why is it named `sudo`? Just to create confusion?

Also, something like sudo is clearly not possible on modern Windows, because Microsoft thinks it owns your computer and won't allow Admins to do certain things.

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paweladamczuktoday at 4:13 AM

The embracing continues

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SugarReflextoday at 3:53 AM

sudon't